Space Soldiers

by Jack Dann

  Baker’s net was suppressing adrenalin production; otherwise he would have been trembling with flight reaction and stinking up the lifesystem with sweat. He said. “We’re in this together. I’ve accepted that. I thought it would be a good idea to dump the cargo in a high orbit. Makes us more maneuverable and saves reaction mass. We’ll get there earlier than the flight plan allows, so we can surprise Berry’s mother.”

  It was the best lie he had been able to come up with. He sipped at a bulb of orange-flavored glucose solution and watched her work it through. At last, she said. “I know you’re trying to fuck me over, but I can’t figure out how, not yet. But I will, and then I’ll know what to do with you. Meanwhile, climb into your pressure suit. There’s a chance that Berry’s mother might have changed her defense systems since he left.”

  “I thought you got the codes from him. And she knows we’re bringing him here.”

  “The codes are 20 years old, and she might not believe us. We’ve got 15 minutes before the main burn, so get moving.”

  ###

  They only just made it.

  The scow, decelerating, fell behind the cargo train. The string of half-silvered beads dwindled against the sweep of the rings, vanishing into the planet’s shadow as the scow swung in around the nightside. Vast lightning storms illuminated sluggish bands of storm systems that could have swallowed Earth without a ripple. Then the rings appeared, a silver arc ahead of the dawning diamond point of the sun. The scow’s motor rumbled continuously, decelerating at just over one gravity. Baker was heavier than he had been for years. Lying flat on the padding of the lifesystem, he tried to find a comfortable position within his pressure suit to wait it out, but there always seemed to be some seam or wrinkle digging into him. Jackson lay beside him, her ungloved right hand holding his ungloved left so that she could access the ship through his net. They lay there like spent lovers.

  “Seems hard to remember how we stood this on Earth,” Baker said at one point. “I almost envy Berry, floating in that tank.”

  “Just keep quiet,” Jackson said. “I’m watching everything. If something goes wrong, you’re toast.”

  She didn’t say it with much conviction, Baker thought. For the first time, he fell that he might have a chance to win back from this. It was clear that she hadn’t been able to work out what he’d done. He felt pity for her—she was out-of-date, left behind by the accelerating changes that were sweeping through the Outer System. She should have returned to Earth; out here, the aggression which had helped win the Quiet War was not a survival trait. Individualism counted for nothing in the Outer System. To survive, you had to commit yourself to helping others, who in turn would help you.

  Baker said, “What’s wrong? You said you remembered how good I was. I’m even better now.”

  “I remember you always thought you were a hotshot, but didn’t have much to back it up. You were a company man, Baker, even when you were in the service. You were always happiest following orders. You had no initiative. That’s one thing about you that hasn’t changed.”

  “Nothing you say can hurt me more than what you tried to do to me,” Baker said, with a fair imitation of wounded pride, thinking that her initiative had got her into prison, and now into this. He pulled down the view to shut her out.

  The rings spanned the curve of the planet in a thousand shades of gray and brown and white, casting a shadow across the bulge of its equator. The scow was coming in at a narrow angle above the plane of the rings, and they spread to port like a highway a million lanes wide. Zooming in with the scow’s telescope, Baker could see the seemingly solid plane break apart in lanes of flecks that grew into rocks and bergs flashing in the sunlight as they tumbled, a storm of motes forever falling around the planet.

  The scow plunged stern-first towards the gap beyond the outer edge of the narrow F ring. Jackson started a looped broadcast of the code she had dug out of Berry. Their target was still around the curve of the planet, coming towards them out of night; they’d rendezvous with it just at its dawn. Baker wanted to look for the cargo train, but wasn’t sure that he could do it without Jackson catching on.

  “I was wondering,” he said, after a while, “what you’ll do if this works out.”

  “That’s none of your fucking business.”

  “We might not survive it.”

  “I intend to. You could have set yourself free, Baker.”

  “Things have changed.”

  “This is the frontier, Baker. It’s far from the antfarms of Earth. It’s where people can walk tall and make their fortunes if they have the intelligence and the backbone.”

  “Or end in the vacuum farms.”

  “I had some bad luck. I’m going to turn that around. You might be content to give up your free will to a bunch of farmers who sit inside rocks like bugs in a bad apple. Well, I’m not.”

  She said more, but Baker tuned it out. The scow was just about to begin its final course correction. He patched telescope scans into a 360-degree perspective. The rings stretched away ahead and behind, flattened into a narrow line that bisected the sky. A single speck was bracketed ahead: their target.

  ###

  Janus was roughly the same size as Phoebe, an irregular body like the profile of a fist. It was pockmarked with craters, most eroded by billions of years of micrometeorite sleet and further softened by patches of vacuum organism growth. One small circular crater had been tented over, and shone greenly with internal lights. There was a ring of silver around it. The scow spotted one of the defense drones a hundred kilometres out and presented Baker with a grainy image of the tiny, deadly thing: a slim body less than two metres long, with a flat radar dish at one end and the swollen bowl of an oversized motor at the other. No radar probed the scow; nothing moved to intercept it. The broadcast code must be working.

  The scow shuddered, spinning this way and that, making a series of short burns before finally shutting down its motor. Now it was falling in the same orbit as the little moon, barely 20 kilometres away.

  Jackson started what seemed to be a one-sided conversation—she had made contact with someone on Janus, it seemed, but she wouldn’t allow Baker to switch into the channel.

  “I have him right here,” she said, “just like I told you. You must know he’s aboard—that’s why I could shut down your defense drones. Don’t try and target me manually, the ship will blow up if radar locks on it. Because he asked me to, don’t let’s go into all that again. Well, I expect that he misses you all. Yes, I can bring evidence, but it might be easier if you came up here, or I landed the ship. Well, okay, that’s fine by me too. Creepy little fucker,” she added, turning to Baker.

  “Can you really blow up the ship?”

  “Only if it’s absolutely necessary.”

  “That was Berry’s mother you were talking with?”

  “Some kind of agent, I think. It wants me to go down there with evidence I brought Berry back.”

  Jackson sealed up her pressure suit but did not go out through the airlock; instead, she opened an internal access hatch and plunged into the water tank. Berry was supine. She had added a relaxant to his alcohol mix. Baker watched as she snipped off the little finger from Berry’s right hand and came back out.

  “It has to be fresh,” she said, grinning at Baker through her helmet’s visor. She was pumped up with excitement. “That way she’ll know we’re not kidding. You’re not going to give me any trouble, are you?”

  “Maybe you had better tell me what you’ve thought of.”

  “We’re going down together. And if I see any sign that the ship is moving out of orbit, I’ll blow it.”

  “I should stay here with Berry.”

  “And have you swing the ship around and torch me?”

  “I wouldn’t do that. I’m in this with you.”

  “You’d better be, because you’re going to be my backup. They’re expecting one person. You’ll be a surprise. They won’t know who you are or what you’ll be doing while I walk
in there.”

  They used a little jet unit to pull them across, touching down two kilometres from the tented crater, which was somewhere beyond the close, sharply curved horizon. Except for his annual safety certification exercises, Baker had hardly ever done any vacuum work. His P-suit was intelligent and responsive, but a residual stiffness blunted his reflexes; he let go a moment too soon and tumbled end for end when he touched down on the little moon’s surface.

  He tumbled a fair way—in Janus’s microgravity, he could bounce a couple of hundred metres off the surface with the gentlest of kicks. At last the suit fired a grapple and he slowed to a halt with a cloud of dust raining straight down all around. He was at the edge of a dense field of tall black blades that sloped away to the close horizon. Some reached up to four metres; all grew from thick rhizomes that snaked half-buried through the dusty regolith; all had turned the flat surfaces of their blades towards the sun’s yellow spark.

  Jackson threw a camo cloth over the jet unit and crept towards Baker on her belly, supple as a snake in her yellow P-suit. She checked him over and began to assemble a hollow tube and a scaffold cradle from components she had strapped to her backpack.

  “What are you doing?”

  “It’s amazing what you can get in the way of surplus weaponry, if you have the credit. This is a missile launcher. The Europans made them to shoot down drones like the ones we operated, only they didn’t have time to deploy them before the hydrogen bomb broke open the crust. I paid for this through Berry’s room service. It fires up to ten smart micromissiles, but I only need two. One is aimed at the scow, the other at the dome over the horizon.

  “Ah. I thought you were joking about blowing up the ship.”

  Jackson said flatly, “I don’t joke about business.”

  She started to adjust the angle of the tube by minute increments, finally sitting back in a squat. “It’s running, ready to go in three hours. Try and move it now and the charge will explode. Try and rip out the chip that controls it—same thing. The only way to stop it is to use a code. You think I’m a fuck-up, but I know what I’m doing here.”

  Baker couldn’t see Jackson’s face because the sun was reflecting off the gold-tinted visor of her helmet, but he could imagine her tigerish grin. He said, “I don’t doubt it.”

  “You stay right there. I’ll be telling them that you’ll fire the mortar at any sign of trouble, so don’t stray. And remember that I’m linked to the ship just like you. Try anything—especially try and close down my link—and I’ll blow her. Sit tight. Enjoy the view. I’ll be back soon.”

  ###

  Baker sat tight, watching Saturn’s crescent slowly wax above the sharp, irregular edge of the horizon. Like almost all of Saturn’s moons, Janus was tidally locked, and kept one face permanently turned toward its primary. Sri Hong-Owen had sited her home at the edge of sub-Saturnian hemisphere; Saturn stood permanently at the horizon, his rings arching beyond his banded crescent like the string of a drawn bow—he dominated half the sky, shedding a bilious light over the pockmarked slope. Janus was so small that wherever you looked the ground appeared to slope away—Baker felt that he was hugging the top of a hill that was plunging towards Saturn’s storms, a hill studded with half-buried boulders of all sizes which cast multicolored shadows. In the other direction, the outer ring system scratched a thin arch across the width of the sky, with several of the moons bright against a dusting of stars. There was Dione, which had its own satellite trailing at 60 degrees of arc in the same orbital path; there was the tiny crescent of Titan, lit not only by the Sun but by the terraforming fusion lamps hung in equatorial orbit. Baker wondered what it would be like when Janus was overtaken by its co-orbital moon, Epimetheus. Passing only 50 kilometres away, Epimetheus would eclipse Saturn and exchange a fraction of its momentum with Janus; the two moons would swap orbits and Janus would slowly accelerate away in the lower orbit. The orbital exchange happened every four years, and was not a stable configuration; in slightly under ten million years the two moons would collide, and it was thought that the fragments would eventually coalesce into a single body.

  He thought his plan through again. With the insurance of the cargo train, he was pretty sure that he could get out of this alive. The rest was as imponderable as ever, but he was confident that he could make some friends here. That was what he was good at, after all. Of course, he’d underestimated Jackson, and it was only pure dumb luck that she hadn’t upgraded her net—otherwise he was pretty sure that she would have disposed of him as soon as she had control of the scow. But Jackson wasn’t the problem now. He was pretty sure that she would be killed as soon as she walked into the habitat. Although it certainly increased his chance of survival, part of him—the fragmented bits of his old self—wished that he’d warned her.

  The P-suit’s lifesystem made comforting hums and soft hisses; it was like being inside a tent exactly his size.

  Baker broke radio silence to try and talk with Berry, but the man was gurgling inside his mask, drunk or asleep, and wouldn’t answer.

  He tried that counting trick: one potato, two potato, three potato, four. Tested it against the system clock of his net, tried different intonations, couldn’t get it to come out right. Maybe it was just a story Jackson had spun to draw him in. It didn’t matter. He didn’t need dumb tricks like that, not any more.

  Time passed. Baker had always been calm in the squeeze of danger—to his way of thinking, there was no sense in getting caught up in useless speculation, it was best to face any situation with an uncluttered mind. In any case, there was nothing he could do until either Jackson came back or Berry’s mother came for him. He set up a couple of alarms on his P-suit’s system and fell asleep.

  And woke an hour later to find four pressure-suited figures kneeling by him, visors blankly reflecting the gray-brown moonscape. They were as small as children. A fifth figure was examining Jackson’s missile launcher.

  Baker tried to sit up, and discovered that his suit was bound by a thousand tough, tightly wrapped fibres. He squashed the first tremors of alarm and said as calmly as he could, “There’s a couple of things you should know.”

  ###

  The ring of silver around the tented crater was a plantation of things like flowers, tough wiry stalks five metres tall rising straight out of dusty ice, each bearing a single big white dish-shaped bloom with a black cylinder protruding from its centre. The dishes were all turned in one direction, toward the setting sun. It was pitch black beneath the packed dishes, but Baker’s captors carried him at the same fast-gliding gait with which they’d crossed the open ground.

  Just as he was carried out of the far side of the plantation, Baker thought he saw a flash at the horizon, and wondered if that had been the missile launcher. Then he and his captors plunged down a sleep terraced slope, following a path sketched in dabs of green fox-fire. Baker didn’t ask where they were taking him. He was just grateful that so far he had not been killed.

  The slope became a tunnel, hung from floor to ceiling with a thousand stiff black curtains that must have formed a pressure lock, because the tunnel suddenly opened up at the lip of a huge bowl of greenery under a thousand brilliant lamps, with flocks of what looked like birds floating lazily at different layers in the air, Saturn a blank-faced giant peering in at the construction diamond tent which capped the vast space.

  Baker’s pressure-suited captors dropped him at the edge of the bowl and threw themselves over the drop, bouncing like balls from terrace to terrace and finally vanishing into a stand of tree ferns. Baker’s bonds slowly dissolved, snapping apart like brittle elastic as he picked himself up.

  A woman was moving toward him through the air above the green gulf, sitting on a throne borne up by what looked like cherubs. She was not Sri Hong-Owen but one of her daughters. She was young, golden-skinned and unselfconsciously naked. She had a tweak’s etiolated build, her long arms and legs skinny but supple, her breasts no more than enlarged nipples on her prominent rib cage. A
cloud of black hair floated around her narrow face.

  When Baker asked her name, she smiled and said that no names were needed here, where all were one mind, one flesh. He asked then where her mother was, and the golden-skinned woman told him that she had moved on, which at first Baker took to mean died.

  “Alder descended to the Earth to continue our mother’s work there,” the woman said, “and Berry went his own way. He is only our half-brother, and is weak-minded, but we love him anyway. Our mother would have killed him, we think, but she no longer needs to make small decisions like that, and we decided to show mercy.”

  “How many are you?”

  Baker had unlatched the helmet of his P-suit and stood with it tucked under his arm, like an old-fashioned knight in front of his enthroned queen. The cherubs had flown away—they had little patience, the woman had said when they left, being full of the joy of life lived moment to moment.

  “There are more than enough of us to deal with you or anyone else who tries to invade our kingdom,” she told Baker now. “We have killed many in the last 20 years—spies, pirates, adventurers, the merely curious. But you are the first to think of kidnapping Berry, and you are the first to threaten our mother. How did you know?”

  “Luck, I guess,” Baker said, wondering what he was supposed to have guessed.

  The woman leaned forward, gazing intently at him through her floating tangle of black hair. “Berry is not dead.”

  Her gaze compelled. Baker said, “No. No, not when I left him.”

  “Then you are luckier than you know,” the woman said.

  “What about Jackson?”

  “Was that her name?”

  “You killed her, didn’t you? You should know she aimed a missile at this place.”

  “We dealt with it.”