Space Soldiers

by Jack Dann

  She took another sip of her cocktail, and another.

  Then she told me something new. Something that I never expected.

  “When your grandfather came back to earth,” she confessed, “and after all the parades and interviews and the medal ceremonies, he came home. Finally. It was the middle of the night, and he walked into my bedroom and sat on the edge of my bed, and he put his face down into his hands, and he cried. That’s the only time that I’ve ever seen your grandfather cry. When Mom died last year, there weren’t two tears from him. But he sat there and wept for almost an hour . . . !”

  I had to ask, “Why?”

  “Because.” It was obvious to Mom, but she needed a sip before she said it. “Because he was so very glad to see me, Sammy. And that’s all it means!”

  ###

  The farmer felt awful. Felt sick.

  He said so, and he looked so, his face twisted as if he was ready to bring up his breakfast. “The bastards,” he kept saying, walking us back toward the truck after the men in suits had gone. “Of all the nerve! Tracking you down, just to harass you . . . !”

  Grandpa didn’t say one word.

  Solomon was hunting again, following a scent out of the yard and into the trees. Grandpa looked at his dog, but he didn’t say anything.

  I shouted for him. “Come here, boy. Come!”

  But the dog had gone deaf again.

  “It’s not fair,” the farmer sputtered. “Trying to punish you like this. Now. They feel guilty, and this is how they try to make things right.”

  Grandpa gave a little half-nod.

  “Christ,” said old Mr. Teeson, “it isn’t as if you knew.”

  We’d reached the truck, and Grandpa stopped at his door. Doing nothing.

  “You didn’t know,” said the farmer.

  Grandpa turned. “What do you mean?”

  “About the humongous, and what the king was telling you . . . all of that . . .”

  “What was the king telling me?”

  The man licked his lips, then said, “The ship was split up into factions. With the worst group trying to make a home for itself.”

  Grandpa didn’t make one sound.

  The farmer pulled a hand over his scalp, then looked at me. Talking only to me, he asked, “So what if the king was telling the truth? Nobody understood those aliens, and your grandfather had to act. He had to do something—”

  “Shut up.” The same as he said it years ago, talking to the humongous, Grandpa told Mr. Teeson, “Shut up.” Then he turned and shouted, “Come on, boy! We’re leaving!”

  As hard as his stiff legs could manage, Solomon came back across the yard.

  “I’m sorry,” the farmer whispered.

  Then he said, “Colonel,” one last time.

  Grandpa opened the back door and grumbled, “Get in.”

  The dog tried, but he was too sore and too tired.

  He whined when his jump fell short, and Grandpa grabbed him by the neck and threw him into the back, making him squeal even worse.

  ###

  I had never, ever asked him about the humongous or the starship.

  I knew better.

  It was so much of a rule that I couldn’t remember ever being told not to do it. Although I must have been. Mom or Grandma must have said, “Don’t,” in an important voice. “Don’t ever,” they would have told me. “He doesn’t like talking about it, Sammy.”

  I didn’t ask. Even then, I didn’t.

  Grandpa was driving again, following a good road between the fields and little ribbons of trees, and the dog was in the back, licking his sore spots. Grandpa was the one who said, “You know what they haven’t found? Those three days before. The three days we spent talking to that king. Talking to his princes or his advisors, or whatever they were. Hearing things that sounded like promises. Only nothing ever changed.

  “ ‘We are working,’ they said. ‘We are trying.’ They kept chanting, ‘Soon, soon, soon, soon, soon.’ And all that time, people were dying, and cities in every part of the world were drowning.”

  I stared at my grandfather, saying nothing.

  “That idiot Teeson was right,” he told me. “There was plenty that I didn’t know. Like why it smelled inside their ship. As bad as skunk, almost. I assumed that because they were aliens, they must have liked the stink. The king didn’t tell me that their ship was on its last oars, and the stink and those enormous empty rooms and all the factions and all of the rest of the bullshit were measures of how bad things had gotten.”

  He said, “Sam.” He said, “Do anything, and there is always something you don’t know. Always. Even if it comes out for the very best, there were facts and figures that you didn’t consider. And that’s why it’s the weakest, sickest, saddest apology to say that you did it wrong because you didn’t have some perfect golden knowledge at your disposal.”

  He seemed to be talking to me, but thinking back, I know that he was talking more to himself. His voice was steady and dry and strong, and a little bit strange because of it. Grandpa couldn’t have sounded more like his old self. And for reasons that I couldn’t name, that made me feel scared and a little bit sick.

  All at once, he said, “Here.”

  We turned off the paved road, following the edge of a wide field. And that’s when I remembered the place. Last year, we’d come here to hunt, and this was where I shot my first pheasant. I could still see the shot in my mind, all those feathers knocked loose and the bird dropping and me racing the dog to get to it first.

  At the top of a little hill, we stopped. But instead of hunting, we sat. Saying nothing.

  Grandpa turned on the television, jumping through the channels until he found what he wanted. Then with his steady voice starting to break, he said, “Your mother hasn’t let you watch it clear through. Has she?”

  I looked at him, and blinked, and I managed to say, “No, sir.”

  “Watch it now,” he told me. He ordered me.

  Even on that little screen, it was sick to see. There was my grandfather, suddenly young, standing naked underneath the alien king. He was covered with pink blood, and he was holding a long knife, and dangling beside him were two of the king’s dicks. The third dick was lying at his feet, long as a man is tall, and like a live fish, still flopping. And Grandpa was screaming, “Tell me! How do we stop them?! How?!”

  “I die,” the king answered, his voice huge and weak at the same time. “Please. I die. Please.”

  Grandpa shoved the knife up into the body itself, letting a river of blood pour over him. And he screamed, “The leads! Give ’em here!”

  Someone came running, a black and a red cable in hand.

  “Where is it?” Grandpa asked, looking down at some sort of biological map.

  Someone said something. I couldn’t hear what.

  Neither could he. “That fat bunch of nerves . . . where is it . . . ?”

  The woman came close enough to point—

  And Grandpa shoved the wires up into that wide wet hole, then stepped back and said again, “How do we stop this?”

  “I die,” said the king.

  Grandpa turned and said, “Do it!”

  Someone said, “Sir—?”

  “Shit!” he screamed. Then he moved over to a humanmade box and hit a red button, and nothing happened for a half-second. Maybe longer. Then the king gave out a wail, big and deep, and he started to move, caught between those two strong nets and flopping like his own dick, only faster. Stronger. Flopping and flinging himself, and screaming right up until the nets broke free and he dropped onto the bloody floor. And he still kept moving, that whole long body arching up until Grandpa finally hit the red button again.

  Again, Grandpa asked, “How can we stop this?”

  The king said, “No.”

  Then he said, “I won’t tell you.”

  And Grandpa, my grandpa turned off the television. He said, “Look at me.” Then he took both of his thumbs, wiping the tears off my face. And after
a little while, he said, “Wait here. Stay with the truck.”

  ###

  I didn’t feel like hunting.

  Not anymore.

  I was numb and sick, and sadder than I thought I could ever be. I barely heard Grandpa opening the back end, then shutting it again. Then I didn’t hear anything until this sobbing started, and I forced myself to turn and look into the back. The dog was in the back end of the truck. Tied up. He was saying, “I want to go,” with his little-kid voice.

  I climbed out and went around back. It took me a minute or two to figure out the latch, then lift the gate high enough to unlock it. Then I saw which gun was missing, and I picked up the empty case, not really thinking. Just feeling sicker all the time. And the dog begged. Not using words, but sounding like an old-fashioned dog. So I undid the leash, and he jumped down and started off down along a line of trees.

  I followed him.

  I found myself starting to run, my boots heavy and getting heavier. But I kept the dog in sight, right up till he slid down into a draw. And I got to the draw and stopped, spotting my shotgun’s safety lying at my feet.

  “I am dismantled,” the machine told me.

  There was a little pond in the draw. And trees. Grandpa was sitting on a downed log with the gun barrel put up into his mouth. He didn’t hear me. He was too busy working at the angle of gun, trying to get everything just so.

  I tried to talk.

  My voice quit working, but I managed to make a whimpering sound.

  Then without pulling the barrel out of his mouth, he halfway turned and saw me, his eyes getting wider and brighter, and somehow farther away.

  I stepped closer.

  Talking around the barrel, he told me, “Go away.”

  I was thinking what he said about never knowing enough. About how a man can’t just wait till he has perfect knowledge to act.

  Grandpa was crying.

  “Leave me alone,” he said. Louder this time.

  I don’t know where I got the strength, but I told him, “No.”

  Then I told him, “They’re going to find you innocent. If you explain things.”

  Then I sat down on the ground. Waiting.

  After a little while, Grandpa managed to pull the barrel out of his mouth and put the gun at his feet, and acting more embarrassed than anything, he wiped at his tears and the rest of his face, and he pulled out a comb and ran it through his hair. Three times. I counted. Then with a tight little voice, he said, “Sam.” He said, “Do me a favor? Pick up this gun for me. Would you, please?”

  GALACTIC NORTH

  Alastair Reynolds

  Persistence can be a virtue, especially in war . . . but perhaps—as in the breakneck, relentlessly paced, gorgeously colored story that follows, which sweeps us along on a cosmic chase across thousands of light-years of space and millions of years of time—it can sometimes be taken a bit too far . . .

  New writer, Alastair Reynolds, is a frequent contributor to Interzone, and has also sold to Asimov’s Science Fiction and elsewhere. His first novel, Revelation Space, already being hailed as one of the major SF books of the year, has just appeared. A professional scientist with a Ph.D. in astronomy, he comes from Wales, but lives in the Netherlands.

  ###

  LUYTEN 726-8

  COMETARY HALO—AD 2303

  The two of them crouched in a tunnel of filthy ice, bulky in space suits. Fifty metres down the tunnel the servitor straddled the bore on skeletal legs, transmitting a thermal image onto their visors. Irravel jumped whenever the noise shifted into something human, cradling her gun nervously.

  “Damn this thing,” she said. “Hardly get my finger round the trigger.”

  “It can’t read your blood, Captain.” Markarian, next to her, managed not to sound as if he was stating the obvious. “You have to set the override to female.”

  Of course. Belatedly, remembering the training session on Fand where they’d been shown how to use the weapons—months of subjective time ago; years of worldtime—Irravel told the gun to reshape itself. The memory-plastic casing squirmed in her gloves to something more manageable. It still felt wrong.

  “How are we doing?”

  “Last teams in position. That’s all the tunnels covered. They’ll have to fight their way in.”

  “I think that might well be on the agenda.”

  “Maybe so.” Markarian sighted along his weapon like a sniper. “But they’ll get a surprise when they reach the cargo.”

  True: the ship had sealed the sleeper chambers the instant the pirates had arrived near the comet. Counterintrusion weaponry would seriously inconvenience anyone trying to break in, unless they had the right authorization. And there, Irravel knew, was the problem; the thing she would rather not have had to deal with.

  “Markarian,” Irravel said. “If we’re taken prisoner, there’s a chance they’ll try and make us give up the codes.”

  “Don’t think that hasn’t crossed my mind already.” Markarian rechecked some aspect of his gun. “I won’t let you down, Irravel.”

  “It’s not a question of letting me down,” she said, carefully. “It’s whether or not we betray the cargo.”

  “I know.” For a moment they studied each other’s faces through their visors, acknowledging what had once been more than professional friendship; the shared knowledge that they would kill each other rather than place the cargo in harm’s way.

  Their ship was the ramliner Hirondelle. She was damaged; lashed to the comet for repair. Improbably sleek for a creature of vacuum, her four-kilometre-long conic hull tapered to a needle-sharp prow and sprouted trumpet-shaped engines from two swept-back spars at the rear. It had been Irravel’s first captaincy: a routine 17-year hop from Fand, in the Lacaille 9352 system, to Yellowstone, around Epsilon Eridani—with 20,000 reefersleep colonists. What had gone wrong should only have happened once in a thousand trips: a speck of interstellar dust had slipped through the ship’s screen of anticollision lasers and punched a cavernous hole in the ablative ice-shield, vaporizing a quarter of its mass. With a massively reduced likelihood of surviving another collision, the ship had automatically steered toward the nearest system capable of supplying repair materials.

  Luyten 726-8 had been no one’s idea of a welcoming destination. No human colonies had flourished there. All that remained were droves of scavenging machines sent out by various superpowers. The ship had locked into a scavenger’s homing signal, eventually coming within visual range of the inert comet which the machine had made its home, and which ought to have been chequered with resupply materials. But when Irravel had been revived from reefersleep, what she’d found in place of the expected goods were only acres of barren comet.

  “Dear god,” she’d said. “Do we deserve this?”

  Yet, after a few days, despair became steely resolve. The ship couldn’t safely travel anywhere else, so they would have to process the supplies themselves, doing the work of the malfunctioning surveyor. It would mean stripping the ship just to make the machines to mine and shape the cometary ice—years of work by any estimate. That hardly mattered. The detour had already added years to the mission.

  Irravel ordered the rest of her crew—all 90 of them—to be warmed, and then delegated tasks, mostly programming. Servitors were not particularly intelligent outside of their designated functions. She considered activating the other machines she carried as cargo—the greenfly terraformers—but that cut against all her instincts. Greenfly machines were Von Neumann breeders, unlike the sterile servitors. They were a hundred times cleverer. She would only consider using them if the cargo was placed in immediate danger.

  “If you won’t unleash the greenflies,” Markarian said, “at least think about waking the Conjoiners. There may only be four of them, but we could use their expertise.”

  “I don’t trust them. I never liked the idea of carrying them in the first place. They unsettle me.”

  “I don’t like them either, but I’m willing to bury my prejudices
if it means fixing the ship faster.”

  “Well, that’s where we differ. I’m not, so don’t raise the subject again.”

  “Yes,” Markarian said, and only when its omission was insolently clear did he bother adding: “Captain.”

  Eventually the Conjoiners ceased to be an issue, when the work was clearly under way and proceeding normally. Most of the crew were able to return to refeersleep. Irravel and Markarian stayed awake a little longer, and even after they’d gone under, they woke every seven months to review the status of the works. It began to look as if they would succeed without assistance.

  Until the day they were woken out of schedule, and a dark, grapple-shaped ship was almost upon the comet. Not an interstellar ship, it must have come from somewhere nearby—probably within the same halo of comets around Luyten 726-8. Its silence was not encouraging.

  “I think they’re pirates,” Irravel said. “I’ve heard of one or two other ships going missing near here, and it was always put down to accident.”

  “Why did they wait so long?”

  “They had no choice. There are billions of comets out here, but they’re never less than light-years apart. That’s a long way if you only have in-system engines. They must have a base somewhere else to keep watch, maybe light-weeks from here, like a spider with a very wide web.”

  “What do we do now?”

  Irravel gritted her teeth. “Do what anything does when it gets stuck in the middle of a web. Fight back.”

  But the Hirondelle’s minimal defenses only scratched against the enemy ship. Oblivious, it fired penetrators and winched closer. Dozens of crab-shaped machines swarmed out and dropped below the comet’s horizon, impacting with seismic thuds. After a few minutes, sensors in the furthest tunnels registered intruders. Only a handful of crew had been woken. They broke guns out of the armoury—small arms designed for pacification in the unlikely event of a shipboard riot—and then established defensive positions in all the cometary tunnels.