The major paints the protruding gloves with medical nanite goo, which smells like a cross between motor oil and sour milk. You lay face-down in the grav-cradle and sleeve your arms into the gloves. The goo is tingling and cool. It gets under your skin, inside you. The major tells you if you pull free from the gloves before you're released, it will lead to massive staph infection. The station's atmosphere scrubbers aren't perfect, and the corps doesn't cover hypos for space-heads who can't follow orders. Hypos go to those who need them, ground troops returning from strikes against the Tivhari on outer arm planets. Pilots don't need them. If you're hit, vacuum is the sterilizer.
The major locks you inside the room.
For four days, you lay alone.
The LIC provides the only light. The interface liquid is alive, a culture held over and extended many, many generations. The room smells of ozone, a byproduct from the liquid. Inside its chamber, it has all the nutrients it'll ever need. Your control gestures and fingertip sequences mix it and feed it.
The door is behind you. You cannot move your body to look at it without pulling free. If you pull free, the light will dim.
You're babbling when the major returns and releases you. The hand on your shoulder, the weight of it, its warmth and the person it implies are both real and impossible, terrible and lovely. The soundproof room expanded in your mind to envelop the core worlds which lay like glittering opals spilled along the galactic arm; the front where Tivhari swarm the arm's outer fringe; and everything unseen and unknown beyond. Outside the room lay nothing. Inside lay everything. The major came from outside. His whispered voice brings you back to the worlds.
"Good job," the major says. "You're ready for your fighter. Don't touch the button, unless you need to."
His voice strikes the solitary cord strung down the crumbling tower of your being. It is like hearing God.
You have lost ten pounds.
In a bare hall within the station, you are seated at one end of a long table with others just like you, their forearms ringed with fresh scar tissue. Even fidgeting your slippered feet across the steel decking sounds like scraping sand across the tension of a drum.
The long table has been rendered in micro lattices from anodized plastic, printed segment by segment from the station's supply line. The benches, too. Everything in the hall can be melted down, fed back to the supply, and repurposed at will. It is all sturdy, yet so light you fear the breeze from the scrubbers could blow it away.
From the door at the far end of the table, servers arrive with food and lay it before you, then leave.
Buttery rolls steam when you break them apart. You dip the broken ends into cups of almond honey. You bite into turkey legs lathered in smoky barbeque sauce, the bones of which you hold in your fists. The tastes are familiar, yet this is the first time you've eaten such foods. You've earned it, passed the corps' tests and graduated through therapy.
Your tongue burns on the meat. Blisters form and pop on the roof of your mouth. There are no utensils. Globs of fat smear and congeal on your chin, collect between your fingers with sticky sauce. You drink real black coffee until you shake.
When a mouthful of raw steak lodges in your throat, your eyes bulge and you rise from the table and glare at the others who have frozen midgorge to watch you. They look like you, like each other, their heads shaved, their muscled builds shaped by electrical stimuli regimens, every last one in pilot casuals. They are all the same height. In a moment of clarity, you understand you are alone, then pound your abdomen down against the side of the table once... twice... then dislodge the obstruction. Partially chewed steak flies over the table and lands in the punchbowl with a splash. A roar of laughter fills the hall.
Suddenly, you are surrounded. Someone pounds you on the back. You do not see who it was. Your chest hurts; you fear you have broken some ribs and will have to hide the injury in order to go out with the assault wave. Someone says, "Well, that was a close call."
You smile and shakily accept their jibes.
"What: you wanted to get it over with before the Tivhari got a chance?"
"Couldn't help yourself, huh?"
"Scrawny fucker."
They all speak your language without accent. Their voices all sound the same. You are glad someone, anyone is speaking, even if to single you out.
The circle widens around you, and you notice a man standing with his face to the corner, the only one not laughing. At his sides, his clean hands rapidly repeat control gestures you read even from your distance: concentrate fuel to thrusters, full thrust, concentrate fuel to thrusters, full thrust... He is trying to escape.
Your stare draws attention to him, and the laughter dies away.
The major enters. The man locks hard, shaky eyes on you while the major escorts him from the hall.
You return to your seat. Your partially chewed steak slaps onto the table before you and speckles your casuals with red spiced punch. Someone fished it out and threw it back to you. The silence grows severe. You pop the cold steak into your mouth and chew. The room erupts with laughter. You fake choking, those nearest rush to your aid, and you wave them off with a grin. The laughter doubles.
You regain your weight.
The major introduces you to your fighter. She has a name— Skulldugger. In script like riveted steel, it stamps her white hull beside where a tech ascends caution-orange steps to fit your LIC into her egg-shaped cockpit. Spidery cracks scrimshaw the grinning skull decal beside the name. Below it, Roman numerals XXVIII are painted in black, followed by the stenciled shape of a man. Skulldugger killed twenty-eight Tivhari before she lost her pilot.
"She's a good ship," the major says. "She came back. She'll bring you back."
Skulldugger can fly herself to rendezvous if unmanned.
She is shaped like an oversized chicken egg glued fat-end to fat-end to a ring of five other oversized chicken eggs, everything seamless and contained under the stippled white of her hull, even the point collapse cannons and HARP blasters. You have worked their control gestures endlessly in your mind. You know how to crush a Tivhari fighter in upon itself at six clicks, how to fire thrumming radiation balls as hot as suns. But the button, synaptic therapy has given you no reference for it. The best pilots don't use it.
Twenty-eight is more than is painted on any of the other fighters, even the major's. His fighter has no kills on it, a sign of rank, of not keeping track anymore. His is painted an iridescent yellow that hurts your eyes to look at directly. He is staying behind during the assault. His fighter would draw attention, even in the shadow of a moon.
You imagine yourself in his position someday. You are the same, but for experience. You are better even, more classes reside in your hindbrain.
"Don't let it go to your head," the major says, indicating Skulldugger's kills. "It isn't enough by a long shot."
The Tivhari are parasites who expand their territory by dusting atmospheres with their seed, like fish wildly milting into currents baubled with eggs. Their seeds rarely create life. Unluckily, humans are unique. Once in gested, Tivhari seeds connect with gut bacteria and grow into barbed tubes. They dig in and grow and strain to fill all 7.6 meters of intestines until backup forces the barbs to tear through intestinal walls, and the Tivhari burst free.
The Tivhari don't care what planets they dust. They'll try anything. They're driven, swimming upstream toward the core planets.
You assure the major you're fine, you're not anxious, it's just your ribs. He locks eyes with you and says he hasn't noticed any stiffness or shortness of breath. He is sure you will perform admirably. You've graduated through the synaptic therapies. His hindbrain contains more of the prime cipher than yours. Yours has been aggregated since he graduated the pilot therapies. Within a few classes, he won't be able to relate to the new pilots while you will. You're starting out ahead of where he started.
While completing the ten jumps to the fringe, Skulldugger communicates with the other fighters in your squadron and randomly t
rades jump points. At each point, you are alone in space but for one fellow pilot, a different one at each point. You'll arrive at the rally point in formation, your squadron the tip of the wing's lance. Until then, it is a goose chase in reverse, your wing scattered. The star field shifts around you as though someone has clicked your viewer from one slide to the next, growing dimmer and less dense.
On jump eight, Skulldugger arrives over planet Magdalena—named after its founder's wife, the names of the Gods long exhausted. It looks like a blue ball sneezed on by a giant who had a mouthful of islands. It is about a quarter larger than Earth. White clouds band its equator and calve swirling formations that scud out toward the poles to dissipate and collide in ponderous puffs.
You shouldn't have time to appreciate such things.
You tap thumb to pinky in sequence, and gambol your wrists to spin Skulldugger in a slow sine wave pan. Your hindbrain pulses for patience, but you form your hands into the sign for peace, and ping for friendlies.
Magdalena is silent.
Tivhari dusted Magdalena when the Corps started its push-back campaign to flush them from the galactic arm. It is not your target. Tivhari evolve at a rate faster than fruit flies, yet those on Magdalena aren't even "adolescent." It'll be decades before they develop brain and appendages enough to make use of the colonizers' ships and escape off planet. Colonizer ships are complicated though, and there is a chance they'll blow themselves up and ground themselves until they can build their own spacecrafts, which could be decades more. By then, they'll have evolved to their plateau state, their DNA shortened during quick evolution and unable to continue the rush—stuck like humans in a crawl along the evolutionary ladder, age by age.
They aren't going anywhere. Magdalena's water is seeded. It'll take time and concentrated resources you don't have onboard to clear Magdalena for human habitation again.
Your comms crackle with an incoming.
"This is Magdalena Base Five, thank God you've come."
You are not to speak with the planet. Your hindbrain tells you even if Tivhari can't make it off planet, they may be able to communicate, to mimic. You are not to give them info that may be sent ahead, even of your presence. You have already made a mistake by pinging. You should have exercised patience.
"This is Magdalena Base Five, repeat, Magdalena Base Five, friendlies, over."
Your partner fighter pops into orbit over Magdalena, a neon-green blip on your 3-D field dome. It locks in on Skulldugger with a flat band comm line. A fraction of a second between jumps caused the delay.
You jump away.
In formation within the shadow of a moon at the outer fringe, Skulldugger sights a Tivhari seed ship fleet flying over Melville IV, and enlarges it for your viewer. Glinting in the full strike of the system's yellow sun, gargantuan, whale-shaped ships which house thousands of king Tivhari have locked a synchronous orbit over Melville IV's equatorial sea. Dark, roiling clouds veil much of Melville IV's surface, punched through from beneath by volcanic flares.
Skulldugger counts two hundred seed ships, more than expected. Dissemination ships swarm from hangar bays, which split the seed ships' black-steel faces. They dive into Melville IV's atmosphere and return to their hangars.
Each seed ship is capable of generating thousands of barrels of dusting seed a day. Left unchecked, Tivhari will do just that until they're spent, then replaced.
There are no humans on Melville IV. There is water, a foothold. With what they're doing, it'll take a hundred times the resources Magdalena needs to clear it.
Skulldugger goes wild with blaring alarms, and jolts the interface liquid so it glows ruby. You've been locked on. Tivhari are behind you, emerging from behind the moon whose shadow the corps predicted would hide you. You feel guilty; you shouldn't have pinged over Magdalena.
You barrel roll to avoid what may already be coming at you, then nose planetward in an erratic scribble to shake the lock and drag what else may follow into the gravity well. A fellow pilot has the same idea and dives beside you. A rooster tail of glowing interface liquid bursts from his cockpit, spectruming through the primary colors as it freezes and dies. You didn't see what hit him. His path was straighter than yours though, a surer track for Tivhari jump munitions. Once true-locked, a hardened tungsten bolt fitted with a jump drive had a straight course through him into the planet.
Before you nose back, a fiery fingernail scratch scores the smoky atmosphere filling your viewer—a Tivhari jump bolt missed you.
With a flip of your wrists, Skulldugger pivots to face the pursuing Tivhari. Your body feels like a hollow thing filled with sloshing wet pieces, your ribs a brittle, creaky cage; even the grav-cradle can't nullify all the force of the sudden turn and thrust. You pinch thumb to pointer, and the pursuing Tivhari fighter crumples in upon itself and disappears. Skulldugger bucks with its disappearance as though hitting a speed bump.
Skulldugger's collapse cache tics down one of its dozen units.
You realign Skulldugger for a view of the dogfight. The scrum is traveling from the moon, closing in on the seed ship fleet. Tivhari fighters are painted a bright, fuck-off, I'm one bad son of a bitch Rorschach of neon caution-orange that tickles a frightened, reptilian part of your brain. It is not something synaptic therapy readied you for. It is something new from the Tivhari.
The LIC registers your hands' tremor, shakes Skulldugger.
Concentrate fuel to thrusters, full thrust; you head in.
Dissemination ships pour from the seed ships. They are unarmed, manned by docile spent males. They are dangerous like debris is dangerous. Tivhari females pilot their fighters. They outnumber your wing five to one.
Nearer the seed ship fleet, Tivhari fighters switch from jump munitions to gauss cannons, the rounds of which won't punch through seed ship hulls and keep going to hit another if they miss you. Skulldugger jukes with your hands' trembling and condenses the shaky scene on your viewer into a more stable view with minimum tracer blur.
At six clicks, you collapse a seed ship, and Skulldugger jars from its disappearance.
Skulldugger wails with alarms, a Tivhari fighter has locked on.
Skulldugger counts one hundred fifty seed ships left before you veer away in perpendicular orbit to the Tivhari fleet and head for Melville IV's northern pole. It wasn't your hands' trembling that caused so much shaking for Skulldugger, rather the rapid collapse of so many large ships. Your wing has kept its eye on the prize. Skulldugger counts your squadron. Of its twelve fighters, five have been lost. Those remaining are all in the midge cloud mix surrounding the seed ships; the remaining five squadrons of the wing less so, scattered to save their asses and pick off Tivhari fighters one at a time.
You dive toward a bright volcanic flare pancaking across Melville IV's upper atmosphere. The pursuing Tivhari matches route. Before it can true-lock, you about-face Skulldugger, pinch thumb to pointer, and the Tivhari dodges, fires its gauss wide into the atmosphere. You snap your fingers. Skulldugger thrums and fires blinding little suns, which the Tivhari shrugs past. HARP rounds hurtle away like winking stars, growing dimmer, dimmer. You pass each other, close enough to spit, then about-face for another pass.
The Tivhari switches to pinwheel rounds, specially shaped reels of flex cord that unfurl with rifling spin and come at you like expanding rotor blades.
Eventually, she runs out and returns to her gauss.
The elastic rhythm of your passes locks you alone together in a shallow orbit.
The seething mass of Melville IV obscures the main battle, the Tivhari fleet's lock over the great equatorial sea dragging it away at the speed of the planet's rotation.
Upper atmosphere bumps Skulldugger from below. To break free would be to expose yourself and concede an angle of attack. You ride out the passes, and grow comfortable enough for point collapse. Skulldugger's weapon cache tics to half, a quarter. You are wasting it. A Tivhari f leet remains, which shouldn't. It is your mission. Not this.
A pinwheel round
blooms from the Tivhari fighter and chops toward you. You pull Skulldugger up from shallow orbit, drawing the Tivhari after, then enter a battle fugue—your control gestures a wild flurry of instinct, anger, and fear, wondrous to you for their split-second tactic, like they had been planned, yet terrifying for their desperation, Skulldugger a part of you, your skin, you. Somewhere, maybe in your body, pain wraps around ribs like fine burning wire. You're screaming, cursing—cyst bitch, shit-eater, you shit-eating bug fucker! —when you find yourself back in shallow orbit, trading passes, thrumming Skulldugger for tiny sun after terrible tiny sun.
Skulldugger's weapons cache color-codes to red, low. There is a reserve, something below E. You blank out the cache, keep firing.
Your passes grow closer. The Tivhari stops firing.
Before you collide, before you pull free from the contact gloves and push the button, you think she is more determined than you. She would kill herself to kill you. She is a weapon.
You push the button.
Suddenly, everything is still.
You are nose to nose with the Tivhari fighter, suspended in a zero bubble, speeding in orbit around Melville IV toward the northern pole—a double-yolked egg.
The Tivhari pilot scrabbles at her cockpit glass, then her multifaceted mouth fingers spread apart. A throat tube protrudes and spits a vicious bile-colored acid against her cockpit's glass that obscures her with browning bubbles.
She comes to her senses and wipes the acid clean with something like a rag. When she looks at you, she sees only the sleek nose of Skulldugger. Perhaps she can see the tally marked on Skulldugger's side. Perhaps she understands, has seen it before. You can't say how—the arrangement and swell between her facial plates, the tuck of her mouth fingers—but you can tell she is frightened. She knows what you know. Even if she breaks through her cockpit, she will get no further. She is in a zero bubble. It will stop her. And you control its button. If she breaks through, you can press release and fill her cockpit with vacuum. When you do that, there's no telling how strong she'll be, if she'll be able to force the rest of her way out, if she'll be able to get to you before Skulldugger speeds away. Perhaps you have HARP rounds left. Perhaps she has chambered her final pinwheel round, reserved for just this moment.
Analog Science Fiction and Fact - September 2014 Page 12