“Say again?”
“There is no opening above my head. In fact, there is no opening at this end of the room at all. Take a look.” Three rovers floated around her, earnestly searching for the missing opening.
“Let me check—” O’Connor’s voice stopped. There wasn’t even static. The rovers drifted in random directions.
Jeanine and I turned to each other. “Now what?” she asked.
I accessed the rovers. There should have been signals from fifteen. Only ten showed up on the display. The image from the one farthest back showed a collapsed tunnel. None were under control.
“We will suppose that we have not sprung a trap,” I said hesitantly, “because, if we have, our situation is likely to be hopeless.”
Jeanine took control of the rovers. They darted through tunnels and chambers seeking a way out.
“Let’s think this through,” I said. “A nuke or something similar blasts out that crater above us. The remainder of the station looks solid enough, but in fact it has been shattered. You can’t tell immediately because everything is at rest. But if sufficient force is applied, like plowing into the outer fringes of the atmosphere, the parts will shift into a new configuration. Old tunnels will close. New ones will open.”
“Yes!” Jeanine shouted.
“Have you found a way out?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I have found a way in.”
We went back about fifty meters. There, a narrow slit opened onto a passageway that seemed to have formed from interconnected bubbles. At their end, we came out on a cleft which must have extended all the way to the center of the derelict. And there, scattered across a surface which curved away to a rocky floor, were the field distributors—or whatever they were. A jagged rectangle of sunlight crept down the wall. Looking up, I saw far above a long opening one to two meters wide. Except for the brightness of the sunshine, I would have been able to see the stars marching by.
Jeanine bounded ahead of me and pried up one of the units from its substrate.
“Ow!” She dropped the unit. It settled to one side and began drifting slowly up the wall. “Minibots. One stung me!” She grabbed the unit and stuffed it in her backpack.
The shaft of sunlight swept over her and I could see dots swarming around her. Not swirling like insects, but zooming in straight lines broken by sharp turns. I unholstered my Otee and fired a test pulse at Jeanine. A green light flicked on, assuring me that it recognized Jeanine as a friendly and would not fire when pointed directly at her. I told it to define anything moving as a legitimate target and, pointing in Jeanine’s general direction, squeezed the trigger. A dozen minibots exploded all around her.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“One of them got me,” she said. Pain was in her voice.
I examined her arm. A metal ovoid about the size of the nail on my little finger was embedded just below her elbow. Her suit was trying to seal itself over the wound. As I watched, the ovoid pushed itself further into her flesh.
I set my Otee to its lowest cutting power and narrowest beam. “This is going to hurt,” I warned. I immobilized her arm between my left arm and my side. Then I put the short barrel directly on the ovoid and depressed the trigger. The minibot twisted violently as if trying to hide in Jeanine’s arm. I depressed the trigger further, increasing the strength of the beam. The minibot blackened and ceased moving. I flicked a short blade out of the Otee and used it to dig out the pieces. Jeanine moaned and tried not to fight me. Her suit sealed itself when I was done. My hand was shaking. I blinked away a combination of tears and sweat. By the time I could see clearly, Jeanine had lost consciousness.
I wrapped her around my shoulders in a fireman’s carry. I would have removed the unit from her backpack except that it had surprisingly little mass. Tentatively at first, I began to climb out of the cleft. The farther out, the greater the effect of centrifugal force. I had to be careful. If I lost contact with the wall, we would be ejected into the void.
I used the rovers to scout ahead for handholds. Near the rim, I sent two rovers over the top to look for the Specter. It was nowhere in sight. Instead there were three Eternal vessels about five kilometers out, making a cautious approach.
While Jeanine and I and the rovers were sending out a steady stream of signals. I shut down our communications network and pressed myself against the side of the wall. I had no idea what to do. The Specter had vanished and, under the circumstances, I could not blame Jansons. There was no way she could fight Eternal warcraft.
A decrypted message displayed itself inside my helmet. Jump. Now. I blinked, then resumed my climb, going faster and faster until the derelict threw me into space. I had just enough time to wonder if I had misunderstood the message when stars above me vanished and I collided with the interior of an airlock. The outer hatch sealed behind us. The inner hatch slid aside and Shakeel helped us into the Specter’s interior.
“I’ve got them,” he yelled up the companionway. Heat washed over my skin, the feeling you get when you make a quantum jump and the suppressor fields aren’t precisely aligned. Five seconds later we were back in normal space.
“Eternals,” I said as I opened my helmet. “What were they doing?”
“No idea,” Shakeel said. “They just appeared fifteen minutes ago and seemed as surprised by the derelict as we were at first. They were moving in slowly, as if they thought the station might come alive and fire at them. When the Lieutenant realized that, she figured she could wait a few minutes to see if the two of you would make contact. She really wanted a white-hole unit and did not want either of you ending up in an Eternal interrogation facility.”
Jeanine was still unconscious. I explained what had happened to her as Shakeel retrieved the unit from her backpack. “”We’ll keep her in a cold-sleep capsule until we can reach a medical installation. You were lucky,” he said. “A well-designed system would have overwhelmed both of you. Or maybe you just ran into the only one that had not been knocked out of commission.”
I have a lot of beliefs that are considered odd by some people, but I do not believe in that kind of luck. And why should the Eternals have been so cautious about approaching a station they had already defeated?
Jeanine stirred. Her hands went to her helmet.
“Don’t open that!” I said. She turned in my direction, but gave no indication that she recognized me or understood a word I said. Her fingers found the release switch.
“I said, don’t open your helmet!” My Otee was in my hand, pointed at her.
“Wait a minute,” Shakeel said. “What—”
I pulled the trigger and put a hole right through her heart.
Jansons was almost obscenely pleased with herself. “The entire crew will get medals, but that’s arguably the least of it. If you re-up, you will be eligible for a five-year rejuve treatment.”
“The white-hole unit was a fake,” I said. “There is no such technology.”
“Well, yes, and knowing that is valuable information by itself. But in discovering that, we also discovered a real TransHuman weapon, one that might have done incalculable damage if we had no warning of its existence. We have that warning because you were able to put loyalty to the Dominion above your personal feelings.”
I had just sufficient self-control to turn away from her. Punching a superior officer is still frowned upon in the Space Force.
“Look, I understand that you are emotionally distraught right now. All I’m saying is that now is not the time for rash decisions. Give it time and I’m sure you will make the decision that’s best for both of you.”
I finally said something ambiguously positive just to get her to go away.
Jeanine had been put in stasis immediately in a cold-sleep unit and kept that way for the ten weeks it took us to get back to Dominion space. There she was delivered to a quarantined Space Force medical unit. All her blood was removed and strained, harvesting a crop of nanobots that made all the Intelligence techs ooh and a
h. Her heart was too badly damaged for repair. The surgeon snipped it out, dropped in a standard heart for a woman her size from the refrigerator section, and zipped her up. They had also primed the heart with her DNA. Those cells would spread, replacing the standard cells over the course of a year, at the end of which she would truly have her heart back.
I was allowed to visit the third day after the surgery. Her room looked like a regular bedroom. Sterilized air, scented like the ocean during the day and like mountain jungles at night, blew through a fake window. This was done, not because she had ever lived in either habitat, but because her psych profile indicated that she wanted to and so would be most comfortable imagining herself in those surroundings. Circuits imprinted on her nightwear monitored her condition at all times. All surgical and resuscitation mechanisms were hidden in the walls.
I sat in a chair by her bedside, impatient for her to awake and afraid that she would do so.
“So, they say you shot me.” Jeanine had opened her eyes while I was sunk in my own thoughts. Her voice was weak but clear.
“Technically speaking, I killed you,” I said.
She stared at me dispassionately from her pillow. “You are sure you had a good reason, but you are not sure I will agree.”
“Being shot by your fiancé might put a damper on romance for some,” I allowed.
“This better be good,” she said.
I took a deep breath, and it was like running up the side of the cleft and jumping into space.
“From the beginning, I was afraid the derelict might be a trap. I was just thinking of the kind that snaps shut and kills you. Not until it was almost too late did I think about traps baited with poison to be brought back to the nest and kill all the creatures exposed.”
I shook my head, trying to order my thoughts. “Jansons said how lucky we were to have discovered the derelict when we did because it would burn up in the atmosphere in a day. That bothered me when I heard it, though I couldn’t say why at the time. Subconsciously, though, I was remembering the astronomers’ postulate that we do not occupy a specialized place in the universe. All apparent coincidences are suspect. And what could be a greater coincidence than discovering an abandoned station stuffed with secret technology a day before it would be destroyed?
“Then Shakeel pointed out another coincidence. You had been attacked by the one remaining active defense system. A system active enough to make us run with our loot but not active enough to stop us.
“There were other things equally strange. The way we were run like rats in a maze that kept opening some paths and closing others. The way the Eternal strike force approach the station so cautiously. Yet the Eternals were the ones who supposedly had defeated it. Why should they be cautious?
“The pieces didn’t come together until we were back in the Specter. It had been no coincidence to find the station in a decaying orbit and no coincidence that you were attacked the way you were. The station was not a derelict at all. It was functioning as designed. It would always shift its orbit to appear a day from destruction. It would always attack raiders but let them go after injecting them with nanobots to take home and spread. We triggered a trap set for Eternals. If I had allowed you to open your helmet, they would have spread through the entire ship.”
“So you shot me to keep all of us from becoming cyber-zombies,” Jeanine said.
“Jansons prefers the story that I chose the Dominion over you,” I said. “I would never have done that.”
“Yet reasonable as all that is, you are worried that I may not forgive you,” she said.
I gave a slight nod.
“Good,” she said. “I needed something to hold over you. Guilt! You must be partly Jewish. Or Otho-Catholic. Whenever I want something in the future, and however compelling your reasons for saying no, all I will have to do is wail about the cruel brute who broke my heart and you will wilt immediately.”
The talking had tired her out. She turned on her pillow and smiled, for all the world looking like a sleepy cat. “I think . . . this is the beginning . . . of a beautiful . . .”
MORRIGAN IN THE SUNGLARE
by Seth Dickinson
The tenets of Ubuntu taught compassion, understanding, humanity for all. But was that any way to win a war?
THINGS LAPORTE SAYS, during the war—
The big thing, at the end:
The navigators tell Laporte that Indus is falling into the sun.
Think about the difficulty of it. On Earth, Mars, the moons of Jupiter, the sun wants you but it cannot have you: you slip sideways fast enough to miss. This is the truth of orbit, a hand-me-down birthright of velocity between your world and the fire. You never think about it.
Unless you want to fall. Then you need to strip all that speed away. Navigators call it killing your velocity (killing again: Laporte’s not sure whether this is any kind of funny). It takes more thrust to fall into the sun than to escape out to the stars.
Indus made a blind jump, fleeing the carnage, exit velocity uncertain.
And here they are. Falling.
They are the last of Indus’ pilots and there is nothing left to fly, so Laporte and Simms sit in the empty briefing room and play caps. The ship groans around them, ruined hull protesting the efforts of the damage control crews—racing to revive engines and jump drive before CME radiation sleets through tattered armor and kills everyone on board.
“What do you think our dosage is?” Laporte asks.
“I don’t know. Left my badge in my bunk.” Simms rakes her sweat-soaked hair, selects a cap, and antes. Red emergency light on her collarbone, on the delta of muscle there. “Saw a whole damage control party asleep in the number two causeway. Radiation fatigue.”
“So fast? That’s bad, boss.” Laporte watches her Captain, pale lanky daughter of Marineris, sprawled across three seats in the half-shed tangle of her flight suit, and makes a fearful search for damage. Radiation poisoning, or worse. A deeper sort of wound.
In the beginning Simms was broken and Laporte saved her, a truth Simms has never acknowledged but must know. And she saved Laporte in turn, by ferocity, by hate, by being the avatar of everything Laporte didn’t know.
And here in the sunglare Laporte is afraid that the saving’s been undone. Not that it should matter, this concern of hearts, when they’ll all be dead so soon—but—
“Hey,” Laporte says, catching on. “You sneak, boss. I call bullshit.”
“Got me.” Simms pushes the bottlecap (ARD/AE-002 ANTI RADIATION, it says) across. A little tremble in her fingers. Not so severe. “They’re all too busy to sleep.”
The caps game is an Ubuntu game, a children’s game, a kill-time game, an I’m-afraid game. Say something, truth or lie. See if your friends call it right.
It teaches you to see other people. Martin Mandho, during a childhood visit, told her that. This is why it’s so popular in the military. Discipline and killing require dehumanization. The caps game lets soldiers reclaim shared subjectivity.
“Your go, Morrigan,” Simms says, shuffling her pile of ARD/AE-002 caps. The callsign might be a habit, might be a reminder: we’re still soldiers.
“I was in CIC. Think I saw Captain Sorensen tearing up over a picture of Captain Kyrematen.” Yangtze’s skipper, Sorensen’s comrade. Lost.
Simms’ face armors up. “I don’t want to talk about anything that just happened.”
“Is that a call?”
“No. Of course it’s true.”
Laporte wants to stand up and say: fuck this. Fuck this stupid game, fuck the rank insignia, fuck the rules. We’re falling into the sun, there’s no rescue coming. Boss, I—
But what would she say? It’s not as simple as the obvious thing (and boy, it’s obvious), not about lust or discipline or loyalty. Bigger than that, truer than that, full of guilt and fire and salvation, because what she really wants to say is something about—
About how Simms is—important, right, but that’s not it. That’s not big enough.
>
Laporte can’t get her tongue around it. She doesn’t know how to say it.
Simms closes her eyes for a moment. In the near distance, another radiation alarm joins the threnody.
Things Laporte already knows how to say—
I’m going to kill that one, yes, I killed him. Say it like this:
Morrigan, tally bandit. Knife advantage, have pure, pressing now.
Guns guns guns.
And the ship in her sights, silver-dart Atalanta, built under some other star by hands not unlike her own, the fighter and its avionics and torch and weapons and its desperate skew as it tries to break clear, the pilot too—they all come apart under the coilgun hammer. The pilot too.
Blossoming shrapnel. Spill of fusion fire. Behold Laporte, starmaker. (Some of the color in the flame is human tissue, atomizing.)
She made her first kill during the fall of Jupiter, covering Third Fleet’s retreat. Sometimes rookies fall apart after their first, eaten up by guilt. Laporte’s seen this. But the cry-scream-puke cycle never hits her, even though she’s been afraid of her own compassion, even though her callsign was almost Flower Girl.
Instead she feels high.
There’s an Ubuntu counselor waiting on the Solaris, prepared to debrief and support pilots with post-kill trauma. She waves him away. Twenty years of Ubuntu education, cherish all life hammered into the metal of her. All meaningless, all wasted.
That high says: born killer.
She was still flying off the Solaris here, Kassim on her wing. Still hadn’t met Simms yet.
Who is Lorna Simms? Noemi Laporte thinks about this, puzzles and probes, and sometimes it’s a joy, and sometimes it hurts. Sometimes she doesn’t think about it at all—mostly when she’s with Simms, flying, killing.
Maybe that’s who Simms is. The moment. A place where Laporte never has to think, never has a chance to reflect, never has to be anything other than laughter and kill-joy. But that’s a selfish way to go at it, isn’t it? Simms is her own woman, impatient, profane, ferocious, and Laporte shouldn’t make an icon of her. She’s not a lion, not a war-god, not some kind of oblivion Laporte can curl up inside.
The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera Page 15