The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century

by Harry Turtledove

  He shook his head. “I don’t understand that. People like you.”

  “You haven’t had to become an animal. You’re a macroeconomist, and you’re trained to take the long view. A few people blown out a hatch, that’s just an acceptable sacrifice. I tend to take this kind of thing personally, is all. See, I figure everyone who ever tried to get me killed was looking at the long view.”

  Ken’s gaze was steady. “I’m not planning on getting you killed. That’s not part of my view.”

  “Maybe someday I’ll end up standing between you and your revolution. Then we’ll see.”

  He didn’t say anything. In the steadiness of his dark eyes, the absence of expression, Reese read her answer, and knew it was the one she’d expected.

  “REESE.”

  It was the first time she’d heard her name in six months, and now it came from a complete stranger on a streetcorner in Uzbekistan. Her hardwired nerves were triggered and her combat thread was evaluating the man’s stance, calculating possible dangers and responses, before she even finished her turn.

  He was about forty, tanned, with receding brown hair and a widow’s peak. His stance was open, his hands in plain sight: he wore a blue down vest over a plaid shirt, baggy grey wool pants, old brown square-toed boots. He smiled in a friendly way. His build was delicate, as if he’d been genetically altered. His face was turning ruddy in the wind.

  “You talking to me?” Reese asked him. “My name’s Waldman.” Her wetwear was still evaluating him, analyzing every shift in posture, movement of his hands. Had Ken shopped her? she wondered. Had Cheney, after deciding she was a danger to Ken?

  His smile broadened. “I understand your caution, but we know who you are. Don’t worry about it. We want to hire you.”

  His voice was as American as hers. Her speeded-up reflexes gave her plenty of time to contemplate his words.

  “You’d better call me Waldman if you want to talk to me at all.”

  He put up his hands. Her nerves crackled. She noticed he had a ragged earlobe, as if someone had torn off an earring in a fight. “Okay, Miss Waldman. My name’s Berger. Can we talk?”

  “The Natural Life, in an hour. Do you know where that is?”

  “I can find out. See you there.”

  He turned and walked casually up the narrow street. She watched till he was gone and then went to the apartment she rented in a waterfront condecology. She looked for signs anyone had been there in her absence—there weren’t any, but that didn’t mean anything—and then, to calm her jittery nerves, she cleaned her pistol and took a long, hot bath with the gun sitting on the side of the steel tub. She stretched out as far as the tub would let her, feeling droplets of sweat beading on her scalp while she watched the little bathroom liquid-crystal vidscreen show a bouncy pop-music program from Malaya. She changed her clothes, put the pistol back in its holster—the security softwear at the Natural Life would shred her with poisoned darts if she tried to carry it in—and then headed back into town. The muezzins’ song hung in the gusty air. Her mind sifted possibilities.

  Berger was the heat. Berger was an assassin. Da Vega had shopped her out of pique. Cheney had sold her name. Ken had regretted telling her so much about his revolution and decided to have her iced before she sold his plans to Ram.

  Life was just so full of alternatives.

  Berger hadn’t arrived at the bar when she came in. The bartender was at prayer and so she turned on the desktop comp and read the scansheets, looking for something that might give her an edge, help her to understand what it was about.

  Nothing. The aliens hadn’t generated any headlines today. But there was a note about a Cerean exile named da Vega who had been found dead, along with a couple of his bodyguards. Another bodyguard was missing.

  Reese grinned. The Uzbeks, a people who usually endorsed the long view, had probably turned da Vega into fertilizer by now.

  The amplified muezzins fell silent. The bartender returned and flipped on todo music broadcast by satellite from Japan. He took her order and then Berger walked in, dabbing at his nose with a tissue. He hadn’t been ready, he explained, for this bitter a spring. He’d have to buy a warm jacket.

  “Don’t worry, Miss Waldman,” he added. “I’m not here to crease you. If I wanted to do that, I could have done it on the street.”

  “I know. But you might be a cop trying to lure me out of Uzbekistan. So I hope to hell you can prove to me who you are.”

  He grinned, rubbed his forehead uncomfortably. “Well. To tell you the truth, I am a policeman, of a sort.”

  “Terrific. That really makes my day.”

  He showed her ID. She studied it while Berger went on. “I’m a captain in Brighter Suns’ Pulsar Division. We’d like to hire you for a job up the well.”

  “Vesta?”

  “No. Closer to Earth.”

  Reese frowned. Policorp Brighter Suns was one of the two policorps that had been set up to deal with the alien Powers. It was almost exclusively into Power imports, and its charter forbade it from owning territory outside of its home asteroid, Vesta. A lot of Brighter Suns execs were running for cover ever since Steward had blown Griffith’s network in L.A., and the whole Vesta operation was being restructured.

  “The Pulsar Division handles internal security on Vesta,” Reese said. “Your outside intelligence division is called Group Seven. So why is Pulsar handling a matter so far away from home?”

  “What we’d like you to handle is an internal security matter. Some of our people have gone rogue.”

  “You want me to bring them back?”

  Something twitched the flesh by one of Berger’s eyes. She knew what he was going to say before the words came out his mouth. She felt her nerves tingling, her muscles warming. It had been a long time.

  “No. We want you to ice them.”

  “Don’t tell me anything more,” she said. “I’m going to check you out before I listen to another word.”

  “IT’S NOT EVEN murder, I’d say,” Berger said. He was eating spinach salad in an expensive restaurant called the Texas Beef, named after a vaguely pornographic and wildly popular vid show from Alice Springs. Dressing spattered the creamy table cloth as Berger waved his fork. “We’ve got tissue samples and memory thread, like we do for all our top people—hell, we’ll clone ’em.”

  “That doesn’t mean I can’t end up in prison for it.”

  “Who’s gonna catch you? It’s a goddam asteroid fifty zillion klicks from anywhere.”

  She had checked him out as far as she could. After telling him what she was going to do, she’d sent a message to Vesta asking for confirmation of the existence of one Captain Berger of the Pulsar Division, that and a photo. Both arrived within twelve hours. If this was a plot to arrest her, it had some unlikely elements.

  Reese took a mouthful of lamb in mustard sauce. She worked out hard enough, she figured, and deserved her pleasures.

  “The rock’s about two kilometers in diameter. The official name is 2131YA, but it’s also called Cuervo Gold.”

  “Funny names they’re giving asteroids these days.”

  “They’ve run out of minor Greek gods, I guess. Cuervo’s officially owned by a non-policorporate mining company called Exeter Associates, which in turn is owned by us. Gold’s an Apollo asteroid, crossing Earth’s orbit on a regular schedule, and that makes it convenient for purposes of resupply, and also makes it a lot more isolated than any of the rocks in the Belt. We’ve had a lab there for a while, using it to develop some technology that—” He grinned. “Well, that we wanted to keep far away from any competition. Security on Vesta is tight, but it’s a port, people are always coming in and out. What we’ve got on the asteroid is pretty hot stuff, and we wanted to keep it away from the tourists.”

  “I don’t really want to know,” Reese said.

  “I don’t know myself, so I couldn’t tell you,” Berger said. “The work was in a fairly advanced stage when certain activities relating to your old friend Gri
ffith became public. It became an urgent matter to shut down the project and transfer its members to other duties in central Africa, where I work. If the investigators found out about our owning that asteroid, and what’s on it, Brighter Suns could be very embarrassed.”

  “The techs refused to move?” Reese asked.

  “They protested. They said their work was entering a critical stage. A transport was sent from Earth to pick them up, but they refused to evacuate, and then we lost touch with the freighter. We think the crew have been killed or made prisoner.”

  “Your people could have defected to another policorp, using the transport.”

  “We don’t think so. Their work would have been hard to take with them. And they couldn’t have gone far without attracting attention—some of the lab personnel were Powers.”

  A coolness moved through Reese’s bones. She sat up, regarding Berger carefully. Powers were forbidden off the two entry ports—the official reason was that there was too much danger of cross-contamination from alien life-forms. Plagues had already devastated the two Power legations, and the reverse was always a possibility. The discovery of Powers in Brighter Suns employ outside of Vesta would ruin Brighter Suns’ credit for good.

  But after a while the heat on Brighter Suns would die down. Trade with the aliens was too profitable for people to interfere with it for long. In a year or two, the lab could be reopened with cloned personnel and some very mean security goons to make certain they followed orders.

  “I understand your sense of urgency,” Reese said. “But why me? Why not go yourself?”

  “We don’t have anyone with your talents on Earth,” Berger said. “I’m not wired the way you are. And…well, we’d like to know you’re gainfully employed by us rather than floating around Uzbekistan waiting to be captured by the heat. If we can find you, they probably can.”

  Reese sipped her club soda. “How did you find me, exactly?”

  “Someone recognized you.”

  “Who might that have been?”

  The skin by Berger’s eye gave a leap. “It’s already taken care of,” he said. “We didn’t want him giving your name to anyone else.”

  Da Vega. Well. At least it wasn’t Ken.

  But there was also a threat: Berger didn’t want her in this refugees’ paradise, where the number of desperate people was higher than average and where a policorporate kidnap team could find her. If they’d already iced one person, they could put the ice on another.

  “Let’s talk payment,” Reese said. “Brighter Suns, I think, can afford to pay me what I’m worth.”

  RAM’S COPS HAD beaten some woman to death during interrogation. Ken was busy at his console, putting out fact and opinion pieces, making the most of another death for the revolution. Reese paced the room, picking at the tattered wallpaper, eating Mongolian barbecue from a waxed paper container. Below the window, some drunken descendant of the Golden Horde was singing a sad song to the moon. He kept forgetting the lyrics and starting over, and the burbling ballad was getting on Reese’s nerves.

  “I’d feel better,” she said, “if Cheney was paying you a decent wage.”

  “He pays what he can afford.” Ken’s fingers sped over his keyboard. “The money has to be laundered, and he has to be careful how he does it.”

  “You don’t even have a promise of a job after it’s all over.”

  Ken shrugged. “Prince can always use another economist.”

  “And you don’t have protection. Ram could order you iced.”

  “He needs a live scapegoat, not a dead martyr.” He frowned as he typed. “This isn’t a mysterious business, you know. Ram knows our strength and most of our moves, and we know his. There aren’t very many hidden pieces on the board.”

  The Uzbek began his song again. Reese clenched her teeth. She put her hand on Ken’s shoulder.

  “I’m disappearing tomorrow,” she said.

  He tilted his head back, looking up in surprise. His fingers stopped moving on the keys.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I got a job.”

  She saw a confirmation in his eyes. “Not one you can talk about,” he said.

  “No. But it’s not for Ram. In case you were wondering.”

  He took her hand in one of his. “I’ll miss you.”

  Reese put her food carton on top of his video display. Her chopsticks jabbed the air like rabbit ear antennae.

  “I’ve got another twelve hours before I take the plane to Beijing.”

  Ken turned off his console. “I can send the rest out tomorrow,” he said.

  Reese was surprised. “What about the revolution?”

  He shrugged and kissed the inside of her wrist. “Sometimes I feel redundant. The revolution is inevitable, after all.”

  “It’s nice to know,” Reese said, “that the devil can quote ideology to his purpose.”

  Outside, the Uzbek continued his wail to the desolate stars.

  THE TUG WAS called Voidrunner, and it was thirty years old at least, the padding on its bulkheads patched with silver tape, bundles of cable hanging out of access hatches. Reese had been in enough ships like it not to let the mess bother her—all it meant was that the tug didn’t have to impress its passengers. The air inside tasted acrid, as if the place was crammed full of sweating men, but there were only four people on board.

  Berger introduced the other three to Reese, then left, waving cheerily over his shoulder. About four minutes later, Voidrunner cast off from Charter Station and began its long acceleration to its destination.

  Reese watched the departure from the copilot’s chair in the armored docking cockpit. The captain performed the maneuvers with his eyes closed, not even looking out the bubble canopy at the silver-bright floodlit skin of Charter, reality projected into his head through his interface thread, his eyelids twitching as his eyes reflexively scanned mental indicators.

  His name was Falkland. He was about fifty, an Artifact War veteran who, fifteen years before, had been doing his level best to kill Reese in the tunnels of Archangel. A chemical attack had left his motor reflexes damaged, and he wore a light silver alloy exoskeleton. Fortunately his brain and interface thread had survived the war intact. He wore a grey beard and his hair long over his collar.

  “Prepare for acceleration,” he said, his eyes still closed. “We’ll be at two gees for the first six hours.”

  Reese looked out at Earth’s dull grey moon, vast, taking up most of the sky. “Right,” she said. “Got my piss bottle right here.” Hard gees were tough on the bladder.

  After the long burn Voidrunner settled into a constant one-gee acceleration. Falkland stayed strapped in, his eyelids still moving to some internal REM light show. Reese unbuckled her harness, stretched her relieved muscles while her spine and neck popped, and moved downship.

  Falkland offered no comment.

  The crew compartment smelled of fresh paint. Reese saw the tug’s engineer, a tiny man named Chung, working on a bulkhead fire alarm. His head was bobbing to music he was feeding to his aural nerves. Chung was so into the technophilic Destinarian movement he was turning himself slice by slice into a machine. His eyes were clear implants that showed the interior silver circuitry; his ears were replaced by featureless black boxes, and there were other boxes of obscure purpose jacked into his hairless scalp. His teeth were metal, and liquid crystal jewelry, powered by nerve circuitry, shone in ever-changing patterns on his cheeks and on the backs of his hands. He hadn’t said anything when Berger introduced him, just looked at Reese for a moment, then turned back to his engines.

  Now he said something. His voice was hoarse, as if he wasn’t used to using it. “He’s downship. In Cargo B.”

  His back was to Reese, and she had been moving quietly. His head still bobbed to inaudible music. He hadn’t even turned his head to speak. “Thanks,” she said. “Nice implants.”

  “The best. I built ’em myself.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be monitoring t
he burn?”

  He pointed at one of his boxes. “I am.”

  “Nice.”

  She always found she had common ground with control freaks.

  Vickers was in Cargo B, as Chung had promised. He was Reese’s armorer, hired by Berger for the sole purpose of maintaining the combat suit that Reese was to wear on Cuervo. Vickers was young, about eighteen, and thin. His dark hair was cut short; he had a stammer and severe acne. He was dressed in oil-spattered coveralls. When Reese walked in, Vickers was peeling the suit’s components out of their foam packing. She helped him lay the suit on the deck. Vickers grinned.

  “W-wolf 17,” he said. His voice was American Southern. “My favorite. You’re gonna kick some ass with this. It’s so good it can p-practically do the job by itself.”

  The suit was black, long-armed, anthropoid. The helmet, horned by radio antennae, was fused seamlessly to the shoulders. Inside, Reese’s arms, legs, and body would fit into a complex web that would hold her tightly: the suit would amplify and strengthen her every move. It wasn’t entirely natural movement—she’d have to get used to having a lot more momentum in free fall than she normally did.

  “F-fuckin’ great machine,” Vickers said. Reese didn’t answer.

  The Wolf’s dark viewplate gleamed in the cool cabin light. There was a clean functionality to its design that made it even more fearful—nothing in its look gave the impression that it was anything but a tool for efficient murder. The white Wolf trademark shone on the matte-black body of the suit. Reese fought a memory charged with fear—Wolf made most of the cyberdrones she’d encountered on Archangel. The combat suit, free of its packing, had a smell she’d hoped she’d never scent again.

  “I want to look at the manual,” she said. “And the schematics.” If her life was going to depend on this monster, she wanted to know everything there was to know about it.

  He looked at her approvingly. “I’ve got them on thread in m-my cabin. The suit’s standard, except for some c-custom thread woven into the t-target-acquisition unit. Berger knows who you’re going to b-be gunning for, and he put in some specific target-identification routines. You’re gonna be h-hot.”