The Hidden War

by Michael Armstrong

  Krim felt his fingers itching to get at the controls of a fighter, but resisted. That wasn’t a Jack fighter—it was an Ameruss fighter. Podhoretz class, indeed. “I’d rather bathe in dung than fly one of those.”

  “Oh, I think you’ll fly it,” Thom said. “Besides, you don’t have to get into it.”

  “How’s that?”

  Thom punched up a schematic illustration of the fighter. Arrows and labels identified weapons pods circling the egg; a drive aft, at the flattened, narrower end; a cluster of sensors and the AI’s brain at the rounded end forward. “You’ll notice there’s no place for a pilot,” he said. Krim frowned.

  “It’s a remote?”

  Thom nodded. “Flies by waldo—body waldo, actually. You fly it the way you’d fly a Jack fighter, only you jack into the artificial reality suit at a remote base and not in the fighter. The bases have been launching Poddy fighters for four years. There are entire squadrons ringing the outer system, within striking range of any probe leaving or entering.”

  Krim did a quick calculation, bit his lip. Yeah, he thought, it was possible. Even the Jack fighters could have hit half a C with enough fuel and a little time. Something felt wrong, though.

  “You’re still limited by distance,” he said. “How do you get artificial reality feedback over half a light year?”

  “Tachyons,” Thom said. “Each of the Poddies has an ansible, a tachyon communication system. Almost instantaneous. And anyway, the way the fighter’s set up, we don’t need feedback.”

  “But with a body waldo?”

  “Not necessary,” he repeated. “You’ll see.”

  “My ass I won’t. You want me to fly for you?”

  “We need you, Krim. Your war’s over. We won. Why keep fighting? Join us. Join the Alliance.”

  “The Alliance? What the hell is that?”

  “The Solarian Alliance. A true democratic union. All the nations of the world, and the surrounding habitats of Earth-Mars-Moon space, out to Jupiter even—one people. It’s forming, not just Ameruss, but everyone. A true world order—a solar system order.”

  “Hah.” He tried to spit, but when he tried to purse his lips, felt the spit sucked back into his mouth. He wiped his lips with the back of a hand. “You still follow the Marxist-Reaganist dogma?”

  “We’ve reformed some of our principles, but, yes, we still adhere to the principles of Revolutionary Democratic Capitalist Socialism.”

  “Hah!” He shook his head. “Stodgy conservatism, I bet. Statism. There are bosses?”

  Thom nodded. “Someone has to run things.”

  “And there are rich people? And poorer people?”

  “Not exactly.” He shrugged. “There must be rewards for those who strive, else why would anyone strive? As I said, no one goes hungry; the hides protect everyone, there is food for all.”

  “Can you dance?”

  “What?”

  “Can you dance? Can you dance to the glorious beat of bebop? Can you swing to the screaming sounds of jazz? Can you moan to the blues? Can you fall delirious into the primal beat of rock?”

  “Well, certain forms of decadent expression are, of course, frowned upon, but—”

  “Same old, same old, Thom. I don’t even have to go out into your world. I know. Those clones out there in their white hides—nothing’s changed. It’s still not free.”

  “We’re free from hunger, free from want. What more could you want?”

  “Freedom to starve. Freedom to want. Freedom to die. Freedom to destroy yourself in a blaze of glory. Freedom to be. That’s what the Jack had, Thom. That’s what we fight for.”

  “Fought for, Krim. Fought for. You’re the last. Even the other pilots we’ve released have joined us. As you will.”

  “You seem so confident, Thom.”

  “I am. Don’t you know your choice? Join us, Krim. Or rot in the world in a prison of your own making.”

  “Join you? Screw that. Rot in a prison of my own making? I thought I was free.”

  “Freedom, as you seem to ignore, is a relative proposition.” He smiled. “Go forth into the world. See how we have changed. See if you’ve changed. Perhaps you will grow fond of it and want to protect it. It’s a safe world, a complacent world. They don’t know about the Terrorons—it’s a military secret. Even the military is a secret. The war we fight is a hidden war. Our citizens think the only soldiers left are old farts like me. We haven’t tried to keep things secret—it’s just that no one cares to ask, so we don’t make a big issue of it.

  “Perhaps you will discover, as I have, that the world has become too safe, too complacent—that no challenges remain except the one I offer you. Space, Krim. Maybe the stars. If we can capture a Terroron probe, who knows what their technology could teach us? You are more like me than you realize. We live for space—for battle.”

  “Eat it, Thom. I’m not fighting your war.”

  The Admiral shrugged. “Think about it, then. Go, leave, be free as you can be, if you can be free.”

  I have always been free, Krim thought. But he did not say it. Krim rose.

  Admiral Thom reached for something on the desk, handed Krim a gold equilateral triangle twenty centimeters on a side. “A console—a slate. You’ll need it, ignorant as you seem to be of the world now. You have an open account on the Alliance Net, up to six levels of information. You also have full rights of citizenship that allow you access to common resources. If you have any questions—ask. The slate can access your hide, modify that thing we all wear to protect us from the harsh world.”

  Krim took the slate, held it awkwardly in his hands, looked for someplace to put the floppy, sticky triangle. Thom smiled, noticing his confusion, and stepped around the desk.

  “May I?” he asked, taking the slate back. He bent it like a wing, pressed one edge along Krim’s stomach, one point of the slate’s triangle descending down between his legs and over his crotch. The slate stuck to his hide, rippled slightly as he breathed. Thom stepped back. “You can place it over your breasts, at the small of your back, around your wrist, on your skull, even. It adheres to your hide, can even stretch over it in various patterns—it’s completely plastic and malleable. Clever, eh?”

  Clever, Krim thought. How clever. He turned and walked toward a flashing door.

  “We’ll keep in touch, Krim. And we’ll be thinking about you.

  “You’ll be back. Your kind always comes back to us. Your kind always comes home.” Thom smiled. “To battle, to the fight—to space.”

  Krim glared at Admiral Thom as he went forth into the world, and into freedom.

  Chapter 2

  One of the puritan attendants met him as he came out of Thom’s office. She or he—Krim couldn’t tell anymore—looked away from his near nakedness, from his mahogany-dark skin now revealed in its true shade after Thom had cleared away the Kabuki paleness of the hide. She escorted him down the hall from Thom’s office to yet another room, what seemed to be a changing room or bathroom. Krim dimly remembered such a place from when he had come in fifteen years ago. His treatment then had been far rougher. The guards had manacled him against a wall, stripping him naked and telling him to keep his eyes shut. He remembered the searing white light that quick-fried him, remembered the pale ash on his body from the outer layer of skin and hair that had been torched off, remembered the cold blasts of the water hosing him down. He remembered the guards injecting the chip then, too, the encoded microchip inserted against the back of his throat that would allow the prison to keep track of his every movement. The chip had rubbed against his trachea—they had injected it wrong—and he felt naked now with it gone.

  The heat lamp was gone, the manacles gone, but Krim could still see the holes where the fixtures had been, could still see the scratches in the plastic walls where other prisoners had resisted, where he had resisted. A drawer slid out from the wall—he remembered that, the guards had stuffed his clothes in it—and the attendant took out a clear-wrapped package, the bag he ha
d left in Thom’s office.

  “Your personal effects,” she said. “Please sign for them and put the clothes on.” She glanced down at the slate over his crotch, and Krim smiled at her embarrassment.

  He took the pad she handed him, put his hand over a blinking handprint as he had seen the guards do when they had handed him over to her, and felt a tingle as the slate read his handprint.

  “Please get dressed,” she said, looking away again, and then leaving the room.

  Krim ripped the package open, and held up a suit—his suit, the tight gray jumpsuit he had worn in the Beat fighter. The body waldo. Useless without a fighter, it was all he had left of the Jack, of his home. He peeled the slate off and pulled on the suit like, yes, a skin, skin over hide. A webbing of thin wires ran the length and circumference of the suit. As he moved beneath the tight suit, the wires moved, disrupting the map of his body. If he had been jacked into his ship, the movement would be transferred to his fighter’s controls, and he would have felt the feedback from the ship. The familiar charge didn’t shiver through him. But of course it wouldn’t, he thought, looking at the smooth skin over his navel where the socket of the jack had been—the socket that had been ripped from him years ago. Nothing to connect to. He closed the seam running up from his right hip up to his shoulder, sealing it shut, and letting the hood dangle down his back. Holding the slate up, wondering where to put it, he glanced down, shrugged, and placed the floppy triangle where it had been, point down over his crotch. A faint trickle of static electricity, of some sort of charge, coursed through him then. The body waldo? The hide? The slate connecting? He didn’t know.

  The white attendant knocked, came in, and smiled at his appearance. Krim laughed to himself. The slate covered him no more than before, but apparently the five-mil thickness of the jumpsuit covered him enough. “Good,” she said. “Your clothes still fit, I see.”

  How could he tell her the waldo would always fit, that it adjusted to any shape? But Krim nodded and smiled back. He handed her the crumpled plastic wrapping the suit had come in, and a ring bounced out of it.

  “Oh,” the woman said, picking it up and handing it to him. “You forgot this.”

  Krim took the ring, turned it around, looking at the runelike symbols etched in the gold: straight lines and checks and circles circling the band. Inside the ring, he read the inscription: To K from C. His bond ring from Corso, the bond they had made when the final campaign for the Jack had begun, the bond they forged because they both knew they would die—the bond so made that would require one of them to always stay behind on the carrier in an assault. He had not forgotten about the ring so much as refused to remember.

  He could not have endured prison with the memory, could not have stood the long confinement thinking Corso still lived, and that they must be apart. He could not have kept his anger burning thinking that there could be something beyond anger, beyond revenge and hate. He would have died. He had silently blessed Thom and his captors for taking this away, blessed their stupidity for not letting him keep the ring.

  Krim peeled his right glove back enough to expose the third finger and put the ring on. A little loose, it felt strange after all these years, and yet familiar, the way he imagined it would feel to have lost a hand and to suddenly grow the hand back. He resealed the glove.

  “Thank you,” he said. In putting the ring back on, Krim knew, understood, that in one way he was free. Free to remember, and free to grieve.

  The white woman took his elbow and steered him to an opening door at the other end of the reception room, a door out. She stood at the threshold, waved down the long glass corridor. “The hall ends at the outside of the gate,” she said. “There’s a station there, a station to wherever you want to go. Your slate can advise you.” She shook her head. “Once when it was more common to release zeks, volunteers from our order would be there to greet you. We are fewer now, though. . . . I would take you myself, but I have work to do here.”

  Krim looked at her then, and saw in her white covering, the alabaster shroud that exposed only her face and obscured all other features, a memory of some bird he had read about as a child, a black and white bird. Then he remembered the term: a nun, a religious woman who dedicated herself to healing and service. She served such as him, though he had never seen her kind before the torture of the hide. Some service.

  He walked down the long, clear corridor and beyond, to freedom.

  As the portal to the prison hissed shut behind him, Krim stepped out onto a broad, white-tiled patio. Sand had blown in over the low wall surrounding it, sand from a vast, flat desert stretching featureless to a far horizon. Krim turned, looked back at the corridor and the building beyond. The prison seemed to have vanished, seemed to have slid under the desert, and yet he remembered walking into the open across a courtyard, remembered seeing blue sky above—the same sky. Krim looked around the alcove at the end of the corridor, saw steps leading around it, and climbed up them to a platform on the alcove’s roof. A wire fence ringed the platform, the fence crackling as he approached it. The prison stretched below.

  He understood the layout then, as he hadn’t before. A pit contained the prison, a vast crater pocked by buildings that thrust up into the floor of the pit, with the building he had been in—Thom’s office—at this end of the pit, a series of buildings stacked like jumbled steps falling down to the pit bottom. A clear black wall, perfectly vertical and impossibly smooth, rose up from the floor of the pit. Ventilation shafts and ducts and access portals dotted the roof of the prison, his prison, that stretched underneath the pit. Krim had never been to the surface in all his imprisonment, until today, and if he had escaped to the surface, he now saw, he could never have scaled the pit’s walls.

  Krim pushed against the wires, felt the hum of the wire increase, and then jerked back as a blast of cold kicked through his hand. He looked at his left hand, watched ice steam away into the desert heat.

  “Please step back from the barrier,” an older woman’s voice said. “Visitors must refrain from touching the barrier.” The voice seemed to come not from any particular place, but from all around him.

  A hawk screeched from overhead.

  He turned his head at the sound, saw the raptor floating on the hot updraft, smiled at its primal beauty, and wished he had binocs to better see it. Krim peered at it, and its image grew larger in his eyes as he stared, until he saw the bird magnified ten, fifteen times, so close he could see its feathers rippling in the winds, its golden eye staring at him. The hawk turned, and he looked closer at it, the image magnifying, until he could see the ridge of metal rods down the back of its neck, the luminescence of its camera eyes, and the steel razors set into its talons. The hawk turned toward him, pulled back its wings, and dropped down.

  Krim shook his head, focusing on the patio below, shut his eyes, and then opened them slowly, trying not to peer too closely at anything. His eyes stabilized, and he looked up and saw the hawk again, far away now, but still circling over him, watching, watching. A remote, of course, he realized. He saw three more hawks circling the far end of the pit, and he imagined those claws coming down and ripping at him if he had a chip in his neck, if they had identified him as a zek and not a visitor. Krim walked back down to the patio.

  The attendant had said there would be a station outside the gate, but all he saw was the patio. How would prisoners be brought to this entrance, if they came in this way at all? He could only remember coming at night, being dragged through doors upon doors until he had reached the showers below. That he remembered. Krim looked at the patio again. No door below, no hatch or anything. Not even a road or a landing pad, unless the patio itself served that purpose. He paced out its length, twenty meters square, large enough to land upon. The low wall ringed it, except for a gap at one end, opposite the prison exit. Krim smiled. Why else would there be a gap there? He stepped up to the opening, walked through it.

  The desert opened before him.

  He stopped, stepped back.
The sand rolled away as four triangular-shaped doors rose up, pushed up by an elliptical egg, squared at its ends. A door slid open on the egg.

  “Please enter,” the same woman’s voice said, again seeming to come from around him.

  Krim paused, trying to find the source of the voice.

  “Please enter,” it said again.

  Between his ears, he realized. The voice came from inside his head. How did it do that? he thought. He looked down, saw the slate, saw a light twinkle on it as the voice repeated itself.

  “Please enter.”

  Krim stepped into the car, and the door closed behind him. A circular couch lined the inside of the car, large enough to hold a half-dozen people, with a small console in the center. Padding covered the inside of the entire car, except for a ring of lights just above head level.

  “Destination, please,” the voice said.

  Krim had started to get used to it coming from inside his head. “Right,” he said to himself. “Where do I go from here?”

  “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” the voice said.

  Krim glanced down at the slate, and saw the lights on the slate flicker again. “That was a rhetorical question.”

  “Then say ‘I wonder,’” the voice said. The lights flickered again.

  “I wonder if that voice comes from the slate.”