The Hidden War

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The Hidden War Page 16

by Michael Armstrong


  “Leetso . . .” Krim called after her. Puzzled, he remained where he was.

  The warrant officer turned, her bobbed purple hair swinging slightly with the jerk of her neck.

  “I didn’t request new quarters,” Krim said.

  “Automatic, sir.” She looked at him and smiled. Leetso dropped her gaze, slowly looked him over, then grinned again—a grin that held a certain promise, he thought. “An ace always gets inner court billeting. Sir.”

  “I, uh—” He waved down the hallway at Nurel’s room next door. “I like my neighbors here.”

  Leetso followed his glance, looked back at him, then smiled again. “Plenty of room for companions in your new digs. You’ll see. This way, sir.”

  Krim shook his head and followed her. She led him up and farther toward the greenhouse in the center of the living quarters, almost to the top of the dome. They passed by a lift, using the stairs instead. Standard procedure, Krim remembered: exercise whenever possible. Leetso led him down a short hall and to a red door. She stepped aside and let the door scan him, and then it slid open.

  “Your quarters, sir.”

  He stepped inside. Blazing light streamed through one wall opposite the door. A bed big enough for two extended out from a wall perpendicular to the window. Krim smiled at the bed, realizing that it hadn’t just been opened up for him—it didn’t fold up. A couch was opposite the bed and a desk and chair were to his left. At least triple the size of his previous quarters, maybe four by five meters, it was the biggest room he had ever had in his life.

  “Will this do, sir?” Leetso asked.

  Krim grinned. “Satisfactory.”

  She went to the window, touched a button, and the wall became clear, then slid back. A towering tree, long and spindly, rose up outside the window. Leetso motioned him to the window, and as he came up to her, she stepped through it. Krim held his breath, then realized she stood on a platform outside.

  “Balcony,” she said. She waved at the open space before them, at the false forest and the hanging pods of plants. “Come on out.”

  He followed her onto the platform. The width of the room, it extended another two meters out. Several levels of similar balconies ringed the greenhouse, and he could see across to the mirrored windows of other units opposite him. A chest-high railing kept him from falling over the edge, and a similar railing separated his balcony from an adjoining balcony off the room next to his. Leetso motioned at a shimmery chair and a pedestal next to it.

  “I’ll leave you, sir. ‘Leetso-One’ is my address if you need me.” She put a slight emphasis on the word “need.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Refreshment dispenser in the pedestal there. Your slate will enable it for you. If there’s anything else . . . ?” she asked, with a slight emphasis on “anything.”

  He smiled, shook his head. When she frowned, he quickly said, “Perhaps later.” Leetso left, and Krim lay down in the shimmery chair. It adjusted itself under him, falling back as he wriggled farther into its soft cushions. He put his feet up, and the chair extended to support his feet. Warm light fell down on his face from the artificial sun moving across the greenhouse ceiling. The chair seemed to warm beneath him, then began vibrating slightly, the heat and motion rolling through the thin membrane of his outer hide and into his muscles. The tension rolled away from him, the memory of the flight fading, with the disorientation of flying a remote trillions of miles distant, and the weird duality of being in two places at once ebbing away, too. Krim fell into sleep then, the sleep not of rest, but exhaustion: deep, seemingly final, and thorough.

  Chapter 11

  Over the next five days Shuka had Krim running so many simulations that sleep seemed to become itself a simulation, and not the one sliver of physical reality he had been granted. In between the simulations it seemed as though all he did was eat, if drinking slimy green shakes could be considered a gastronomical experience. And once Nurel visited his new quarters. She might have stared slack-mouthed at the great expanse of his personal space, and they may even have field-tested his double bed, but he could not be sure beyond a vague memory of brief pleasure that occasionally intruded upon the utter tedium of the attack simulations.

  Each simulation shared but one similarity, Krim noticed after about the third run: sometime during the only apparently real attack, a foe would pop up in his field of vision, and he would be expected to fire not only instantly, but without even thinking. In the first run he didn’t even shoot: a time-motion expert program assessed the colors and shapes he responded to quickest, and came up with a symbolic representation of a foe that would appear in his simulated reality. If they’d asked directly, he could have told them, because it was the symbol every Beat had learned to identify as foe—the fluorescent orange harpy, like the harpy that he had visualized the Kirkpatrick to be when it captured him. Pale, silver-blue angels were friendlies, and everything else—hostile or not—was a fluorescent orange lump.

  Shuka said he had a “morality filter,” which slowed him down. In his second session she led him through the entire recording of his first attack, down to the last speck of dust, and psychologists and analysts studied his failure to fire in picayune detail. “How did you feel when you ignored your slate?” they asked him. “How did you feel when the bogey fired on you?” They asked him how he felt about his mother, and when he told them he didn’t have a mother, he had been crèche-raised, he swore he could hear data recorders whirring in the long silence. The analysts came up with interesting theories to explain his failure to fire, with the morality filter being their favorite.

  “You’re just too considerate,” Shuka told him after that session. “You want to believe any alien presence will be nice and good, and that kept you from doing your job. Only when you became convinced that the bogey was a threat did you fire. You’re a pilot, Krim. You can’t afford to be considerate.”

  So they showed him more of the propaganda films, the ones with the Terrorons ripping babies out of the teddy bear people, and even grosser ones that—they said—had been picked up recently. That film had been so savage and disgusting that when he jacked out of the simulator and peeled the hide back from his face, he could still taste the vomit in his mouth—he had thrown up inside the mask, and the hide hadn’t quite absorbed all the puke.

  But as he sat in the telly-op couch, ready to run another simulation, he thought about why he really had hesitated to fire on the bogey. It hadn’t been a morality filter. Hadn’t he fired instantly and quickly upon humans, upon people like Shuka when the Beats fought for their freedom? And hadn’t he killed people? Of course he did—in prison, it had been part of his punishment to face, to be slapped by, the families of the pilots he had killed, all seventeen of the men and women whose lives he had snuffed out in his futile attempt to keep the Beats free. No, Krim knew, he could kill; they should have known that. So why had he hesitated? He knew.

  He thought the bogey might have been a Beat. In all his years since he thought he had seen the Jack fade away into Ur space, in all his years of imprisonment, he had convinced himself that they really didn’t survive, that no planetoid could break through that strange membrane of space-time and vanish into Ur. He had convinced himself that the Jack had been destroyed—until he saw that bogey. When it popped up on his screen, he didn’t think it was a Terroron. He didn’t think it was some horrid alien. It looked and felt and seemed to be a friendly.

  He thought it was a Beat fighter.

  He thought that bogey might have been a friend, a compatriot. It could have been Corso. And in that thought had vanished all doubts about the Jack. It had survived. He believed that now. If it survived, out there, among those bogies, might be Beats.

  And he would kill them. The simulations had made sure of that.

  The simulation powered up, and once again he assumed the perspective of his virtual Poddy. His movements, his controls, even the easy dialogue with Sam—mere words, rather than whole sentences—seemed natural. He wor
e the Poddy the same way he wore his hide; it had become an extension of his body, not a thing he operated from a distance, but a machine he wore. He became the Poddy. Though he knew he operated it from a distance—or, as in the simulation, in an abstract reality—when he took over the controls, it was not like putting on a coat, but the hide.

  The Poddy oozed into every nerve of his body, his senses expanding so he felt the space around him, felt the microscopic flecks of dust ramming into the skin of the spaceship, felt the waves of ions rippling out from the sun, felt the blast of the heliosphere hitting the waves of photons and other subparticles roaring into the solar system from distant stars.

  He flowed through the simulation, diving and bobbing around rocks and comets and stray chunks of stellar matter. His fist danced before him, finger pointing and squeezing, pointing and squeezing, destroying any anomaly that appeared before him. Krim had come to anticipate the bogies, had learned when the simulation would be tossing a target at him. A flash of orange in the corner of his perspective, and he’d zoom toward it, confirming the harpy shape and the harpy color even as he aimed and began to squeeze. That flash of orange, and his fingers would react, his body would react, even before he thought. He had become a good soldier.

  A harpy appeared, orange and hideous, its tentacles stretched out before him. Krim smiled at the target—smiled because the simulations gave him pleasure feedback, literally an orgasmic rush the program rewarded him with. He aimed. He circled the red dot over the center of the harpy. It opened its repulsive maw at him, and in that instant as he squeezed the trigger, the harpy changed shape suddenly, from orange to silver and from beast to angel.

  “Friendly, friendly,” Sam shrieked. “ID error.”

  Too late. No, he thought later. Not too late. He could have paused—he knew that. He could have paused. But he kept pulling his finger, kept closing it toward his fist. The kinetic rounds tumbled toward the screaming angel, too late to stop. Once fired, the shot was committed. The rounds hit, and the angel broke into a billion shards of glowing light. He let his finger go slack, and felt the rush of pleasure wash through him.

  When the simulation was done, Shuka met him as the couch unfolded. She turned to one of the shrinks who had been monitoring his sessions; they both had huge grins on their dusky gray faces.

  “I think our boy’s ready to fight,” she said.

  A day before Krim’s wing went out on its next attack, Shuka prepared them for their second assault. Again they would go out in a wing of Poddies launched six months earlier. Again they would run the standard mission: destroy all anomalies, destroy any bogies, sweep the sector of any possible probe. This time, they would take the initial assault, make a primary attack. Another wing would take sweep-up, another wing from another redoubt made up of another group of pilots not yet out to their sector. After Shuka briefed them on their mission, she brought up the matter of Krim’s bogey. He had been over it before, numerous times, but the entire wing had to understand where he had gone wrong—and right.

  The wing jacked into Shuka’s projection as she played the recording of Krim’s attack on the foe. He winced as the recording showed the bogey turning toward him and firing. Shuka froze the image at a shot showing a handful of glowing missiles hurtling toward him.

  “We have finished the analysis of Krim’s mission,” she said, “and this will delay your next mission for a day. We need to discuss the new parameters of future attacks.

  “It turns out,” she said, “that by waiting for the alien to fire its missiles, Krim was able to destroy it.”

  “How?” Nurel asked.

  Yeah, how? Krim wondered.

  “Good question. It appears the probe had some sort of mass deflector. Kinetic loads only work if you make direct contact. We had assumed dumb targets, but now we’re not so sure. Our initial analysis is that the alien fired a fusion-bomb-tipped missile, and when it hit one of the kinetic rounds, it ignited. The resulting electromagnetic pulse may have disabled the probe’s deflectors, or it may have propelled a kinetic load to sufficient speed so that it got through. Or, the number of kinetic loads may have overpowered it. Or, the fusion bomb exploded too close to the probe. Or, the resulting shock wave from Krim’s evasive-maneuvers nuke coupled with the alien missile and his kinetic rounds combined together to destroy it.” She smiled at Krim. “You probably would have been blown, too, if you hadn’t been accelerating so fast.”

  “Was the probe sentient?” Tesh asked.

  “Negative. No organics.” Shuka paused. “It could have been a tele-presence, though.” Another projection came up, this time the familiar image of a Poddy. Spotted among the white clumps of the kinetic rounds were black lumps. “All new Poddies are being redesigned slightly. Those now launched will contain five fusion rounds. However, until those Poddies reach their attack launch points, we will have to use the capabilities of the old Poddies. You will continue to assault any probe encountered with kinetic rounds first. If that doesn’t destroy it, you will use what nukes you have.”

  “There’s only the one reserve nuke for emergency evasive maneuvers,” Krim pointed out. “Or the final attack run.”

  Shuka smiled at him and shook her head. “Oh, no, you’re wrong. There’s one more.” She let the words sink in.

  “The auto-destruct?”

  “Correct, Diz. If you don’t destroy the probe with your EM nuke, you will ram it and engage the AD.”

  “But—” Nurel began to protest.

  “Exactly,” Shuka said. “I know: Auto-destruct must be engaged before your final upload. If necessary, you will engage the AD and begin ramming the bogey.”

  Shuka took a deep breath, shook her head slightly as if the thought repelled her, and nodded. “Even if you can’t make the final upload.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Krim muttered.

  “It’s a new war, pilots,” Shuka said. “No one ever said it would stay one-sided forever.” She cut the projection off.

  “Dismissed. You’ll run the new simulations before your next flights.”

  The morning before his group’s next mission, Krim lay on the chaise out on his balcony, basking in the warmth of the fake sun rising over the atrium. Shuka had advised them to get a good solar exposure before the mission—“filling up,” she called it, recharging the cells of the hide. He had opened the silvery hide up, exposing his back to the sun. Fake or not, the little sun put out enough energy to make his skin grow warm to the touch.

  “Nice,” a voice said from behind him.

  Krim rolled over, the silvery covering slipping around his body and up to his neck. He felt blood rush to his face.

  “Nice morning,” the voice said again—a woman’s voice.

  Krim looked up at the fake sun, over at a woman leaning against the railing separating his balcony from his neighbor’s—from hers. “It’s always a nice morning,” he said.

  “Nah, sometimes they put clouds up.” She shrugged. “You’re the new ace, huh?”

  “Yeah.” Krim looked at her.

  Ageless though the hide was supposed to make them, she looked older—older than he, older than Nurel, certainly older than Shuka. Like those ravaged pilots he’d seen boarding the Kirkpatrick, her hide had gone from gleaming silver to dusky gray. Tight reddish brown curls covered her head in an even aura, short and all one length. Like so many back on Earth, she had the panracial features of dark skin, Asian eyes, sharp cheekbones, narrow lips, and squat nose. Her ears lay flat against her head, and she wore three hoops in her right ear—three tours, an old spacer tradition.

  “Yeah,” Krim said again, “I guess you could call me that. I’m Krim.”

  “Minae,” she said, holding out her hand.

  “Oh.” He shook Minae’s hand, one light up-down motion. “Oh, of course—you’re the other ace.”

  “The one and only, until you got lucky.”

  “That’s about it.” Krim smiled. “The lucky part was that I made it back, not just the kill.”

  “
So I hear. I did some of the analysis on your mission recording.” Minae leaned against the railing, so that she was to his side, toward the atrium. She jerked her chin out toward the fake sun. “You’re going out today.”

  “In a half day. Second mission.”

  “I got my bogey in my second-to-last mission.”

  Krim looked at her again, closer now. Something had seemed odd about her hair and scalp, and then it clicked. She didn’t grow hair on the outside of her silver exterior hide—you couldn’t see the silver underneath, or the faint line at the hairline where the silver hide met the inner hide. Then he realized something else: She grew actual hair, not hide-grown. Real hair, about an inch-and-a-half long, with a sheen hide-grown hair never had. “Your last mission? You’re not flying anymore?”

  “Grounded,” she said.

  “They didn’t rotate you back to Earth?”

  “I don’t want to go back. You know why.”

  “Yeah.” He understood.

  “I do analysis, training, stuff like that. I get ace quarters, get to hang out with the pilots. It’s okay.”

  Krim smiled, imagining her life. Yeah, if you couldn’t stand Earth, and wanted to be in space, but couldn’t fly, this might be the next best thing. Only it had to hurt to see the other pilots go out and not go out yourself. “You miss it?” In asking, he realized the rudeness of the question. “I’m sorry—I shouldn’t ask.”

  “No, that’s okay.” She shook her head. “I miss . . . I miss a lot of things, but not flying. It’s not the real thing, not for me, anyway—not anymore. It’s tele-presence and tele-operation.”

  “It seems real enough.”

  “Not to me—not once I figured out . . . Well, you’ll find out.” She ran a hand through her hair, over the ear with the earrings, then felt the three hoops. “They always get you on the next mission.”

 

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