The Hidden War

by Michael Armstrong

  “Yeah,” Minae said. “They told you what would happen if you didn’t disconnect properly, right?”

  “Right. Shock to the pilot, seizures.” He stared past Minae. “Oh—like Nurel.” He looked down. “I didn’t believe that—but I feel fine.”

  Shuka shook her head, then turned to the command-cube core. “Let me show you what’s inside.” She pressed the probe to a panel, and the panel slid back.

  Inside, the same gelatinous mass quivered, the one he’d seen before. Wires and circuits wound through it, but the thing seemed dead or inactive.

  “What the hell is that?” he asked.

  “It’s the thing that operates the Poddies,” Minae said. “Where you go when you fly it.”

  “A synthetic brain,” Shuka explained. “Like a battery for storing human intelligence.”

  “It’s alive?”

  “Not this one,” Shuka said. “Nor on any of the Pod dies being launched or not yet linked. But it will be—can be.”

  “I don’t understand. The Poddies . . . It’s supposed to be tele-presence, supposed to be us operating them at a distance.”

  “The distances are too vast.”

  “Tachyon transmitters—that’s what they said in training.”

  “A load of crap,” Minae said.

  “Well, not exactly,” Shuka added. “There are two transmissions: one at the beginning, and one at the end. The telly-op couch ‘reads’ your essence, your brainpath, your personality—whatever it is that makes you human. Then it sends that signal to the Poddy. It’s not a tachyon transmission, but—”

  “An Ur transmission,” Minae said. “Everyone talks about the Beats, about how they figured out how to go into other space—Ur, I heard it’s called. None of the Beats that ever got captured could explain how it worked.”

  “No one really knew. It takes special minds,” Krim said, perpetuating the lie.

  “Yeah, that’s what they all say.”

  “They didn’t let the Ur guides out on Beat fighters. No one wanted to risk it.”

  “Yeah, they say that, too.” Minae grinned at him.

  “The transmission goes through this Ur,” Shuka said. “We figured out how to do that, at least. We can’t send things out, but we can send beams, signals. So at the start of the mission, ‘you’ get beamed out to a Poddy—a fighter launched months ago, and that’s accelerating a half light year out. ‘You’ run the mission, and ‘you’ get beamed back, so that your real body, what’s been in the telly-op couch the whole time, remembers.”

  “What happens to that, uh, thing?” Krim pointed at the blob.

  “You engage the auto-destruct sequence,” Shuka said.

  “You kill it.” Minae looked at him.

  Krim stared at it. “It’s alive, though.”

  “It’s a synthetic intelligence recording device. You render it inoperative, just like wiping a slate.”

  “A slate’s alive.”

  “A slate is an artificial representation of a personality that enables you to better connect with the universal information network,” Shuka said. “It is not alive.”

  “That thing’s alive,” Krim said. “It has my thoughts, my memories. . . . It’s me.”

  “It’s just a recording.”

  “Krim’s right—it’s you, us.” Minae glared at her. “You have to tell them. They have to know what they sacrifice.” She looked at him. “Every time we go out, part of us dies. The training Poddies? They wipe them after a training session is done, and new trainees use them. Does that disgust you?”

  “Yes,” Krim said, thinking of those training Poddies, of the voices he’d heard, of the discomfort he’d felt—as though he were using someone’s discarded hide or slate. “It’s a—” He glared at Shuka. “A violation.”

  “Necessary,” she said.

  “Why don’t you just send out live pilots?” Krim asked.

  “Too far. Too expensive.”

  “Live fighters, on actual ships, working from carriers,” Minae said. “The way we used to do it.”

  “This is the way it’s done.”

  “Crap.” Krim looked at the Poddy, up at Minae. “That’s what happened to you? You lost your Poddy?”

  “Yeah. Next mission after my bogey. I told you. The Terrorons know. I think they track our Ur transmissions, identify an ace, and the next time they see that ace upload, they kill the Poddy.”

  “Poddies blow,” Shuka said. “Things happen.”

  “How many have you lost?”

  “On Redoubt Ya? Sixteen. The others, the total missions . . .”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Minae said. “They all get destroyed anyway. The pilots figure it out sooner or later. I keep saying, tell them the truth.”

  “If they knew the truth, who’d go out? Would you go out?”

  Minae stared at her, nodded. “If it was worth it. But you won’t let me anyway.” She turned to Krim. “They won’t let you go out. ‘You’ll compromise the mission,’ they’ll say.”

  “Close it up,” Krim said. He turned away. Though he knew the medical slate kept his body stable, he still felt as if he’d been kicked in the heart. He’d lost not only a part of himself, he’d lost a thing that had been himself—two of them, not counting the training Poddies. He’d died twice, and some of the pilots, like the ones who had done three tours, like Minae—they’d died tens, hundreds of times. “I need to think,” he said.

  “I’ll take you to your quarters,” Minae said. “Ace.”

  Ace, he thought, hearing the word. Ace. He shared her disgust of the term. Ace. Krim followed her out of the lab and away from the Poddy, from the thing.

  Minae stood by the entryway to his quarters. “Need some company?” she asked.

  Krim looked at her, smiled. “Yeah. Yeah, that would be nice. I’m a little—” He held his hand up to the doorplate, let his slate power up the room.

  “Confused,” she said. “I know.” The door slid open and she followed him in.

  The sun in the atrium rose on its track, its light shining in through his open window. Another day. Krim remembered rising just one cycle ago, but it still felt as though it were the same day—might as well have been. He sat on his bunk, looked out at the sun.

  “You ever get it back?” he asked.

  “No.” Minae sat next to him, put a hand on his shoulder.

  “I mean, the Poddy could still be—” He waved his hand toward the artificial sun. “Could be out there.”

  “It would be destroyed. The auto-destruct goes off within fifty hours of a mission initiation. You know that.”

  “What if it got captured?”

  “Then it would destroy a Terroron.” She shrugged. “And you’d get another bogey and not know it.”

  “Yeah.” Krim grinned, looked down at his chest. The auxiliary slate flickered away. “How long do I have to have this thing on?”

  “Don’t worry about it. Some pilots . . . some pilots just lose it completely.” Krim winced. “Sorry.”

  “Nurel.”

  “Were you close to her?”

  “Not as close as to . . . others.” Krim turned his ring. “We had some okay times.” He stared out at the artificial sun. “Dead. I didn’t think anyone could die anymore. The hide . . .”

  “Oh, her body’s fine. The hide will repair any neural damage, but the patterns, the personality . . . She would literally be a tabula rasa, a blank slate. Body and mind. It might be possible to reintegrate her with an earlier mission upload.” Minae put a hand on his shoulder. “Most likely Nurel will go back to Earth, be put in therapy. Essentially, she’ll get raised again, like a baby. A new person in an old body.”

  “So the Nurel I knew is dead.”

  “Unless her Poddy’s out there still.” Krim glared at Minae. “Sorry—a bad joke.”

  “It could have happened to me.”

  “Did happen,” Minae said. “To both of us. We came back; Nurel didn’t. Schadenfreude, Ace.”

  “Schadenfreude?”<
br />
  “Sad joy. You lived; she didn’t. You’re sad she died and joyful you lived. Conflicting feelings.”

  “Yeah.” Krim closed his eyes. He understood the conflict raging. Nurel. He’d lost someone he cared for, just as he had lost . . . lost Corso. Only maybe Corso still lived. Maybe Nurel still lived. But he had come back. “So what do you do—what do I do now?”

  “Celebrate life,” Minae said, as she moved her hand to his other shoulder, put an arm around him, and hugged him.

  “Life. Right.” Krim turned to face her and reached up to touch her short curls. Pushing a strand of hair behind her right ear, he ran his fingers down to the three gold rings, and tapped them gently. “Three tours.”

  “Yeah. But forget about that.” She took his hand and pulled it down to her neck, and as he stroked her skin, the silver outer hide rolled back, exposing bare, deep-olive skin. Minae arched her back as he ran his fingers lower, then she looked back down at him.

  “Celebrate life, honey.” She did something to the auxiliary slate, and it fell off his chest and onto the floor. His slate slithered up around his left hand, and her slate crawled to meet his. She touched his chest with her right hand, and his own outer hide spread back.

  They joined, slate to slate, and Krim let her enter him as he entered her. Their senses joined, became one, and they opened up layer upon layer of memories to each other, surface memories, but also deeper ones—secrets enough to share, to become intimate. He saw her then, saw her tours and the bogeys and the trauma, redoubt upon redoubt, year upon year of missions, until the last one.

  She overlaid her memory of her last mission on top of his, showing him the grief she felt upon discovering her loss, and the aching pain of never knowing what happened. As they rode each other’s pleasure and pain, she shared with him one final revelation, of another Poddy, some other pilot soaring through the cosmos, and coming up on a nearly destroyed Poddy, a hulk, its kinetic loads spent. In a haze that showed it to be someone else’s memory, not hers, he saw the Poddy fighter destroyed—destroyed by a fellow pilot, destroyed so no one could possibly recover its data. At the pain of knowing—but the joy of closing the mystery—Krim and Minae rose together into an emotional bond, a shared memory as intimate as the union of their bodies.

  As they rolled away from each other, hands still clasped and memories fading, Krim looked at her, Minae’s hair tousled and her dark skin dappled in the light of the sun. “At least you know,” he said.

  “I know. You might, too. They’ll send a sweeper mission out in your sector, where you . . . lost it. To be sure.”

  “How’d you find out?”

  “I hacked the records of Ya. I knew this redoubt would do the sweep-up, and I figured out who did the mission, and then I—then I seduced her.” She sat up. “She had, uh, some remorse about the mission, so it helped us both, I think.” Minae pushed him back down, and broke the slate contact. “Hey—thanks.”

  “Thanks?” Krim shook his head. “No—thank you.” He watched her as the silvery hide began covering her body again, a process as sexy as when it had ebbed away.

  “First Beat who ever let me get that close,” she said. “Hey—you guys are tight.”

  “Had to be. We fought a war against the Dominion. I guess maybe we still don’t trust a lot of people.”

  “Right.” Minae smiled at him. “You wouldn’t let me in too deep, though.” She waved a hand at him. “No, that’s okay. You can’t share everything, not at once. But I don’t understand the Beats. I checked them out once. The Beats started an obscure midtwentieth-century cultural movement. How the heck did a remote asteroid colony wind up with that ideology? It was never in any of the official registers.”

  Krim smiled. “It was an accident—some say an act of God.” He sighed. “The colony was founded by a seed ship, you know?”

  “Right. A slow burner sent out with a small crew and a hold full of genotypes.”

  “Yeah. And a really huge computer net. It was a Mormon ship, a Latter-day Saints colony starter. They sent them out all over. The Orson Scott Card, we found out later. Those Mormons were absolute fanatics about records: they had half the Earth’s libraries and every possible genealogical record they could find on board.

  “So, anyway, the guy commanding the ship had this real thing about the Beats. They had been the subject of his doctoral thesis, only he never passed his committee, so he took up piloting. Out past Mars he spaced the rest of the crew and took the ship to a likely asteroid—the Jack, he called it, after a major Beat writer, Jack Kerouac. Then just before landfall, he wiped everything on the ship’s net except the history and culture of the Beats. And physics and science—he left that in there. Basic stuff. No Mormons, though, and no other culture. So the colony grew up knowing only the Beats. Then the pilot took the ship on, but no one ever knew where. About a hundred years later we were rediscovered, but by then it was too late—and good—for us.”

  “That’s the craziest damn thing I’ve ever heard,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, it’s the best explanation anyone has ever come up with. It’s true that there was a ship called the Card. And it was lost.” He held up his hand to stroke her face again. “Believe it or—” Minae’s face suddenly went slack. “What the hell . . . ?” Krim asked, and then he felt it too.

  The alarm ripped through him, an eardrum-shattering screech. In the training they had done a full battle alert once, just for the effect, and now the screech did what it was supposed to do: stop him dead and make him listen. The alarm rang out on every slate, he knew, and right after the alarm the battle commands would start hitting, tracking pilots and other staff and sending them to their posts. But Minae wasn’t going out, he suddenly realized as she smiled.

  And neither was he, Krim knew. They had him on the sick list. Sam’s utterance was simple: “Report to quarters.” Krim looked at Minae, who suddenly shook her head.

  “Report to quarters my ass,” she said. “I’m an ace. They’re going to need me.”

  “You, too? What the hell is happening?”

  “Bogey ten klicks out,” Sam said inside his head. “It appeared out of nowhere and just stopped. Terroron. It’s broadcasting the standard savage messages. Initial scans indicate it’s fully armed. A full Poddy attack has already been initiated.”

  “Poddies,” Minae said. “That’s not going to work. They need live ships.” She slapped Krim on the shoulder. “You want to go out?”

  He glanced at her, thought of dying on the Poddy, shook his head. “Not on one of those tin cans.”

  “You’re never going to get near a telly-op couch,” she said. “No, not that. A real fighter.”

  “The Ya has some?”

  “Derelicts. Antiques,” she said. “But yeah, it has some. The original Podhoretz-class fighters. They’re supposed to be scrapped for their nukes, but I know some folks in maintenance. They’ve been keeping a few on-line and armed.”

  “Crap.” He looked up at her, smiled. Live piloting? That’s what he’d come out for. “You’re nuts, Ace. Let’s do it.”

  “You got it, Ace.”

  She slapped him on the shoulders. “Follow me, then.”

  Minae led him out into the hall and started pulling him down hallways to tubes to lifts to shafts. They headed deeper into the redoubt, back toward the out-system end, Krim thought. Once, she stopped, rolled her slate down around her hand like a glove, then jacked in to one of the ports by a hatch. The hatch opened, revealing a long access corridor, and she pointed down it.

  “Where are we going?” Krim asked.

  “Rail launch. They’re firing kinetics at the bogey. Two of the rounds will be fighters, and we’ll be in them.” She grinned. “Some guys owed me.”

  They came up into the torpedo bay, a big hangar at the loading end of the railgun. Krim remembered the gun firing Poddies on their long flight out to their missions. In the bay, remotely operated forklifts whirred around, loading shells into a tube that led, he figured, into the ra
ilgun. Two egg-shaped Poddies, old ones, lay on cradles. They looked squatter but bigger, and bristled with tubes and firing ports, with an engine that took up the whole aft end. Hatches opened as they approached, and a forklift moved toward one as Minae came up to it.

  “I’ll take the lead, you take the second.” She slapped his slate with her gloved slate. He felt a shudder as a comm program roared through him. “We’re linked and encrypted on a personal communications link,” her voice said inside him. “Like a slate. Get into your fighter.”

  Minae turned, moved toward the first fighter. She paused and looked back, as if she’d forgotten something, and then raised her slated hand to her head. Krim waved to her. Running the slate over her scalp, she shaved the red-blonde curls away, and then her outer hide rose over her bare scalp. She waved back to him and entered the fighter.

  Krim pulled his own hood up, and then went to the second one. It held only a seat and little else—no control panels, nothing. The hatch closed on him as he got in. Instinctively, he lowered his mask over his face, then felt his hide inflate around him to fill in the space between his body and the console.

  “Set your hide at fifteen G’s,” Minae said.

  Krim echoed the command to Sam, and felt his muscles stiffen and extend. “Got it.”

  “Okay. Power up your standard console. You’ve got full sensors but don’t bring up a visual display until we’re on our way—all you’ll see is the inside of the railgun rushing by. I guarantee you’ll puke.”

  “Right.” Krim felt the forklift raise his fighter up, and then felt it lay him down on some sort of belt that slowly moved him forward. He jacked in, got his screen, the spiderweb of patterns that had become so familiar, on-line. His fist hovered before him, and he flexed and unflexed his fingers to get the feel of it. “Hey—is the projection virtual?”

  “It’s virtual but simulated, not an artificial reality: it’s whizzy-wig. W-Y-S-I-W-Y-G. What you see is what you get.”

  “Just like on a Beat fighter.”

  “Just like on a real fighter. With a fifteen-G hide you won’t be able to move much, so your motions will be exaggerated, but you’ll be flying it live, that’s for sure.”