The Coalition Man

by Alec Saracen

  “It's not my fault that I'm replacing Green Dragon,” Grey Hawk said sharply. “If that's what Red Wolf is pissed off about–”

  Blue Wasp shook his head vigorously, which was visible even at this distance. “It's not.” He paused, and reconsidered. “Well, it's not the only thing.”

  “What the fuck else have I done?”

  “It's not personal.”

  “It feels personal.”

  “It's not,” Blue Wasp snapped. Grey Hawk bit her lip and forced herself to calm down. She didn't want to drive away her only ally. “It's complicated,” he continued, in a more normal tone of voice. “Think about it from her point of view. She's just lost her oldest comrade, and now she's seen all the rest of her original squad die and be replaced. Worse, his replacement is the freshest rookie any squad has ever seen, or close to it, and the squad's being chucked right into what's probably a war zone in the making. So, let's count.”

  Blue Wasp summoned up three flaming meteorites overhead, the first of which screamed out of the blue and exploded into the earth a few kilometres away.

  “One. She's lost her friends, her mentors, her best and most trusted allies. Gone.” The second meteor slammed down, this time on Blue Wasp's other side. “Two. She's the last one left. She knows she hasn't got long left. You're shoving her own mortality in her face, even if you don't mean to.” The final meteor crashed down directly behind Blue Wasp, silhouetting him against the incandescent burst of flame. “And three. She's now responsible for you, or at least she feels that way. She doesn't want to like you, because that way it's easier on her if you get yourself killed – but she also desperately wants you to live, because there's no dodging that kind of guilt, and she knows there's a good chance you won't. So that's where you stand, Grey Hawk. That's where we all stand.”

  Grey Hawk watched the virtual soil rain down, and said nothing.

  Their next scheduled drill was political. They were given a procedurally generated scenario based on their intelligence on Tor: a planet newly shorn of its larger political alignment by interstellar war, its panicking administration cut adrift from its mother government, and its allegiance coveted by the greedy Coalition-analogue which had severed the world from its Alliance-analogue. The computers invented dozens of interested parties similar to the Confederation, the Unified Republic of Star Systems, even the FSN and the Protectorate and Star City, all enmeshed in a wildly complex superstructure spiralling out from this one tiny world.

  Predictable flashpoints came up. Assassinations. Bombings. Abductions. Mysterious disappearances. Coups. Even more improbable courses of events – invasions, unexpected behind-the-scenes political deals, engineered virus outbreaks – were thrown at them. Their goal was to find the small changes – an assassination prevented or carried out, a coup scuppered or subtly aided – which would tip the scales towards freedom.

  A thumb on the scales was the best they could do, Grey Hawk found. It was what she knew to expect, but the disappointment was still visceral every time their simulated actions had only a minor positive effect – or worse, backfired. That was rare, but possible. In one sim, their backing the wrong horse in an intelligence service coup led to a tyrannical corporatist cabal seizing the levers of power.

  “...shit,” Blue Wasp had said, scratching his simulated head as they stared at their strategic display, trying to understand their mistake.

  “Yasaria Two Point Oh,” Blue Bull murmured.

  Red Wolf leaned in over the table, glaring at the wreckage of their failed intervention as if she could undo it by sheer force of will. “Again.”

  They ran it again, and again.

  Each incarnation took them between five and thirty minutes, with conditions partially randomised each time to keep them on their toes and prepare them for every eventuality. As the hours slipped by, Grey Hawk fancied that they were getting better and better results, but the scowl of irritated concentration never left Red Wolf's face. For that matter, Grey Hawk found herself growing more frustrated with every marginal improvement. Surely they could do more. There had to be some perfect pressure point they could strike to unwind the constricting coils choking the liberty out of the world, but they could never quite find it.

  “Run it backwards,” she said suddenly, after yet another intervention resulted in an independent yet insidiously repressive government.

  Red Wolf looked up at her in annoyance. “What?”

  Grey Hawk stood frozen for a second while her brain caught up to her mouth. She wished that didn't happen so often. “If we run it backwards,” she said slowly, “starting with the best possible outcome, we can see what we should have done. What we needed to do and what we missed. Right?”

  She looked around hopefully. Blue Bull looked as if he were about to object, then just shrugged.

  “Hell. Why not?”

  “That's not what this simulation was designed for,” Red Wolf said shortly.

  Blue Wasp laughed heartily at that one. “Wasn't it? Seems to me like these sims were designed for Liberators to fuck around in. Let's give it a go.”

  Red Wolf saw the numbers against her and gave in, though not before shooting Grey Hawk an icy glance. Shove it, Grey Hawk thought, smiling innocently.

  It took them longer than she'd expected. First, they had to run thousands upon thousands of sims with varying conditions and events, even simulating their own interventions, to get a single scenario to result in a desirable outcome. It wasn't an encouraging start. Once they had it, they combed through the fictional timeline, looking for points of fracture and hinge events which changed the political course of the world.

  Grey Hawk resisted the urge to kick the table in frustration as she surveyed the sim. “This is ridiculous.”

  “It doesn't look likely, does it?” Blue Wasp said, chewing a lip thoughtfully.

  The eventual outcome had been a democratic-socialist government with strong safeguards against one-party governments and a dramatically weakened military-intelligence arm of the state, but it had only come about through the violent failure of a misjudged coup and the Coalition-analogue appointing a completely inept ambassadorial team. Worse, their own simulated doppelgangers had managed to pull off a series of difficult assassinations at exactly the right moments.

  “No,” Red Wolf said shortly. “But it tells us something valuable: we cannot screw up. Ever. Better to do a few things perfectly than to do a lot of things more or less right.” She swept away the display with her hand and looked up at them, her mouth set in a grim line. “Back to work.”

  Grey Hawk had a talent for assassination. The governments of the galaxy had developed their defences well, but a determined Liberator could accomplish pretty much anything. The trick was to kill in a sufficiently subtle and confusing way that Liberation was just one of many possibilities. If Liberation killed someone, the reason behind it was clear. If mysterious, faceless forces killed someone, the political reaction became much more complex. Sometimes that complexity was useful, and sometimes Liberation needed to announce itself theatrically, letting their rivals know that their agenda was in play. That was what Grey Hawk had been taught, anyway, and the simulated responses to her assassinations seemed to bear that out.

  Her personal favourite was infiltrating the Chamber of Delegates with a tiny remote drone, which she managed to slip past the security screens by burrowing through an exterior wall with a separate drone beforehand. The drone was an experimental design, loaded with a single projectile and enough propellant to fire it. The lethal distance was less than three metres and the drone was notoriously difficult to aim, hence its unpopularity among Liberators, but Grey Hawk had always liked the finicky little murder-bot. Liberation's variant was the best in the galaxy, but not unique – so when Grey Hawk divebombed the Coalition ambassador as he addressed the chamber and scrambled his grey matter with a perfect shot, the only evidence was the wreck of the drone, scorched by the act of shooting.

  “That would never work,” Blue Wasp told her,
as the chamber exploded into uproar and security agents poured out of the woodwork. He had appeared lounging in the Speaker's chair. “If you missed, security would pucker up so tight you'd never get another shot.”

  “I don't miss,” Grey Hawk said.

  She'd hoped Blue Wasp would be awed into silence by the comeback, but instead he just laughed. “You didn't miss. There's no risk in the sim, but there is in the field. Think hard about whatever you do. How many times out of ten could you make that shot?”

  Grey Hawk bristled at the implied insult to her skills. “Ten.”

  “Prove it.”

  She ran the scenario nine more times, scoring seven kills. On one of the two failed attempts, she missed the head but nailed the ambassador's foot, which at least meant she got to watch him hop around, yowling in agony.

  “Eighty percent,” Blue Wasp said. He made a non-committal noise in the back of his throat. “Maybe. You've got to weigh the repercussions of missing versus the benefits of making the kill.”

  “I know,” Grey Hawk said.

  It came out perhaps more hotly than she'd intended, because Blue Wasp held up his hands in mock surrender. “Easy, kid. I'm just saying: you'll fuck up. I'll fuck up. We'll all fuck up. We've just gotta make sure we only fuck up when it doesn't matter so much.”

  Grey Hawk recognised that as a loose translation of Yustrid, and snorted. She could throw doctrine right back at him. “'A revolution is an incautious beast, forever tripping over its own feet.'”

  “It is,” Blue Wasp said. “But revolutionaries – maybe they want to watch their step.”

  Grey Hawk saw the amiable look on his face and softened the acerbic reply rising in her throat. “Maybe,” she said instead, and went back to plotting murder.

  The combination of the sims and the constant low-level distortion of the Void made time pass strangely. Grey Hawk regularly checked how long they had before reaching Tor, and every time the answer was slightly different to what she expected. Once she waited what must surely have been an hour only to discover it had been just twenty minutes, and once she spent four hours repeatedly blitzing the same scenario and came out of it convinced it had been no more than half that. She slept in concentrated two-hour bursts which alternately felt like five-minute naps and ten-hour crashes.

  Was the Void doing it? It seemed plausible. She knew very little of the Void, and she planned to keep it that way. It was knowledge she could live without.

  It came as a surprise when the ship's commander cut into the sim over the intercom and announced that they were approaching Tor. Grey Hawk had almost forgotten there was a world outside the sims. The message sparked off a flurry of activity in the cramped V-ship as the squad unplugged and rolled out of their nooks.

  As they filed towards the launch bay, there was a quiet sense of danger hanging in the air between them. Liberation's insertion pods – the needles, as Grey Hawk almost always heard them called – were arguably the most important piece of tech they had, even more so than the Liberators themselves. No use in having Liberators if they couldn’t get planetside.

  It was a miracle that what amounted to climbing into a missile and being fired at a planet was so safe. The official stats claimed that hot insertions resulted in an explosive death for the unlucky Liberator something like three percent of the time. Blue Wasp's bullshit about percentages suddenly didn't seem so silly to Grey Hawk. She fervently hoped she made it. The idea that she might die before even setting foot on Tor was unimaginably awful. To work so hard and get so close, then have it yanked away forever without ever making a difference would be horrifying. She was ready to die, but not to die pointlessly.

  Their four pods were laid out like coffins in the launch bay, their lids open. Grey Hawk felt a pang of nervousness as she followed Red Wolf into the room and saw them there. They looked uncomfortably like mouths ready to swallow the squad up.

  She refused to let herself hesitate, though, especially after seeing how quickly Blue Bull hopped into his own pod and closed the lid behind him. She'd heard rumours of how different squads dealt with insertions. Some had little pre-insertion, rituals or superstitions, some always said their goodbyes before entering the pods, and some just refused to acknowledge the risk at all. It seemed to Grey Hawk that that was a superstition in itself, but it was one she was happy to go along with.

  Three percent. Except that was the average rate, and they were probably going to have a significant Coalition picket between them and the planet. Don't think about that, idiot, she thought. Three percent is nothing.

  It didn't feel like nothing as she climbed into her pod. As she lay back, she felt the adaptive seat remould itself around her, which only added to the unsettling aliveness of the thing.

  She plugged in, lead by lead and wire by wire. Before she lost her nerve, she told the lid to close. It came down mercifully quickly, leaving her in a gloom filled with dozens of lights and displays.

  “Go into a sim,” Red Wolf said in her ear. “It's easier.”

  Grey Hawk was a step ahead of her, but she was still grateful for the rare note of kindness in the Grade Six's voice. “I will. See you on the other side.”

  “Yeah,” Red Wolf said. “See you there.”

  Grey Hawk called up one of the default sims for the scenario. It left her lying on a beach – one of Zhi Lazh's famous polar beaches, she saw, based on the spindly starscrapers dominating the skyline. Zhi Lazh's peculiar red sun was splashed like a drop of blood on the white expanse of the sky.

  It was better. The claustrophobia dimmed, and she found it easier to focus on running checks on the displays still floating around her. All the basics looked good, which meant it was time for the fluid.

  She told the pod to start filling up and activated her helmet, which folded up out of her neck just below the point where real flesh met artificial body to encompass her head. The sim rendered it as the tide rapidly coming in, lapping around her feet and soon her shoulders, rising up over her legs and chest, and finally pooling across her visor. It kept rising until the pod was full. It was necessary to dampen some of the crippling forces she would be exposed to. Liberators could survive a lot, but they still had human heads, and their bodies could only do so much to compensate.

  Grey Hawk stared up at the rippling image of the false sun through the sea. It wasn't much better than just looking at the pod's interior, so she cut back to the darkness of reality. The fluid around her was congealing slightly, approaching its optimum viscosity. When she tried to move her limbs, it held them firmly in place. That freaked her out, so she quickly flipped back to the sim. Her actual limbs were still paralysed by goo, but the sim's illusory sensory inputs were much less distressing. She raised her hands to her face and waved them back and forth. The sim's watered-down sensations were a pale shadow of the real thing, and right now that didn't matter in the least.

  A safety video popped up in her vision. She waved it away. There wasn't much she could do now except hope that Tor's anti-space defences weren't good enough to shoot the needles down.

  Time ticked by. Grey Hawk closed her eyes, dimmed her displays, and listened to music. She liked a particular AI composer whose soft, dreamy cello-driven pieces she could normally listen to for hours on end, but today she couldn't focus on it for more than a minute. She couldn't even calm her nerves with the breathing exercises she used to practice, because she didn't even need to breathe. She could still physically inhale and exhale, but now that breathing was a lifestyle choice and not a physiological necessity, it had lost all of its mental power. Grey Hawk remembered waking up from the final transplant from her old body to her new one. The horrible sensation of suffocation that had persisted for ten minutes until her mind finally registered that she wasn't dying.

  Her body was waiting for her if she survived long enough to retire. It was kept more for comfort, to know that the option was always there, than for any actual purpose. Almost every Liberator who made it to retirement chose to keep their artificial body. To b
e relieved of so many basic biological needs – breathing, eating, drinking, excreting – and suddenly burdened with them again after so many years was a hell of a shock. Grey Hawk tried to think of her own life after her Liberator days, more to distract herself than anything else, and drew a blank. What would there be to do? Everything else would be a step down.

  “Prepare for launch,” the commander said on the ship-wide channel. Her voice was taut, stressed. They were taking a heavy risk as well. Dodging the Coalition picket, hanging around in realspace long enough to launch the pods, then diving back into the Void and hightailing it out of there before the Coalition blew them to pieces was no walk in the park. “Good luck.”

  “Same to you,” Red Wolf replied.

  The channel went silent. Grey Hawk waited. Suddenly, the ship bucked beneath them, a movement she felt even through the pod and the dampening fluid. For a dizzying moment, she thought the ship had been destroyed, but it must just have been a glancing blow to their V-shield.

  “Hope that shield's up to scratch,” Blue Wasp said cheerfully.

  “They'll get us there,” Red Wolf said.

  “I know,” Blue Wasp said. The ship shimmied again, as if shunted sideways by a lateral hammer blow. “But will they make it out?”

  Red Wolf paused before answering. “That's not our concern.”

  Grey Hawk thought she heard someone start to speak, but at the same moment the disorienting shift from Void to realspace kicked her in the brain stem. As the new physical laws asserted themselves, she felt a sudden burst of movement, and watched the hovering 3D display in fascination as four icons arced away from the ship, followed by dozens of dummy launches that would hopefully draw enemy fire away from them. After less than twenty seconds in realspace, the ship finished disgorging its cargo and vanished back into the Void.