Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 111

by Neil Clarke

  A storm is powerful. But smart things can shelter from a storm.

  So how do they defeat the gods of thought using only the logic of annihilation? Or, more aptly: what tactics might they stumble on, in their blind exploration of the possibility space?

  Laporte cups her hands and accepts the sacrament. The ants start eating her flesh. She crushes them between her palms, to show her strength, and it only drives them deeper.

  “They provoke the creation of monsters,” she says. “Experts at the use of violence. And then they consume them to enhance their own violence.”

  “You will lead the Nemesis in war against the Alliance,” van Aken intones, reading the sacred terms, the covenant he sacrificed himself to create. “You will guide them as long as you can. Inevitably, you will be devoured by the Nemesis, and your authority will be erased. But as long as you endure, you can protect your home.”

  The ants are inside her now. She can feel them under her skin. She looks at her arms and sees them in her muscle, bound by violence, grappling and flexing. The Alliance’s spies and admirals would drink razors to get a look at her brain right now, full of the alien logic that will give her a transient kind of power over the local Nemesis.

  “What about you?” she asks. Ken was a good friend, once, with good advice, even if he’s now the organizing point of all Nemesis behavior in human space. “How long will you last?”

  His smile is warm and toothy, an earnest, clever smile, and each tooth in it is a broad-headed warrior ant. “Humanity is going to be at war with Nemesis for a long, long time,” he says. “I am the anima in command of semiotic warfare. I am the Admiral of communion. I keep myself from the jaws by supplying the Nemesis with new weapons. And if you can manage the Nemesis, Miss Laporte, if you can keep the fire burning hot . . . then I will have new monsters to cultivate.”

  “Ah,” she says, satisfied. She gets it! It makes simple sense.

  Van Aken knows how to achieve a kind of common ground with the Nemesis. How to make humanity at least temporarily useful. The Nemesis devoured van Aken because he could enhance their lethality. Make them better monsters.

  Humanity will defy the Nemesis as long as their strength lasts. They’ll get ruthless. And thus they will become the Nemesis’ monster farm. A new drop in the acid bath. Victory is not only annihilation: it’s monster-genesis.

  “I’m sorry your lover abandoned you,” Ken says. “She was a good person, deep down. That’s why she didn’t understand the necessity of our work.”

  The jaws of the Sinadhuja begin to close around Laporte’s ship.

  simms 8/9

  After the curry-and-cosmology fight, they go to the gym to beat the shit out of each other. That helps less than it used to: Simms is still weak and they both know it, and holding back in a fight is just like lying anywhere else.

  Showers require less discipline than they used to. They retreat to their haven in the officers’ cabins, freed up by the death of most of Eris’ staff, and they have makeup sex. It’s the night before the mutiny, before Laporte asks Simms, one last time, to be her zombie warrior buddy cop. The night before Simms says, sorry, I’m not mission capable.

  Laporte drowses in Simms’ arms and then she wakes up to the sight of al-Alimah leaning over her. She’s upgraded her eyes. They are blind, brilliant silver. The stud in her tongue gleams like Laporte’s armor tooth.

  “The mission,” al-Alimah says, “begins now.”

  By reflex (it’s all reflex, love reflex) Laporte reaches for Simms who’s curled up beside her and in need of protection. But no one’s there: only a warm place. She sits up to shove al-Alimah back. Simms pounces on her from behind, Laporte recognizes the feel of her forearms and the smell of her, she tries to fight but Simms is stronger, she’s stronger, she was holding back in the gym. She pins Laporte facedown in the mattress with a growl.

  Al-Alimah puts a needle into Laporte’s neck and the world goes out.

  Laporte remembers this as just a dream. Not because it’s true, but because it’s useful.

  nagari 11/10

  “Stop asking me to fly with you,” Simms says. “I’m done. I can’t be part of this. That’s my final decision.”

  This is the moment before Laporte falls into Capella. At the end of the mutiny, in the slim window before Steele catches up with the NAGARI task force and stops them from breaching Nemesis space. Laporte’s Uriel is waiting on the Eris hangar deck with a full warload and two empty seats. There is no time for hesitation.

  “Boss,” Laporte says, reaching out. She’s sealed up in her flightsuit and when she touches Simms it’s through the interface of her tactical gloves, fireproof, skin-sealed, built to insulate and protect. “Hey.”

  Not again, she wants to say. Don’t do this again. We survived this. We split up but we found each other again and we cooked some curry and fixed some fighters, we’re so close, we’re going to win. For values of victory encompassing genocide.

  Simms pulls away. “You’re not the woman I knew,” she says. “You can go make your bargain. But I don’t want to be part of it.”

  Their orbit is over. The punch-drunk bloodlust and the will to win. They’ve spiraled too close and now they will fling each other away, each of them ballistic and alone. Simms prefers defeat.

  “Laporte,” al-Alimah calls, from the Eris’ CIC. “We’re losing time. Are you airborne?”

  “You don’t need me,” Simms says. “You never have.”

  Laporte wants to say something clever, to fix this. An alien told me that every Laporte needs a Simms. That monsters have to love makers, so they can hone each other. So they can keep a safe orbit. Simms, if you go, I don’t know how to find my way back.

  But this time it’s Simms who walks away from her.

  Laporte flies through the wormhole, into Capella. Into the maw of the singularity. She falls.

  capella 8/8

  simms 9/9

  The jaws of the Sinadhuja close around her ship. Armored mandibles clamping down to protect the warship’s antimatter stores and soft internal structure and most of all van Aken, who is the bridge the Nemesis need, the means of their third incursion. Shutting off the ring of receding starlight, and the blue nova of the Atreus high above.

  The Uriel’s navigational lights illuminate the Sinadhuja’s interior. Laporte scans serrated geometry swarming with jointed, armored Nemesis organisms. Somewhere down there van Aken’s human body has been translated, or consumed, into a component of the Sinadhuja. A semiotic weapons system.

  Ken. Who is in Laporte’s head, who knows what she knows. Who knows that Atreus is here to kill her. Who knows that she left Simms on a hangar deck in Vega.

  Laporte’s armored tooth fires a jolt of pain up the side of her jaw.

  “Boss, Morrigan,” Laporte says. She knows she has to say this. A dream told her. “We’re a go. Wake up. Do it.”

  In the Uriel’s back seat, the electronic warfare station, Simms smashes her helmet against the headrest in surprise.

  “Fuck!” she says. Her voice is dry like paper tearing. “Holy shit!”

  Laporte’s weapons panel lights up with status reports. An IV dumping combat stimulants into Simms’ blood, a cardiac implant restarting her heart, reflex sequencers firing commands into her brainstem. Waking her up from functional death. Since they left Eris together, Simms has been sustained by the emergency oxygen in her synthetic bone marrow and whatever black-ops technofuckery al-Alimah cranked into her.

  Hidden from Haywain van Aken’s communion. From his semiosis weapon, his dream of ants, his bridge into conscious minds.

  In the garden, Ken says: “She left you. She thought you were an abomination. I don’t understand.”

  Understand. That wonderful word. Laporte, giddy with the knowledge that Simms is alive again (again!), alive and flying with her, just can’t resist the quip: “Just a bad dream, Ken.”

  “Al-Alimah. She fabricated that event and put it in you. Why?” The formicidae face tilts. “What ab
out your mission, Laporte? What about human survival?”

  “You’re the mission, Ken.” The Nemesis never manifested any central vulnerabilities during the second incursion. Never organized around any one point of weakness. “I’m sorry.”

  In the back cockpit Simms is speaking into her COM, the quick clipped voice of a veteran combat pilot, signaling for backup: “Atreus, Atreus, this is TROJAN. Request fire mission, flash priority, target is a Sinadhuja world-killer with enemy command assets aboard. Jump vectors coming now—”

  Laporte’s helmet pokes her in the back of the head. ALERT! it complains. EMCON VIOLATION! It doesn’t like what Simms is doing, hotloading the reactor, shunting power into the ship’s IFF and navigational beacons. Broadcasting targeting data on an Alliance tactical channel: a screaming, desperate plea to shoot me.

  “TROJAN, Atreus.” Steele’s scalpel voice faint, so faint, distorted by the Sinadhuja’s armor and defensive jamming, by the grip of the black hole. By all these things keeping his missiles at bay. “We have your target. Stand by for fire. Godspeed, pilots.”

  Maybe, in younger and less certain days, Laporte and Simms would have paused to say things left unsaid. To say goodbye.

  But they don’t need that now. They’re on the same frequency. Much like the Atreus and the Uriel gunship, which is looking around the Sinadhuja’s guts with its targeting package, plotting trajectories with its navigational sensors, and telling Steele where, exactly, to fire his miracle missiles.

  It’s very hard to kill a Sinadhuja. From the outside.

  In the garden, Ken makes a soft, thoughtful noise. “You knew I’d read your memories. So you let Simms and al-Alimah use you as a weapon. They leveraged Admiral Steele into cooperating with you. They used the NAGARI dreamscape to fabricate Simms abandoning you. And I believed it, because I cared about you.”

  Laporte grins an ant-tongued grin. She came here knowing, in a veiled way, that Simms was waiting for her. But she had no idea, all the way down, whether Steele had actually agreed to the plan. Whether his missiles were feints or fatally true.

  But she knows, right now (as the first of Steele’s fusion bombs jumps in ten meters off her nose and arcs off towards the back of the Sinadhuja’s interior) exactly what she needs to do. She needs to live. And so does Simms.

  Laporte touches the stick, one last time, to line up the Uriel’s cockpit with the gap in the armored jaws above.

  “Eject!” In pilot code, you always say it three times, to make it real. “Eject, eject!”

  She gets a nanosecond glimpse of Simms in the backseat mirror. She’s grinning like an idiot.

  Laporte pulls the wasp-colored handle between her legs. Her ejection seat hurls her starward, between the flashing jump-sign and corkscrewing trails of Atreus’ missiles, up through the Sinadhuja’s jaws and away. She’s turning as she rises, g-force snapping the acceleration sumps in the seat, and she can see another light with her, orbiting her, no, it’s not an orbit, they’re just flying together, co-moving.

  “Simms!” she calls. “Boss!”

  Down beneath them the Sinadhuja’s drive flares up red and massive and vomits debris and cuts out. The world-killer drops away, free falling, a mountain conjured up out of the black hole and now reclaimed by it. A flash of annihilation light blows through its hull down astern and suddenly it’s geysering jets of molten metal, crumpling on itself, jump missiles darting out of the interior and curving back to re-attack with their submunitions scattering out behind them like fairy dust.

  In the garden Ken says: “This is a selfish choice, Miss Laporte. What do you gain by killing me? You know they’ll keep coming. You know they always win.”

  “Maybe.” Laporte sprays him with her garden hose. He’s already falling to pieces, ants sloughing off and returning to the dirt. “Maybe we’ll make enough monsters to stop them.”

  Is that, his fading voice asks, how you want things to be? Everything honed to fight? Irrevocably weaponized?

  Laporte doesn’t know what to say to that. She has been a monster. But she’s going to see Simms again, and when they’re together, she won’t feel like anything but a happy woman. Is monsterhood conditional? Like a mirror you hold up to the war around you, just long enough to win?

  Everything dies. Even humanity, Laporte supposes. Maybe how you live should count for more than how long you last.

  Admiral van Aken sends a soft farewell. He doesn’t seem angry. More proud than anything.

  Godspeed, he says. And good luck, Miss Laporte.

  The Sinadhuja’s hull shatters. Blazes up in dirty fire and fades to ash and smelt and then the ruin of the world-killer falls away. Down below, in the accretion disk, black shapes begin to stir.

  “Good kill,” Simms says, like they’re still back in Sol, shooting down bad Alliance pilots. Her voice is tinny over the suit radios, but very confident. “Scratch one Nemesis warship.”

  High above them, silhouetted against the distant bundled stars, Atreus has turned over. She’s decelerating, burning ‘up’, trying to stop herself from hitting the black hole. Trying to make it back to the wormhole above.

  “TROJAN, Atreus.” Steele quite calm and utterly polite—disappointingly unmoved to cheer. Laporte would’ve liked to rattle the bastard. “We have your beacons. A search and rescue craft is on the way. Reply if able.”

  “Morrigan.” Simms calling. “Morrigan, it’s Boss.”

  “Atreus, this is Eris, Federation Second Fleet.” Another transmission. Stretched by blueshift and spiked by radiation. “We have transited the wormhole. We are deploying tankers to assist your escape burn.”

  “Copy you, Eris. Put your tankers on GUARD for rendezvous control.”

  “Morrigan!” Simms calls. “We’re fucked!”

  “What is it, Boss?”

  “We got cooked pretty bad, Laporte.” She sounds more disgusted than afraid. “Gamma flash. Check your rad meter.”

  Laporte picks the radiation alarm out of the small congress of alerts on her suit visor. It wants her to know that she’s absorbed a critical dose, that she needs medical assistance, and that she should consider recording a last message for her loved ones.

  “Ugh,” Simms says. She makes an about-to-spit noise and then, considering her helmet, abandons it. “I’m going to have so much cancer.”

  Laporte dismisses the alarm and cues up an anti-emetic injection. They’ll be okay. A little radiation never kept a good Federation pilot down. She starts tapping her seat thrusters, moving towards Simms, and look, Simms is already headed for her. As they pass they reach out and grab each other by their forearms so that they turn together around a common point.

  “I think we’ll be okay, boss,” she says. She can hear the beacon of the search-and-rescue ship, howling down to them from the stars above, and the frame-shifted scream of the black-hole-eating light, far down below. “I think we’ll be okay.”

  Simms claps her on the wrist, once and then again. “Me too, Morrigan.” She’s still grinning. “Me too.”

  FLASH FLASH FLASH

  ISN BACKBREAKER FASTEST

  S 0348 BAST $DATE_DYNAMIC_REFRAME

  FM SECCON//BETAQ

  TO ALLIANCE HIGHER

  NEMESIS PSYWAR CHANNEL DESTROYED IN CAPELLA STRIKE BY JOINT FEDERATION/ALLIANCE ACTION

  ALLIANCE SPECIAL ASSETS RECOVERED. DEBRIEFING PENDING. NOW IN RADIATION THERAPY ABOARD FEDERATION WARSHIP ERIS

  LIMITED NEMESIS INCURSION NOW IN PROGRESS VEGA. SMOKEJUMP UNITS RESPONDING. FEDERATION NAGARI TASK FORCE RESPONDING. PRELIMINARY ESTIMATE 60% CHANCE CONTAINMENT

  FIREWALL UNITS ON STANDBY

  SOL EXPEDITIONARY FORCE: IMMEDIATE RETASK TO VEGA FOR SMOKEJUMP RELIEF

  DUE TO ENHANCED NEMESIS THREAT POSTURE, DIPLOMATIC RESOLUTION TO SOL REGIME REALIGNMENT ACTION IS BACK IN PLAY

  MAINTAIN HIGHEST VIGILANCE. HUMANITY STANDS

  About the Author

  Seth Dickinson is the author of The Traitor Baru Cormorant and a lot of short stories, including “Morr
igan in the Sunglare”, this story’s antecedent. He studied racial bias in police shootings, wrote much of the lore for Bungie Studios’ Destiny, and threw a paper airplane at the Vatican. He teaches at the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers. If he were an animal, he would be a cockatoo.

  When We Die on Mars

  Cassandra Khaw

  “You’re all going to die on Mars.” This is the first thing he tells us, voice plain, tone sterile. Commander Chien, we eventually learn, is a man not predisposed towards sentimentality.

  We stand twelve abreast, six rows deep, bones easy, bodies whetted on a checklist of training regimes. Our answer, military-crisp, converges into a single noise: “Yessir!”

  “If at any point before launch, you feel that you cannot commit to this mission: leave,” Commander Chien stalks our perimeter, gait impossibly supple even with the prosthetic left leg. He bears its presence like a medal, gilled and gleaming with wires, undisguised by fabric. “If at any point you feel like you might jeopardize your comrades: leave.”

  Commander Chien enumerates clauses and conditions without variance in cadence, his face cold and impersonal as the flat of a bayonet. He goes on for minutes, for hours, for seconds, reciting a lexicon of possibilities, an astronautical doomsayer.

  At the end of it, there is only silence, viscous, thick as want. No one walks out. We know why we are there, each and every last one of us: to make Mars habitable, hospitable, an asylum for our children so they won’t have to die choking on the poison of their inheritance.

  Faith, however, is never easy.

  It is amoebic, seasonal, vulnerable to circumstance. Faith sways, faith cracks. There are a thousand ways for it to die, to metamorphosize from yes to no, no, I could never.

  Gerald and Godfrey go first, both blondes, family men with everything to lose and even more to gain. Gerald leaves after a call with his wife, a poltergeist in the night, clattering with stillborn ambition; Godfrey after witnessing the birth of his daughter third-hand.