Warchild

by Karin Lowachee

  After some minutes the higher whine swallowed itself to silence, leaving only the pulse of the drives. The godcomm beeped again, once. An unfamiliar, no-nonsense female voice came through.

  “Crew prep for leap. Tee minus ten mikes and counting.”

  Leaping was mostly a comfortable affair, when things went right. The most you might’ve felt was some nausea or headache, a kind of hot displacement, as if you had a high fever. The turtle shell shielding and transsteel compound routinely used in ship hull construction effectively insulated the crew from the rougher effects of being shot through spatial shortcuts—the Jordan leap points, the first of which were discovered by some long-dead astrophysicist named Emil Jordan. But one thing he hadn’t predicted and nobody could prevent was the memory loss.

  Essential personnel got RI, or rapid infeed, from their comp consoles—a dump of information straight into their brains that briefed them on systems status. It could get dangerous if navigators weren’t aware of where they were, even for a few minutes, after coming out of a leap. RI was a mind rush, any nav or conn officer could tell you that. Some said it was addictive, but nobody who actually took RI on a regular basis ever confirmed that. Those who didn’t infeed, like recruits strapped into their racks so they didn’t tumble, had to suffer with complete disorientation and selective amnesia of the few minutes before leaping. As a kid on Mukudori it was fun. Now I wondered if too many leaps did more than just short-circuit your short-term memory.

  The woman’s voice on the godcomm counted down the leap, then the ship shuddered slightly.

  Heat rushed from my feet to the top of my head.

  I blacked out.

  Then I looked up at the bottom of Iratxe’s bunk. Somehow I’d gotten the extra webbing strapped over my torso. Everyone lay in their bunks, cards and poker chips absent. I couldn’t remember who’d put them away, but obviously someone had. The time on my watch read a half hour later than when I last remembered looking, some time in the middle of our game.

  Nathan groaned.

  “That was one long fuckin’ leap.”

  It had felt deep. No way to really explain how a body knew that, but the short Jordans were considerably less mind-numbing. I couldn’t move for five minutes. My brain just refused to function. On Mukudori I’d had no need to move about afterward, but could sleep it off. Now I was just glad we didn’t get attacked. Fighting would have been a problem. Apparently the effects got easier to handle the more you did it. That was the theory.

  Nathan continued to mutter with his gutter London accent. Cleary was the first of us to slide up, rubbing his eyes.

  I lay there for more than five minutes. When I looked at my watch again another half hour had passed. I might have dozed.

  A klaxon went off.

  “What the hell—?” from Kris.

  The godcomm beeped. “General quarters,” Captain Azarcon said, with no evident urgency in his voice. “I repeat: general quarters. This is not a drill.”

  I could picture the man on the bridge, completely calm, ordering deaths.

  “We leaped right into a fray,” Nathan said eagerly. “Damn, an’ I’m stuck in this shit!”

  He meant the training deck. Or his webbing. I undid mine and sat up as far as I could with the bunk overhead. I was nowhere near the bridge, I wasn’t even a jet yet, but my gut tightened into a hard little ball. “You think they’re aliens?”

  “Strits or pirates,” Nathan answered.

  The bulkhead began to whine, then the whole ship started to shudder, as if we lay inside a thunderstorm.

  “Those’re the cannons!” Jelilian yelled in excitement.

  We couldn’t exactly hear the blasts, just the machinery, and we felt it.

  “C’mon!”

  He jumped down from his bunk and headed for the hatch.

  “Where’re you going?” Aki snapped.

  I followed him and didn’t care where we were supposed to be. I had to see who Macedon was fighting.

  Footsteps fell in behind me. They couldn’t resist.

  Nobody else on training deck had the same idea, or they were too scared. Nathan led us alone into the recruit rec center and straight to the wide window. The ship had slowed considerably from its leap rate but hadn’t stopped. Macedon roared around us with the thud and scream of its torpedoes and laser cannons. Like the drives, the sound of the giant turrets and loading mechanisms couldn’t be muffled, not on a carrier that bristled with weaponry around its thick hide. The battle klaxon had silenced, but the battle had not.

  Outside a ship hung some distance off, but I knew the sleek, upswept shape of its aft engines. It was close enough that I could even recognize the large striviirc-na markings on its hull. I could read them. Havurkar. White Eye. I counted two torpedoes that had launched from Macedon— they matched the gaping, jagged holes in Havurkar’s starboard side. The ship sat dead in space, blackened lights and pummeled skin.

  Mukudori must have looked like that.

  Macedon still fired but not at anything we could see from the port side. Black-shelled hunter-killers streaked by like iridescent dragonflies, targeting Havurkar’s engines. The striv ship spun out of sight, but not because it had moved; we had. I put my hand on the window as a second ship shot across our line of vision.

  “Not a battleship,” Nathan said.

  “Looked like a merchant,” Iratxe said. “Diamond-class.”

  One with a lot of gunports. Not a regular merchant. A hunter-killer exploded right in front of us, a brief puff before hull parts sailed out from the center of the blast in a balletic dance. Nathan swore and slammed his hand on the window. Macedon wrenched its mammoth body through the vacuum, shooting at the enemy ship like a rabid beast swatting at a rodent on its skin. We saw nothing but benign stars. The battle went on out of our view; only the booming of the cannons told us the merchant hadn’t yet fled.

  Then as abruptly as it began, everything stopped. The deceptive silence of space bled through the hull once more. The cannons quieted. The ever-present whine of Macedon’s drives seemed a whisper by comparison.

  The carrier sailed around in its inertial turn until I saw the scattered cold remains of the striviirc-na dreadnought. Like specks of dust in the span of space, the bits and pieces of the destroyed ship spun toward the many stars, toward nothing. My own image bled through, superimposed blur against the black, a ghost with hollow eyes and a hand pressed to its own transparency.

  The godcomm beeped and Azarcon’s voice rained down all around us.

  “Stand down battle stations. Commander Xavier to the bridge.”

  “It doesn’t look like we got that merchant,” Kris said.

  “Merchant?” Nathan laughed. “Pirate! How much you wanna bet?”

  “Well, we got the strit at least,” Iratxe said.

  In the window reflection I saw them behind me, congratulating one another with high fives and shoves as if they’d had something to do with the battle.

  “Dead strit,” Nathan said. “How ’bout that for a show? Strit dead, mano!”

  No sympathizer dreadnought would have anything to do with a pirate—or an EarthHub merchant. Not Niko. But I couldn’t tell them that. I couldn’t even ask Niko.

  Kris came up behind me and slapped my shoulder, squeezed it. I spun, locked on his grinning face, and forced a smile.

  “That was better than a vid.” He grinned. “We must’ve ambushed them.”

  “We didn’t feel it,” I said absently. “I guess we wouldn’t, really, unless the grav-nodes were knocked off-line.”

  They agreed.

  But I was wrong. I had felt it.

  * * *

  XIX.

  I had a final psych interview before graduation, the last one I was likely to receive unless I volunteered to see somebody or showed signs of mental breakdown. Cleary and I sat waiting outside the JI offices. He was folding a piece of colored print into odd shapes.

  “Where do you get the paper from?” I asked, to take my mind off the int
erview.

  “My mom sends it out in batches when she can, through the replenishment ships.” His deft hands folded and pressed until a blue bird appeared. It was so balanced it stood on its own with spread wings.

  “That’s amazing.” Out of all my berthmates, I liked Cleary best. He knew how to leave you alone and behind his reserve was humble intelligence. He was also going into engineering as a drive technician and would be a good source of information for those parts of Macedon I was unlikely to see while on probation. It would be a challenge to make him talk but I had the feeling he would, and could, if it was about something he loved.

  “I can teach you.” He gestured to the bird. “You can have that too if you want.” He smiled shyly.

  “Thanks.” I took the bird, turned it around in my hands. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t seem the type that would want on a ship like Macedon.”

  He shrugged. “My dad served her previous captain. It’s kind of tradition.”

  “Both your parents are alive?”

  He nodded. “On Pax Terra.”

  An oddity in Nathan’s theory about throwaways. I would’ve asked him more except SJIs Laceste and Schmitt appeared in the doorway to the office corridor. “Come on in, gentlemen,” Laceste said.

  “Yes, sir,” we said in unison. Cleary cast me a sympathetic look, then followed Schmitt. I went with Laceste into her office. It didn’t look any different from the last time and neither did she.

  I couldn’t read her face from across that gray desk.

  “Since our last conversation, Recruit Musey, much has changed. You’ve integrated well with your fellow recruits, though we’ve noticed still a certain preferred isolation. Your scores in the shooting gallery are on top, as well as your performance in the training sims. You’re also a competitor in the hand-to-hand fighting and your slate work is impeccable.” She folded her hands. “But why, after reading all of this, am I still concerned about you, Recruit Musey?”

  I gave her a bland face I’d perfected in jet training. “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Maybe because the library comp system shows an increase in queries regarding Vincenzo Falcone since you’ve come aboard. Are there things you wish to know that aren’t in the public files?” Before I could answer she waved a hand. “Don’t worry, we don’t purposely set to spy on crew. The system is designed to store queries in that way so the recreation department can gauge what might be in demand. Except your queries didn’t involve a particular interest in the marine mammals of Earth, did they?”

  Sometimes anger served a purpose. I knew I didn’t look scared. “Sir, I don’t understand why Falcone’s an issue. Yes, I want to know more about him. One day I’d like to kill him. I’m not psychotic about it, but it’s not something I’ll dismiss either.”

  “Of course not,” she said, in a reasonable tone. “The fact he’s still at large and currently in hiding disturbs you.”

  “Not to the point of distraction, if that’s what you mean, sir.”

  “This is what we’re concerned about. Obsessions of this sort can lead to errors.”

  “I’m not obsessed, sir.”

  “Macedon has a reputation not only for strit killing, but pirate hunting. Is this one of the reasons you chose her?”

  “I guess it is, sir.” They had me all figured out, I was sure. I kept the sarcasm off my face and out of my voice.

  “You realize, Recruit Musey, that the chances of you actually meeting Falcone now, much less killing him, are slim to none?”

  This was true. The Hub was big, and I was a nonentity jet on a large ship, tasked for other duties by two different captains. If Macedon actually did meet the Khan, in some odd stroke of fate, Falcone was the type to either run or die fighting.

  One part of me wanted the opportunity to meet him, if only to put a shot in his head. To let him know who was doing it and if he remembered. Memories that were years removed, however close they seemed in quiet moments, were good targets in meditation.

  “Musey?” Laceste said, tapping a finger on her desk.

  “Yes, sir. I know. As I said, sir, I’m not obsessed.”

  * * *

  XX.

  The tattoo on my inner right wrist itched maddeningly, as if bot-knitters scurried just beneath my skin. Rodriguez said it would, at first, but that was a small price to pay considering the minimal pain and lack of bandages. Macedon’s emblem was a sixteen-point black star overlaid by a blond man’s profile. Corporal Erret Dorr told me it was Alexander the Great—an ancient king of the country this ship was named after. The tat spanned about five centimeters in diameter, painstakingly drawn. It was Rodriguez’s most holy work and every single one on every crewmember’s wrist was a piece of art. If you dishonored it in any way the pain of punishment would be equal to the artistry.

  Upon graduation from RT you got three things: your tat, your tags, and your blacks. The first was skin—Macedon was now your corps, your body, and your brag. The second was face—the tags held your image, chipped info, and also doubled as short-range comm by tapping the tiny contact pads on the reverse side in code sequence. And they were a key for your assigned quarters lock. The blacks were your uniform: pants, shirt, tank, boots. Other crew wore the blacks, like the command staff, but the uni was most associated with the elite—the anchor, gold starburst, and sweeping black arrows of the Soljet Corps.

  I had another patch on my opposite arm—the lion shield of Macedon’s Alpha Company, better known as the Ship’s Pride. Corporal Dorr was in my company, in fact he was in my platoon as my squad leader. He’d requested me personally for his fire team, along with Kris Rilke. Private First Class Keith Madison rounded it out; he’d been Dorr’s teammate since my gauntlet run. Sergeant Odette Hartman commanded three squads, of which ours made up one-third.

  Dorr made it clear from the beginning that Alpha Company was the elite.

  Now that we were forward on jetdeck I was allowed into the jet wardroom, which had holo-accessible comps with paths to Macedon’s outgoing communications. I tread lightly on the new freedom, though, since Sanchez, Bucher, and Ricci—the three jets I’d shot in the gauntlet run—eyed me like barely restrained animals. But I was under Erret Dorr’s command. People seemed to walk wide of him and everything he owned. Once I’d strolled by the jet wardroom’s open hatch and overheard Dorr warning all and sundry that he didn’t want his new ace damaged. That had been a relief until he’d continued: “Any rankin’ Muse deserves will come from me.”

  At least they’d returned our personal belongings. My holopoints were untouched, of course, otherwise I would’ve been spaced some weeks ago. The image disk was also there, which I wore beneath my uniform shirts, against my chest, and removed only when I took a shower. Other than in the head, I couldn’t seem to go anywhere and be alone. Jetdeck was a profusion of uniforms, loud mouths, and nosy, gossiping individuals. Trying to send my first report to Aaian-na took timing I didn’t seem to have. The wardroom was open to newly graduated jets, but it was also heavily trafficked. At any given shift people were in there relaxing, reading, or talking idly about the latest reports from some other battle.

  It had been nine weeks since leaving Turundrlar, less since the battle where that striviirc-na dreadnought had died and the mysterious merchant fled. I knew Dorr, Hartman, and a few others of higher rank were doing some sort of investigation into the merchant, but they didn’t share it with their subordinates.

  I had my own questions for Niko.

  Through trial and error I eventually discovered the best time to hit the wardroom was very early in my duty shift, an hour or so before reveille. It was the tail end of the previous watch, so most of the jets were heading to quarters or already in them. I tried to dress quietly with the lights on a minimum five percent, but Kris, who’d been assigned as my berthmate, rolled over in his bunk and peered at me through the shadows, then squinted at his watch.

  “What’s going on?”

  I had to get stuck with the lightest sl
eeper on ship. “I’m just going to the head.” I stuffed my feet in boots and went to the hatch. He put his face back in the pillow as I left. He never had problems sleeping at the end of shifts, but I couldn’t quiet my mind for more than four hours, not since seeing Havurkar and that merchant, which everybody said was probably a pirate.

  I wished I could talk to Niko face-to-face and ask him about it. Or grab him and shake him. I had dreams about it, yelling without sound, in a room full of people I couldn’t get away from even when I shut my eyes.

  When I got to the wardroom I didn’t have time to open the hatch. It swung in unexpectedly and Erret Dorr stepped back, surprised.

  I kept walking, nodding to him absently as if I was actually going somewhere. My heart thudded.

  “What you doin’ up, Muse?”

  “The head,” I mumbled, as if I was still half-asleep.

  “Come back here when you done. We got a mission.”

  I stopped. “Sir?”

  He looked like he hadn’t slept and his temper proved it. “The war don’t wait on your beauty rest, Private. Get the hell goin’.”

  * * *

  XXI.

  “There’s a stranded symp out there,” Corporal Dorr told our squad, “and we’re goin’ to help it.”

  He was lying, of course. He loaded the intel files on our slates as he spoke. The files briefed us on schematics, codes, radio freqs and procedures, enemy strength and weaponry, and our rules of engagement, which, among other things like viable and off-limit targets, also warned us about maltreatment of the enemy. No killing of children, raping, or wanton destruction of the enemy’s ship (sometimes they could be salvaged and used). It was all presented frankly, with much detail, as if they weren’t people you were talking about.

  For this mission we were using a small, salvaged symp runner. A military-employed merchant had picked up a coded distress message, forwarded it to Macedon since we were the closest military ship in the vicinity, and Macedon had spent a full shift deciphering it—which was quite an accomplishment and something Niko would definitely want to know, so he could revamp the system.