“Listen up, the Offense are playing poker, and we’re playing checkers,” he says. “We’re in the wrong game.”
I can’t hear anything from the bathroom. I strain my ears for the sound of running water or a flushing toilet, while half-listening to a rant of Bolt’s I have heard before, about changing the rules and taking the fight to the enemy. As if Francie, Patrick, and their comrades weren’t doing that every day of their too-short lives.
At last I decide she must have finished in there by now. “Hey, Bolt, have you looked at the mine lethality ratio recently?” I cut him off. I checked this stat earlier. “It’s all there, in the public domain. All the information you need to understand how and why we are losing the war. But you have to know what to look for before you can look for it. Anyway, the ratio is up to 27 to 1. We’re taking one fatality per every 27 devices found. That’s terrible. It’s doubled in the last six months. So forget the nifty analogies. There are plenty of actual problems we need to solve, right here on Leda, and we aren’t doing it, because why? Silos. Everyone’s in their own little information security box. Even you and me. I know you fix things, but I don’t know what or how, even though I know what your farts smell like, and I know you use baking soda instead of toothpaste.”
I’ve never spoken to him like this before. I give him a sort of crooked smile combined with a salute, hoping he won’t get too mad at me for calling him on his bullshit, and head for the door without giving him a chance to respond.
“Hey, it gets your teeth really white,” he yells after me.
I know this, as Bolt’s teeth would blind oncoming traffic. I actually tried the baking soda trick myself but it didn’t work for me.
Back into my room.
Francie’s not there.
Check the bathroom door.
Locked on my side. As I’m standing there, the shower starts. Bolt isn’t too mad to alter his evening routine, anyway.
*
My heart rate slowly drops back to normal.
She left while I was talking to Bolt.
Left the portable drive in my computer, too.
I remove it and look around for a good hiding place.
Wait a minute.
Wait a goddamn minute.
My pulse speeds up again.
I know I shut those drawers.
The bottom drawer is now sticking out ten centimeters.
Dread swallows rational thought. I drop on my knees and yank the drawer onto the floor. Try frantically to remember how the contents looked before Francie came over.
Did I knot the drawstring of the laundry bag?
It’s not knotted now.
It’s open wide enough for a hand to slip in and out.
I bury my nose in the opening, to see if I can smell Francie. I remember from when she was sitting next to me that she uses some hair product that smells like roses.
Of course, all I get is a noseful of my own disgusting laundry. I cringe for a second at the thought that she may have smelled that, before circling back to the cataclysmic possibility that she snooped in the bag.
I paw madly through the dirty clothes, scoop out my egg, and roll onto my cot, hugging it against my sternum.
A chime sounds.
The lights go out.
Curfew.
In the dark, my computer screen glows, and the crevice between my chest and my pulled-up knees glows, too. The light is coming from the dragon egg. It started doing this when I was going through a miserable phase in university. The silver threads in the malachite-green shell look black against the diffuse light from within. The light pulses between my fingers, and every pulse makes the shell warmer. My hands aren’t the little paws of an eight-year-old anymore; they’re stupid-big, my fingers long and thin, my knuckles swollen because I have a mild case of idiopathic arthritis. Young person’s arthritis, brought on (in my opinion) by too many hours at the keyboard.
The egg’s warmth soothes my knuckles, calms my racing mind.
It’s like a vacation in a bottle.
The egg doesn’t do this every night.
Only when I need it.
I lace my hands over the egg, pressing it into my stomach, as if I’m trying to keep my guts from slipping out.
After a while I sleep.
*
Daddy? the egg says in its plaintive, familiar voice.
When I’m awake, it comforts me.
When I’m asleep, it makes demands.
I’m floating in space, magically alive without a spacesuit. The voice is coming from the kangaroo pocket of the sweater my mom knitted for me when I was eight, because this is a dream, so I can still wear the sweater even though I’m six feet two.
Jupiter burns reddish-white in the blackness. The dot crossing its orb could be Io or Ganymede or Europa or Callisto—which are all still there, if rather hotter than they used to be—but I know in my heart it’s Earth, the planet we saved from the Void Dragon, the planet we are spilling our best blood to save again, from the Offense.
Dad. Daaaaddy. I’m HUNGRY.
The forlorn cry slices my heart into ribbons. I reach into my kangaroo pocket, intending to pluck the egg out and hurl it away into space, where it won’t be able to pester me anymore. But my fingers stick to the shell. I’m like the proverbial monkey with its hand stuck in the cookie jar.
Daddy. DADDY!
The baby dragon in the egg starts to cry, a mewling torrent of sobs. I can’t stand it. I have to—
Wake up.
Fully clothed on top of my bunk.
The egg glows, very faintly, through my fingers.
I roll it into the crack between the mattress and the wall, cover it with my blanket to hide its light.
Get up, drink some flat soda.
The egg’s cries are still rasping my emotions, but my thoughts focus on Francie, and what she may or may not have done when she was alone in my room.
If she snooped in my storage unit, and saw the egg, would she have known what it was?
Yes.
I knew, and I was only a kid.
But maybe I knew because I was a kid.
Adults are better at rationalizing away the impossible.
Maybe she thought it was a paperweight or something.
Fat chance, but leave that aside for a moment. If she did guess that I’ve got a Void Dragon egg, would she snitch on me?
This is a tougher question. I don’t know her well enough to know if she’d go straight to the military police … or say nothing … or try to use my secret in some way. For instance, to blackmail me into fixing their code, regardless of the trail of shattered rules we would leave behind us.
This last seems the likeliest possibility.
But I’m going to fix their code anyway. And whether she saw the egg or not, it doesn’t change what I’ve got to do now.
What I should have done years ago.
I owe Francie, actually. I needed a scare like this to kick me in the pants, make me go through with it.
I sit down at my desk and smear a sore fingertip on the screen to wake my computer.
I have to get rid of the egg. Irretrievably. Forever.
And Francie may have given me a way to do it.
3
I hit the faceplate dimmer switch on the wrist control pad of my EVA suit.
The Jupiter-bleached surface of Leda darkens into a sinister landscape of dinosaur ribs and inky chasms.
The ridges that look like half-buried fossils are the rims of ancient impact craters. The “chasms” are actually only a few feet deep. We’re on the far side of Leda, 500 klicks away from Tech City as the hopper flies. The infantry have a small facility over here—a test-firing range—but the curve of the little moon’s horizon hides it.
I feel like the only human being in the universe.
Until Francie, Patrick, and their teammates—Paul, Huifang, Milosz, Dilip, and the two noobs who haven’t earned the right to be called by name yet, as they replaced dead guys of whom the others were f
ond—bobble into view over the horizon.
Their fluorescent spacesuits, orange and electric blue, soar closer in micro-gravity bounds. They’re clearing the area for today’s test.
My suit, acid yellow, has VISITOR stenciled on the front, making it clear that I am not part of the team.
I’ve started to feel like part of the team, sometimes, but Francie never misses an opportunity to remind me that I am not. She reaches me before the others do, shoves me hard in the back, and says on the radio: “Get down, idiot.”
I lie on the dusty rock, the wind half knocked out of me, conscious of the fragile electronics pumping oxygen into my helmet and the 17-millimeter thickness of insulated memory alloy protecting my body from the vacuum.
How did I end up here, hundreds of klicks from my nice safe cubicle?
It’s all Bolt Galloway’s fault.
I apparently made an impression on him with my rant about mine lethality ratios. A couple of days after that, he dropped by my room and grilled me about Francie. Of course, people had seen her on the night she visited me. She’s hard to miss, harder to forget. And Bolt, having found out who she was, made the connection with my sudden interest in mine clearance. The only part he didn’t work out was that Francie had already slipped me an illegal copy of the Alsatian code.
So, when Bolt arranged a meeting between me, our team leader, and the team in charge of the Alsatian mecha, I was able to wow them by instantly grasping their turgid overview of the Alsatian’s issues, and suggesting ways that our mining droid performance enhancements could be used to fix them. Of course I’d worked this all out beforehand in marathon late-night coding sessions.
Our team leader, with Bolt hovering at his side, dazedly approved my transfer to the Alsatian team. I think he knew my heart wasn’t in MTBF averages, anyway.
“You owe me,” Bolt said after my transfer went through.
“I don’t owe you shit, Galloway,” I said with a big smile, clearing my desk.
“You should have it made in the shade with that hottie now. If you can’t close the deal, it’s your own damn fault.”
“All I want to do is improve the odds for our brave men and women at the front.”
“Ask her if she’s into threesomes.”
I think me and Bolt are friends now.
And next time I see him, I will tell him that I do owe him.
I owe him a punch in the goolies for getting me into this.
Yes, my work on the Alsatian mecha is now out in the open, officially sanctioned. I’m not committing information security violations every time I boot up my computer, and that’s a huge relief.
But now I have to mess around on the surface of Leda in a spacesuit. I’m so far out of my comfort zone, I need a telescope.
The nine of us lie in a row behind a crater rim, peeking over its rounded summit.
“There she is!” Patrick breathes.
Our Alsatian lopes over the horizon.
She’s four-legged, with a blast shield in place of a head. Her manipulators extend past the edges of the blast shield. She carries them high in front of her as she runs.
Incidentally, the algorithms that enable her to run are superlative coding achievements. That must have been way, way more difficult than anything I’m doing. I would like to shake the hands of the guys who did that work, if they hadn’t been dead for a hundred years. The Alsatian covers the rocky surface of Leda in an apparently effortless lope, avoiding micro-craters, circling chasms, never once losing her footing.
At a distance of 160 meters from us, she slows.
“She’s got the scent!” Patrick says.
The Alsatian reorients herself and minces down a steep slope to the bottom of a crater. Her lamps disperse the darkness down there. She pokes at the rock with her manipulators.
“She went straight to it,” Dilip exults.
“Are you sure you buried it properly?” Francie snaps at Noob One.
“Yes ma’am,” he insists. He has to call Francie ma’am because she is a corporal. Patrick’s a sergeant, the leader of the squad when they’re in the field. This counts as being in the field, although it’s actually a welcome break for them.
“He did bury it properly,” Patrick says to Francie. “The Offense couldn’t have done a better job. I checked. It’s totally invisible.”
What Noob One buried, and what the Alsatian is now uncovering, millimeter by millimeter, is a dummy mine identical in every way to the ones that kill our troops on a daily basis. With one difference, of course: it won’t blow up.
Nevertheless, I find myself terrified for the Alsatian, clenching my fists in their insulated gloves, willing her to be careful.
Delicately, she cracks through the rocks that Noob One cracked with a sledgehammer and then replaced on top of the mine like a jigsaw puzzle, gluing them together with heat-stabilized silica paste. It took him and Noob Two all night. Real Offense mines bury themselves autonomously, no grunts required. We’ve yet to develop the technology to pull that off. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is whether the Alsatian can safely dig the mine out, and defuse it.
Zoomed in, I watch her add shards of rock to a neat little pile beside the hole.
Come on, come on …
Of course, I’ve got a personal stake in this. We’re testing the latest iteration of my sensitivity upgrade. I incorporated all the available information on next-generation Offense mines: the spectrographic absorbance spectra of the explosives, data on the casing material, and the tolerances of those damn detonators. They’re sensitive to as little as half a gramme of pressure, when all other detonation criteria are satisfied. The Alsatian will need to be as patient as a snake and as deft as a neurosurgeon …
She blows up.
Not really. But the dummy mine disintegrates in a puff of smoke and light so bright that it washes out my faceplate filter, and for an instant I see the Alsatian in silhouette, sitting back on her haunches, surprised.
“Another thirty million bucks down the crapper,” Patrick sighs.
Theoretically, we are now looking down into a smoking crater. Theoretically, half of Leda is now radioactive.
The Alsatian gets up, and of course, in her programmed drive to retreat from the “explosion,” she steps on one of the secondary devices—smaller, less sensitive mines buried around the big one in a random scatter pattern. This time she leaps off the ground with all four feet, springing so high that the squaddies wonder out loud if she’ll achieve escape velocity.
It would be funny, if it weren’t my fifth failure in a month.
“Sorry, guys,” I say, near tears. “Sorry.”
We trudge back to our temporary quarters at the test range facility. The Alsatian trots after us, as perky as ever. She seems to know it’s not her fault that her programmer can’t get his shit together.
As we’re stripping off our spacesuits, Francie says to me in a venomous whisper, “I thought you said you could fix it.”
“I’ll review the Alsatian’s video and sensor feed,” I say, knowing this is a fool’s errand.
“We’ve only got three more weeks.”
They gave us two months to try out my suggested fixes. If nothing comes of my efforts in that timeframe, the squad goes back into their regular rotation, wrangling real, deadly Offense mines in deep space, with the help of inadequate mechas. I feel as if I’m on a deadline to save them from ritual execution.
And I’m failing.
“I wanted to get this right,” I say to Patrick in the mess.
“You can do it,” he says. “We got real close today!”
Getting real close to safely defusing a mine is like getting real close to winning the lottery. You end up with a double handful of nothing. Slump-shouldered, I ladle mashed potatoes onto my plate.
“Hey,” Patrick says, “you’re under a lot of pressure.” He tops his mystery meat with a mountain of potatoes that makes mine look like a molehill. “Why don’t you hang with us tonight? Spend some time away from t
hat computer, you might get a fresh perspective.”
I want to say no, I have to work. What stops me is the realization that Patrick is under more pressure than I’ll ever be. His life is on the line, and as leader of the squad, he also feels responsible for their lives. Yet he’s still able to laugh and joke around, and even to notice that one skinny, lumpy-knuckled coder has ravines under his eyes from sleeping three hours a night.
I say yes.
Naturally, I’m aware that Francie will also be there.
It’s time I took a temperature reading on that situation.
The mess turns into a bar after hours, with multicolored fairy lights blinking over the counter where kegs of beer have replaced the trays of spinach and mash. We stake out a corner table, beneath a speaker playing excruciating muzak. Paul, a taciturn man with an afro trained into horns, sets up his computer and plays loud rock tracks until whoever is in charge of the muzak surrenders and turns it off. The squad breaks into a victory chant. The REMFs drinking at the other tables pretend to ignore us.
Francie leans over to remind me that I am, in fact, a REMF, and not part of the team. “Are you looking forward to getting out of here?”
I shrug, while parsing her words for hidden meaning. I still don’t know if she knows about my dragon egg. The uncertainty hangs over my head like a sword.
“If you leave any of your stuff behind, they’ll use it for target practice,” she says.
She does know. What else could that be but a veiled reference to the egg?
“Then again, you’ll probably have to turn in your computer when you leave, anyway. They won’t take the risk that you could leak our test data.”
No, she doesn’t know. She thinks I am exactly what I appear to be, a geek who rashly vowed to save her life because she’s beautiful, and now can’t keep his promise. Jesus, how she must despise me.
Her sneering tone breaks through Patrick’s beery haze. “Leave him alone, Francie.”
Guardians of Jupiter Page 3