War & Space: Recent Combat

by Ken MacLeod

  More than a hundred people had searched in the rain for LD, and all but one openly confessed to seeing nothing and no one. I was the lone dissenter. I said nothing, and not even Cheryl could make me confess what happened, though I know she sensed that I had seen more than nothing while we were apart.

  To Don, I said simply, “Come to chess tomorrow. The usual place.”

  He was at the coffee shop before me, and I was early. He had his board set up, and he looked exactly as I expected him to look: Exhausted and pained, weak and frail.

  I picked up my queen’s pawn and then put it down again.

  Then quietly, I told him what I had seen and everything that I had done in the backstretches of that pasture, trying to win over the heart of a boy that really, when you got down to it, I barely knew.

  Don nodded.

  With a voice less than quiet, he halfway accused me of not doing enough to save LD from his own childish nonsense.

  But what more could I have done?

  That’s what I thought, and maybe he did too. Then he sat back—a defeated father who would surely never see his son again—and with a mournful voice, he asked, “Is there anything else?”

  Then I lied.

  I said, “Yeah, there’s more.”

  I smiled enough to bring him forward again, elbows to his knees as he waited for whatever I said next.

  “Donnie wanted me to tell you something.”

  “What?”

  “That he’s going up there for one reason only: He wants to put an end to that awful ancient war. He’s not going to fight anyone, but instead he’ll reason with the Kuipers and show them that it’s better to live in peace.”

  A staggering lie, that was. Unbelievable to its core.

  But Don accepted my words without complaint. He sat back in his chair, his shoulders relaxing and then his face too. And being his friend for years told me that here, with just a few words, I had made it easier for him to sleep easy, and if not tonight, sometime soon.

  Mehra and Jiun

  Sandra McDonald

  Brilliant white light, a bone-rattling explosion, her ship spinning wildly as it thundered toward the icy surface of Europa. Lieutenant Vandi Mehra remembered these things vividly. Now the world was much darker and more peaceful. Her limbs felt very light but also restrained. Maybe that was a pillow under her head, a warm blanket cocooning her. Or maybe she was dreaming. It was more likely that she was hospitalized and sedated. That would explain the way her senses reached out and then receded, reached and receded again. A hum in the air, followed by silence; air that smelled like mud, followed by the absence of any smell at all.

  I hope I’m not brain-damaged, she thought sluggishly.

  Finally her senses steadied—humming noise, muddy smell, definitely low-gravity, straps holding her to a bed. Slowly she cracked open her eyes. Instead of a military infirmary she saw a cabin with fibrous, brown bulkheads. Tree roots, almost, which made no sense at all. Globes of soft green light decorated the roots. Standing nearby, watching her intently, was a man her own age. He had dark brown eyes, dark skin with a mop of black hair, and a lithe body clad in what looked like black silk pajamas. The most important thing about him was the black cable jutting from a port on his forehead, curving around his head and inserted back into his right ear.

  Tung, she realized.

  She was in a Tung ship, captive of a Tung soldier.

  Mehra supposed her death was a foregone conclusion. The only details to be settled now were how long it would take for her heart to stop beating and for her consciousness to sink back into the river of all life. Death was an unsettling idea (and maybe she was a little anxious, yes, her palms clammy, her heartbeat fast), but she hadn’t really expected to wake up at all. Life was full of surprises like that.

  Her captor was watching a tablet in his hands. When he glanced up and saw that she was awake, he said, “Lieutenant Mehra.” In English. No Tung were known to speak English. Their own language was a mystery. Any prisoners of war died soon after being captured, steadfastly silent. This Tung had also made her name a statement and not a question. As if they’d already met before, social acquaintances in a time of war.

  A half-dozen replies flitted through her mind but she settled on the most civil one. “Who are you?”

  “Kennu Di Jiun,” he said. “Your ship was poorly designed for landing and your onboard medical robot completely inadequate. You might as well ride a tukra into a torasar.”

  She tugged at the straps holding her arms. “I wouldn’t have needed to land if your people hadn’t attacked me.”

  “Your planet shouldn’t have allied with the Roeir,” he said.

  “Above my paygrade,” she retorted, tallying the losses in her head: thousands and thousands of good pilots and good crews, their bodies and ships pulverized and scattered in the airless void. Her own father, killed in the sneak attack on Opportunity Base on Mars. The ruthless destruction of envoys sent in peace. You could say that at least the Tung hadn’t directly attacked Earth yet but that was only because the Roeir were protecting it. Mehra had skipped history and politics seminars at the academy, preferring to spend all of her time in a trainer. She didn’t need to know anything more about the Tung than how to shoot them down.

  “You know nothing,” Jiun said, his gaze narrow. He retreated toward one bulkhead. “You were dead but Sophene resuscitated you. Come up to the flight hub when you’re ready.”

  A hatch opened in the tree roots, spilling in more green light. He left Mehra alone in the chamber. The hatch stayed open.

  “You could untie me first!” she called out.

  The restraints faded. Dissolved away as if they’d never been there. Mehra sat upright, adjusting to the low gravity all over again. She pulled herself free of the dark brown blanket. Flight suit, gone. New clothes: a loose-fitting black top and pants like Jiun’s. She’d always wanted to dress like a Japanese ninja. No bra, no absorbent underwear. She examined her torso and limbs but there were no injuries at all, not even a tiny cut. She had nothing to use as a weapon and there were no convenient medical trays of scalpels, lasers or other devices that could inflict bodily harm.

  Only the bed where she’d been restrained (resuscitated, he’d said), the tree root bulkheads, and the hatch.

  She touched the root walls. Spongy, not fibrous at all. They hummed with energy. Mehra wondered if she could cut them, break them, sabotage them; if she could make Jiun’s ship overload and explode.

  She was a soldier. She wasn’t going to die easily, and it would be her pleasure to take a Tung with her.

  Nothing in his ship was labeled or marked. Nothing resembled equipment or machinery. Just tree roots and open hatches, browns and greens, and if it weren’t for that muddy smell (change the filters, guys, she wanted to say) she might have found it peaceful. She hadn’t walked in a real forest in years. She wasn’t walking now, of course, but instead bounding along, each step propelling her several feet. The passage wasn’t very large, and she had to constantly reach out to keep herself from colliding with the bulkheads. Low gravity really pissed her off.

  No noise but the hum of the ship, deep and steady. No ship’s announcements, beeping equipment, boisterous conversation. No damn map. After several minutes of exploration she found Jiun sitting in a small chamber where the bulkheads extended into padded furniture and a table. A panel hung on one wall, at least two meters long, and on it was a panoramic view of frozen ice with Jupiter in the sky. Jiun was tapping on his tablet and studying the landscape, looking for something.

  “We’re parked on Europa,” Mehra said from the hatchway.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “To rescue you,” he said.

  “And now what?” she asked, imagining the possibilities: he returned her home, he killed her, he tortured her, he shoved her out an airlock—

  “I’m not going to kill you,” he said. She wasn’t sure if he was reading her mind somehow or if her thoughts were that clear on
her face. He continued, “Sophene rescued you. I don’t know why, so don’t ask me. Ask her.”

  It was the second time he’d mentioned someone else. The captain of this ship, maybe. Mehra said, “Okay, where is she?”

  Jiun tapped his tablet. The panel display changed into a mirror. Mehra stared at her own reflection. Jutting out of her own forehead, plugged into her own right ear, was a black cable like Jiun’s. For a long moment she thought it was a trick or optical illusion. Surely she’d have noticed something like that before. Her hands reached up to touch it, though she had no awareness of actually moving them. Cool exterior, slightly oily, firmly embedded—

  Mehra panicked and yanked.

  Rainbow light seared her vision—pinkyellowgreenblueredpurple—and pain, yes, that was pain, a thermonuclear explosion inside her skull. The black cable slithered out of her fingers like a snake and fell to the floor. Not like a snake, no, but actually really truly a snake—long, sinewy, whipping its way across the deck, sliding toward Jiun.

  Mehra was too busy vomiting from pain to see where it went.

  Cool hands touched her face. Jiun. He looked angry. He spoke to her but now it was in a language she couldn’t make sense of, couldn’t even try to decode, and her head hurt so badly she wanted to die, and she curled up against him and gasped until darkness, blessed darkness, took her away.

  But eventually she woke up again. It only took a moment to discover that the oily cable was back in her forehead, back in her ear.

  “That’s Sophene,” Jiun told her. “She lets us talk to each other. Don’t pull her out again.”

  Mehra swallowed against the taste of bile. “I don’t want her there.”

  “You don’t have a choice,” Jiun said. “Come to the hub if you want dinner.”

  She didn’t think she was hungry, but the mention of food woke up her belly and got her moving. Jiun’s idea of dinner was bland tea and little squares that looked and tasted like cheese sandwiches. He had portioned out three squares for each of them.

  “How do I know I can digest these?” Mehra asked. “They could be poisonous to Earthlings.”

  His expression didn’t change. “Our species are identical. And if the food kills you, Sophene would resuscitate you anyway.”

  Mehra ate slowly. She didn’t feel poisoned. She prioritized the eight million questions in her head and asked, “Who is Sophene, exactly? Another species, an artificial intelligence, what?”

  Jiun drank his tea. “She assists me.”

  “She saved me,” Mehra said. “You would have let me die.”

  His gaze was steady on her face. “She chose to resuscitate you. I would have let you depart.”

  Mehra said, “Depart as in . . . ?”

  “Continue from this world for the next,” he said. “Chasing your ship down to the surface drained my fuel. Saving it from sinking into a ice fissure took several hours and damaged not just the engine but also our external comm array. Restoring you to health sucked up even more of our reserves. Now we don’t have enough fuel to leave the surface. We don’t have way for me to message my fleet. I’m probably presumed dead. Unless someone comes looking for us, or stumbles on us accidentally, we’re stranded here until the food, water or oxygen gives out.”

  Mehra had forgotten all about the food in her hand. She felt something sticky and looked down to see her right hand clenched into a fist. Cheese-like substance oozed under her fingernails.

  “How do I know you’re telling the truth?” she asked.

  Jiun’s head tilted slightly. “Why would I lie?”

  “To trick me,” she said. “To fool me into doing something for you.”

  “Anything you know of military value was added to our knowledge bank while you were unconscious,” Jiun said. “There wasn’t much.”

  “Were you a jerk before now or does being stranded just bring out the worse in you?” Mehra asked.

  “Ask Sophene,” he said.

  Sophene, however, didn’t talk to Mehra. At least not in any way she understood. If she asked a question aloud, such as, “Which way to the lavatory?” she got a hazy mental image of a path through the ship, a root-like control she could touch to open a tiny chamber. If she asked, “Where’s my ship?” she saw a hunk of burnt and twisted metal on Europa’s surface, totally unsalvageable. If she asked for Jiun’s engine room or bridge she got nothing at all. Maybe this ship didn’t have them. Or maybe Sophene didn’t want Mehra sabotaging, fiddling or otherwise meddling with the technology. Maybe Sophene didn’t trust her.

  During her first Europa day—eighty five hours, more or less—Mehra explored the ship as much as she could. She didn’t see much of Jiun. He put out food for her in the hub area, and sometimes she found him there staring out at Europa, but mostly he kept himself busy elsewhere. Maybe he was holed up in his cabin, watching Tung porn or reading Tung books. The few times they interacted, she tried asking him about the his homeworld, and the history of the Tung and Roeir, and how he’d come to be a soldier. He deflected her with questions of Earth or refused to answer at all, and later Mehra dreamed of ice, a big glacier of it adrift on a black ocean.

  Patience, she heard a dream voice say.

  Sometime in the middle of the second Europa day she found him in the hub with his feet clamped to the floor. He had taken off his shirt. He was performing fluid stretches and strikes, not unlike the martial arts classes she remembered from the academy. His expression was focused and intense, and sweat gleamed on his smooth brown skin.

  “Want some company?” she asked.

  He stopped and studied her, but didn’t answer.

  She took that as a yes. Mehra wedged her feet under the furniture and did push-ups and sit-ups. Not very challenging in the low gravity, but any exercise would help stave off bone loss. She wished Jiun and Sophene had stocked up on free weights or a treadmill. Something other than tea and faux cheese sandwiches would be nice, too.

  “You focus too much on strength, not balance,” Jiun remarked when she was done.

  Mehra said, “You focus too much on grace, not practical hand-to-hand combat.”

  He lifted his chin. “Maybe we have something to learn from each other.”

  She finally figured out how to use the ship’s chronometer but breaking Europa days into more manageable Earth days didn’t make the time go any faster. Then she discovered that if she asked the panel in the hub area to display images other than the exterior view, it would oblige her. It cycled through real-time images of Earth (a distant shiny spot), Jupiter’s surface (mildly interesting), and the panorama around Jiun’s ship (ice, more ice, and an ice mountain). It didn’t show her battles but she knew the war still raged above their heads; good people dying because the Tung refused to negotiate peace.

  On a whim, Mehra asked the panel to show her Jiun’s home. It paused slightly before bringing up an image of a city so vast, so beautiful, that Mehra rose off the furniture and walked right up to it to study every tiny detail.

  A city, yes, but also a forest; silver threads holding glass walls strung between brown branches and green leaves, blue water flowing in sweet cascades between levels, yellow and red flowers blooming in vast hanging gardens. Mehra could smell the deep fragrance of fir and pine, of azaleas and jasmine and wild roses. Above the city hung a startling blue sky, completely different than the gray and brown skies that now covered Earth. Jiun’s home was a paradise, so close and tangible that Mehra wanted to crawl right into the image—

  “It’s not real,” Jiun said from behind her. He nodded at the screen and it went dark. “It’s just a picture.”

  Mehra stared at him. “Why did you leave? How could you?”

  “My emperor commanded,” he said, his voice cracking at the end.

  He retreated before she could ask more and skipped their next exercise session. Mehra was so desperate for conversation, so ruthlessly bored, that she returned to the hub and asked the panel to show her Tung again. It stayed blank. She suspected Jiun had told it not
to obey. Anger shot through her—how dare he—and she snapped, “Show me Sophene.”

  She didn’t think it would work. If she’d know all it took was one command, she would have tried it days earlier. But there was Sophene, or at least some kind of representation: blueyellowgreenredorange in a splatter on the screen.

  “Is it you?” Mehra asked.

  “I’m here,” Sophene said, serene and calm, her voice as clear and fluid as water.

  Mehra touched the edge of the screen gingerly. “Tell me everything.”

  “I’ve been waiting,” Sophene said, and began with the ten-thousand-year history of aggression, hostility, distrust and broken promises between the Roeir and the Tung. Mehra was almost sorry she’d asked.

  If Jiun knew she was taking intergalactic history lessons with Sophene, he didn’t mention it. But during their exercise sessions he started using the occasional Tung word, simple things like “first” or “second” or “strike to the heart,” and she memorized those as best she could. He was stronger than she was, of course he was, but every now and then she surprised him with her speed or flexibility.

  She noticed, during one particular lesson, that he had grease under his fingernails and a callous on his thumb.

  She didn’t think he was watching porn in his cabin all day long.

  Sometime in the third Earth week, while relating every detail of the Roeir-Tung Second War of the Aristone Peninsula, Sophene mentioned that Jiun had been trained as a teacher. Prior to his military service he had spent three winters teaching history at a small school in the mountains, where he was popular among students and parents alike.

  “I can’t imagine that,” Mehra said.

  “He wasn’t always the man he is now,” Sophene said. “Watching your friends die changes a person.”

  Mehra knew that. She knew that so well that she didn’t need a damned computer to remind her. “How did he end up here?”

  “The Tung emperor had declared war on Earth for allying with Roeir, and all firstborn sons were inducted into the army regardless of their occupation or personal feelings about the war.