War & Space: Recent Combat

by Ken MacLeod

  Last day, she thought, watching Jessica check over her gear. Jess wore a plain jumpsuit that announced its military purpose. Her train left at ten—one hour left. Now fifty-nine minutes. Now—

  “Check and double-check,” Jessica said, straightening up with a grunt. “Damn. I’m getting old for this shit. Just as well they only allow us two bags.”

  Two modest bags, stuffed with books and off-duty clothes and several mementos from Kate, all of them cleared by Thatcher’s security regulations. Kate touched the implant at the base of her skull, the connection points hidden beneath her hair. The operation had taken more time than she expected—more than a day for the surgical procedure, another three days for recovery and training, with subsequent training sessions scheduled over the next few weeks.

  “I miss you already,” she said suddenly.

  “Hey.” Jessica pulled her into a hard hug. “I miss you, too. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We still have an hour.”

  “Fifty-six minutes,” Kate said into Jess’s shoulder. “And no, we don’t have time for one more . . . ”

  She felt Jessica shake with silent laughter. “I wish we did. Come on. Help me get this stuff into the car.”

  Kate’s internal clock ticked down the minutes as they loaded bags into the car and drove to New Haven’s newly renovated train station. A winding ramp brought them over the flood zone and into the parking garage. If you ignored the trash floating on the oily waves below, the view was breathtaking. The planners had taken that into account: the moving sidewalks and glass-paneled elevators showed only the Sound and the blurred outline of Long Island in the distance. Far below, the shoreline highway curved above the open water.

  Jessica slung one bag over her shoulder. She swatted Kate away from the second bag. “Might as well get used to the weight now,” she said. “In six days, they won’t weigh anything at all.”

  Thirty minutes left. Twenty-three. Passing through station security took just a few moments at this hour. Kate and Jessica sat side-by-side on the platform bench, hands barely touching in this much too public area. At fifteen minutes, the train squealed into the station, filling the air with a sharp electric odor.

  Jessica quickly squeezed Kate’s hand. “Hey,” she whispered. “It’s time.”

  Not yet, Kate wanted to say, but she stood silently as Jessica gathered her two bags, then pulled out her e-card for the conductor. Seven minutes. Five. Three.

  “Kate.”

  In that one word, Kate heard a tone in Jessica’s voice that she never had before. “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey.” Jessica leaned forward and kissed Kate firmly on the lips. Kate caught a whiff of Jessica’s cinnamon perfume, a fainter one of her green tea shampoo. One brown strand fell from its braid and brushed against Kate’s cheek. Jessica tucked the strand behind her ear. “Six months to the first visit,” she whispered.

  And then the clock ticked down to zero, and she was gone.

  Throughout April and early May, Kate worked to undo the early neglect of her garden. She cleared out the weeds and repaired the old border. She added fresh mulch and compost, and with judicious watering, teased the roses and irises into luscious blooms. She even expanded the beds to include a small vegetable patch, which the deer promptly attacked.

  At work, she had the impression that her friends and co-workers had divvied up watches over her. Singly and in groups, they took her out to lunch (Aishia, Anne, and once Stan), or invited her to the movies (Anne, Cordelia), or on shopping expeditions (Olivia, with or without Remy).

  The constant invitations irritated her at first. Over the weeks, however, she learned to accept their well-meant attentions. It helped, after all, to distract her from counting the hours, days, and weeks, without Jessica. Even so, she found herself calculating Jessica’s progress away. One day of train travel. Five more days to launch. Another month until Jessica arrived at Gamma Station.

  Kate had allowed herself just one letter for each week, emailed to Jessica in care of Thatcher. Thatcher would screen the contents and forward the message via satellite to Gamma Station. Jessica had fired off one brief message before the launch. Since then nothing.

  She’s busy, Kate told herself. Reviewing security procedures. Coordinating her crew assignments with others in Thatcher and the military. Handling any crises . . .

  No. Bad idea to think about crises. Better to concentrate on the mundane tasks of personnel records and fitness reports and all the other tedious paperwork Jessica always complained about.

  She parked the car in the too-empty driveway and gathered briefcase and groceries from the back seat. Following an almost-predictable schedule, Anne had invited Kate to dinner, but Kate had refused, wanting one night to herself. Maybe she could download a vid, or eat too much popcorn, or do all the things other people talked about doing when they had the house to themselves.

  Still mulling over her options, she unlocked the door and scooped up the mail from the carpet. Bills. Flyer from the local ACLU. Credit card offers. A small reinforced envelope with the return address: Thatcher Security Operations.

  Jess. She wrote.

  Kate abandoned everything else in the entryway. Her pulse dancing, she hurried into the living room. A letter. A long one. Even sooner than she expected. Jessica must have saved up her letters and transcribed them the moment she arrived at Gamma.

  She took up a letter opener from the letters desk and slit the envelope carefully. Nothing. Perhaps the envelope’s padded interior—made from a strange soft material—blocked the contents. She shook the envelope gingerly. A micro disc tumbled into her lap.

  Kate drew a sharp breath. She recognized the disc from her training sessions. Reflexively, she touched the knob at the base of her skull. No one at work knew about this device. She had not dared to tell them, not even Anne. Aishia would lecture her about man-machine interfaces and their risks. Olivia would make jokes. Anne might say nothing, but Kate had learned to read her friend’s subtle changes in expression. Whatever name you put on her reaction, it would not be a positive one.

  The disc gleamed red in the late sunset. Kate touched its rim—a faint dull spot remained where her fingertip had rested. Damn. The technicians had warned her how sensitive these discs were. They had provided her with a supply of special cleaning fluid, along with admonitions about overusing the stuff.

  Kate vented a breath, and carefully inserted the disc back into its envelope. Again she touched the knob. Jess. Oh Jess. What are we doing?

  She took a few moments to put the groceries away—extending the anticipation, or avoiding the disc, she wasn’t sure which. Then she climbed the stairs to the tiny office next to their bedroom. The Thatcher machine stood on her desk, in the corner behind stacks of books and papers and her gardening magazines, untouched since the Thatcher tech has installed it weeks ago.

  Kate cleared away the magazines and sat down. Squinted at the machine. It looked like any piece of lab equipment—a low sleek ivory box with several touch pads labeled in red. A half dozen indicator lights ran along the top edge. These too were clearly marked. She skimmed a finger along the side and found the recessed slot for the discs.

  You’re stalling.

  Damn straight, as Jessica would say.

  A touch of the power switch, and the machine hummed into life, its lights blinking through a series of test patterns. Kate cleaned the micro disc, just as the technicians told her, then slid the disc into its slot. It clicked into place.

  Now the tricky part.

  She touched a side panel, which slid open to reveal the connector cable with its slim square terminator. She uncoiled the cable and brushed her hair away from the knob in her skull. The terminator and her own connector port would slide open together when oriented correctly and pressed together.

  She felt the click reverberate through her bones. Her skin prickled and she felt faintly queasy. Psychosomatic, she told herself. She had done the same thing a hundred times in the training lab with no ill effects. She
pressed the touch pad marked PLAY.

  A pale green light blinked. Kate’s vision went dark.

  Hey, babe.

  Kate heard, felt a cough.

  Testing, one, two three . . .

  Soft self-conscious laughter followed, with an echo soon after, as though Jess sat in a small enclosed space. Her cabin aboard the shuttle? With a shiver, Kate realized she felt heavy fabric encasing her arms and legs. The air smelled charged and faintly stale. She blinked, wishing she could see what Jessica saw. Thatcher had warned her she would get no visuals. The prototype could handle them, but her particular machine had that feature disabled. A matter of security, the tech had explained.

  Hey.

  Kate jumped at the sound of Jessica’s voice next to her, inside her.

  So, like. I guess this is working. Harder than vidding a message, but damn, after going through that operation, I might as well use the machine.

  Pause. Kate felt her chest go tight. Was that her body’s reaction, or Jessica’s? Then she felt warm breath leaking between tense lips. A subdued laugh. The words, Hey, babe. I miss you. Later.

  Without warning, the machine clicked, and Kate’s vision returned so abruptly, she swayed from the vertigo. If she closed her eyes, she could still feel the weight of Jess’s pressure suit, still taste the shuttle’s recycled air. Hey, babe, she thought. Don’t make it too much later.

  After some procrastination, Kate recorded a brief reply, using the same disc Jessica sent her. She wished she could keep the recording to play later, but Thatcher had insisted on their return. Proprietary materials, the security manager had explained.

  It took her several tries before she was satisfied. Jessica had had it right—making the recording was far more difficult than reading one. What to say? How to react, when every sensation impressed itself onto that tiny disc, to be reviewed by Thatcher research and security personnel?

  In the end, Kate recorded a brief description of her garden, one of the roses in her palm, where its velvet-soft petals tickled her skin. Later, she whispered, and tapped END RECORD.

  Jessica sent three more recordings over the next six weeks, all of them brief, all of them ending with a whisper-soft kiss. She supplemented those with longer text messages forwarded from Thatcher by email. Kate found the longer messages more frustrating than the brief micro-recordings. More than once, Thatcher’s censors had deleted apparently random sections of text, badly garbling Jessica’s meaning. Kate was tempted to add something inflammatory, but she restrained herself. Thatcher might not care about personal lives, but they were as humorless as any federal spooks. Still, the thought that Thatcher observed their correspondence bothered her. You might think that some aspects of life were private, she thought. Even now, even in these days of constant surveillance and the uneasy comprises between freedom and security.

  And so, the weeks rolled from spring into summer. One hot July evening, Kate parked her car in the driveway far later than usual—XGen had another rush order from a government super-contractor. Muzzy from the long hours in the lab, she had thoughts only of dinner and cold tea, and when she picked up the mail from the carpet, she almost didn’t register the envelope from Thatcher.

  Then recognition clicked into place. Not just another envelope, but one with a disc. Dinner could wait, she thought. She hurried upstairs to her office and slid the disc into the machine. The terminator plug clicked into place, and the familiar black-brown veil dropped over her vision . . .

  Hey, lover. Something new this time.

  A warm hand pressed against Kate’s (Jessica’s?) breast. Kate drew a sharp breath as she realized that Jessica wore no clothing. What was she thinking? What about Thatcher—

  The hand slid over her breast, cupped the flesh a moment and squeezed, making Kate gasp. No time wasted. The hand skimmed over her belly, and paused briefly to cover her sex. Possession, said that gesture. Kate felt the doubled warmth from her body and Jessica’s at the same time. She had just time to muffle a gasp of pleasure when three fingers plunged into her vagina, slid out, and pinched the clitoris with practiced skill. Heat blossomed outward, upward. Their nipples contacted to hard painful points. The fingers plunged deeper inside. And again, but faster, more urgent. Kate’s, (Jessica’s) breath went ragged as she panted, Oh, god . . . yes . . . oh . . . my . . .

  Kate’s office blinked into existence.

  She leaned against the desk, shivering in spite of the July warmth. Her groin ached from half-fulfilled passion, and a ripe musky scent filled the air. Very faint, almost like a memory, she could still smell a trace of Jessica’s favorite perfume.

  Too much. Not enough. I can’t stand it.

  Kate reached up to remove the terminator from her skull. Her hands shook. Deep inside, her muscles tensed, rippled, stretched, as though pleading for release. She paused and licked her lips. Slowly she reached for PLAY again.

  For three days, she wavered on how to reply. She wished (again) she could keep a copy of Jessica’s recording. She wished she could keep her response private. Neither was possible. Nor could she send back a simple text message. In the end, she closeted herself in the office with a glass of chilled Pouilly Fuissé and a tightly held memory of Jessica’s recording.

  She shucked off her T-shirt and jeans. Slid her panties over her hips and let them drop onto the floor. Though she had no audience, not even a virtual one, Kate tried to act as though she did. It would put her into the mood for what she had planned.

  Perfume over her breast, at the base of her throat, behind her knees. Blinds tilted just so to let in the sunlight, but keep the room private. She had thought about lying on the floor, except the cord didn’t reach far enough. She would have to make do with her office chair and her imagination.

  Kate inserted the terminator, then drank a long slow swallow of wine. As an afterthought, she rolled the wine glass over her bare skin. The cold wet surface raised a trail of goose bumps that made her shiver with anticipation. She pressed her left hand over her mons. Warm and damp already. It was as though she only needed to think of Jessica, to have her body respond.

  She touched RECORD.

  Hey, babe. Here’s something for you.

  We are a duet, Jessica whispered time and again. My fingers burrow through my pubic hair, twice over. Once with me, making me shake with desire, once with you, Kate. I’m soaked, a puddle of want. Want you. Now, girl. In and out. Again. More. Now I trail the wetness up between my breasts and paint myself with cum.

  Whatever Jessica said, Kate heard weeks later. Whatever Jessica did—how her fingers pinched Kate’s nipples, how her tongue licked wet fingers and tasted her smoky climax—repeated itself in Kate’s lonely office.

  You are my succubus, Kate whispered back. You take me as a ghost would, by invading my mind. As I do with you, my love. As I do with you. She crushed her mouth against her hand, and slid the new vibrator into her own vagina. Her lips closed hard around the silky shaft. An electric pulse gripped her clitoris and rippled through her belly, up her spine. Fireworks. Hot and dazzling. She threw back her head and cried out.

  Over the next three months, Kate and Jessica exchanged recordings every week. Jessica sent text messages twice a week, long rambling letters about the insipid food, the jokes her crew made, the techniques she and others used to make life in tight quarters more bearable. Like our little not-so-secret, she said once.

  Kate disliked Jessica’s jokes about their situation, but she understood them. She read on as Jessica described more about the implants.

  It’s a clever little toy, Jessica wrote. Thatcher wants to run more tests once they develop their high-capacity modules, but the basic technology works. It even has a few tricks the technicians didn’t tell us at first. Remember the discs and how we have to record over them? Well, the chip has a smidge of memory itself, and if you press PLAY three times fast, then hold down PROGRAM and RECORD together, you can store a few moments in the chip and replay it later. Here’s how . . .

  Saturday. Kate k
nelt and surveyed her garden. A lush rainy summer had produced more squash and beans and tomatoes than she could give away. Now, as the season drifted into autumn, she busied herself with preparing the beds for winter.

  “How much mulch do you actually need?” Anne asked. “And could you make a tongue-twister from that question?” She had volunteered to help Kate with the day’s work. Later, they would go to a neighborhood rummage and art festival. Aishia had promised to join them.

  “All the mulch,” Kate answered, ignoring the question about tongue-twisters. “They say we’ll have a colder winter than usual. Unless you think we should dig up all those bulbs . . . ”

  “Don’t,” Anne said quickly.

  Kate grinned. “Thought not.”

  They set to work, Anne digging up weeds and Kate mixing the soil and compost. Kate had acquired a new supply of micro-insulating fabric that claimed a fifty-percent improvement over other materials. If she alternated mulch with the fabric, she might get away with keeping even the tulips in the ground.

  “I always wished I had a garden,” Anne said. “Though I’m not very good at keeping the plants alive. Where did you hear about the colder winter?”

  “Almanac. Good old-fashioned almanac. Though this one is online.”

  Anne laughed. “And here I thought we were high-tech.”

  More than you know, Kate thought. She had not confided in anyone, not even Anne, about the experimental implants. A private matter, she thought. As private as Thatcher allows.

  They dispatched the latest weed crop and started on splitting the lilies, which had multiplied since last year. It was easier with a friend, Kate thought, and the work soothed as nothing else could. She could almost forget the constant ache in her chest that had begun with Jessica’s departure. My garden, my refuge, she thought as she set another bulb back into the ground. These days, even her garden seemed a less a refuge than before. Prices climbing. The shrill debates in Congress and blogs. The noisy protests at universities.

  A brisk knock sounded at the front door, followed by the faint chimes of the doorbell. Kate dusted off her hands. “If that’s Aishia, she’s early,” she said. “Unless she wants to help with covering the beds.”