War & Space: Recent Combat

by Ken MacLeod

  Dust and gas blasted out of the hole. The scientist had ignited the lifepod’s motor. The big square of fullerene cloth billowed like a sail in a squall, and the hunter-killer smashed into it, tore it free from the clips Carter had so labouriously secured, and tumbled past him at the centre of a writhing knot.

  Carter dived through the hatch in the pod’s blunt nose. Gravity’s ghost clutched him and he tumbled head over heels and slammed into the rear bulkhead as the pod shook free of its hiding place.

  Humans had settled the extensive asteroid belt around Keid, the cool K1 component of the triple star system 40 Eridani, more than a century ago. The first generation, grown from templates stored in a seedship little bigger than a man’s head, had settled on a planetoid and built a domed settlement and planted intercrater plains of water ice and primeval tars with vast fields of vacuum organisms. Succeeding generations had spread through Keid’s asteroid belt, building domes and tenting crevasses and ravines, raising families, becoming expert in balancing the ecologies of small, closed biomes and creating new varieties of vacuum organisms, writing and performing heroic operettas, trading information and works of art on the interstellar net that linked Earth’s far-flung colonies in the brief golden age before Earth’s AIs achieved transcendence.

  The Keidians were a practical, obdurate people. As far as they were concerned, the Hundred Minute War, which ended with the reduction of Earth and the flight of dozens of Transcendent AIs from the Solar System, was a distant and incomprehensible matter that had nothing to do with the ordinary business of their lives. Someone wrote an uninspired operetta about it; someone else revived the lost art of the symphony, and for a few years her mournful eight hour memoriam was considered by many in the stellar colonies to be a new pinnacle of human art. Very few Keidians took much notice when a Transcendent demolished Sirius B, and used trillions of tonnes of heavy elements mined from the white dwarf’s core to build a vast ring in close orbit around Sirius A; no one worried overmuch when other Transcendents began to strip-mine gas giants in other uninhabited systems. Everyone agreed that the machine intelligences were pursuing some vast, obscure plan that might take millions of years to complete, that they were as indifferent to the low comedy of human life as gardeners were to the politics of ants.

  But then self-styled transhuman Fanatics declared a jihad against anyone who refused to acknowledge the Transcendents as gods. They dropped a planet-killer on half-terraformed Mars. They scorched colonies on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn and Neptune. They dispatched warships starwards. The fragile web of chatter and knowledge-based commerce that linked the stellar colonies began to unravel. And then, a little over a thousand days ago, a Transcendent had barrelled into the Keidian system, swinging past Keid as it decelerated from close to light speed, arcing out towards the double system of white and red dwarf stars four hundred AU beyond. The red dwarf had always been prone to erratic flares, but a few days after the Transcendent went into orbit around it, the dim little star began to flare brightly and steadily from one of its poles. A narrowly focussed jet of matter and energy began to spew into space, and some of the carbon-rich star-stuff was spun into sails with the surface area of planets, hung hundreds of thousands of kilometres beyond the star yet somehow coupled to its centre of gravity. Pinwheeling of the jet and light pressure on the vast sails tipped the star through ninety degrees, and then the jet burned even brighter, and the star began to move out of its orbit.

  Soon afterwards, the Fanatics had arrived, and the war of the 40 Eridani system had begun.

  The scientist said, “The hunter-killers found us. We had to outrun them.”

  Carter said, “I was ready to make a stand.”

  The scientist glared at him with her one good eye and said, “I’m not prepared to sacrifice myself to take out a few drones, Mr Cho. My work is too important.”

  She was young and scared and badly injured, but Carter had to admit that she had stones. When the singleship struck, Carter had been climbing into a p-suit, getting ready to set up a detector array on the surface of the comet nucleus. She had been the first person he’d seen after he’d kicked out of the airlock. He’d caught her and dragged her across twenty metres of raw vacuum to a lifepod that had spun loose from the platform’s broken spine, and installed her in one of the pod’s hibernation coffins. She’d been half-cooked by reflected energy of the X-ray laser beam that had bisected the main section of the science platform; one side of her face was swollen red and black, the eye there a blind white stone, hair like shrivelled peppercorns. The coffin couldn’t do much more than give her painblockers and drip glucose-enriched plasma into her blood. She’d die unless she went into hibernation, but she’d wouldn’t allow Carter to put her to sleep because she had work to do.

  Her coffin was one of twenty stacked in a neat five by four array around the inner wall of the lifepod’s hull. Carter Cho hung in the space between her coffin and the shaft of the motor, a skinny man with prematurely white hair in short dreads that stuck out in spikes around his thin, sharp face as if he’d just been wired to some mains buss. He said, “This is my ship. I’m in charge here.”

  The scientist stared at him. Her good eye was red with an eightball haemorrhage, the pupil capped with a black data lens. She said, “I’m a second lieutenant, sailor. I believe I outrank you.”

  “Those commissions they handed out to volunteers like you don’t mean anything.”

  “I volunteered for this mission, Mr Cho, because I want to find out everything I can about the Transcendent. Because I believe that what we can learn from it will help defeat the Fanatics. I still have work to do, sailor, and that’s why I must decide our strategy.”

  “Just give me back control of my ship, okay?” She stared through him. He said, “Just tell me what you did. You might have damaged something.”

  “I wrote a patch that’s sitting on top of the command stack. It won’t cause any damage. Look, we tried hiding from the hunter-killers, and when that didn’t work, we had to outrun them. I can appreciate why you wanted to make a stand. I can even admire it. But we were outnumbered, and we are more important than a few drones. War isn’t a matter of individual heroics. It’s a collective effort. And as part of a collective, every individual must subsume her finer instincts to the greater good. Do you understand?”

  “With respect, ma’am, what I understand is that I’m a sailor with combat experience, and you’re a science geek.” She was looking through him again, or maybe focussing on stuff fed to her retina by the data lens. He said, “What kind of science geek are you, anyway?”

  “Quantum vacuum theory.” The scientist closed her eye and clenched her teeth and gasped, then said, her voice smaller and tighter, “I was hoping to find out how the Transcendent manipulates the magnetic fields that control the jet.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Just a little twinge.”

  Carter studied the diagnostic panel of the coffin, but he had no idea what it was trying to tell him. “You should let this box put you to sleep. When you wake up, we’ll be back at Pasadena, and they’ll fix you right up.”

  “I know how to run the lifepod, and as long as I have control of it, you can’t put me under. We’re still falling along the comet’s trajectory. We’re going to eyeball the Transcendent’s engineering up close. If I can’t learn something from that, I’ll give you permission to boot my ass into vacuum, turn around, and go look for another scientist.”

  “Maybe you can steer this ship, ma’am, but you don’t have combat training.”

  “There’s nothing to fight. We outran the hunter-killers.”

  Carter said, “So we did. But maybe you should use the radar, check out the singleship. Just before you staged your little mutiny, I saw that it was turning back. I think it’s going to try to hunt us down.”

  Carter stripped coffins and ripped out panels and padding from the walls. He disconnected canisters of the accelerant foam that flooded coffins to cradle hibernating sleepers. He
pulled a dozen spare p-suits from their racks. He sealed the scientist’s coffin and suited up and vented the lifepod and dumped everything out of the lock.

  The idea was that the pilot of the singleship would spot the debris, think that the pod had imploded, and abandon the chase. Carter thought there was a fighting chance it would work, but when he had told her what he was going to do, the scientist had said, “It won’t fool him for a moment.”

  Carter said, “Also, when he chases after us, there’s a chance he’ll run into some of the debris. If the relative velocity is high enough, even a grain of dust could do some serious damage.”

  “He can blow us out of the sky with his X-ray laser. So why would he want to chase us?”

  “For the same reason the hunter-killer didn’t explode when it found us. He wants to take a prisoner. He wants to extract information from a live body.”

  He watched her think about that.

  She said, “If he does catch up with us, you’ll get your wish to become a martyr. There’s enough anti-beryllium left in the motor to make an explosion that’ll light up the whole system. But that’s a last resort. The singleship is still in turnaround, we have a good head start, and we’re only twenty-eight million kilometres from perihelion. If we get there first, we can whip around the red dwarf, change our course at random. Unless the Fanatic guesses our exit trajectory, that’ll buy us plenty of time.”

  “He’ll have plenty of time to find us again. We’re a long way from home, and there might be other—”

  “All we have to do is live long enough to find out everything we can about the Transcendent’s engineering project, and squirt it home on a tight beam.” The scientist’s smile was dreadful. Her teeth were filmed with blood. “Quit arguing, sailor. Don’t you have work to do?”

  A trail of debris tumbled away behind the pod, slowly spreading out, bright edges flashing here and there as they caught the light of the red dwarf. Carter pressurized p-suits and switched on their life-supports systems and transponders before he jettisoned them. Maybe the Fanatic would think that they contained warm bodies. He sprayed great arcs of foam into the hard vacuum and kicked away the empty canisters. The chance of any of the debris hitting Fanatic’s singleship was infinitesimally small, but a small chance was better than none at all, and the work kept his mind from the awful prospect of being captured.

  Sternward, the shattered comet nucleus was a fuzzy speck trailing foreshortened banners of light across the star-spangled sky. The expedition had nudged it from its orbit and buried the science platform inside its nucleus, sleeping for a whole year like an army in a fairytale as it fell towards the red dwarf. The mission had been a last desperate attempt to try and learn something of the Transcendent’s secrets. But as the comet nucleus had neared the red dwarf, and the expedition had woke up and the scientists had started their work, one of the Fanatic drones that policed the vicinity of the star had somehow detected the science platform, and the Fanatics had sent a singleship to deal with it. Like all their warships, it had moved very fast, with brutal acceleration that would have mashed ordinary humans to a thin jelly. It had arrived less than thirty seconds behind a warning broadcast by a spotter observatory at the edge of Keid’s heliopause. The crew of the science platform hadn’t stood a chance.

  The singleship lay directly between the comet and the lifepod now. It had turned around and was decelerating at eight gravities. At the maximum magnification his p-suit’s visor could give him, Carter could just make out the faint scratch of its exhaust, but was unable to resolve the ship itself. In the other direction, the red dwarf star simmered at the bottom of a kind of well of luminous dark. Its nuclear fires were banked low, radiating mostly in infrared. Carter could stare steadily at it with only a minimum of filtering. The sharp-edged shadows of the vast deployment of solar sails were sinking beyond one edge as the jet dawned in the opposite direction, a brilliant white thread brighter than the fierce point of the white dwarf star rising just beyond it. Before the Transcendent had begun its work, the red dwarf had swung around the smaller but more massive white dwarf in a wide elliptical orbit, at its closest approaching within twenty AU, the distance of Uranus from the Sun. Now it was much closer, and still falling inward. Scientists speculated that the Transcendent planned to use the tidal effects of a close transit to tear apart the red dwarf, but they’d had less than forty hours to study the Transcendent’s engineering before the Fanatic’s singleship had struck.

  Hung in his p-suit a little way from the lifepod, the huge target of the red dwarf in one direction, the vast starscape in the other, Carter Cho resolved to make the best of his fate. The Universe was vast and inhuman, and so was war. Out there, in battles around stars whose names—Alpha Centauri, Epsilon Eridani, Tau Ceti, Lalande 21185, Lacaille 8760, 61 Cygni, Epsilon Indi, Groombridge 1618, Groombridge 34, 82 Eridani, 70 Ophiuchi, Delta Pavonis, Eta Cassiopeiae—were like a proud role call of mythic heroes, the fate of the human race was being determined. While Carter and the rest of the expedition had slept in their coffins deep in the heart of the comet, the Fanatics had invested and destroyed a dozen settlements in Keid’s asteroid belt, and the Keidians had fought back and destroyed one of the Fanatics’ huge starships. Compared to this great struggle, Carter’s fate was less than that of a drop of water in a stormy ocean, a thought both humbling and uplifting.

  Well, his life might be insignificant, but he wasn’t about to trust it to a dying girl with no combat experience. He fingertip-swam to the stern of the pod, and opened a panel and rigged a manual cutout before he climbed back inside. He had been working for six hours. He was exhausted and sweating hard inside the p-suit, but he couldn’t take it off because the pod’s atmosphere had been vented and most of its systems had been shut down, part of his plan to fool the Fanatic into thinking it was a dead hulk. The interior was dark and cold. The lights either side of his helmet cast sharp shadows. Frost glistened on struts exposed where he had stripped away panelling.

  The scientist lay inside her sealed coffin, her half-ruined face visible through the little window. She looked asleep, but when Carter manoeuvred beside her she opened her good eye and looked at him. He plugged in a patch cord and heard some kind of music, a simple progressions of riffs for percussion and piano and trumpet and saxophone. The scientist said that it was her favourite piece. She said that she wanted to listen to it one more time.

  Carter said, “You should let the coffin put you to sleep. Before—”

  The scientist coughed wetly. Blood freckled the faceplate of her coffin. “Before I die.”

  “They gave me some science training before they put me on this mission, ma’am. Just tell me what to do.”

  “Quit calling me ma’am,” the scientist said, and closed her good eye as a trumpet floated a long, lovely line of melody above a soft shuffle of percussion. “Doesn’t he break your heart? That’s Miles Davis, playing in New York hundreds of years ago. Making music for angels.”

  “It’s interesting. It’s in simple six/eight time, but the modal changes—” The scientist was staring at Carter; he felt himself blush, and wondered if she could see it. He said, “I inherited perfect pitch from my mother. She sang in an opera chorus before she married my father, and settled down to raise babies and farm vacuum organisms.”

  “Don’t try and break it down,” the scientist said. “You have to listen to the whole thing. The totality, it’s sublime. I’d rather die listening to this than die in hibernation.”

  “You won’t die if you do what I tell you.”

  “I’ve set down everything I remember about the work that was done before the attack. I’ll add it to the observations I make as we whip around the star, and squirt all the data to Keid. Maybe they can make something useful of it, work out the Transcendent’s tricks with the magnetic fields, the gravity tethers, the rest of it . . . ” The scientist closed her eye, and breathed deeply. Fluid rattled in her lungs. She said softly, as if to herself, “So many dead. We have to make their deaths w
orthwhile.”

  Carter had barely got to know his shipmates, recruited from all over, before they’d gone into hibernation, but the scientist had lost good friends and colleagues.

  He said, “The singleship is still accelerating.”

  “I know.”

  “It could catch us before we reach the star.”

  “Maybe your little trick will fool it.”

  “I might as well face up to it with a pillow.”

  The scientist smiled her ghastly smile. She said, “We have to try. We have to try everything. Let me explain what I plan to do at perhelion.”

  She told Carter that observations by drones and asteroid-based telescopes had shown that the Transcendent had regularized the red dwarf’s magnetic field, funnelling plasma towards one point on photosphere, where it erupted outward in a permanent flare—the jet that was driving the star towards its fatal rendezvous at the bottom of the white dwarf’s steep gravity well. The scientist believed that the Transcendent was manipulating the vast energies of the star’s magnetic field by breaking the symmetry of the seething sea of virtual particular pairs that defined quantum vacuum, generating charged particles ab ovo, redirecting plasma currents and looped magnetic fields with strengths of thousands of gauss and areas of thousands of kilometres as a child might play with a toy magnet and a few iron filings. The probe she’d loaded with a dozen experiments had been lost with the science platform, but she thought that there was a way of testing at least one prediction of her theoretical work on symmetry breaking.

  She opened a window in Carter’s helmet display, showed him a schematic plot of the slingshot manoever around the red dwarf.