Aggressor Six

by Wil McCarthy

  Deus ex machina, he mused. God from machine. Was that Latin? English? He couldn't remember. He supposed it didn't much matter. All thoughts, all poetry and music and ancient languages, all would be Waisted in the end.

  “Two indigenous ecosystems,” Marshe said, “And lots of Earth-export lifeforms. Barnarde harbors more living species than Sol does.”

  Ken pondered that for a moment. “And almost as many people, isn't it?”

  “About a third,” she said.

  “Maybe they'll think of something.”

  “Maybe.”

  Ken could think of nothing more to say. Neither, it seemed, could Marshe.

  The observation chamber was cold. Not enough ventilation, perhaps, to account for radiative heat losses through the window? The room's bare walls smelled of metal and, more faintly, of human sweat. How many people had been in here over the centuries, Ken wondered? How many arguments had been fought in here? How many children conceived, marriages proposed?

  He looked out at Saturn. The planet stared back like an unfriendly eye.

  “Ken,” Marshe said quietly. “Come here, please. Hold my hand.”

  Nodding, Ken kicked gently off the wall and drifted over to her. He removed a hand from his uniform's pocket, offered it. Marshe took it, wrapped her own hands around it. They were cold, cold as water in a mountain stream. But soft. His own hand, tense at first, began to relax.

  Her brown hair, straight and short, stood about her head like a crown. Her face was flushed, distorted by the lack of gravity. A “pudding face”, Josev had called it. A “fat, squishy slug” face.

  Ken thought otherwise. This woman, his Captain and Queen, was solidly built, her fat layered with muscle, her frame rugged. Inside, she was somehow both warm and cold, a volcano crowned with glaciers, steaming in the places where magma seethed close to the surface.

  Not “pretty in her own way,” as his mother might say, but genuinely beautiful, Marshe seemed to fit perfectly into the fleshy clothing of her body. How could Josev not see that? If Marshe's mass were to drop, surely her strength must melt away with it?

  Her eyes met his. “Have... Do you...?”

  Understanding the question, Ken shook his head.

  Shiele Tomas flashing in the light of two suns, skin peeling back from her like blackened rinds. Albuquerque sidewalks melting beneath her feet.

  “You?” He asked.

  She shook her head. “No. Not for a long time.”

  With his other hand, he pulled her closer to him. Her face centimeters from his own.

  “We can't,” she said, simply. Her breath smelled of breakfast apples.

  “No,” Ken agreed. “We can't.”

  Her hands were warmer, now.

  “Just hold me?”

  “Yeah.”

  Their arms and legs and bodies twined. They had done this before, but... That had been a mother-and-son kind of thing, soothing and comforting but also condescending somehow. Not like this.

  His manhood stirred, stiffened. She could feel it, he knew.

  “We can't,” he repeated, as if to convince himself.

  “No.”

  They floated in the chill air as a single unit, tumbling slightly.

  “Marshe?” Ken asked after a while. “Am I crazy? Have I come unpinned, like Josev says?”

  Marshe paused, breathing deeply. “I think you have.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “No.”

  “Do... Are you afraid of dying?”

  She shrugged. “I try very hard not to think about it. I can imagine this whole fortress boiling away, with me inside it. Breathing splatters of molten metal, trying to scream. Yes, I'm afraid.”

  “Me too,” he said, surprising himself with the admission. “I really expected to die in the Flyswatter. I hoped it would be quick, you know, relatively painless, but it never occurred to me that I'd survive. But I did. So many people didn't make it, but I did. Why is that? I mean, I wasn't even good at my job. I made a lot of mistakes. Bad ones.”

  Oh, yes. Very bad.

  He continued: “Part of me... I wish I were dead sometimes. A lot of the time. Especially before I came here; it was really bad then.”

  “I've been hard on you,” Marshe said. “I'm sorry.”

  He waved a hand, back where she could see. Forget it.

  “You don't sound scared,” she offered.

  Ken let out a breath, felt it heat the fabric that clothed Marshe's shoulder and neck. “It's getting dead that scares me. The pain, the helplessness. Suicide is one thing, but... Right now, it doesn't seem fair that I have to die.”

  “But you do.”

  Ken nodded, his chin digging into her shoulder. He did have to die. And there was a feeling growing inside him, that he didn't have much longer to wait.

  Chapter Ten

  “Quit it!” Rik shouted down into the water. Damn dolphins were getting twitchier every day. They were down there, huddled together in the deep end of the tank, squirming and flopping together as if in orgy. Except for Khola, who was “pacing” here at the shallow end, splashing hugely with every turn.

  “Drone two, quit that!” Rik shouted again as a low-gravity wave slopped at him, wetting his shoes.

  Khola stopped, put his head up out of the water. Said something in dolphin, and something else in Waister. Rik caught neither, though the dolphin-clicks had sounded like a sonar holographic.

  “Would—” He took a step backward, leaned in toward the water. “Would you say that in Standard?”

  Khola jerked his head back and forth several times, frothing the water. “CONFRONT!” He shouted.

  “Ho, friend,” Rik said. He held his hands out level, a gesture of reassurance. “Calm down. What's the problem here?”

  “CONFRONT!” The dolphin shouted again, and repeated his frothing dance.

  Rik sighed. Khola, like the other dolphins and their “dog,” had been modified to speak both Standard and Waister with intelligible, if not always fluent, grammar. But lately they were becoming obtuse, hard to talk to. Secretive, even, as though sharing among themselves some knowledge Rik and the others could not, or should not, understand.

  Rik crouched down, leaning over a little farther until he could slap the water. “Khola! What are you talking about? Do you want me to go get the helmet?”

  “No,” Khola said, calming suddenly. “Not helmet. Not see pictures, angry pictures. Sorry.”

  Angry pictures? Rik turned toward the equipment racks, saw his helmet hanging there. An ordinary gill helmet, of the sort he'd been using since childhood, but modified. His dolphin hat. His Waister hat. With it he could interpret Khola's sonar images, his groans and clicks and sibillant Waister flutings.

  Made it hard to think, though, and anyway Rik could hold his breath a long time. Off Kauai he had once dived to thirty meters without equipment, without even weights. And he'd been swimming with dolphins years before he'd ever learned to use a gill.

  The peg next to his, the one where Sandre's's helmet normally hung, was empty.

  More splashing.

  Beneath the water, a dark shape torpedoed out of the deep end. Ilio, the common seal who served as the group's “dog.” Slowing as she approached, she nuzzled Khola's tail, curled herself sinuously around it.

  “Must go,” Khola said. No inflection in his modified voice, no hint of emotion. What was going on here? What was he thinking?

  Ilio disengaged from her dolphin friend and shot back toward the deeper water, toward the knot of dolphin flesh squirming in the far corner.

  “Where is Sandre?” Rik asked, holding out a forestalling hand. “Her helmet is gone.”

  “Not see Sandre,” Khola said. He started thrashing again. Slow water slopped over Rik's shoes. “Khola must go.”

  “Why? What's going on in the deep end?”

  “Confrontation,” Khola said.

  “With what?”

  “We strong. We prove that we are more strong.”

  A cold feelin
g prickled up Rik's neck. “More strong than what? Where is Sandre?”

  “Khola must go.”

  The dolphin flipped over, splashing with his tail, and in moments had traveled fifteen meters to the tank's deep end. Rik's knees gave out as he watched, and he settled slowly into the cold wetness of Khola's puddles.

  A human arm projected limply from the dolphin swarm, and a red stain was spreading slowly through the water.

  ~~~

  “...examination has moved inward and aft,” Colonel Lopez went on, “and the teams seem to be well out of the habitation area. The artifacts they're finding seem to be mainly tools and sensory prostheses. The purposes of these devices are unknown at this time.”

  “Did you find markings on some of the walls?” Jhee asked him from across the table.

  “Yes,” Lopez said, looking up sharply from his flatscreen. “How did you know?”

  “My... sources indicated that was a possibility.” Jhee smiled wanly at his colleague. So much secrecy, and from whom? The enemy was utterly disinterested in human things, except as targets. There were no turncoats in this war, no infiltrators to guard against. Public opinion was a problem, maybe, if you believed what the commanders said. Politics, even in the face of catastrophe. But right here, right now, there was no public to keep the secrets from.

  There was a delay of several seconds before the image of General Chu spoke. “Your sources have told us little else, Mister Jhee,” he said then, in his dry, disapproving way. “I had warned you against frivolity, yes?” Behind the holie window he slapped a flatscreen against a tabletop, flexing and releasing it, flexing and releasing again. “Your tactical analysis is very, shall we say, sketchy? And this other material, this cultural fluff...”

  “Information about our enemies!,” Jhee protested. Uselessly, of course. “Anyway, I am making an effort to steer that team in a more useful direction.”

  “An effort,” Chu said, after the usual delay. “I see.”

  Chu was elsewhere in Saturnian space, two or three light-seconds away in the vast region where Saturn's gravity held sway. Ironic that on the ansible link, Jhee could get reports from Astaroth, eight light years distant, more quickly than he could argue with his own superiors. No FTL signals this close, not unless you were a Waister.

  “Back off him, Chu,” said General Voorhis, who was here, present in the room with Jhee and Lopez. “Sometimes a think tank need a little insulation. Even when the situation is... as dire as this.”

  The pause, and then Chu flapped his screen against the tabletop again. “Voorhis, what do you think the purpose of your station is? When the Armada arrives, we'll be meeting them with sticks and stones. We need a map to their vulnerabilities, or at the very least a new weapon, or a new strategy or something. We do not need markings on the wall, or trinkets we can't understand.”

  “Who knows?” said Voorhis. “Maybe those markings contain the very information we need.”

  Pause. “Had we the time, Voorhis, we could could explore every such possibility. As we do not have the time, I want you to cut funding for these two areas by twenty percent. Shift the difference into Ring Project Five. Understood?”

  “Yes sir,” Voorhis replied.

  Pause again, and the image of General Chu winked out.

  Jhee felt a hollow, impotent anger ringing inside him. Twenty percent! His projects were a matrix, a web of interconnected goals and resources. Where could he cut, what could he possibly afford to lose? Not Marshe Talbott's team, despite the difficulties. Not the dolphins, or the response matrix group. Certainly not the MI's.

  “We'll discuss the mechanics of this in five hours,” Voorhis said, rising from his seat, gathering up his things.

  The door opened, and a young man came bursting through. Lieutenant... Stover, wasn't it?

  “Colonel!” The man huffed, a hand against his stomach. “Colonel Jhee, come quickly! There's been an... accident!”

  “Accident?” Jhee said, standing up slowly.

  “Yes, in the dol, uh, the water tank!”

  “Names of God,” he said. An accident, one serious enough to propel this young man directly to him, bypassing two layers of bureaucracy. Here, perhaps, was his answer. “I'm on my way. Come with me, explain this!”

  Chapter Eleven

  “ATTENTION,” a booming voice announced. “ATTENTION. ALL PERSONNEL MUST REPORT TO THE NEAREST HOLIE FOR AN IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT. ATTENTION. ALL PERSONNEL MUST REPORT TO THE NEAREST HOLIE FOR AN IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT.”

  “We're at the nearest holie,” Josev said, looking up at the ceiling of the assimilation chamber as if the announcer were above him, and listening. Then, to Ken Jonson: “What do you suppose it is?”

  “#I/We not-know#” Jonson replied, shrugging.

  Marshe's eyes narrowed. Somewhere along the line, Jonson had stopped speaking Standard. Was he doing this to irritate her? She shook her head. No, no of course not.

  “It must be the Waisters,” Yeng said.

  Roland Hanlin looked up. “Too early,” he muttered. But his voice sounded unconvinced.

  Marshe felt a cold breeze stirring through her. The Waisters. Yes. They weren't really expected for months, but then nobody really knew their comings and goings. That's supposed to be our job, she thought, and shivered.

  “Pay attention,” she said crisply. Not that her group was doing anything else, of course. Sitting in this stupid circle of chairs and paying attention was how they'd been spending every hour of every day. She might as well order them to breathe and swallow and blink their eyes. But she needed to have something to say.

  The holie screens went gunboat gray for a second. Everyone froze. Then a face appeared, that of Carlos Tindaros, Sol system's eighteenth Governor General. To Marshe's eyes the man looked tired and... irritated? Something like that. His usual finery had been replaced with a cap and shirt of gold mylar.

  “Citizens,” the GovGen said, inclining his head slightly.

  Marshe hardly dared to breathe.

  “The news is bad,” Tindaros continued after pausing politely. “Though hardly unexpected. At eighteen-thirty-four hours Earth standard time, our long range pickets in the Oort cloud detected the passage of a Waister armada moving at one tenth the speed of light. They were several light hours above the plane of the ecliptic but were moving almost directly toward it. By the time most of you receive this transmission, the armada will have entered the ecliptic plane and changed course. Headed, of course, toward Sol.”

  He paused, to give his words a chance to soak in, then continued: “It begins. I must ask each of you to be brave. Please. We must fight harder than we have ever fought before, for our very existence is at stake. We must turn a blind eye to our own suffering, and to the suffering of our comrades. We cannot spare the energy that charity and self-pity would require of us.

  “It is commonly said that Waister technology is greatly superior to our own. I would like to tell you otherwise, but you would not be fooled. Nor should you be. Four hundred and twenty-eight ships were lost in the Flyswatter operation, as compared with six on the enemy side. And now we must confront a force nearly a hundred times larger. If we make a few simple arithmetic calculations, as so many of you have done, it is easy to conclude that Sol system hasn't the resources to withstand this attack. On this point, at least, I can offer some reassurance.

  “Fleet action is not a matter of simple arithmetic, but a complex weave of pressures and responses. Our top analysts have studied Waister tactics very closely, so that we will be anticipating their thrusts and parries before they occur. Our enemies do not have this advantage, as they have never encountered a human fleet of significant size or firepower. In addition, we have prepared a number of surprises for them.

  “Still, their armada is very large. Their weapons are very powerful. It may be that Sol system, the ancestral home of Humanity, will fall before the enemy. I think we have all entertained this bleak thought, unconscionable though it seems. In our minds, we equate the d
eath of Sol system with the death of Humanity itself. But the colonies at Rigilkente and Barnarde are very much alive, and will continue that way long after you and I are gone. It is not only for ourselves but for them that we fight.

  “Like us, and like Lalande, Rigilkente faces an uncertain future. It was the first human colony in extrasolar space, founded over six hundred years ago, but its lack of mineral resources has limited its growth. It is, in fact, smaller than the Sirius colony was at the time of its destruction. However, unlike Sirius, Rigilkente knows its danger, and has devoted virtually its entire industrial capacity to the task of defense. Their resistance may buy time for Barnarde, as may ours.”

  There was a heavy pause, as if GovGen Tindaros knew that Marshe would be dizzily fighting down the urge to vomit.

  “Citizens. We must broaden our thinking. Perhaps the seeds of the Human future lie not on Earth or Mars, or Astaroth, but on the myriad worlds of Barnarde system. That system is rich in life, and in mineral resources. Their factories and refineries were tooled up for warfare in parallel with our own, but we estimate the Waisters will not arrive there for at least another six and one half years. Meanwhile, Barnardean production rates continue to climb.

  “Using the same simple-minded arithmetic as before, we can see a glimmer of hope. The figures show Barnarde destroying a great number of Waister ships. Almost all of them, in fact. Of course, we know reality is not that simple. Hundreds of variables are involved, perhaps thousands. But I do know that each day we delay the Waisters means more weapons from Barnardean production lines, more soldiers from their schools, more children from their wombs. Every Waister ship we destroy tips the balance that much further in our favor.

  “That is why we must all be brave. If we must face the darkness, Citizens, we shall not go gently. We shall shake a fist at the stars, and scream defiance with the very last of our breath. In battle, we shall not leave our stations. Though our hulls rupture, our atmospheres boil, our very bodies burn and freeze, we shall stand firm, firing our weapons again and again, bringing death and confusion to our enemies. We shall make them curse the day they launched their fleets against us.”