The Hidden War Read online

  “Holy Moloch,” Krim whispered.

  The people—the beasts, he had to think—came up to them, the Beats so plain in their bodies, and raised imploring hands and claws and talons. Creatures wandered up to them, electric things with bodies shimmering—stolen slates, Krim now understood—touching them and beseeching them. Zoetropes.

  “Oh, tabby, tabby, come to me,” they would say. “Let us work our magic, make you free.” And then, at the sight of the brooms, they would step back, ripples of disgust flowing across their television faces.

  Krim and Prima wandered through the crowds, stepping around wakening couples copulating in the grass. Up on one terrace a man with silver hair that stood out from his body in little pins recited poetry, its form impossible to decipher and its meaning unclear, despite the booming of his voice—a booming, Krim saw, made possible by his immense chest and throat. A small audience stared up at him, absorbed nonetheless. Everywhere the Electric men and women moved among the crowds, the true manipulators not only of bodies, but of the crowd itself. Each flickered brightly, its images fading or waning as it passed by ever-more-strange beasts. Periodically it would approach some person, touch him or her or it, and the hide would blank out, the person would shed all appearance, and become stilled. The Electric would then begin carving the body, altering it according to some obscure vision, and crowds would watch as the creation emerged: a moment’s entertainment.

  Despite the chaos, despite the activity, Krim saw, though, that even as the people rose to meet the sun, they did little more than lie upon their backs and bask in the brightness. Some would wander among the trees, plucking fruits and slowly gnawing on them, while one or two even managed to catch a raven, clubbing it to death, eating the bird, feathers, bones, and claws. Most, though, most lay placid, unmoving, staring into a distance no one could see.

  Krim focused on an Electric man, his skin shimmering in ultraviolet purple. He watched him as he approached a placid olive-drab-tinted troll. The troll waved at the purple man, and he sat beside the troll, his hands running over the troll’s slate. Some change flickered through the troll’s face, and the troll stood up, pointing, and then following some unseen thing.

  “A drug hacker,” Sam said. “Docs, they call the ultraviolet ones. They reprogram slates and alter the body chemistry.”

  “Is anyone here sane?” Krim asked Prima.

  She pointed at a cluster of Naturals, brooms whisking before them, walking their way. “Some.”

  The Naturals, he saw, weren’t all old like the ones at the station. Some were even short, and then he stopped, realizing what he saw: children. In his time outside the prison, in all the years since the Jack, he had never seen children. Surely there must be some, he had wondered. Or would there be? The hide protected, and he figured that meant it protected women from being fertilized by sperm, or—should that untold event happen—would protect the uterus from supporting a fetus. The Naturals walked toward them, all naked, but the smaller ones definitely were children, with their own small brooms, breasts flat on the girls, testicles undescended on the boys, and almost hairless save for the fine hair hanging down in long braids from their heads.

  One woman even held a baby to her breast, newborn and pink, but protected by that faint shimmer of the hide that Krim had learned to look for, had seen in his own body. Dust did not settle on his skin, and any dirt or detritus was shed. A baby. The Naturals stopped as they greeted the two of them, looked quizzically at the strangers.

  “You are new here,” the mother said, a statement rather than a question.

  Krim nodded. “From the tubeway station, out of The Forest.”

  “You took the Broom?” she asked.

  “It seemed only polite,” Prima said.

  “Wise.” The mother held out her child to Prima, and Prima took the baby, holding it in her arms and letting her broom rest against her.

  “Beautiful child,” Prima said. “Does it have a name?”

  “She.” The mother stretched out her back, rubbed her shoulder muscles. “No other name yet. She will not be named until we discover her name.” The mother took the child back. “Where do you come from?” She waved at the path beyond, at the mountains.

  “From the prison,” Krim said, feeling he should be honest. How could they explain space? “I was released recently, and Prima ran away from one of the Electrics in the forests.”

  “The prison?”

  “A great fortress far to the south, I think,” Krim said. “You do not know of it?”

  “Unaltered people come to the city occasionally. That is why the older people watch the paths: to protect them from . . . this.” She waved at the strange people, none of them daring to approach the Naturals, almost repulsed, it seemed, at their lack of adornment. They stood in their own small plaza, the tide of weirdness moving around them as if they were a large rock in a raging stream.

  “We were glad for their gift.” Krim raised his broom.

  “You should work for it,” the mother said again, pointing to the dirty ground.

  “Of course.” Krim looked at the Naturals, looked into their faces, searching, hoping to recognize another Beat. On the ride out on the tube, or after he had helped Prima escape from Zoetrope, Krim had tried to imagine the faces of his friends on the Jack. Sam had filed his memories and would scan every face for a fit. Nothing, though with people so changed, how could anyone tell? Still, if a Beat had come here, he thought, a Beat would look like the Naturals, like these people.

  “Have you seen many like us? Many who say they come from a prison?” Krim asked.

  An older man, skin slightly wrinkled but otherwise strong, took his hand. “Once,” he said, almost whispering, “or twice, long ago. Some like you would come, and they would go”—he pointed to the high tower off in the distance—“to the Space Needle, and back to the skies from where they had come.”

  “We have work to do,” the mother said. She took her child back, and She moved her mouth toward her mother’s breast. “No one cares for this city.” She shook her head as an elephant man squatted and dropped a steaming clot of dung on the brick path. With her broom, she swept it up, sucking it away. “Too much work to do.”

  Krim held his broom then, looked at its hard wood, and swept away a pile of small leaves and twisted green hair. The broom sucked up the detritus, and he felt the broom glow, felt a trickle of energy run through him. “It’s like hide, too,” Sam told him, and Krim understood. The Naturals cleaned up, and the brooms gave them power, and the power kept away the assaults of the Electric changers.

  “Thank you for this information,” Krim told the Naturals, and they moved on, sweeping and sweeping.

  They wandered for weeks, exploring Sea City’s many plazas and parks. Everywhere Krim and Prima saw the people, the grotesquely altered citizens. Few looked even halfway normal, and few seemed able to resist the onslaught of the Electrics. They climbed the great skyscrapers, most of the floors vast lofts open to the sky and the wind. Some made great sport of leaping off the highest floors, tumbling to the ground, and writhing in sick ecstasy as their hides pumped endorphins to dull the pain and repaired their shattered bones.

  The Beats prowled the dead highways of the old city, highways rotting into tumbled concrete. On the edges of Sea City great tracts of dead homes rotted back into the forest. Sometimes the tribes would light a house for a bonfire and dance around it, or run into it wrapped in straw, and rush out flaming. Sometimes entire blocks would burn, and when the fire came to the forest, the flames would be snuffed back by clouds of cool steam rising up from the ground or appearing out of nowhere.

  Krim and Prima searched for other vestiges of normalcy, others like them, and found only the Naturals. Few of the Naturals slept in the city, they discovered. At night they disappeared, but Krim had never been able to find where they vanished to. Their brooms kept them safe, kept them from being transformed again. Krim saw the torment of the transformed, and wanted none of it. Yet the Naturals did n
ot tempt him either, not the gray-haired people in their placid contentment, in their sweeping. There had to be more, he thought.

  Always, the Space Needle beckoned.

  And so Krim and Prima found themselves before the spire, looking up. You’ll be back. Krim remembered Admiral Thom’s words when he had been released from the prison. “You’ll be back.” As he and Prima stared up at the Space Needle, at the rusty old tower cordoned off by a high, archaic chain-link fence, he remembered the words again. Thom had been so sure, so smug. And so right. Barely out in the world for a month, Krim had seen it for what it was: void of challenge, decadent and absurd. He had thought to wander the planet, to get dirt under his feet and to breathe clean air, to see things he had never seen on the Jack, or in prison. Well, I did, he thought. I did.

  But what of hard soil, of blue skies and clouds and trees? The wonder of it excited him, and he could understand those primal urges to simply head off into the forest, to disappear in the woods. In Prima’s subjugation, though, he had seen what occupied the woods. He had seen what occupied the cities. He’d asked Sam what the rest of the world was like, and Sam had shown him flickering images: more cities like Sea City, the spaces in between either vast and unoccupied or crawling with body bandits like Zoetrope. He had asked Sam an obvious question, once he knew he could ask, and Sam had told him, yes, a few Beats still roamed the planet, some of their locations classified, but the rest, the pilots, all were in space, off-planet.

  REGIONAL HEADQUARTERS, PACIFIC SPACE COMMAND, a sign read over the tin shed that covered the only entrance into the fenced area. An opening in the shed led to a gate, and the shed covered the gate on either side. Krim looked at Prima, shrugged, and walked into the shed.

  “Entrance to authorized personnel only,” Sam said, and Krim saw by the way Prima stopped that her slate told her the same thing. “Only those deemed worthy of space will be granted entrance,” Sam continued.

  On a steel post inside the shed was a control panel, the outline of a right hand etched into its surface. EARTH IS ROOM ENOUGH someone had scrawled on the panel. Krim put his hand on the etching and felt a slight charge pass over his palm. The gate cranked open.

  “Admission granted,” Sam said.

  Krim turned to Prima, shrugged, and walked through. As he passed through, the gate suddenly slammed shut. He whirled at the noise and looked back at Prima. “I guess it only lets us through one at a time. Put your hand on the panel.”

  Prima raised her hand up, began to touch the panel, then pulled it back. “I can’t,” she said.

  “What?” Krim pointed at the tower. “Sure you can. We can go up, get out of here.”

  “No . . . I can’t. I don’t—don’t belong with you.” She looked down at her finger, pulled the gold ring loose, and tossed it to him.

  Krim caught the ring, and as he looked at it, the ring dissolved into a gold smear. “What?”

  “She’s not a Beat,” Sam said.

  “I’m not what you think I am,” she said.

  A group of Naturals had come over to Prima and stood next to her outside the gate, their brooms resting before them. As Prima stood by them, her skin began to change color, darkening from its light cream color to a deeper, tanned bronze. Slight lines appeared in her face, and her hair grew out, the curly black ends shedding off and her hair turning silver-gray.

  “I become what people want me to be,” she said. “You wanted me to be a Beat, so I became a Beat. But I am not.” She held her palm up to the panel, and as her skin neared its surface, the panel began to glow red. Prima pressed against it, pushed, and then jerked back as a charge shot through her. One of the Naturals caught her, helped her back up.

  “She’s a Chameleon,” Sam said. “Her transceiver picks up other’s images of what they want her to be, and she becomes that image. You wanted her to be a Beat, to be Prima, and she was.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this earlier, Sam?”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  “It’s not Sam’s fault.” Prima said. “I can’t go up with you. I didn’t come from space, so I could never go back there.” She smiled at him. “I’m sorry. You’ll find your friends somewhere. I would . . . would be your friend, but it would be a lie—a lie up there.”

  Krim looked at the Naturals, at Prima who already seemed to fade into them, to lose her identity—no, gain her identity—among them. He touched his own gold ring, felt the solidness of it, then smiled. Alone again. Okay. The hard wood of the broom felt cold in his hand. He looked up the path to the Space Needle, its door now sliding open and beckoning. Dirt cluttered the path, weeds choking it. Krim walked up the path, sweeping the dirt away with the broom, clearing the path and making it clean again. He walked back to the gate, the broom now glowing, and he passed the broom back over the top to Prima.

  “Thanks for being who you were anyway,” he said. “It gave me hope for a while.”

  “Thanks for helping me to be free,” she said. “And for leading me to something I don’t mind being.” She looked around at the Naturals, at herself becoming a Natural. “You’ll come back someday?” She took the broom from him.

  “Maybe,” Krim said, letting the broom go—letting her go. He held out his hand, and through the gate touched his fingertips to her fingertips. For a moment, her image flickered to that he had seen minutes before, an image of a Beat, and then she became one of the Naturals, and she turned, and he turned, and he walked into the tower, and up into space.

  PART II: OUT

  Chapter 5

  Krim went out. Out: into space, into the endless beyond, into the great void, into the darkness of all darkness. Above. Out. Up! Once he had volunteered to fight in the Hidden War, once he had walked into the room high up in the Space Needle, it had been only days before he had been whisked off to Earth’s sole remaining launch facility, the Cannon, a thirty-kilometer-long perfect tube burrowed out of the earth. Few went out anymore, out of the earth’s five-thousand-kilometer mountain of gravity, up into space and out into the vastness of the ether. Earth sucked the system’s resources down to it, its power and metals and ideas, and gave little back in return.

  Except soldiers. Except the bodies and brains of old pilots, ready to go back out and fight.

  They strapped him into a capsule, no more than a bullet-shaped shell two meters in diameter and ten meters long. Krim occupied one seat of four, the other three empty, and the cargo bay behind him filled with he knew not what. The launch end of the Cannon was a kilometer underground, a small chamber that would have the air pumped out of it until the capsule lay in vacuum. Krim breathed through his suit, a pressurized suit not unlike his old body waldo, with a clear helmet and a hose pumping in air, and Sam stuck to his chest inside.

  He wasn’t so much strapped in as enclosed in his console, its rubbery arms enveloping him so the seat was more sarcophagus than chaise. Krim could not move a muscle of his arms or legs or hands. Krim was a pilot, yet it would be the one time he would go into space without piloting; the launch sequence was automatic, controlled, and completely foolproof, of course.

  The air was sucked out of the Cannon’s chamber, and a lock in the launch area opened before him—Sam showed him a projection of the action—and he moved into the base of the Cannon. “Locked and loaded,” Sam said. The air lock closed behind him, and the Cannon powered up. It was more of a railgun than an actual cannon. The walls of the tube had been charged with gigawatts of energy, the charge repelling the capsule and moving it forward, one meter at a time, slowly building up acceleration. Krim heard a distant hum as the capsule moved through the Cannon, but nothing more. Sam explained it to him: The capsule would move along the tube, picking up speed, increasing acceleration, moving ever upward against minimal air resistance, until the capsule came to the end, and it would burst through a final air lock, out into the atmosphere, and up, up into space.

  Krim felt a slight pressure increase on his chest, on his cheeks, on the sinuses of his face, and upon all the pockets of
air and fluid in his body. The pressure increased steadily, inexorably, pushing deeper and deeper, the whine of the capsule’s rush through the tube growing louder and louder, screeching higher and higher until he felt his very eardrums would burst from the noise, from the pressure, from the acceleration. He had done four, five, even ten G’s once, the absolute limits of human endurance, and when he had fought for the Jack’s freedom, he had done it almost daily. But not in fifteen years, not in a long time, and never had he felt so alone or out of control. And never had he fought against the very gravity of the mother planet.

  Harder and harder the weight pushed against him, the weight of the planet and the weight of escape, and if he had not lived fifteen years on Earth, if he had not built up the muscles that only being on-planet could give, he felt he would have died. Krim felt the power of the Cannon, the great force that seemed it would explode inside him, and then it did explode, a great rush as he came into the light and the atmosphere. Sam showed him the world, showed him the shot of a blazing bullet coming screeching out of the cannon, its sides burning as the friction met air and shed energy. Then Sam showed him the view as the capsule rose up, in a shallow angle flying right along the horizon, light giving way to darkness inside of seconds as the capsule hit full escape velocity, twenty-two thousand kilometers per hour, and he was unbound.

  Unbound into space, unbound from the weight of the world, adrift and weightless and free. Sam showed him the blue marble revolving below, the Earth, green and dusted with gyrating clouds, ice caps snaking down from the poles, seas deep blue or pale green or purple-black at the greatest depths. In the dark side jeweled lights twinkled at the coasts, and the interiors of the continents stayed dark and deep.