The Hidden War Page 9

  Would they rescue him? They had thrown him out—surely they would not waste a pilot, Admiral Thom would not waste a pilot, after all that work to recruit him. Or was that a test, too, not just an initiation, but an exam he had not been warned about? Find his way back. Figure out the resources of his augmented body—figure out the resources he did not know he had.

  As he tumbled, Krim looked at his right hand, silvered before him, the only constant. By watching how his hand moved relative to the sun and the ship, he could calculate his axis of rotation. He held his right thumb perpendicular to his palm, so it cast a shadow on the surface of his hand. As he rotated, he watched the shadow move in an arc across the lines of his palm, from wrist up to fingers and back around. Okay, he thought. If his axis was perpendicular to the orbital plane—if the axis ran through his body longitudinally—the shadow would move straight. The Kirkpatrick roared straight out from the sun, bow to the Oort Cloud, its long axis perpendicular to the orbital plane.

  Good, he thought. Krim imagined his body rotating, imagined arms twenty klicks long. With arms like that, he could rotate around and grab the Kirkpatrick. He would not revolve in an axis parallel to it, but at an angle to it. Okay, he thought, his body placed in perspective to the universe, what good did that thought do?

  Arms twenty klicks long . . . Ah, he thought.

  Krim looked at his fingers, remembered the strange bodies of the Electrics’ creations. They had fur, fins, claws, wings, all extensions of the hide, all created by the organic mechanism that oozed over his skin, throughout his body. Those extensions had come from those bodies, had been created by devious hacks projected by the Electrics. But those hackers had used a slate, had sent commands with a slate. He had no slate, did he? But his hide must have some computing power, something to keep it going, or he would already have died.

  So what could he make on his own, out of his own thought and substance? He closed his eyes, then felt his index finger and thought, cold there, a spot of cold, extend the silvery skin. Cold beyond the fingertip, extend. He opened his eyes, and saw a thread of silver snake out from his index finger. Krim smiled, imagined cold beyond that thread, saw the thread stretch out farther. Cold, extend, cold. He kept thinking—no, feeling—that, and watched the strand grow longer and longer, his rotation whipping it out straight from his body.

  Extend, extend. He felt the thread extend, wished it, almost, to grow, his hide and body to extrude itself in this thin cable—a cable, yes. An extension. It unspooled out from him, silk from a worm, the strand catching the sun, reflecting it barely. A line from his body, a lifeline.

  The strand grew and grew, extruding, extending. He imagined it as a great whip, growing and growing and flailing toward the Kirkpatrick. How long would it have to grow? How strong would it have to be? Krim felt a shudder as it hit something, as the end struck the ship’s hull, then slid off. He stretched again, harder, farther, and it rippled once more, twice, as he hit the ship on his next rotation. Then the strand tightened, as it either wrapped all the way around the ship, or caught on something, and stuck.

  Stayed, he realized—did not break. He flew around, his force of rotation suddenly arrested, and then the strand grew taut, and he hung, suspended in space, attached—attached—to the Kirkpatrick, a mere dot in the distance, but he no longer cartwheeled around, he was attached, fastened, connected to the ship.

  Quickly, unsure of its strength, Krim pulled in on the strand, wrapping it around his wrist and imagining it growing thicker, thinking that it became stronger, not a wire, but a cable, a rod of steel. As the silk thickened, it pulled him closer. He felt the cold, seeping into his muscles as the hide stretched, but then the silver fluid rolled over him, pulling him in, thickening. Krim pulled, empowered the cable to grow thicker, let the hide come back into his body, and slowly, then faster and faster still, moved toward the ship until his feet touched the pitted surface, until only a long strand of his body wrapped around its vast circumference and held him fast.

  He looked then, looked for an open hatch, and saw it, ten meters up and to the right, and extending his cable, his fingertip, again, worked his way to it, grabbing handholds and crawling to the open hatch. Pulling his body in, grasping a handhold in the hatch, he wrapped a cable from another finger around the handhold, and then, when he felt firmly attached in the air lock, he brought the long cable back into his body, into his hide. With his feet he kicked on the inner hatch until someone closed the outer hatch, pumped air into the lock, and let him back in.

  Brana stood by the door, her face no longer opaqued, smiling. “Okay, you maggot,” she said. “Okay, I guess you’re worth wasting my time on training.” She held out a flask of some noxious, lime-green, glowing liquid.

  Krim opened his mask then, gasping in air, and took the flask, draining it in a gulp. The fluid refueled and rehydrated his body. He had to sit down; his muscles shook and his teeth clattered. With a flick of his wrist he cracked the remaining silver strand of his hide, popping it in the air before him, then withdrew it all back to his body, hands exposed again.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said. “Holy Moloch—it’s broiling in here.”

  He felt the hard steel of the deck, smelled the stench of the air and the sweat of the other pilots, and smiled.

  Chapter 6

  Brana handed Krim another flask of the lime-green liquid, and he sucked it down almost as fast as the first. “Why the hell did you space me?” he asked her. He glared at the other pilots. “Why the hell? It’s damn cold out there—you know that? You could have killed me. Killed me!” Krim shook his head. “Mother of Moloch—son of a bitch.”

  “You wouldn’t have died,” Brana said. “How long did it take you to opaque your face and hands?”

  “Ten seconds, I don’t know. You yanked my time heads-up when you yanked Sam off.”

  “You did it though, right? It didn’t just happen?” Nurel asked.

  He nodded, sipped the last of the liquid. “Yeah. I just didn’t think about it—just sort of, I don’t know, imagined it, and the shiny covering oozed down.”

  “It’s an autonomic reflex,” Brana said. “Some of the hide’s functions don’t need a slate to work. Slates are for high-end gimmickry. Your lungs cut off at the first taste of vacuum.”

  “Inside a second. My lips kind of puffed out from whatever gases I had in my mouth, and I gagged for a few seconds, and then quit breathing. Didn’t black out, though.”

  “Modified mammalian diving reflex. You make your own air, essentially. The outer limit’s an hour, by the way.”

  “Yeah. I wondered about that.”

  “You didn’t learn any of this in the prison?” Brana asked.

  Krim shrugged. “Admiral Thom slapped me in the vat and sent me on my way.” He thought of Prima back on Earth, and how she had functioned without her slate, too.

  Brana shook her head. “Kids get the hide at infancy, and about two they start learning to control it.”

  “Yeah, well, we Beats didn’t hear about this until we started getting released. So I would have lived for about an hour?”

  “At least. You go opaque inside a minute, but you sometimes lose fingers from frostbite if you wait for the reflex to kick in.”

  “So I would have drifted out there with frostbite until my air ran out?”

  “Nah,” Brana said. “We would have picked you up within a half hour. That spinneret trick was pretty clever. You know how most people get back to the ship?”

  Vuko chuckled. “Gas expulsion.”

  “Gas?”

  “Farts,” he explained. “You may have noticed you still fart in the hide. Same idea. You fart your way back to the ship. It takes some doing.”

  “So why’d you space me?” Krim asked again.

  “To see if you could solve a problem,” Brana said, “and to see if you had a brain in there. To see if you had a soul.”

  “I don’t follow you.” But a soul, he thought. Sure, every Beat had a soul.

  “Su
re you do. You have to understand your place in the universe to fly. You have to see yourself as separate, alone—distinct and an individual. Most people aren’t. You know those people. You saw ’em on Earth. So we throw you out in space to see if you know you’re an individual. If you solve your problem, you have an identity.” She shrugged. “That’s the theory anyway.”

  “But I’m a Beat.” He thought of prison, of resisting all those years. “Of course I’m an individual.”

  Brana shook her head. “Sometimes we find people try so hard not to conform they wind up conforming to a nonconformity. That’s not enough. We strip your identity”—she pointed to his bald head—“and then throw you out to find it. If you find it, you live.”

  “Hell of a way to find that out. You could have asked.” He smiled.

  “There’s something else. You have to want to come back.”

  “I don’t get it. Of course I wanted to come back. I didn’t want to die.”

  “Uh-uh,” she said. “What if the ship hadn’t been here? What if we’d sped away? What would you have done?”

  “Died, I suppose.” Krim thought for a second, considered a few factors. “Well, I could have done a few other things. Space isn’t entirely empty, you know. Photons on the wind, debris—I don’t know, if I had to . . .”

  “Some don’t come back. It’s a balance: the individual and society. You want to be your own entity. On the other hand, you want to be part of the community. Pilots need to have that. Who do we fight for?”

  Krim looked up, started to say something, then shook his head. “Self. My . . . friends.” My Beats, he thought. Humanity. He thought of the Terrorons, the threat from Beyond. “Yeah, humanity.” And to fly, he thought, too, because that was where you went if you wanted to fly.

  “So you come back to your friends. We space you so you’ll come back.”

  Krim grinned. “Well, I wanted to come back to pound your faces into the bulkhead. Still do.” He clenched and unclenched his right hand, trying to pump some of the warm blood back into it.

  Brana grinned back. “Good enough. Point is, you have to want to be part of your community, too. Some don’t come back.”

  “They just drift out there?” He tried to imagine it: all of space, alone, utterly void, the ship receding away, and some who wouldn’t come back.

  “We chase them, even—sometimes haul them in. Then they jump again. Something happens to them. They change. They figure out how to use the hide to change. Usually, they stretch their hide—as you did with the spinneret—and make great diaphanous wings, large enough to catch the solar wind. There must be enough of something—trace organic molecules—to give them sustenance. They don’t want to come back. After a while, we give up.” Brana gazed toward the air lock, as if she were looking at something far away, then shrugged. “Sometimes you see them, floating on the sun, or hunkered down on a rock, eating.

  “But you came back. You passed the test.”

  Krim stretched. “Yeah. Thanks. I don’t like dying, and floating in space doesn’t appeal to me. So?”

  “So now you become a pilot.”

  “Already am.”

  “You haven’t become our kind of pilot. Not a distance pilot.”

  As the Kirkpatrick moved out-system, and her long acceleration began to slow down, Brana began the training—or retraining, in the case of the others. Some of the pilots—Zeba and Vuko—had flown their three tours. For every three tours of six months each, they got a tour in-system, and at the end of each tour they got a month of R&R on one of the Jovian moons. Long-haul freighters like the Kirkpatrick brought back new versions of the fighters or new pilots to replace those who had retired, and the returning pilots trained on the way out on the new fighters; the senior pilots would in turn train the other pilots out at the Beyond on the new machines.

  Brana took them back to the hangar deck, where the new fighters clung to the bulkheads of the hold, six deep and bolted in to prevent shifting during acceleration and deceleration. One of the Kirkpatrick’s crew lowered a fighter down onto a cradle in the launch deck of the hangar.

  The fighter looked like a big egg, Krim thought. The smooth skin and aerodynamic shape surprised him. It flew in a vacuum, so why did it need to be so sleek? The bow had a blunt, almost flat end, while the leading edge of the stern tapered to a sharp point. At the midline a ring of quarter-meter-diameter globes circled the little ship. Krim ran his hand over the fighter, felt slight cracks in the covering, and noticed a series of hexagonal panels over the entire surface. A few sensor bulbs rose up from the exterior, and some pitch and yaw jets were at the bow and stern, but other than that, nothing marred the fighter’s skin.

  “This is the Mark Nine version of the Podhoretz-class fighter,” Brana said, “the same basic frame as all previous Poddies, but redesigned to deal with some of the complaints about previous versions.” Brana caught the eye of Zeba.

  “This one doesn’t blow up before mission completion, I hope?” Zeba asked.

  “That’s what they say.” Brana smiled.

  “She’s two meters thick at mission start,” she continued, “and as the mission progresses the Poddy blows successive layers of its six total layers. The command core is less than a meter long and a half-meter wide—enough mass at the end to pack a punch. At the end of the mission, that’s all that will be left.” Krim raised his hand. “Yeah, Krim?”

  “It’s a remote, right?” He remembered what Thom had told him when he got out of prison.

  “Yeah. You fly it virtually, with a display, and you connect to the controls through your hide and slate, only it’s flown through telly-op.”

  “Telly-op?” he asked.

  “Tele-operation. Remote flying. A drone. Nobody gets in there.” She patted the fighter’s skin. “You’ll be on a fighter base, in telly-op couches, connected by a tachyon beam at almost real time, with real feedback, and you fly this puppy into the ground.” Brana stared at him. “Yes, Krim?”

  “So where’s the joy in it?” Krim asked. Or would they understand?

  “What do you mean?” Brana asked.

  Vuko glanced at him, nodded. “I think I see. The physical sensation, the being alive as you move through space?”

  “Yeah. That.”

  “You get that, as sure as you would if you flew inside the fighter, only the connections are a bit, uh, longer, and you’re back on the ship.” He smiled, and put a hand on Krim’s shoulder. “And the ‘joy,’ my friend, as you put it, is that you don’t die in the process. You can return and fight again.”

  “And I don’t have to train another one of you idiots to flame out in glory,” Brana added.

  “But it will feel as if I’m out there—what, half a light year beyond the outer planet?” Krim asked.

  “You got it. Tachyon communication. You jack in and you feel as if you’re there in the Poddy, and when it’s done with its run, you break the connection, set it on auto-destruct, and jack out. Let me walk you through it.”

  Brana spoke a command into her slate, and the layers of the Poddy fighter shed away, opening out from the little ship like two flower petals. A silver tube remained at the middle, slightly longer than it was wide. “That’s the command core,” she said. “It’s really just servos and a big antenna, to pick up the signals. We make ’em crude, simple, and cheap.”

  She subvocalized another command, and the layers folded back in. “Each hexagonal section is a charge. It’s a kinetic killer, using the momentum of the initial launch to pack a punch. As you come up on a target, you throw a charge or a cluster of charges at the target. When all the layers have been shed, you ram the target with the command core. Like all previous Poddies, it doesn’t come back.” She looked at the pilots. “Any questions?”

  “Yeah,” said Vuko. “They fixed the problem with the propellant for the rounds?”

  “In theory. Like I said, Vuko, it’s not supposed to blow up.” She glanced at Krim. “Each charge or round has a propellant charge to send it ou
t and away from the fighter. In previous versions, sometimes the propellant would ignite neighboring charges and blow the ship up prematurely, before the pilot would have a chance to jack out. That’s not good, by the way.” Brana scanned their faces another time. “No more questions? Good. Let’s hit the couches and take one out. Krim, you’ll go first.”

  As Krim lay down on the telly-op couch, he thought back to the last time he had jacked in to a representational virtual reality and flown a fighter. He remembered the cold feel of the body waldo, the awkwardness of the goggles, and the clumsiness of the process. The Beats had flown that way to get a better representation of the ship’s perspective, to enhance the human senses—and to maintain a connection with the Jack, and the carrier ships, back in Ur. They could have flown remotes, he thought, flown the ship through tele-operation, flown them from the safety of Ur, maybe, but the idea had never been seriously considered. A pilot had to be with his ship; it was the only way. But now, he would fly the ship from the safety of a cruiser, or a base—from trillions of miles away, if he understood Brana correctly.

  The Beat body waldos had been clumsy, like big body stockings. Krim remembered when he had been fitted with his body waldo on the Jack decades ago. His trainer had told him the body waldo was essentially an input device, a way to transfer the motions of his body to the Jack fighter’s systems. Long ago, the trainer explained, people had connected to computers with keyboards, by actually typing words. Later, they duplicated the motions of the hand through a device called a mouse, and then a more sophisticated version called a data glove, or waldo. Finally, the Jack himself, it was said, came up with the body waldo, the skin-tight suit that sensed the motions of the body and—coupled with the goggles, and voice communication—gave the wearer a true connection to the computer, so human intelligence could interact with machine intelligence. Sophisticated as the Beat body waldos had been, Krim had always felt the fact of the connection. The illusion was only illusion, and every Beat fighter knew he never really quite connected with his fighter. The gap between human and machine, however slight, could still be felt.