No one noticed the rock.
And for a very good reason. The rock was nondescript, one of millions of chunks of rock and ice floating in the parabolic orbit of a long-dead short-period comet, looking just like any chunk of that deceased comet might. The rock was smaller than some, larger than others, but on a distribution scale there was nothing to distinguish it one way or another. On the almost unfathomably small chance that the rock was spotted by a planetary defense grid, a cursory examination would show the rock to be composed of silicates and some ores. Which is to say: a rock, not nearly large enough to cause any real damage.
This was an academic matter for the planet currently intersecting the path of the rock and several thousand of its brethren; it had no planetary defense grid. It did, however, have a gravity well, into which the rock fell, along with those many brethren. Together they would form a meteor shower, as so many chunks of ice and rock did each time the planet intersected the comet's orbit, once per planetary revolution. No intelligent creature stood on the surface of this bitterly cold planet, but if one had it could have looked up and seen the pretty streaks and smears of these little chunks of matter as they burned in the atmosphere, superheated by the friction of air against rock.
The vast majority of these newly minted meteors would vaporize in the atmosphere, their matter transmuted during their incandescent fall from a discrete and solid clump to a long smudge of microscopic particles. These would remain in the atmosphere indefinitely, until they became the nuclei of water droplets, and the sheer mass of the water dragged them to the ground as rain (or, more likely given the nature of the planet, snow).
This rock, however, had mass on its side. Chunks flew as the atmospheric pressure tore open hairline cracks in the rock's structure, the stress of plummeting through the thickening mat of gases exposing structural flaws and weaknesses and exploiting them violently. Fragments sheared off, sparkled brilliantly and momentarily and were consumed by the sky. And yet at the end of its journey through the atmosphere, enough remained to impact the planet surface, the flaming bolus smacking hard and fast onto a plain of rock that had been blown clean of ice and snow by high winds.
The impact vaporized the rock and a modest amount of the plain, excavating an equally modest crater. The rock plain, which extended for a significant distance on and below the planet surface, rang with the impact like a bell, harmonics pealing several octaves below the hearing range of most known intelligent species.
The ground trembled.
And in the distance, beneath the planet surface, someone finally noticed the rock.
"Quake," said Sharan. She didn't look up from her monitor.
Several moments later, another tremor followed.
"Quake," said Sharan.
Cainen looked over to his assistant from his own monitor. "Are you planning to do this every time?" he asked.
"I want to keep you informed of events as they happen," Sharan said.
"I appreciate the sentiment," Cainen said, "but you really don't have to mention it every single time. I am a scientist. I understand that when the ground moves we're experiencing a quake. Your first declaration was useful. By the fifth or sixth time, it gets monotonous."
Another rumble. "Quake," said Sharan. "That's number seven. Anyway, you're not a tectonicist. This is outside your many fields of expertise." Despite Sharan's typical deadpan delivery, the sarcasm was hard to miss.
If Cainen hadn't been sleeping with his assistant, he might have been irritated. As it was, he allowed himself to be tolerantly amused. "I don't recall you being a master tectonicist," he said.
"It's a hobby," said Sharan.
Cainen opened his mouth to respond and then the ground suddenly and violently launched itself up to meet him. It took a moment for Cainen to realize it wasn't the floor that jerked up to meet him, he'd been suddenly driven to the floor. He was now haphazardly sprawled on the tiles, along with about half the objects formerly positioned on his workstation. Cainen's work stool lay capsized a body length to the right, still teetering from the upheaval.
He looked over to Sharan, who was no longer looking at her monitor, in part because it lay shattered on the ground, near where Sharan herself was toppled.
"What was that?" Cainen asked.
"Quake?" Sharan suggested, somewhat hopefully, and then screamed as the lab bounced energetically around them again. Lighting and acoustic panels fell from the ceiling; both Cainen and Sharan struggled to crawl under workbenches. The world imploded around them for a while as they cowered under their tables.
Presently the shaking stopped. Cainen looked around in what flickering light still remained and saw the majority of his lab on the floor, including much of the ceiling and part of the walls. Usually the lab was filled with workers and Cainen's other assistants, but he and Sharan had come in late to finish up some sequencing. Most of his staff had been in the base barracks, probably asleep. Well, they were awake now.
A high, keening noise echoed down the hall leading to the lab.
"Do you hear that?" Sharan asked.
Cainen gave an affirmative head dip. "It's the siren for battle stations."
"We're under attack?" Sharan asked. "I thought this base was shielded."
"It is," Cainen said. "Or was. Supposed to be, anyway."
"Well, a fine job, I must say," Sharan said.
Now Cainen was irritated. "Nothing is perfect, Sharan," he said.
"Sorry," Sharan said, keying in on her boss's sudden irritation. Cainen grunted and then slid out from underneath his workbench and picked his way to a toppled-over storage locker. "Come help me with this," he said to Sharan. Between them they maneuvered the locker to where Cainen could shove open the locker door. Inside was a small projectile gun and a cartridge of projectiles.
"Where did you get this?" Sharan asked.
"This is a military base, Sharan," Cainen said. "They have weapons. I have two of these. One is here and one is back in the barracks. I thought they might be useful if something like this happened."
"We're not military," Sharan said.
"And I'm sure that will make a huge difference to whoever is attacking the base," Cainen said, and offered the gun to Sharan. "Take this."
"Don't give that to me," Sharan said. "I've never used one. You take it."
"Are you sure?" Cainen asked.
"I'm sure," Sharan said. "I'd just end up shooting myself in the leg."
"All right," Cainen said. He mounted the ammunition cartridge into the gun and slipped the gun into a coat pocket. "We should head to our barracks. Our people are there. If anything happens, we should be with them." Sharan mutely gave her assent. Her usual sarcastic persona was now entirely stripped away; she looked drained and frightened. Cainen gave her a quick squeeze.
"Come on, Sharan," he said. "We'll be all right. Let's just try to get to the barracks."
The two had begun to weave through the rubble in the hall when they heard the sublevel stairwell door slide open. Cainen peered through the dust and low light to make out two large forms coming through the door. Cainen began to backtrack toward the lab; Sharan, who had the same thought rather faster than her boss, had already made it to the lab doorway. The only other way off the floor was the elevator, which lay past the stairwell. They were trapped. Cainen patted his coat pocket as he retreated; he didn't have all that much more experience with a gun than Sharan and was not at all confident that he'd be able to hit even one target at a distance, much less two, each presumably a trained soldier.
"Administrator Cainen," said one of the forms.
"What?" Cainen said, in spite of himself, and immediately regretted giving himself away.
"Administrator Cainen," said the form again. "We've come to retrieve you. You're not safe here." The form walked forward into a splay of light and resolved itself into Aten Randt, one of the base commandants. Cainen finally recognized him by the clan design on his carapace and his insignia. Aten Randt was an Eneshan, and Cainen was vaguely ashamed to admit that even after all this time at the base, they all still looked alike to him.
"Who is attacking us?" Cainen asked. "How did they find the base?"
"We're not sure who is attacking us or why," Aten Randt said.
The clicking of his mouthpieces was translated into recognizable speech by a small device that hung from his neck. Aten Randt could understand Cainen without the device, but needed it to speak with him. "The bombardment came from orbit and we've only now targeted their landing craft." Aten Randt advanced on Cainen; Cainen tried not to flinch. Despite their time here and their relatively good working relationship, he was still nervous around the massive insectoid race. "Administrator Cainen, you cannot be found here. We need to get you away from here before the base is invaded."
"All right," Cainen said. He motioned Sharan forward to come with him.
"Not her," Aten Randt said. "Only you."
Cainen stopped. "She's my aide. I need her," he said.
The base shook from another bombardment. Cainen felt himself slam into a wall and collapsed to the ground. As he fell he noted that neither Aten Randt nor the other Eneshan soldier had moved so much as a fraction from their position.
"This is not an appropriate time to debate the issue, Administrator," Aten Randt said. The flat affect of the translation device gave the comment an unintentionally sardonic quality.
Cainen began to protest again, but Sharan gently took hold of his arm. "Cainen. He's right," she said. "You need to get out of here. It's bad enough any of us are here. But you being found here would be a very bad thing."
"I won't leave you here," Cainen said.
"Cainen," Sharan said, and pointed at Aten Randt, who was standing by, impassive. "He's one of the highest-ranking military officers here. We're under attack. They're not going to send someone like him on a trivial errand. And now is not the time to argue anyway. So go. I'll find my way back to the barracks. We've been here a while, you know. I remember how to get there."
Cainen stared at Sharan for a minute and then pointed past Aten Randt to the other Eneshan soldier. "You," he said. "Escort her back to her barracks."
"I need him with me, Administrator," Aten Randt said.
"You can handle me by yourself," Cainen said. "And if she doesn't get the escort from him, she'll get the escort from me."
Aten Randt covered his translation device and motioned the soldier over. They leaned in close and clacked at each other quietly—not that it mattered, as Cainen didn't understand Eneshan language. Then the two separated and the soldier went to stand by Sharan.
"He will take her to her barracks," Aten Randt said. "But there is to be no more argument from you. We have wasted too much time already. Come with me now, Administrator." He reached out, grabbed Cainen by the arm and pulled him toward the stairwell door. Cainen glanced back to see Sharan staring up fearfully at the immense Eneshan soldier. This final image of his assistant and lover disappeared as Aten Randt shoved him through the doorway.
"That hurt," Cainen said.
"Quiet," Aten Randt said, and pushed Cainen forward on the stairs. They began to climb, the Eneshan's surprisingly short and delicate lower appendages matching Cainen's own stride up the steps. "It took far too long to find you and too long to get you moving. Why were you not in your barracks?"
"We were finishing up some work," Cainen said. "It's not as if we have much else to do around here. Where are we going now?"
"Up," Aten Randt said. "There is an underground service railroad we need to get to."
Cainen stopped for a moment and looked back at Aten Randt, who despite being several steps below him was nearly at the same height. "That goes to hydroponics," Cainen said. Cainen, Sharan and other members of his staff would go to the base's immense underground hydroponics bay on occasion for the greenery; the planet's surface was not exactly inviting unless hypothermia was something you enjoyed. Hydroponics was the closest you could get to being outside.
"Hydroponics is in a natural cave," Aten Randt said, prodding Cainen back into motion. "An underground river lies beyond it, in a sealed area. It flows into an undergound lake. There is a small living module hidden there that will hold you."
"You never told me about this before," Cainen said.
"We did not expect the need to tell you," Aten Randt said.
"Am I swimming there?" Cainen asked.
"There is a small submersible," Aten Randt said. "It will be cramped, even for you. But it has already been programmed with the location of the module."
"And how long will I be staying there?"
"Let us hope no time at all," Aten Randt said. "Because the alternative will be a very long time indeed. Two more flights, Administrator."
The two stopped at the door two flights up, as Cainen attempted to catch his breath and Aten Randt clicked his mouthpieces into his communicator. The noise of battle several stories above them filtered down through the stone of the ground and the concrete of the walls. "They've reached the base but we're holding them on the surface for now," Aten Randt said to Cainen, lowering his communicator. "They haven't reached this level. We may still get you to safety. Follow close behind me, Administrator. Don't fall behind. Do you understand me?"
"I understand," said Cainen.
"Then let's go," Aten Randt said. He hoisted his rather impressive weapon, opened the door, and strode out into the hall. As Aten Randt began moving, Cainen saw the Eneshan's lower appendages extend as an additional leg articulation emerged from inside his carapace. It was a sprinting mechanism that gave Eneshans terrifying speed and agility in battle situations and reminded Cainen of any number of creepy-crawlies from his childhood. He repressed a shiver of revulsion and raced to keep up, stumbling more than once in the debris-strewn hallway, heading all too slowly for the small rail station on the other side of the level.
Cainen panted up as Aten Randt was examining the controls of the small rail engine, whose passenger compartment was open to the air. He had already disconnected the engine from the railcars behind it. "I told you to keep up," Aten Randt said.
"Some of us are old, and can't double the length of our legs," Cainen said, and pointed to the rail engine. "Do I get on that?"
"We should walk," Aten Randt said, and Cainen's legs began to cramp preemptively. "But I don't think you'll be able to keep pace the entire distance, and we're running out of time. We'll have to risk using this. Get on." Cainen gratefully climbed into the passenger area, which was roomy, built as it was for two Enesha. Aten Randt eased the little engine to its full speed—about twice an Eneshan's sprinting pace, which seemed uncomfortably fast in the cramped tunnel—and then turned around and raised his weapon again, scanning the tunnel behind them for targets.
"What happens to me if the base is overrun?" Cainen asked.
"You'll be safe in the living module," Aten Randt said.
"Yes, but if the base is overrun, who will come to get me?" Cainen asked. "I can't stay in that module forever, and I won't know how to get back out. No matter how well-prepared this module of yours is, it will eventually run out of supplies. Not to mention air."
"The module has the ability to extract dissolved oxygen from the water," Aten Randt said. "You won't suffocate."
"Wonderful. But that still leaves starvation," said Cainen.
"The lake has an outlet—" Aten Randt began, and that was as far as he got before the engine derailed with a sudden jerk. The roar of the collapsing tunnel drowned out all other noise; Cainen and Aten Randt found themselves briefly airborne as they were hurled from the passenger area of the rail engine into the sudden, dusty darkness.
Cainen found himself being prodded awake an indeterminate time later by Aten Randt. "Wake up, Administrator," Aten Randt said.
"I can't see anything," Cainen said. Aten Randt responded by shining a beam from the lamp attached to his weapon. "Thanks," Cainen said.
"Are you all right?" Aten Randt asked.
"I'm fine," Cainen said. "If at all possible I'd like to get through the rest of the day without hitting the ground again." Aten Randt clicked in assent and swept his beam away, to look at the rock falls that had them closed in. Cainen started to get up, slipping a bit on the rubble.
Aten Randt swung the light beam back to Cainen. "Stay there, Administrator," Aten Randt said. "You'll be safer." The light beam dipped to the rails. "Those may still have current in them." The light beam trailed off again, back to the caved-in walls of their new holding pen. Whether by accident or design, the bombardment that struck the rail line had securely closed in Cainen and Aten Randt; there were no openings in the wall of rubble. Cainen noted to himself that suffocation had once again become a real consideration. Aten Randt continued his examination of their new perimeter and occasionally tried his communicator, which seemed not to be working. Cainen settled in and tried not to breathe too deeply.
Some time later Aten Randt, who had given up his examination and cast them both into darkness while he rested, flicked his light back on, toward the wall of rubble closest to the base.
"What is it?" Cainen asked.
"Be quiet," Aten Randt said, and moved closer to the wall of rubble, as if trying to hear something. A few moments later, Cainen heard it too: noise that could have been voices, but not of anyone local, or friendly. Shortly thereafter came the blasting noises. Whoever was on the other side of the wall of rubble had decided they were coming in.
Aten Randt moved back from the wall of rubble at speed and came up on Cainen, weapon raised, blinding him with the light beam. "I'm sorry, Administrator," Aten Randt said, and that was when it dawned on Cainen that Aten Randt's orders to get him to safety probably only went so far. On instinct more than thought Cainen twisted away from the light beam; the bullet intended for his center mass instead went into his arm, spinning him around and slamming him into the ground. Cainen struggled to his knees and caught his shadow splayed before him as Aten Randt's light beam fell on his back.
"Wait," Cainen said, to his shadow. "Not in the back. I know what you have to do. Just not in the back. Please."
There was a moment, punctuated by the sounds of rubble blasting. "Turn around, Administrator," Aten Randt said.
Cainen turned, slowly, scraping his knees on the rubble and putting his hands in his coat pockets, as if they were manacles. Aten Randt sighted in; given the luxury of picking his shot he leveled his weapon at Cainen's brain.
"Are you ready, Administrator?" Aten Randt said.
"I am," Cainen said, and shot Aten Randt with the gun in his coat pocket, aiming up into the light beam.
Cainen's shot coincided with a blast from other side of the rubble wall. Aten Randt didn't appear to realize he had been shot until blood began flowing out of the wound in his carapace; the wound was barely visible to Cainen through the light. Cainen saw Aten Randt look down at the wound, stare at it for a moment, and then back at Cainen, confused. By this time Cainen had the gun out of his pocket. He fired at Aten Randt three more times, emptying his projectile cartridge into the Eneshan. Aten Randt leaned forward slightly on his front legs and then fell back an equal amount, the bulk of his large body settling on the ground with each of his legs splayed out at angles.
"Sorry," Cainen said, to the new corpse.
The space filled with dust and then light as the rubble wall was breached, and creatures bearing lights on their weapons flowed through. One of them spotted Cainen and barked; suddenly several light beams were trained on him. Cainen dropped his gun, raised his good arm in surrender and stepped away from Aten Randt's body. Shooting Aten Randt to keep himself alive wouldn't do him much good if these invaders decided to blow holes in him. Through the light beams one of the invaders came forward, jabbering something in its language, and Cainen finally got a look at the species he was dealing with.
His training as a xenobiologist kicked in as he ticked off the particulars of the species phenotype: Bilaterally symmetrical and bipedal, and as a consequence with differentiated limbs for arms and legs; their knees bent the wrong way. Roughly the same size and body plan, which was unsurprising as an inordinately large number of so-called intelligent species were bipedal, bilaterally symmetrical and roughly similarly sized in volume and mass. It was one of the things that made interspecies relationships in this part of the universe as contentious as they were. So many similar intelligent species, so little usable real estate for all their needs.
But now the differences emerge, thought Cainen, as the creature barked at him again: A broader torso and abdominal plain, and a generally awkward skeletal structure and musculature. Stump-like feet; club-like hands. Outwardly obvious sexual differentiation (this one in front of him was female, if he remembered correctly). Compromised sensory input thanks to only two small optical and aural inputs rather than the optical and aural bands that wrapped nearly entirely around Cainen's head. Fine keratinous fibers on the head rather than heat-radiating skin folds. Not for the first time, Cainen reflected that evolution didn't do this particular species any great favors, physically speaking.
It just made them aggressive, dangerous and damned hard to scrape off a planet surface. A problem, that.
The creature in front of Cainen jabbered at him again and pulled out a short, nasty-looking object. Cainen looked directly into the creature's optical inputs.
"Fucking humans," he said.
The creature swiped him with the object; Cainen felt a jolt, saw a multicolored dance of light and fell to the ground for the last time that day.
"Do you remember who I am?" the human at the table said, as Cainen was led to the room. His captors had provided him with a stool that accommodated his (to them) backwards-facing knees. The human spoke and the translation came out of a speaker on the table. The only other object on the table was a syringe, filled with a clear fluid.
"You are the soldier who knocked me unconscious," Cainen said. The speaker did not give a translation of his words, suggesting that the soldier had another translation device somewhere.
"That's right," the human said. "I am Lieutenant Jane Sagan." She motioned at the stool. "Please sit."
Cainen sat. "It was not necessary to knock me unconscious," he said. "I would have come willingly."
"We had our reasons for wanting you unconscious," Sagan said. She motioned to his injured arm, where Aten Randt's bullet had struck him. "How is your arm?" she asked.
"It feels fine," said Cainen.
"We weren't able to fix it entirely," Sagan said. "Our medical technology can rapidly heal most of our injuries, but you are Rraey, not human. Our technologies don't map precisely. But we did what we could."
"Thank you," Cainen said.
"I assume you were shot by the Eneshan we found you with," Sagan said. "The one you shot."
"Yes," Cainen said.
"I'm curious as to why you two engaged in a firefight," Sagan said.
"He was going to kill me, and I didn't want to die," said Cainen.
"This begs the question of why this Eneshan wanted you dead," Sagan said.
"I was his prisoner," Cainen said. "I suppose his orders were to kill me rather than to allow me to be taken alive."
"You were his prisoner," Sagan repeated. "And yet you had a weapon."
"I found it," Cainen said.
"Really," Sagan said. "That's poor security on the part of the Enesha. That's not like them."
"We all make mistakes," Cainen said.
"And all the other Rraey we found in the base?" Sagan asked. "They were prisoners as well?"
"They were," Cainen said, and felt a wave of concern for Sharan and the rest of his staff.
"How was it that you all came to be prisoners of the Eneshans?" Sagan asked.
"We were on a Rraey ship that was taking us to one of our colonies for a medical rotation," Cainen said. "The Eneshans attacked our ship. They boarded us and took my crew prisoner and sent us here."
"How long ago was this?" Sagan asked.
"Some time ago," Cainen said. "I'm not exactly sure. We're on Eneshan military time here, and I'm unfamiliar with their units. And then there's the local planetary rotational period, which is fast and makes things more confusing. And I am also unfamiliar with human time divisions, so I can't describe it accurately."
"Our intelligence does not have any record of the Eneshans attacking a Rraey vessel in the last year—that would be about two-thirds of a hked for you," Sagan said, using the Rraey term for a full orbit of the home world around its sun.
"Perhaps your intelligence is not as good as you think," Cainen said.
"It's possible," Sagan said. "However, given that the Eneshans and the Rraey are still technically in a state of war, an attacked ship should have been noted. Your two peoples have fought over less."
"I can't tell you any more about it than what I know," Cainen said. "We were taken off the ship and to the base. What happened or didn't happen outside of the base in all this time is not a subject I know much about."
"You were being held prisoner at the base," Sagan said.
"Yes," Cainen said.
"We've been all through the base, and there's only a small detention area," Sagan said. "There's nothing to suggest you were locked up."
Cainen gave the Rraey equivalent of a rueful chuckle. "If you've seen the base you've also no doubt seen the surface of the planet," he said. "If any of us tried to escape we'd freeze before we got very far. Not to mention that there's nowhere to go."
"How do you know that?" Sagan said.
"The Eneshans told us," Cainen said. "And none of my crew planned an excursion to test the proposition."
"So you know nothing else of the planet," Sagan said.
"Sometimes it's cold, other times it is colder," Cainen said. "That is the depth of my knowledge of the planet."
"You're a doctor," Sagan said.
"I'm not familiar with that term," Cainen said, and pointed at the speaker. "Your machine is not smart enough to give an equivalent in my language."
"You're a medical professional. You do medicine," Sagan said.
"I am," Cainen said. "I specialize in genetics. That is why my staff and I were on that ship. One of our colonies was experiencing a plague that was affecting gene sequencing and cell division. We were sent to investigate and hopefully find a cure. I'm sure if you've been through the base you've seen our equipment. Our captors were kind enough to give us space for a lab."
"Why would they do that?" Sagan asked.
"Perhaps they thought if we kept busy with our own projects we would be easier to handle," Cainen said. "If so, it worked, because as a rule we kept to ourselves and tried not to make any trouble."
"Except for when you were stealing weapons, that is," Sagan said.
"I had them for some time, so apparently I didn't arouse their suspicions," Cainen said.
"The weapon you used was designed for a Rraey," Sagan said. "An odd thing for an Eneshan military base."
"They must have taken it from our ship as they boarded," Cainen said. "I'm sure as you search the base you'll find a number of other Rraey-designed items."
"So, to recap," Sagan said. "You and your crew of medical personnel were taken by the Eneshans an indeterminate time ago and brought here, where you've been prisoners and out of communication with any of your people. You don't know where you are or what plans the Enesha have for you."
"That's right," Cainen said. "Other than that I suppose they didn't want anyone to know I was there once the base was invaded, because one of them tried to kill me."
"That's true," Sagan said. "You fared better than your crew, I'm afraid."
"I don't know what you mean," Cainen said.
"You're the only Rraey that we found alive," Sagan said. "The rest had been shot and killed by the Eneshans. Most of them were in what appeared to be barracks. We found another near what I imagine was your lab, since it had quite a bit of Rraey technology in it."
Cainen felt sick. "You're lying," he said.
"I'm afraid not," Sagan said.
"You humans killed them," Cainen said, angrily.
"The Eneshans tried to kill you," Sagan said. "Why wouldn't they kill the other members of your crew?"
"I don't believe you," Cainen said.
"I understand why you wouldn't," Sagan said. "It's still the truth."
Cainen sat there, grieving. Sagan gave him time.
"All right," Cainen said, eventually. "Tell me what you want from me."
"For starters, Administrator Cainen," Sagan said, "we'd like the truth."
It took a moment for Cainen to realize this was the first time the human had addressed him by his name. And title. "I've been telling you the truth," he said.
"Bullshit," Sagan said.
Cainen pointed to the speaker again. "I only got a partial translation of that," he said.
"You are Administrator Cainen Suen Su," Sagan said. "And while it's true enough that you have some medical training, your two primary areas of study are xenobiology and semi-organic neural net defense systems—two areas of study that I would imagine mesh together well."
Cainen said nothing. Sagan continued. "Now, Administrator Cainen, let me tell you a little of what we know. Fifteen months ago the Rraey and the Eneshans were fighting the same off-and-on war they'd been fighting for thirty years, a war that we encouraged since it kept the two of you out of our hair."
"Not entirely," Cainen said. "There was the Battle of Coral."
"Yes, there was," Sagan said. "I was there. I almost died."
"I lost a brother there," Cainen said. "My youngest. Perhaps you met him."
"Perhaps I did," Sagan said. "Fifteen months ago the Rraey and the Enesha were enemies. And then suddenly they were not, for no reason that our intelligence could figure out."
"We've already discussed the shortcomings of your intelligence," Cainen said. "Races stop warring all the time. After Coral, we and you stopped fighting."
"We stopped fighting because we beat you. You retreated and we rebuilt Coral," Sagan said. "Which is the point—there is a reason we stopped fighting, at least for now. You and the Enesha don't have a reason. That worries us.
"Three months ago the spy satellite we parked above this planet noticed that for an allegedly uninhabited world, it had suddenly begun to receive a lot of traffic, both Eneshan and Rraey. What makes this especially interesting to us is that this planet is claimed neither by the Enesha or the Rraey, but by the Obin. The Obin don't mix, Administrator, and they are strong enough that neither the Enesha nor the Rraey would think lightly about setting up shop in their territory.
"So we placed a more advanced spy satellite above the planet to look for signs of habitation. We came up with nothing. As a defense specialist, Administrator, would you like to hazard a guess as to why?"
"I would imagine the base was shielded," Cainen said.
"It was," Sagan said. "And as it happens, by the very sort of defense system you specialize in. We didn't know that at the time, of course, but we know it now."
"How did you find the base if it was shielded?" Cainen asked. "I am curious, in a professional sense."
"We dropped rocks," Sagan said.
"Excuse me?" Cainen asked.
"Rocks," Sagan said. "A month ago we salted the planet with several dozen seismic sensors, which were programmed to look for seismic signatures that suggested intelligently designed underground structures. Speaking from experience, secret bases are easier to shield when they're underground. We relied on the planet's natural seismic activity to narrow down areas to investigate. Then we dropped rocks in areas of interest. And then today we dropped several right before our attack, to get an exact sonic image of the base. Rocks are good because they look like naturally occurring meteors. They don't scare anyone. And no one shields against seismic imaging. Most races are too busy shielding against optical and high-energy electromagnetic scans to consider sound waves much of a danger. It's the fallacy of high technology; it ignores the efficiency of lower orders of technology. Like dropping rocks."
"Leave it to humans to bang rocks together," Cainen said.
Sagan shrugged. "We don't mind when the other guy brings a gun to a knife fight," she said. "It just makes it easier for us to cut out his heart. Or whatever it is that he uses to pump blood. Your overconfidence works for us. As you can see because you are here. But what we really want to know, Administrator, is why you are here. Eneshans and Rraey working together is puzzling enough, but Eneshans and Rraey and Obin? That's not just puzzling. That's interesting."
"I don't know anything about who owns this planet," Cainen said.
"And what's even more interesting is you, Administrator Cainen," Sagan said, ignoring Cainen's comment. "While you were sleeping we did a gene scan on you to tell us who you are, then we accessed ship's records to learn a little of your history. We know one of your primary areas of xenobiological interest is humans. You're probably the Rraey's leading authority on human genetics. And we know you've also got a particular interest in how human brains work."
"It's part of my overall interest in neural nets," Cainen said. "I'm not particularly interested in human brains, as you say. All brains are interesting in their way."
"If you say so," Sagan said. "But whatever it was you were doing down there, it was important enough that the Eneshans would rather see you and your crew dead than in our hands."
"I told you," Cainen said. "We were their prisoners."
Sagan rolled her eyes. "For a minute, let's pretend we're both not stupid, Administrator Cainen," she said.
Cainen moved forward, leaning closer to Sagan from across the table. "What kind of human are you?" he asked.
"What do you mean?" Sagan said.
"We know there are three kinds of human," Cainen said, and held up his fingers, so much longer and more articulated than human fingers, to count off the variations. "There are the unmodified humans, who are the ones who colonize planets. Those come in varying shapes and sizes and colors—good genetic diversity there. The second group is the largest part of your soldier caste. These also vary in size and shape, but to a far lesser extent, and they're all the same color: green. We know that these soldiers aren't in their original bodies—their consciousness is transferred from bodies of older members of your species to these stronger, healthier bodies. These bodies are extensively genetically altered, so much that they can't breed, either between themselves or with unmodified humans. But they're still recognizably human, particularly the brain matter.
"But the third group," Cainen said, and leaned back. "We hear stories, Lieutenant Sagan."
"What do you hear?" Sagan said.
"That they are created from the dead," Cainen said. "That the human germ plasm of the dead is mixed and remixed with the genetics of other species to see what will arise. That some of them don't even resemble humans, as they recognize themselves. That they are born as adults, with skills and ability, but no memory. And not only no memory. No self. No morality. No restraint. No—" He paused, as if looking for the right word. "No humanity," he said, finally. "As you would put it. Child warriors, in grown bodies. Abominations. Monsters. Tools your Colonial Union uses for the missions they can not or will not offer to soldiers who have life experience and a moral self, or who might fear for their soul in this world or the next."
"A scientist concerned about souls," Sagan said. "That's not very pragmatic."
"I am a scientist, but I am also Rraey," Cainen said. "I know I have a soul, and I tend to it. Do you have a soul, Lieutenant Sagan?"
"Not that I know of, Administrator Cainen," Sagan said. "They are hard to quantify."
"So you are the third kind of human," Cainen said.
"I am," Sagan said.
"Built from the flesh of the dead," Cainen said.
"From her genes," Sagan said. "Not her flesh."
"Genes build the flesh, Lieutenant. Genes dream the flesh, wherein the soul resides," Cainen said.
"Now you're a poet," Sagan said.
"I'm quoting," Cainen said. "One of our philosophers. Who was also a scientist. You wouldn't know her. May I ask how old you are?"
"I'm seven, almost eight," Sagan said. "About four and a half of your hked."
"So young," Cainen said. "Rraey of your age have barely started their educations. I'm more than ten times your age, Lieutenant."
"And yet, here we both are," Sagan said.
"Here we are," Cainen agreed. "I wish we had met under other circumstances, Lieutenant. I would very much like to study you."
"I don't know how to respond to that," Sagan said. " 'Thank you' doesn't seem appropriate, considering what being studied by you would probably mean."
"You could be kept alive," Cainen said.
"Oh, joy," Sagan said. "But you might get your wish, after a fashion. You must know by now that you are a prisoner—for real this time, and you will be for the rest of your life."
"I figured that out when you started telling me things I could report back to my government," Cainen said. "Like the rock trick. Although I assumed you were going to kill me."
"We humans are a pragmatic people, Administrator Cainen," Sagan said. "You have knowledge we can use, and if you were willing to be cooperative, there's no reason you couldn't continue your study of human genetics and brains. Just for us instead of for the Rraey."
"All I would have to do is betray my people," Cainen said.
"There is that," Sagan allowed.
"I think I would rather die first," Cainen said.
"With all due respect, Administrator, if you truly believed that, you probably wouldn't have shot that Eneshan who was trying to kill you earlier today," Sagan said. "I think you want to live."
"You may be right," Cainen said. "But whether you are right or not, child, I am done talking to you now. I've told you everything I'm going to tell you of my own free will."
Sagan smiled at Cainen. "Administrator, do you know what humans and Rraey have in common?"
"We have a number of things in common," Cainen said. "Pick one."
"Genetics," Sagan said. "I don't need to tell you that human genetic sequencing and Rraey genetic sequencing are substantially different in the details. But on the macro level we share certain similarities, including the fact that we receive one set of genes from one parent and the other from the other. Two-parent sexual reproduction."
"Standard sexual reproduction among sexually reproducing species," Cainen said. "Some species need three or even four parents, but not many. It's too inefficient."
"No doubt," Sagan said. "Administrator, have you heard of Fronig's Syndrome?"
"It's a rare genetic disease among the Rraey," Cainen said. "Very rare."
"From what I understand of it, the disease is caused because of deficiencies in two unrelated gene sets," Sagan said. "One gene set regulates the development of nerve cells, and specifically of an electrically-insulating sheath around them. The second gene set regulates the organ that produces the Rraey analog for what humans call lymph. It does some of the same things, and does other things differently. In humans lymph is somewhat electrically conductive, but in the Rraey this liquid is electrically insulating. From what we know of Rraey physiology this electrically insulating quality of your lymph usually serves no particular benefit or detriment, just as the electrically conductive nature of human lymph is neither a plus or minus—it's just there."
"Yes," Cainen said.
"But for Rraey who are unlucky enough to have two broken nerve development genes, this electrical insulation is beneficial," Sagan said. "This fluid bathes the interstitial area surrounding Rraey cells, including nerve cells. This keeps the nerve's electrical signals from going astray. What's interesting about Rraey lymph is that its composition is controlled hormonally, and that a slight change in the hormonal signal will change it from electrically insulating to electrically conductive. Again, for most Rraey, this is neither here nor there. But for those who code for exposed nerve cells—"
"—it causes seizures and convulsions and then death as their nerve signals leak out into their bodies," Cainen said. "Its fatality is why it's so rare. Individuals who code for electrically-conductive lymph and exposed nerves die during gestation, usually after the cells first begin to differentiate and the syndrome manifests."
"But there's also adult onset Fronig's," Sagan said. "The genes code to change the hormonal signal later, in early adulthood. Which is late enough for reproduction to happen and the gene to be passed on. But it also takes two faulty genes to be expressed."
"Yes, of course," Cainen said. "That's another reason why Fronig's is so rare; it's not often that an individual will receive two sets of faulty nerve genes and two sets of genes that cause later-life hormonal changes in their lymph organ. Tell me where this is going."
"Administrator, the genetic sample from you when you came on board shows that you code for faulty nerves," Sagan said.
"But I don't code for hormonal changes," Cainen said. "Otherwise I'd be dead already. Fronig's expresses in early adulthood."
"This is true," Sagan said. "But one can also induce hormonal changes by killing off certain cell bundles within the Rraey lymph organ. Kill off enough of the bundles that generate the correct hormone, and you can still produce lymph. It will simply have different properties. Fatal properties, in your case. One can do it chemically."
Cainen's attention was drawn to the syringe that had been lying on the table through the entire conversation. "And that's the chemical that can do it, I suppose," Cainen said.
"That's the antidote," Sagan said.
Jane Sagan found Administrator Cainen Suen Su admirable in his way; he didn't crack easily. He suffered through several hours as his lymphatic organ gradually replaced the lymph in his body with the new, altered fluid, twitching and seizing as concentrations of the electrically-conductive lymph triggered nerve misfires randomly through his body, and the overall conductivity of his entire system heightened with each passing minute. If he hadn't cracked when he did, it was very likely that he wouldn't have been able to tell them that he wanted to talk.
But crack he did, and begged for the antidote. In the end, he wanted to live. Sagan administered the antidote herself (not really an antidote, as those dead cell bundles were dead forever; he'd have to receive daily shots of the stuff for the rest of his life). As the antidote coursed through Cainen's body, Sagan learned of a brewing war against humanity, and a blueprint for the subjugation and eradication of her entire species. A genocide planned in great detail, based on the heretofore unheard of cooperation of three races.
And one human.
Colonel James Robbins gazed down at the rotted, exhumed body on the morgue slab for a minute, taking in the decay of the body from more than one year under the dirt. He noted the ruined skull, fatally misshaped by the shotgun blast that carried away its top third, along with the life of its owner, the man who might have betrayed humanity to three alien races. Then he looked up at Captain Winters, Phoenix Station's medical examiner.
"Tell me this is Dr. Boutin's body, " Colonel Robbins said. "Well, it is," said Winters. "And yet it's not."
"You know, Ted, that's exactly the sort of qualified statement that's going to get my ass reamed when I report to General Matt-son," Colonel Robbins said. "I don't suppose you'd like to be more forthcoming."
"Sorry, Jim," Captain Winters said, and pointed to the corpse on the table. "Genetically speaking, that's your man," Winters said. "Dr. Boutin was a colonist, which meant he's never been swapped into a military body. This means that his body has all his original DNA. I did the standard genetics testing. This body has Boutin's DNA—and just for fun I did a mitochondrial RNA test as well. That matched too."
"So what's the problem?" Robbins asked.
"The problem is with bone growth," Winters said. "In the real universe, human bone growth fluctuates based on environmental factors, like nutrition or exercise. If you spend time on a high-gravity world and then move to one with lower gravity, that's going to influence how your bones grow. If you break a bone, that's going to show up too. Your entire life history shows up in bone development."
Winters reached over and picked up part of the corpse's left leg, which had been sheared from the rest of the body, and pointed to the cross-section of the femur visible there. "This body's bone development is exceptionally regular. There's no record of environmental or accidental events on its development, just a pattern of bone growth consistent with excellent nutrition and low stress."
"Boutin was from Phoenix," Robbins said. "It's been colonized for two hundred years. It's not like he grew up on a backwater colony where they're struggling to feed and protect themselves."
"Maybe not, but it still doesn't match up," Winters said. "You can live in the most civilized place in human space and still fall down a flight of stairs or break a bone playing sports. It's possible that you can get through life without even a greenstick fracture, but do you know anyone who's done it?" Robbins shook his head. "This guy did. But actually he didn't, since his medical records show he broke his leg, this leg"—Winters shook the chunk of leg—"when he was sixteen. Skiing accident. Collided with a boulder and broke his femur and his tibia. The record of that isn't here."
"I hear medical technology is good these days," Robbins said.
"It is excellent, thank you very much," Winters said. "But it's not magic. You don't snap a femur and not leave a mark. And even getting through life without breaking a bone doesn't explain the consistently regular bone development. The only way you're going to get this sort of bone development is if it develops without environmental stress of any kind. Boutin would have had to live his life in a box."
"Or a cloning creche," Robbins said.
"Or a cloning creche," Winters agreed. "The other possible explanation is that your friend here had his leg amputated at some point and had a new one grown, but I checked his records; that didn't happen. But just to be sure I took bone samples from his ribs, his pelvis, his arm and his skull—the undamaged portion, anyway. All these samples showed unnaturally consistent, regular bone growth. You've got yourself a cloned body here, Jim."
"Then Charles Boutin is still alive," Robbins said.
"That I don't know," Winters said. "But this isn't him. The only good news here is that by all physical indications, this clone was vatted right up until just before it died. It's extremely unlikely it |was ever awake, or even if it was that it was conscious and aware, [imagine waking up and finding your first and last view of the I world was a shotgun barrel. That'd be a hell of a life."
"So if Boutin's still alive, he's also a murderer," Robbins said. Winters shrugged and set down the leg. "You tell me, Jim," he aid. "The Colonial Defense Forces make bodies all time—we create modified superbodies to give to our new recruits, and then when their service is through we give them new normal bodies cloned from their original DNA. Do those bodies really have rights before we put consciousness into them? Each time we transfer their consciousness, we leave a body behind—a body that used to have a mind. Do those bodies have rights? If they do, we're all in trouble, because we dispose of them pretty damn quick. Do you know what we do with all those used bodies, Jim?"
"I don't," Robbins admitted.
"We mulch them," Winters said. "There are too many to bury. So we grind them up, sterilize the remains and turn them into plant fertilizer. Then we send the fertilizer to new colonies. Helps to acclimate the soil to the crops humans plant. You could say our new colonies live off the bodies of the dead. Only they're not really the bodies of the dead. They're just the cast-off bodies of the living. The only time we actually bury a body is when a mind dies inside of it."
"Think about taking some time off, Ted," Robbins said. "Your job is making you morbid."
"It's not the job that makes me morbid," Winters said, and pointed to the remains of not-Charles Boutin. "What do you want me to do with this?"
"I want you to have it reinterred," Robbins said.
"But it's not Charles Boutin," Winters said.
"No, it's not," Robbins agreed. "But if Charles Boutin is still alive, I don't want him to know we know that." He looked back at the body on the slab. "And whether this body knew what was happening to it or not, it deserved better than what it got. A burial is the least we can do."
"Goddamn Charles Boutin," General Greg Mattson said, and kicked up his feet on his desk.
Colonel Robbins stood at the other side of the desk and said nothing. General Mattson disconcerted him, as he always had. Mattson had been the head of the Colonial Defense Forces Military Research arm for almost thirty years, but like all CDF military personnel had a military issued body that resisted aging; he looked—as did all CDF personnel—no more than twenty-five years old. Colonel Robbins was of the opinion that as people advanced in rank through the CDF they should be made to appear to age slightly; a general who looked twenty-five years old lacked a certain gravitas.
Robbins briefly imagined Mattson appearing to be his true age, which had to be somewhere in the vicinity of 125 years old; his mind's eye saw something like a scrotal wrinkle in a uniform. This would be amusing to Robbins, save for the fact that at ninety years of age himself, he wouldn't look all that much better.
Then there was the matter of the other general in the room, who if his body showed his real age would almost certainly look younger than he already did. Special Forces disconcerted Robbins even more than regular CDF. There was something not quite right about people being three years old, fully grown and totally lethal.
Not that this general was three. He was probably a teenager.
"So our Rraey friend told us the truth," General Szilard said, from his own seat in front of the desk. "Your former head of consciousness research is still alive."
"Blowing the head off his own clone, now, that was a nice touch," General Mattson said, sarcasm dripping out his voice. "Those poor bastards were picking brains out of the lab equipment for a week afterward." He glanced up at Robbins. "Do we know how he did that? Grow a clone? That's something you shouldn't be able to do without someone noticing. He couldn't have just whipped one up in the closet."
"As near as we can tell, he introduced code into the clone vat monitoring software," Robbins said. "Made it look like one of the clone vats was out of service to the monitors. It was taken out to be serviced; Boutin had it decommissioned, and then put it in his private lab storage area and ran it off its own server and power supply. The server wasn't hooked into the system and the vat was decommissioned, and only Boutin had access to the storage area."
"So he did whip one up in the closet," Mattson said. "That little fucker."
"You must have had access to the storage area after he was presumed dead," Szilard said. "Are you saying that no one thought it odd he had a clone vat in storage?"
Robbins opened his mouth but Mattson answered. "If he was a good research head—and he was—he'd have a lot of decommissioned and surplus equipment in storage, in order to tinker and optimize it without interfering with equipment that we were actually using. And I would assume that when we got to the vat it was drained and sterilized and disconnected from the server and the power supply."
"That's right," Robbins said. "It wasn't until we got your report that we put two and two together, General Szilard."
"I'm glad the information was useful," Szilard said. "I wish you had put two and two together earlier. I find the idea that Military Research had a traitor in its ranks—and as the head of an extremely sensitive division—appalling. You should have known."
Robbins said nothing to this; to the extent that Special Forces had any reputation at all beyond its military prowess, it was that its members were profoundly lacking in tact and patience. Being three-year-old killing machines didn't leave much time for social graces.
"What was to know?" Mattson said. "Boutin never gave any indication he was turning traitor. One day he's doing his work, the next we find him a suicide in his lab, or so we thought. No note. No anything that suggests he had anything on his mind but his work."
"You told me earlier that Boutin hated you," Szilard said to Mattson.
"Boutin did hate me, and for good reason," Mattson said. "And the feeling was mutual. But just because a man thinks his superior officer is a son of a bitch doesn't mean he's a traitor to his species." Mattson pointed to Robbins. "The colonel here doesn't particularly like me, either, and he's my adjutant. But he's not going to go running to the Rraey or the Enesha with top-secret information."
Szilard looked over at Robbins. "Is it true?" he said.
"Which part, sir?" Robbins said.
"That you don't like General Mattson," Szilard said.
"He can take some getting used to, sir," Robbins said.
"By which he means I'm an asshole," Mattson said, with a chuckle. "And that's fine. I'm not here to win popularity contests. I'm here to deliver weapons and technology. But whatever was going through Boutin's head, I don't think I had much to do with it."
"So what was it then?" Szilard said.
"You'd know better than we would, Szi," Mattson said. "You're the one with the pet Rraey scientist that you've taught to squeal."
"Administrator Cainen never met Boutin personally, or so he says," Szilard said. "He doesn't know anything about his motivations, just that Boutin gave the Rraey information on the most recent BrainPal hardware. That's part of what Administrator Cainen's group was working on—trying to integrate BrainPal technology with Rraey brains."
"Just what we need," Mattson said. "Rraey with supercomputers in their heads."
"He didn't seem to be very successful with the integration," Robbins said, and looked over to Szilard. "At least not from the data your people recovered from his lab. Rraey brain structure is too different."
"Small favors," Mattson said. "Szi, you have to have gotten something else out of your guy."
"Outside of his specific work and situation, Administrator Cainen hasn't been terribly useful," Szilard said. "And the few Eneshans we captured alive were resistant to conversation, to use a euphemism. We know the Rraey, the Enesha and the Obin are allied to attack us. But we don't know why, how or when, or what Boutin brings into the equation. We need your people to figure that one out, Mattson."
Mattson nodded to Robbins. "Where are we with that?" he asked.
"Boutin was in charge of a lot of sensitive information," Robbins said, pitching his answer to Szilard. "His groups handled consciousness transfer, BrainPal development and body-generation techniques. Any of that could be useful to an enemy, either to help it develop its own technology or to find weaknesses in ours. Boutin himself was probably the leading expert on getting minds out of one body and into another. But there's a limit to how much of that information he could carry. Boutin was a civilian scientist. He didn't have a BrainPal. His clone had all his registered brain prostheses on him, and he's not likely to have gotten a spare. Prostheses are tightly monitored and he'd have to spend several weeks training it. We don't have any network record of Boutin using anything but his registered prosthesis."
"We're talking about a man who got a cloning vat past you," Szilard said.
"It's not impossible that he walked out of the lab with a store of information," Robbins said. "But it's very unlikely. It's more likely he left only with the knowledge in his head."
"And his motivations," Szilard said. "Not knowing those is the most dangerous thing for us."
"I'm more worried about what he knows," Mattson said. "Even with just what's naturally in his head, that's still too much. I have teams pulled off their own projects to work on updating BrainPal security. Whatever Boutin does know we're going to make obsolete. And Robbins here is in charge of combing through the data Boutin left behind. If there's anything in there, we'll find it."
"I'll be meeting with Boutin's former tech after we're done here," Robbins said. "Lieutenant Harry Wilson. He says he has something I might find interesting."
"Don't let us hold you up," Mattson said. "You're dismissed."
"Thank you, sir," Robbins said. "Before I go, I'd like to know what sort of time constraint we're working under here. We found out about Boutin by attacking that base. No doubt the Eneshans know we know about their plans. I'd like to know how much time we think we have before a retaliation."
"You have some time, Colonel," Szilard said. "Nobody knows we attacked that base."
"How can they not know?" Robbins said. "With all due respect to Special Forces, General, it's difficult to hide that sort of assault. "
"The Eneshans know they've lost contact with the base," Szilard said. "When they investigate, what they're going to find is that a rocky chunk of comet the size of a football field hit the planet about ten klicks from the base, obliterating it and everything else in the immediate area. They can run all the tests they want; nothing will show anything but evidence of a natural catastrophe. Because that's what it was. It just had a little help."
"This is very pretty," Colonel Robbins said, gesturing at what looked like a miniature light show on Lieutenant Harry Wilson's holographic display. "But I don't know what you're showing me here."
"It's Charlie Boutin's soul," Wilson said.
Robbins pulled himself away from the display and looked up at Wilson. "I beg your pardon," he said.
Wilson nodded toward the display. "It's Charlie's soul," he repeated. "Or more accurately, it's a holographic representation of the dynamic electrical system that embodies the consciousness of Charles Boutin. Or a copy of it, anyway. I suppose if you want to be philosophical about it, you could argue whether this is Charlie's mind or his soul. But if what you say about Charlie is true, he's probably still got his wits about him, but I'd say he's lost his soul. And here it is."
"I was told this sort of thing is impossible," Robbins said. "Without the brain the pattern collapses. It's why we transfer consciousness the way we do, live body to live body."
"Well, I don't know that it's why we transfer consciousness the way we do," Wilson said, "since I think people would be a lot more resistant to letting a CDF technician suck their mind out of their skull if they knew it was just going to sit in computerized storage. Would you do it?"
"Christ, no," Robbins said. "I nearly wet myself as it was when they transferred me over."
"My point exactly," Wilson said. "Nevertheless, you're right. Up until this"—he motioned at the hologram—"we couldn't do it even if we wanted to."
"So how did Boutin do it?" Robbins asked.
"He cheated, of course," Wilson said. "Before a year and a half ago, Charlie and everyone else had to work with human-derived technology, or whatever technology we could borrow or steal from other races. And most other races in our part of space have more or less the same level of technology as we do, because weaker races get kicked off their land and die off or get killed. But there's one species who is light-years ahead of everyone else in the neighborhood."
"The Consu," Robbins said, and pictured one in his mind: large, crab-like and almost unknowably advanced.
"Right," said Wilson. "The Consu gave the Rraey some of their technology when the Rraey attacked our colony on Coral a couple years back, and we stole it from them when we counterattacked. I was part of the team assigned to reverse-engineer the Consu tech, and I can assure you that most of it we still don't understand. But one of the bits we could get our brains around we gave to Charlie to work with, to improve the consciousness transfer process. That's how I came to work with him; I taught him how to use this stuff. And as you can see, he's a quick study. Of course, it's easy to get things done when your tools improve. With this we went from banging rocks together to using a blowtorch."
"You didn't know anything about this," Robbins said.
"No," Wilson said. "I've seen something like this—Charlie used the Consu technology to refine the consciousness transfer process we have. We can create a buffer now that we couldn't before, which makes the transfer a lot less susceptible to failure on either end of the transfer. But he kept this trick to himself. I only found it after you told me to go looking through his personal work. Which was a lucky thing, since the machine I found this on was slated to be wiped and transferred to the CDF observatory. They want to see how well Consu tech models the inside of a star."
Robbins motioned to the hologram. "I think this is a little more important."
Wilson shrugged. "It's actually not very useful in a general sense."
"You're joking," Robbins said. "We can store consciousness."
"Sure, and maybe that is useful. But you can't do much with it," Wilson said. "How much do you know about the details of consciousness transfer?"
"Some," Robbins said. "I'm not an expert. I was made the general's adjutant for my organizational skills, not for any science background."
"Okay, look," Wilson said. "You noted it yourself—without the brain, the pattern of consciousness usually collapses. That's because the consciousness is wholly dependent on the physical structure of the brain. And not just any brain; it's dependent on the brain in which it arose. Every pattern of consciousness is like a fingerprint. It's specific to that person and it's specific right down to the genes."
Wilson pointed to Robbins. "Look at your body, Colonel. It's been deeply modified on a genetic level—you've got green skin and improved musculature and artificial blood that has several times the oxygen capacity of actual blood. You're a hybrid of your own personal genetics and genes engineered to extend your capabilities. So on a genetic level, you're not really you anymore—except for your brain. Your brain is entirely human, and entirely based on your genes. Because if it wasn't, your consciousness couldn't transfer."
"Why?" Robbins asked.
Wilson grinned. "I wish I could tell you. I'm passing along what Charlie and his lab crew told me. I'm just the electron pusher here. But I do know that it means that this"—Wilson pointed to the hologram—"does you no good as it is because it needs a brain, and it needs Charlie's brain, in order to tell you what it knows. And Charlie's brain has gone missing along with the rest of him."
"If this is no damn use to us," Robbins said, "then I'd like to know why you had me come down here."
"I said it's not very useful in a general sense," Wilson said. "But in a very specific sense, it could be quite useful."
"Lieutenant Wilson," Robbins said. "Please get to the point."
"Consciousness isn't just a sense of identity. It's also knowledge and emotion and mental state," Wilson said, and motioned back to the hologram. "This thing has the capacity to know and feel everything Charlie knew and felt right up to the moment he made this copy. I figure if you want to know what Charlie's up to and why, this is where you want to start."
"You just said we needed Boutin's brain to access the consciousness," Robbins said. "It's not available to us."
"But his genes are," Wilson said. "Charlie created a clone to serve his purposes, Colonel. I suggest you create one to serve yours."
"Clone Charles Boutin," General Mattson said, and snorted. "As if one wasn't bad enough."
Mattson, Robbins and Szilard sat in the general's mess of Phoenix Station. Mattson and Szilard were having a meal; Robbins was not. Technically speaking the general's mess was open to all officers; as a practical matter no one under the rank of general ever ate there, and lesser officers entered the mess only on the invitation of a general and rarely took more than a glass of water. Robbins wondered how this ridiculous protocol ever got started. He was hungry.
The general's mess sat at the terminal of Phoenix Station's rotational axis and was surrounded by a single shaped, transparent crystal that comprised its walls and ceiling. It gave an astounding view of the planet Phoenix, which circled lazily overhead, taking up nearly the entire sky, a perfect blue-and-white jewel whose resemblance to Earth never failed to give Robbins a sharp jab in the homesickness centers of the brain. Leaving Earth was easy when one was seventy-five and the option was death of old age within a few increasingly short years. But once you left you could never go back; the longer Robbins lived in the hostile universe the human colonies found themselves in, the more fondly he remembered the flabby but relatively carefree days of his fifties, sixties and early seventies. Ignorance was bliss, or at the very least was more restful.
Too late now, Robbins thought, and directed his attention back to Mattson and Szilard. "Lieutenant Wilson seems to think it's the best chance we have of understanding what was going on in Boutin's head. In any event, it's better than what we have now, which is nothing."
"How does Lieutenant Wilson know that it's Boutin's brainwave he's got in his machine? That's what I want to know," Mattson said. "Boutin could have sampled someone else's consciousness. Shit, it could be his cat, for all we know."
"The pattern is consistent with human consciousness," Robbins said. "We can tell that much because we transfer hundreds of consciousnesses every day. It's not a cat."
"It was a joke, Robbins," Mattson said. "But it still might not be Boutin."
"It's possible it could be someone else, but it doesn't seem likely," Robbins said. "No one else in Boutin's lab knew he was working on this. There was no opportunity to sample anyone else's consciousness. It's not something you could take from someone without them noticing."
"Do we even know how to transfer it?" General Szilard asked. "Your Lieutenant Wilson said it was on a machine adapted from Consu technology. Even if we want to use it, do we know how to do it?"
"No," Robbins said. "Not yet. Wilson seems confident he can figure it out, but he's not an expert in consciousness transference."
"I am," Mattson said. "Or at least I've been in charge of the people who are long enough to know about it. The process involves physical brains as well as the consciousness that's carried over. For this we're down one brain. Not to mention there are ethical issues."
"Ethical issues?" Robbins said. He failed to keep the surprise out of his voice.
"Yes, Colonel, ethical issues," Mattson said, irritably. "Believe it or not."
"I didn't mean to question your ethics, General," Robbins said.
Mattson waved it away. "Forget it. The point stands. The Colonial Union has a long-standing law against cloning non-CDF personnel, alive or dead, but especially alive. The only time we clone humans is to stuff people back into unmodified bodies after their term of service is done. Boutin is a civilian, and a colonist. Even if we wanted to, we can't legally clone him."
"Boutin made a clone," Robbins said.
"If it's all the same we won't let the morals of a traitor guide us in this, Colonel," Mattson said, irritated again.
"You could get a research dispensation from Colonial law," Robbins said. "It's been done before. You've done it before."
"Not for something like this," Mattson said. "We get dispensations when we test weapons systems on uninhabited planets. Start messing with clones and some of the more reactionary types get a twitch in their skulls. Something like this wouldn't even get out of committee."
"Boutin's a key to whatever the Rraey and their allies have planned," Robbins said. "This might be a time to take a page from the U.S. Marines and beg forgiveness rather than ask permission."
"I'd admire your willingness to hoist the Jolly Roger, Colonel," Mattson said. "But you're not the one they'll shoot. Or not the only one."
Szilard, who had been chewing a steak, swallowed and set down his utensils. "We'll do it," he said.
"Pardon?" Mattson said.
"Give the consciousness pattern to Special Forces, General," Szilard said. "And give us Boutin's genes. We'll use them to craft a Special Forces soldier. We use more than one set of genes to make every soldier; technically, it won't be a clone. And if the consciousness doesn't take, it will make no difference. It will just be another Special Forces soldier. There's nothing to lose."
"Except that if the consciousness does take, we'll have a Special Forces soldier with treason on his mind," Mattson said. "That doesn't sound appealing."
"We can prepare for that," Szilard said, and picked up his utensils again.
"You'll be using genes from a live person, and a colonist," Rob-bins said. "My understanding was that Special Forces only took the genes from CDF volunteers who die before they can serve. That's why they're called 'the Ghost Brigades.'"
Szilard looked up sharply at Robbins. "I don't much like that name," Szilard said. "The genes of dead CDF volunteers are one component. And typically we use the volunteer genes as the template. But Special Forces has a wider latitude in the genetic material we're able to use to build our soldiers. Given our mission for the CDF, it's almost a requirement. Anyway, Boutin is legally dead—we've got a dead body with his genes in them. And we don't know that he is alive. Does he have any survivors?"
"No," Mattson said. "He had a wife and kid, but they died before he did. No other family."
"Then there's no problem," Szilard said. "After you're dead, your genes aren't yours anymore. We've used expired colonist genes before. I don't see why we can't do it again."
"I don't remember hearing this about how you build your people, Szi," Mattson said.
"We're quiet about what we do, General," Szilard said. "You know that." He cut a piece of steak and speared it into his mouth. Robbins' stomach grumbled. Mattson grunted, leaned back in his chair, and looked up at Phoenix, imperceptibly turning in the sky. Robbins followed his gaze and felt another pang of homesickness.
Presently Mattson turned his attention back to Szilard. "Boutin is one of my people," he said. "For better or worse. I can't pass the responsibility for this to you, Szi."
"Fine," Szilard said, and nodded to Robbins. "Then let me borrow Robbins. He can act as your liaison, so Military Research will still have a hand in. We'll share information. We'll borrow the technician too. Wilson. He can work with our technicians to integrate the Consu technology. If it works, we have Charles Boutin's memories and motivations and a way to prepare for this war. If it doesn't work, I have another Special Forces solider. Waste not. Want not."
Mattson looked over to Szilard, considering. "You seem eager to do this, Szi," Mattson said.
"Humans are moving toward war with three species who have allied together," Szilard said. "That's never happened before. We could take on any one of them, but not all three at once. Special Forces have been told to stop this war before it starts. If this helps us to do that, we should do it. Try it, at the very least."
"Robbins," Mattson said. "Your thoughts."
"If General Szilard is correct, then doing this would get around the legal and ethical issues," Robbins said. "That makes it worth a shot. And we'll still be in the loop." Robbins had his own personal set of worries about working with Special Forces technicians and soldiers, but it didn't seem the right time to air them.
Mattson, however, did not need to be so circumspect. "Your boys and girls don't play well with normal types, General," Mattson said. "That's one reason why Military Research and Special Forces research don't work together much."
"Special Forces are soldiers, first and last," Szilard said. "They'll follow orders. We'll make it work. We've done it before. We had a regular CDF solider take part in Special Forces missions at the Battle of Coral. If we can make that work, we can get technicians to work together without undue bloodshed."
Mattson tapped the table in front of him, pensively. "How long will this take?" he asked.
"We'll have to build a new template for this body, not just adapt previous genetics," Szilard said. "I'd need to double-check with my techs, but they usually take a month to build from scratch. After that it takes sixteen weeks minimum to grow a body. And then whatever time we need to develop the process to transfer the consciousness. We can do that and grow the body at the same time."
"You can't make that go any faster?" Mattson said.
"We could make it go faster," Szilard said. "But then you'd have a dead body. Or worse. You know you can't rush body manufacture. Your own soldiers' bodies are grown on the same schedule, and I think you remember what happens when you rush that."
Mattson grimaced; Robbins, who had been Mattson's liaison for only eighteen months, was reminded that Mattson had been at this job for a very long time. No matter their working relationship, there were still gaps in Robbins' knowledge of his boss.
"Fine," Mattson said. "Take it. See if you can get anything out of it. But you watch him. I had my problems with Boutin, but I never saw him as a traitor. He fooled me. He fooled everyone. You'll have Charles Boutin's mind in one of your Special Forces bodies. God only knows what he could do with one of those."
"Agreed," Szilard said. "If the transfer is a success, we'll know it sooner than later. If it's not, I know where I can put him. Just to be sure."
"Good," Mattson said, and looked up again at Phoenix, circling in sky. "Phoenix," he said, watching the world twirl above him. "A reborn creature. Well, that's appropriate. A phoenix is supposed to rise up from the flames, you know. Let's just hope this reborn creature doesn't bring everything down in them."
They all stared at the planet above them.
"This is it," Colonel Robbins said to Lieutenant Wilson, as the body, encased in its creche, was wheeled into the de-canting lab.
"This is it," agreed Wilson, who moved over to a monitor that would momentarily display the body's vital signs. "Were you ever a father, Colonel?"
"No," Robbins said. "My personal inclinations didn't run that way."
"Well, then," Wilson said. "This is as close as you'll probably get."
Normally the birthing lab would be filled with up to sixteen Special Forces soldiers being decanted at once—soldiers who would be activated and trained together to build unit cohesion during training, and to ease the soldiers' disorientation at being activated fully conscious but without any memory to speak of. This time, there was just one soldier: The one who would house Charles Boutin's consciousness.
It had been more than two centuries since the nascent Colonial Union, faced with its spectacular failure to defend the earliest of its colonies (the planet Phoenix was called so for a reason), realized that unmodified human soldiers were unable to get the job done. The spirit was willing—human history recorded some of its greatest doomed battles in those years, with the Battle for Armstrong in particular studied as a masterful example of how to turn an imminent rout by alien forces into a shocking and painful Pyrrhic victory for one's enemy—but the flesh was all too weak. The enemy, all of the enemies, were too fast, too vicious, too pitiless and too many. Human technology was good, and weapon to weapon humans were as well-equipped as the vast majority of their adversaries. But the weapon that ultimately matters is the one behind the trigger.
The earliest modifications were relatively simple: increased speed, muscle mass and strength, endurance. Early genetic engineers, however, were hampered by the practical and ethical problems of engineering humans in vitro, and then waiting for them to grow sufficiently large and smart enough to fight, a process that took roughly eighteen years. The Colonial Defense Forces discovered to its intense chagrin that many of its (relatively) lightly genetically-modified humans were not particularly pleased to discover they were raised as a crop of cannon fodder and refused to fight, despite the best indoctrination and propaganda efforts to persuade them otherwise. Unmodified humans were equally scandalized, as the effort smacked of yet another eugenics effort on the part of a human government, and the track record of eugenics-loving governments in the human experience was not exactly stellar.
The Colonial Union survived the wracking waves of political crises that followed in the wake of its earliest attempts to genetically engineer its soldiers, but just barely. Had the Battle for Armstrong not emphatically shown the colonies what sort of universe they were up against, the Union would likely have collapsed and the human colonies would have been left in the position of competing against each other as well as against every other intelligent species they had encountered to date.
The Union was also saved by the near-simultaneous arrival of dual, critical technological discoveries: the ability to force-grow a human body to adult size in months, and the emergence of the consciousness transfer protocol that allowed the personality and memories of one individual to be transported into another brain, provided that brain had the same genetics, and had been adequately prepared with a series of pre-transfer procedures that developed some of the necessary bioelectrical pathways in the brain. These new technologies allowed the Colonial Union to develop a large, alternate pool of potential recruits: The elderly, many of whom would readily accept a life in the military rather than die of old age, and whose deaths, in any event, would not create the multi-generational demographic damage that ensued when large numbers of healthy young adults were blown out of the gene pool at the end of an alien's weapon.
Presented with this bountiful new pool of potential recruits, the Colonial Defense Forces found it had the luxury of making certain staffing choices. The CDF would no longer ask colonists to serve in the CDF; this had the salutary effect of allowing colonists to focus on developing their new worlds and making as many second-generation colonists as their planets could handle. It also eliminated a key source of political tension between the colonists and their government. Now that the young adults of the colonies were no longer extracted from their homes and families to die on battlefields trillions of miles away, the colonists were largely unconcerned with the ethical issues surrounding genetically modified soldiers, particularly ones who had, after all, volunteered to fight.
In the stead of colonists, the CDF chose to select its recruits from the inhabitants of humanity's ancestral home, Earth. The Earth held billions of people: More people on that single globe, in fact, than existed on all the human colonies combined. The pool of potential recruits was enormous—so large that the CDF further limited its pool, choosing to take its recruits from comfortable and industrialized nations whose economic circumstances allowed their citizens to survive well into their later years, and whose social blueprints created both an overemphasis on the desirability of youth and a parallel and profound national psychic discomfort with aging and death. These senior citizens were patterned by their societies to be excellent and eager recruits for the CDF; the CDF quickly discovered that these senior citizens would join up for a military tour even in the absence of detailed information about what such a tour entailed—and indeed, recruitment yields were higher the less the recruits knew. Recruits assumed military service in the CDF was like military service on Earth. The CDF was content to let the assumption stand.
Recruiting seniors from industrialized nations proved so successful that the Colonial Union protected its recruiting pool by banning colonists from those nations, selecting its colonist pool from nations whose economic and social problems encouraged the more ambitious of its young people to get the hell out as soon as humanly possible. This division of military and colonist recruitment paid rich dividends for the Colonial Union in both areas.
The military recruitment of senior citizens presented the CDF with one unexpected problem: A fair number of recruits died before they could join the service, victims of heart attacks, strokes, and too many cheeseburgers, cheesecakes and cheese curds. The CDF, who took genetic samples from its recruits, eventually found itself stocked with a library of human genomes it wasn't doing anything with. The CDF also found itself with a desire and also a need to continue experimenting with the body models of the Colonial Defense Forces to improve their design, without cutting into the effectiveness of the fighting force it already had.
Then came a breakthrough: an immensely powerful, compact, semi-organic computer, thoroughly integrated with the human brain, which in a moment of profoundly inappropriate branding was lightly dubbed the BrainPal. For a brain already filled with a life's worth of knowledge and experience, the BrainPal offered a critical assist in mental ability, memory storage and communication.
But for a brain that was literally tabula rasa, the BrainPal offered even more.
Robbins peered into the creche, where the body lay, held into place by a suspension field. "He doesn't look much like Charles Boutin," he said to Wilson.
Wilson, who was now making last-minute adjustments on the hardware that contained Boutin's recorded consciousness, didn't look up from his work. "Boutin was an unmodified human," he said. "He was well into middle age when we knew him. He probably looked something like this guy when he was twenty. Minus the green skin, cat's eyes and other modifications. And he probably wasn't as fit as this body is. I know I wasn't as fit in real life at age twenty as I am now. And I don't even have to exercise."
"You have a body engineered to take care of itself," Robbins reminded Wilson.
"And thank God. I'm a doughnut fiend," Wilson said.
"All you have to do to get it is get shot at by every other intelligent species in the universe," Robbins said.
"That is the catch," Wilson noted.
Robbins turned back to the body in the creche. "All those changes won't mess with the transfer of consciousness?"
"Shouldn't," Wilson said. "The genes relating to brain development are unaltered in this guy's new genome. That's Boutin's brain in there. Genetically, at least."
"And how does his brain look?" Robbins asked.
"It's looks good," Wilson said, tapping the monitor of the creche controller. "Healthy. Prepared."
"Think this will work?" Robbins asked.
"Got me," Wilson said.
"Good to see we're brimming with confidence," Robbins said.
Wilson opened his mouth to respond but was interrupted as the door opened and Generals Mattson and Szilard stepped through, accompanied by three Special Forces decanting technicians. The techs went straight to the creche; Mattson went to Rob-bins, who saluted along with Wilson.
"Tell me this is going to work," Mattson said, returning the salute.
"Lieutenant Wilson and I were just talking about that," Rob-bins said, after a nearly imperceptible pause.
Mattson turned to Wilson. "And, Lieutenant?"
Wilson pointed to the body in the creche, being fussed over by the technicians. "The body is healthy, and so is the brain. The BrainPal is functioning perfectly, which is no surprise. We've been able to integrate Boutin's consciousness pattern into the transfer machinery with surprisingly few problems, and the test runs we've done suggest there won't be a problem with transmission. In theory, we should be able to transfer the consciousness like we do with any consciousness."
"Your words sound confident, Lieutenant, but your voice doesn't," Mattson said.
"There are a lot of uncertainties, General," Wilson said. "Usually the subject is conscious when he transfers over. That helps with the process. We don't have that here. We won't know whether the transfer is successful until we wake up the body. This is the first time we've tried a transfer without two brains involved. If it's not actually Boutin's consciousness in there, the pattern won't take. Even if it is Boutin's consciousness in there, there's no guarantee it will imprint. We've done everything we can to assure a smooth transfer. You've read the reports. But there's still so much involved that we don't know about. We know all the ways it could go right, but not all the ways it could go wrong."
"Do you think it will work or don't you?" Mattson said.
"I think it will work," Wilson said. "But we need to have a healthy respect for all the things we don't know about what we're doing. There's a lot of room for error. Sir."
"Robbins?" Mattson said.
"Lieutenant Wilson's assessment seems right to me, General," Robbins said.
The technicians finished their assessment and reported to General Szilard, who nodded and walked over to Mattson. "The techs say we're ready," Szilard said.
Mattson glanced at Robbins, then Wilson. "Fine," he said. "Let's get this over with."
The Colonial Defense Special Forces build soldiers using a simple recipe: First, start with a human genome. Then subtract.
The human genome comprises roughly twenty thousand genes made from three billion base pairs, spread out over twenty-three chromosomes. Most of the genome is "junk"—portions of the sequence that do not code for anything in the final product of the DNA: a human being. Once nature puts a sequence into DNA it appears reluctant to remove it even if it does nothing at all.
Special Forces scientists are not nearly so precious. With each new body model they build, their first step is to strip out the redundant and switched-off genetic matter. What is left is a lean, mean, streamlined DNA sequence that is completely useless; editing the human genome destroys its chromosomal structure, leaving it unable to reproduce. But this is just a first step. Reassembling and replicating the new genome is several steps away.
The new, small DNA sequence features every gene that makes a human what he or she is, and this simply is not good enough. The human genotype does not allow the human phenotype the plasticity the Special Forces require, which is to say: Our genes can't make the superhumans Special Forces soldiers need to be. What is left of the human genome is now rent apart, redesigned and reassembled to build the genes that will code for substantially enhanced abilities. This process can require the introduction of additional genes or genetic material. The genes that come from other humans usually present little problem with their incorporation, since the human genome is fundamentally designed to accommodate genetic information from other human genomes (the process by which this is usually, naturally and enthusiastically accomplished also relatively easy to incorporate, seeing as all life on Earth features the same genetic building blocks and are related to each other genetically.
Incorporating genetic material from non-terrestrial species is substantially more difficult. Some planets evolved genetic structures roughly similar to Earth's, incorporating some if not all the nucleotides involved in terrestrial genetics (perhaps not coincidentally, the intelligent species of these planets have been known to consume humans from time to time; the Rraey, for example, found humans quite tasty). But most alien species have genetic structures and components wildly different from terrestrial creatures. Using their genes is not a simple matter of cutting and pasting.
Special Forces solved this problem by reading the DNA equivalent of the alien species into a compiler that then spat out a genetic "translation" in terrestrial DNA format—the resulting DNA, if allowed to develop, would create an entity as close to the original alien creature in appearance and function as it was possible to get. Genes from the transliterated creatures were then wrought into the Special Forces DNA.
The end result of this genetic designing was DNA that described a creature based on a human, but not a human at all— inhuman enough that the creature, if allowed to develop from this step, would be an unholy agglomeration of parts, a monstrous creature that would have sent its spiritual godmother Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley far around the bend. Having pulled the DNA so far from humanity, Special Forces scientists now sculpted the genetic message to jam the creature they were forming back into a recognizably human shape. Among themselves the scientists brooded that this was the most difficult step; some (quietly) questioned its utility. None of them, it should be noted, looked any less than human themselves.
The DNA, sculpted to offer its owner superhuman abilities in human shape, is now finally assembled. Even with the addition of non-native genes, it is substantially leaner than the original human DNA; supplemental coding causes the DNA to organize into five chromosomal pairs, down substantially from an unaltered humans twenty-three and only one more than a fruit fly. While Special Forces soldiers are provided the sex of their donor and genes related to sexual development are preserved in the final genetic reduction, there is no Y-chromosome, a fact that made the earliest Special Forces-assigned scientists (the male ones) vaguely uncomfortable.
The DNA, now assembled, is deposited into a vacant zygote shell, which is itself placed into a developmental creche, and the zygote gently prodded into mitotic division. The transformation from zygote to full-fledged embryo proceeds at a profoundly accelerated rate, producing metabolic heat levels that come close to denaturing the DNA. The developmental creche fills with heat-transferring fluid packed with nanobots, which saturate the developing cells and act as heat sinks for the rapidly growing embryo.
And still Special Forces scientists are not done lowering the percentage of humanity in their soldiers. After the biological overhaul come the technological upgrades. Specialized nanobots injected into the rapidly developing Special Forces embryo head to two destinations. Most head to marrow-rich bone cores, where the nanobots digest the marrow and mechanically breed in its place to create SmartBlood, with better oxygen-carrying capacity than true blood, more efficient clotting and near-immunity to disease. The rest migrate to the fast-expanding brain and lay the groundwork for the BrainPal computer, which when fully constructed will be the size of an aggie marble. This marble, nestled deep in the brain, is surrounded by a dense network of antennae that sample the electric field of the brain, interpreting its wishes and responding through outputs integrated into the soldiers' eyes and ears.
There are other modifications as well, many experimental, tested within a small birthing group to see if they offer any advantages. If they do, these modifications are made more widely available among the Special Forces and hit the list for potential upgrades for the next generation of the Colonial Defense Forces' general infantry. If they don't, the modifications die with their test subjects.
The Special Forces soldier matures to the size of a newborn human in just over twenty-nine days; in sixteen weeks, provided the creche's adequate metabolic management, it has grown to adult size. CDF attempts to shorten the developmental cycle resulted in bodies that fried in their own metabolic heat. Those embryos and bodies that didn't simply abort and die suffered DNA transcription errors, giving rise to developmental cancers and fatal mutations. Sixteen weeks was pushing the edge of DNA chemical stability as it was. At the end of sixteen weeks, the developmental creche sends a synthetic hormone washing through the body, resetting the metabolic levels to normal tolerances.
During development the creche exercises the body to strengthen it and allow its owner to use it from the moment he or she becomes conscious; in the brain, the BrainPal helps develop general neural pathways, stimulate the organs' processing centers, and prepare for the moment its owner was brought to consciousness, to help ease the transition from nothing to something.
For most Special Forces soldiers, all that was left at this point was "birth"—the decanting process followed by the quick and (usually) smooth transition into military life. For one Special Forces soldier, however, there was still one more step to take.
Szilard signaled to his techs, who began their tasks. Wilson focused again on his hardware, and waited for the signal to begin the transfer. The techs gave the all clear; Wilson sent the consciousness on its way. Machinery hummed quietly. The body in the creche remained still. After a few minutes Wilson conferred with the techs, then with Robbins, who came over to Mattson. "It's done," he said.
"That's it?" Mattson said, and glanced over the body in the creche. "He doesn't look any different. He still looks like he's in a coma."
"They haven't woken him up yet," Robbins said. "They want to know how you want to do it. Normally with Special Forces soldiers they wake them up with their BrainPals switched to conscious integration. It gives the soldier a temporary sense of self until he can create one of his own. But since there may already be a consciousness in there, they didn't want to turn that on. It might confuse the person in there."
Mattson snorted; he found the idea amusing. "Wake him up without switching on the BrainPal," he said. "If that's Boutin in there, I don't want him confused. I want him talking."
"Yes, sir," Robbins said.
"If this thing worked, he'll know who he is as soon as he's conscious, right?" Mattson said.
Robbins glanced over to Wilson, who could hear the conversation; Wilson give a half shrug, half nod. "We think so," Robbins said.
"Good," Mattson said. "Then I want to be the first thing he sees." He walked over to the creche and placed himself in front of the unconscious body. "Tell them to wake up the son of a bitch," he said. Robbins nodded to one of the techs, who jabbed a finger at the control board she had been working from.
The body jolted, precisely the way people do in the twilight between wakefulness and sleep, when they suddenly feel like they are falling. Its eyelids fluttered and twitched, and flew open. Eyes darted momentarily, seemingly confused, and then fixed on Mattson, who leaned in and grinned.
"Hello, Boutin," Mattson said. "Bet you're surprised to see me."
The body strained to move its head closer to Mattson, as if to say something. Mattson leaned in obligingly.
The body screamed.
General Szilard found Mattson in the head down the hall from the decanting lab, relieving himself.
"How's the ear?" Szilard asked.
"What kind of goddamned question is that, Szi?" Mattson said, still facing the wall. "You get a screaming earful from a babbling idiot and tell me how it feels."
"He's not a babbling idiot," Szilard said. "You woke up a newborn Special Forces soldier with his BrainPal switched off. He didn't have any sense of himself. He did what any newborn would do. What did you expect?"
"I expected Charles fucking Boutin," Mattson said, and shook. "That's why we bred that little fucker in the creche, if you'll recall."
"You knew it might not work," Szilard said. "I told you. Your people told you."
"Thanks for the recap, Szi," Mattson said. He zipped and moved over to the sink. "This little adventure has just been one big goddamn waste of time."
"He still might be useful," Szilard said. "Maybe the consciousness needs time to settle."
"Robbins and Wilson said his consciousness would be there as soon as he woke up," Mattson said. He waved his hands under the faucet. "Goddamn automatic faucet," he said, and finally covered the sensor completely with his hand. The water kicked on.
"This is the first time anyone's done something like this," Szi-lard said. "Maybe Robbins and Wilson were wrong."
Mattson barked out a short laugh. "Those two were wrong, Szi, no maybes about it. Just not in the way you suggest. Besides, are your people going to babysit a full-grown, man-sized infant while you're waiting for his 'consciousness to settle'? I'd be guessing 'no,' and I'm sure as hell not going to do it. Wasted too much time on this as it is." Mattson finished washing his hands and looked around for the towel dispenser.
Szilard pointed to the far wall. "Dispenser is out," he said.
"Well, of course it is," Mattson said. "Humanity can build soldiers from the DNA up but it can't stock a head with fucking paper towels." He shook his hands violently and then wiped the excess moisture on his pants.
"Leaving the issue of paper towels to the side," Szilard said, "does this mean you're relinquishing the soldier to me? If you are, I'm going to have his BrainPal turned on, and get him into a training platoon as soon as possible."
"You in a rush?" Mattson said.
"He's a fully developed Special Forces solider," Szilard said. "While I wouldn't say I am in a rush, you know as well as I do what the turnover rate for Special Forces is. We always need more. And let's just say I have faith that this particular soldier may yet turn out to be useful."
"Such optimism," Mattson said.
Szilard smiled. "Do you know how Special Forces soldiers are named, General?" Szilard asked.
"You're named after scientists and artists," Mattson said.
"Scientists and philosophers," Szilard said. "Last names, anyway. The first names are just random common names. I'm named after Leo Szilard. He was one of the scientists who helped to build the first atomic bomb, a fact that he would later come to regret."
"I know who Leo Szilard was, Szi," Mattson said.
"I didn't mean to imply you didn't, General," Szilard said. "Although you never know with you realborn. You have funny gaps in your knowledge."
"We spend most of our later educational years trying to get laid," Mattson said. "It distracts most of us from stockpiling information about twentieth-century scientists."
"Imagine that," Szilard said, mildly, and then continued on his train of thought. "Aside from his scientific talents, Szilard was also good at predicting things. He predicted both of Earth's world wars in the twentieth century and other major events. It made him jumpy. He made it a point to live in hotels and always have a packed bag ready. Just in case."
"Fascinating," Mattson said. "What's your point?"
"I don't pretend to be related to Leo Szilard in any way," Szilard said. "I was just assigned his name. But I think I share his talent for predicting things, especially when it comes to wars. I think this war we've got coming is going to get very bad indeed. That's not just speculation; we've been gathering intelligence now that my people know what to look for. And you don't have to be in possession of intelligence to know that humanity going up against three different races makes for bad odds for us." Szilard motioned his head in the direction of the lab. "This soldier may not have Boutin's memories, but he's still got Boutin in him—in his genes. I think it'll make a difference, and we're going to need all the help we can get. Call him my packed bag."
"You want him because of a hunch," Mattson said.
"Among other things," Szilard said.
"Sometimes it really shows that you're a teenager, Szi," Mattson said.
"Do you release this soldier to me, General?" Szilard asked.
Mattson waved, dismissively. "He's yours, General," he said. "Enjoy. At least I won't have to worry about this one turning traitor."
"Thank you," Szilard said.
"And what are you going to do with your new toy?" Mattson asked.
"For starters," Szilard said, "I think we'll give him a name."
He came into the world like most newborns do: screaming.
The world around him was formless chaos. Something was close to him and making noises at him when the world showed up; it frightened him. Suddenly it went away, leaking loud noises as it went.
He cried. He tried to move his body but could not. He cried some more.
Another form approached; based on his only previous experience, he yelled in fear and tried to get away. The form made noise and movement. Clarity.
It was as if corrective lenses had been placed on his consciousness. The world snapped into place. Everything remained unfamiliar, but everything also seemed to make sense. He knew that even though he couldn't identify or name anything he saw, it all had names and identities; some portion of his mind surged into life, itching to label it all but could not.
The entire universe was on the tip of his tongue.
::Can you perceive this?:: the form—the person—in front of him asked. And he could. He could hear the question, but he knew that no sound had been made; the question had been beamed directly into his brain. He didn't know how he knew this, or how it was done. He also didn't know how to respond. He opened his mouth to reply.
::Don't,:: the person in front of him said. ::Try sending me your reply instead. It's faster than speaking. It's what we all do. Here's how.::
Inside his head instructions appeared, and more than instructions, an awareness that suggested that anything he didn't understand would be defined, explained and placed into context; even as he thought this he felt the instructions he'd been sent expand, individual concepts and ideas branching off into pathways, searching for their own meanings in order to give him a framework he could use. Presently it coalesced into one big idea, a gestalt that allowed him to respond. He felt the urge to respond to the person in front of him grow; his mind, sensing this, offered up a series of possible responses. Each unpacked itself as the instructions had, offering up understanding and context as well as a suitable response.
All of this took slightly under five seconds.
::I perceive you,:: he said, finally.
::Excellent,:: the person in front of him said. ::I am Judy Curie.::
"Hello, Judy,:: he said, after his brain unpacked for him the concepts of names and also the protocols for responding to those who offer their names as identification. He tried to give his name, but came up blank. He was suddenly confused.
Curie smiled at him. "Having a hard time remembering your name?:: she asked.
::Yes,:: he said.
::That's because you don't have one yet,:: Curie said. ::Would you like to know what your name is?::
::Please,:: he said.
"You are Jared Dirac,:: Curie said.
Jared sensed the name unpack in his brain. Jared: A biblical name (the definition of biblical unpacked, leading him to the definition of book and to the Bible, which he did not read, as he sensed the reading and subsequent unpacking thereof would take more than a few seconds), son of Mahalalel and the father of Enoch. Also the leader of the Jaredites in the Book of Mormon (another book left unpacked). Definition: The descendant. Dime had a number of definitions, most derived from the name of Paul Dirac, a scientist. Jared had previously unpacked the meaning of names and the implications of naming conventions; he turned to Curie.
::I am a descendant of Paul Dirac?:: he asked.
::No,:: Curie said. ::Your name was randomly selected from a pool of names.::
::But my first name means descendant,:: Jared said. ::And last names are family names.::
::Even among realborn, first names usually don't mean anything,:: Curie said. ::And among us, last names don't either. Don't read too much into your names, Jared.::
Jared thought about this for a few moments, letting these ideas unpack themselves. One concept, "realborn," refused to unpack itself; Jared noted it for further exploration but left it alone for now. ::I am confused,:: he said, eventually.
Curie smiled. r.You will be confused a lot to begin with,:: she said.
::Help me be less confused,:: Jared said.
::I will,:: Curie said. ::But not for too long. You have been born out of sequence, Jared; your training mates already have a two-day start on you. You must integrate with them as soon as possible, otherwise you may experience a delay from which you may never recover. I will tell you what I can while I take you to your training mates. They will fill in the rest. Now, let's get you out of that creche. Let's see if you can walk as well as think.::
The concept of "walk" unpacked itself as the restraints holding Jared in the creche removed themselves. Jared braced himself and pushed forward, out of the creche. His foot landed on the floor.
::One small step for man,:: Curie said. Jared was surprised that the unpacking inherent in that phrase was substantial.
::First order of business,:: Curie said, as she and Jared walked through Phoenix Station. ::You think you're thinking, but you're not.::
Jared's first impulse was to say I don't understand, but he held back, intuiting for the first time that this was likely to be his response to most things in the near future. ::Please explain,:: he said instead.
::You are newly born,:: Curie said. "Your brain—your actual brain—is entirely empty of knowledge and experience. In its place, a computer inside your head known as a BrainPal is feeding you knowledge and information. Everything you think you understand is being processed by your BrainPal and fed back to you in a way you can grasp. It is also the thing that is offering you suggestions on how to respond to things. Mind the crowd.:: Curie weaved to avoid a clot of CDF soldiers in the middle of the walkway.
Jared weaved with her. ::But I feel like I almost know so much,:: Jared said. "Like I knew it once but now I don't.::
::Before you are born, the BrainPal conditions your brain,:: Curie said. ::It helps set down neural pathways common in all humans, and prepares your brain for rapid learning and processing of information. That's why it feel likes you know things already, because your brain has been prepared to learn it. For the first month of your life, everything feels like deja vu. Then you learn it, it gets stored in your actual brain, and you stop using your BrainPal like a crutch. Because of the way we are, we can gather information and process it—and learn it—several times faster than Realborn.::
Jared stopped, partly to let his mind unpack everything Curie had just said to him, but partly because of something else. Curie, sensing he had stopped, stopped as well. "What?:: she said.
::That's the second time you've used that word. "Realborn." I can't find out what that means.::
::It's not something they put in your BrainPal,:: Curie said. She began walking again and motioned at the other soldiers on the walkway. ::"Realborn" is them. They're people who are born as babies and have to develop over a very long period of time—years. One of them who is sixteen years old might not know as much as you do now, and you've been alive for about sixteen minutes. It's really an inefficient way to do things, but it's the way it's done naturally and they think that means it's a good thing.::
::You don't?:: Jared asked.
::I don't think it's good or bad, aside from being inefficient,:: Curie said. :.Tm just as alive as they are. "Realborn" is a misnomer—we're really born too. Born, live, die. It's the same.::
::So we're just like them,:: Jared said.
Curie glanced back. ::No,:: she said. ::Not just like them. We're designed to be better physically and mentally. We move faster. We think faster. We even talk faster than they do. The first time you talk to a realborn it will seem like they're moving at half speed. See, watch.:: Curie stopped, appeared to look confused, and then tapped the shoulder of a soldier who was walking by.
"Excuse me," she said, and she used her mouth to say it. "I was told there was a commissary on this level where I could get a really excellent hamburger, but I can't seem to find it. Can you help me?" Curie was speaking in a voice that mirrored to a close degree the voice Jared heard in his head… but slower, slow enough that for the briefest of seconds Jared had a hard time understanding what she was saying.
"Sure," the soldier said. "The place you're thinking of is a couple hundred yards from here. Just keep going the direction you're going and you'll hit it. It's the first commissary you come to."
"Great, thanks," Curie said, and started walking again. ::See what I mean?:: she said to Jared. ::It's like they're retarded or something.::
Jared nodded absently. His brain had unpacked the concept of "hamburger," which lead to an unpacking of "food," which caused him to realize something else entirely. ::I think I'm hungry,:: he said to Curie.
::Later,:: Curie said. ::You should eat with your training mates. It's part of the bonding experience. You'll be doing most things with your training mates.::
::Where are your training mates?:: Jared asked.
"What a funny question,:: Curie said. ::I haven't seen them for years. You rarely see your training mates once you're out of training. After that you're assigned to wherever they need you, and then you integrate with your squad and platoon. Right now I'm integrated with one of the Special Forces platoons that decants soldiers as they're born.::
Jared unpacked the concept of "integration" in his brain, but found he was having a problem understanding it. He tried working through it again but was interrupted by Curie, who kept talking. ::You're going to be at a disadvantage to the rest of your training mates, I'm afraid,:: she said to him. ::They woke up integrated and are already used to each other. It might take them a couple of days to get used to you. You should have been decanted and integrated at the same time as they were.::
::Why wasn't I?:: Jared asked.
"Here we are,:: Curie said, and stopped at a door.
::What's in here?:: Jared asked.
"Shuttle pilot ready room,:: Curie said. "Time to get you a ride. Come on.:: She opened the door for him, then followed him inside.
Inside the room were three pilots, playing poker. "I'm looking for Lieutenant Cloud," Curie said.
"He's the one who's currently getting his ass kicked," said one of the pilots, who tossed a chip into the pot. "Raise ten."
"Badly kicked," said one of the others, and threw in his own chip. "See your ten."
"Your words of scorn would hurt so much more if we were actually playing for money," said the third, who by process of elimination would be Lieutenant Cloud. He dropped in three chips. "I see your ten, and raise you twenty."
"This is one of the drawbacks of having an all-expenses-paid tour of hell," said the first pilot. "When everything's paid for, they don't have a reason to give you money. Call."
"If I knew I was going to be working for socialists, I never would have signed up," said the second. "Call."
"Well, then, in addition to being dumb, you'd also be dead, wouldn't you?" Cloud said. "Talk about being alienated from your labor. You'd be alienated from everything. Also, you'd be out a couple hundred dollars on this hand." He spread out his cards. "Snake eyes and a trio of snowmen. Read 'em and weep."
"Aw, crap," said the first pilot.
"Thank God for Karl Marx," intoned the second.
"That's the first time in history that has been said at a poker table," said Cloud. "You should be proud."
"Oh, I am," said the other pilot. "But please don't tell my momma. It would break her Texan heart."
"Your secret is safe with me," Cloud said.
"Lieutenant Cloud," Curie said. "Sometime this century would be good."
"My apologies, Lieutenant," Cloud said. "I just had to finish up some ritual humiliation. I'm sure you understand."
"Not really," Curie said, and nodded to Jared. "Here is the recruit you need to take to Camp Carson. You should already have the orders and clearance."
"Probably," Cloud said, and paused for a minute as he accessed his BrainPal. "Yeah, it's here. It looks like my shuttle has been prepped and fueled too. Let me file a flight plan and we'll be good to go." He looked at Jared. "Taking anything with you but you?"
Jared glanced over to Curie, who shook her head. "No," he said. "It's just me." He was mildly startled to hear the sound of his own voice speaking for the first time, and how slowly the words formed. He became acutely aware of his tongue and its movement in his mouth; it made him vaguely queasy.
Cloud took in the exchange between Jared and Curie wordlessly and then motioned to a chair. "Okay, then. Have a seat, pal. I'll be with you in a just a minute."
Jared sat and looked up at Curie. ::What do I do now?:: he asked.
::Lieutenant Cloud here will shuttle you down to Phoenix, to Camp Carson, where you'll join your training mates,:: Curie said. "They're a couple days ahead in their training but the first few days are mostly just for integrating and stabilizing personalities. You probably haven't missed any real training.::
-Where will you be?:: Jared asked.
::I'll be here,:: Curie said. -Where did you think I would be?::
::I don't know,:: Jared said. :.Tm scared. I don't know anyone but you.::
::Be calm,:: Curie said, and Jared felt an emotional sense come from her to him. His BrainPal processed the wash of feeling and unpacked the concept of "empathy" for him. ::In a couple of hours you'll be integrated with your training mates and you'll be fine. It'll make more sense then.::
::Okay,:: Jared said, but felt doubtful.
::Good-bye, Jared Dirac,:: Curie said, and with a small smile turned and left. Jared felt her presence in his mind for a few moments longer until finally, as if Curie suddenly remembered she left the connection open, it shut off. Jared found himself revisiting their brief time together; his BrianPal unpacked the concept of "memory" for him. The concept of memory provoked an emotion; his BrainPal unpacked the concept of "intriguing."
"Hey, can I ask you a question?" Cloud asked Jared, after they had begun their descent to Phoenix.
Jared considered the question, and the ambiguity of its structure that allowed for multiple interpretations. In one sense, Cloud had answered his question by asking it; he was clearly capable of asking Jared a question. Jared's BrainPal suggested, and Jared agreed, this was not likely the correct interpretation of the question. Presumably Cloud knew he was procedurally capable of asking questions, and if he previously was not, he would be now. As Jared's BrainPal unpacked and sorted additional intepretations, Jared found himself hoping that one day he'd be able to hit upon the correct interpretation of sentences without having to do endless unpacking. He'd been alive and aware just over an hour and already it was tiresome.
Jared considered his options and after a period of time that seemed long to him but seemed to be imperceptible to the pilot, ventured forth with the answer that seemed most appropriate in the context.
"Yes," Jared said.
"You're Special Forces, right?" Cloud asked.
"Yes," Jared said.
"How old are you?" Cloud asked.
"Right now?" Jared asked.
"Sure," Cloud said.
Jared's BrainPal informed him he had an internal chronometer; he accessed it. "Seventy-one," Jared said.
Cloud looked over. "Seventy-one years old? That makes you pretty old for Special Forces, from what they tell me."
"No. Not seventy-one years," Jared said. "Seventy-one minutes."
"No shit," Cloud said.
This required another quick moment of interpretational choices. "No shit," Jared said, finally.
"Damn, that's just weird," Cloud said.
"Why?" Jared asked.
Cloud opened his mouth, closed it, and shot a look at Jared. "Well, not that you would know this," Cloud said. "But for most of humanity it'd be a little odd to be having a conversation with someone who is only slightly more than an hour old. Hell, you weren't even alive when I started that poker game back there. At your age most humans have barely got the hang of breathing and taking a dump."
Jared consulted his BrainPal. "I'm doing one of those right now," he said.
This got an amused noise out of Cloud. "That's the first time I've ever heard one of you guys tell a joke," he said.
Jared considered this. "It's not a joke," he said. "I really am doing one of those right now."
"I sincerely hope it's the breathing," Cloud said.
"It is," Jared said.
"That's fine, then," Cloud said, and chuckled again. "For a minute there, I thought I'd discovered a Special Forces soldier with a sense of humor."
"I'm sorry," Jared said.
"Don't be sorry, for God's sake," Cloud said. "You're barely an hour old. People can live to a hundred without developing a sense of humor. I've got at least one ex-wife who went through most of our marriage without cracking a smile. At least you have the excuse of just being born. She had no excuse."
Jared considered this. "Maybe you weren't funny."
"See," Cloud said, "now you are telling jokes. So you are really seventy-one minutes old."
"Seventy-three now," Jared said.
"How is it so far?" asked Cloud.
"How is what so far?"
"This," Cloud said, and motioned around him. "Life. The universe. Everything."
"It's lonely," Jared said.
"Huh," Cloud said. "Didn't take you long to figure that one out."
"Why do you think Special Forces soldiers have no sense of humor?" Jared asked.
"Well, I don't want to suggest it's impossible," Cloud said. "I've just never seen it. Take your friend back on Phoenix Station. The fair Miss Curie. I've been trying to get a laugh out of her for a year now. I see her every time I transport a gaggle of you Special Forces down to Camp Carson. So far, no luck. And maybe it's just her, but then from time to time I try to get a laugh out of the Special Forces soldiers I'm transporting down to the surface or bringing back up. So far, nothing."
"Maybe you really aren't funny," Jared suggested again.
"There you go again with the jokes," Cloud said. "No, I thought it might be that. But I don't have any problems making ordinary soldiers laugh, or at least some of them. Ordinary soldiers don't really have a lot of contact with you Special Forces types, but those of us that have all agree that you have no sense of humor. The best we can figure it's because you're born grown-up, and developing a sense of humor takes time and practice."
"Tell me a joke," Jared said.
"Are you serious?" Cloud said.
"Yes," Jared said. "Please. I'd like to hear a joke."
"Now I have to think of a joke," Cloud said, and thought for a moment. "Okay, I thought of one. I don't suppose you have any idea who Sherlock Holmes is."
"I do now," Jared said, after a couple of seconds.
"That's a very scary thing you just did," Cloud said. "All right. Here's the joke. Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick Watson decide to go camping one night, right? So they make a campfire, have a bottle of wine, roast some marshmallows. The usual. Then they bed down for the night. Later that night, Holmes wakes up and wakes up Watson. 'Watson,' he says, 'look up at the sky and tell me what you see.' And Watson says, 'I can see the stars.' 'And what does that tell you?' Holmes asks. And Watson starts listing things, like that there are millions of stars, and how a clear sky means good weather for the next day, and how the majesty of the cosmos is proof of a powerful God. When he's done, he turns to Holmes and says 'What does the night sky tell you, Holmes?' And Holmes says, 'That some bastard has stolen our tent!'"
Cloud looked over at Jared, expectantly, and then frowned after Jared stared back blankly. "You don't get it," Cloud said.
"I get it," Jared said. "But it's not funny. Someone did steal their tent."
Cloud stared at Jared for a moment, and then laughed. "I may not be funny, but you sure the hell are," he said.
"I'm not trying to be," Jared said.
"Well, that's part of your charm," Cloud said. "All right, we're entering the atmosphere. Let's put the joke-swapping on hold while I focus on getting us down in one piece."
Cloud left Jared on the tarmac of Camp Carson's skyport. "They know you're here," he said to Jared. "Someone is on the way to get you. Just stay put until they arrive."
"I will," Jared said. "Thank you for the trip and the jokes."
"You're welcome for both," Cloud said, "although I think one was probably more useful to you than the other." Cloud stuck out his hand; Jared's BrainPal unpacked the protocol and Jared stuck his hand into Cloud's. They shook.
"And now you know how to shake hands," Cloud said. "That's a skill to have. Good luck, Dirac. If I fly you back after your training maybe we'll swap a few more jokes."
"I'd like that," Jared said.
"Then you better learn a few between now and then," Cloud said. "Don't expect me to do all the heavy lifting. Look, someone's heading your way. I think he's for you. Bye, Jared. Stay clear of the lifters, now." Cloud disappeared back in his shuttle to prepare for his departure. Jared stepped away from the shuttle.
::Jared Dirac,:: said the rapidly approaching person.
::Yes,:: Jared responded.
::I am Gabriel Brahe,:: the other man said. ::I am the instructor assigned to your training squad. Come with me. It's time to meet the others you'll be training with.:: As quickly as he reached Jared, Brahe turned around and started walking toward camp. Jared hustled to follow.
::You were speaking to that pilot,:: Brahe said as they walked. ::What were you discussing?::
::He was telling me jokes,:: Jared said. ::He said that most soldiers don't think Special Forces have a sense of humor.::
"Most soldiers don't know anything about the Special Forces,:: Brahe said. ::Listen, Dirac, don't do that again. You're just adding fuel to their prejudices. When realborn soldiers say Special Forces don't have a sense of humor, it's their way of insulting us. Suggesting we're less human than they are. If we don't have a sense of humor we're like every other subhuman automaton humanity has made up to amuse itself. Just another emotionless robot for them to feel superior to. Don't give them a chance to do that.::
After Brahe's rant was unpacked by his BrainPal, Jared thought back to his talk with Cloud; he didn't sense that Cloud was suggesting he was superior to Jared. But Jared also had to admit he was only a couple of hours old. There were a lot of things he could be missing. Still, Jared felt a dissonance between what Brahe was saying and his own experience, small though it might be. He ventured a question.
::Do Special Forces have a sense of humor?:: he asked.
::Of course we do, Dirac,:: said Brahe, glancing back briefly. ::Every human has a sense of humor. We just don't have their sense of humor. Tell me one of your pilot's jokes.::
::All right,:: Jared said, and repeated the Sherlock Holmes joke.
"See, now, that's just stupid,:: Dirac said. ::As if Watson wouldn't know that the tent was missing. This is the problem with realborn humor. It's predicated on the notion that someone's an idiot. There's no shame in not having that sense of humor.:: Brahe radiated a sense of irritation; Jared decided not to carry the topic of conversation further.
Instead, Jared asked, ::Is everyone here Special Forces?::
"They are,:: Brahe said. ::Camp Carson is one of only two training sites for Special Forces, and the only training base of any kind on Phoenix. See how the camp is ringed by forest?:: Brahe motioned with his head to the edge of the camp, where earth-derived trees and native Phoenix megaflora competed for supremacy. "We're more than six hundred klicks from civilization in any direction.::
::Why?:: Jared asked, remembering Brahe's earlier comment about the realborn. "Are they trying to keep us away from everybody else?::
::They're trying to keep everybody else away from ms,:: Brahe said. ::Special Forces training isn't like training for realborn. We don't need the distraction of regular CDF or civilians, and they might misinterpret what they see here. It's best if we're left alone to do what we do, and to do our training in peace.::
::I understand I am behind in my training,:: Jared said.
::Not in your training,:: Brahe said. ::In your integration. We begin training tomorrow. But your integration is as important. You can't train if you're not integrated."
::How do I integrate?:: Jared asked.
::First, you meet your training mates,:: Brahe said, and stopped at the door of a small barracks. ::Here we are. I've told them you're here; they're waiting for you.:: Brahe opened the door to let Jared in.
The barracks were sparsely furnished and like every barracks for the last few centuries. Two rows of eight beds lined the sides of the barracks. In and among them fifteen men and women sat and stood, eyes focused on Jared. He felt overwhelmed by the sudden attention; his BrainPal unpacked the concept of "shy." He felt the urge to say hello to his training mates, and was suddenly aware that he wasn't sure how to speak to more than one person through his BrainPal; near simultaneously he realized that he could just open his mouth and speak. The complexities of communication confounded him.
"Hello," he said, finally. Some of his future training mates smiled at his primitive form of communication. None of them returned the salutation.
::I don't think I'm off to a good start,:: Jared sent to Brahe.
::They're waiting to say their introductions after you've integrated,:: Brahe said.
::When do I do that?:: Jared asked.
::Now,:: Brahe said, and integrated Jared with his training mates.
Jared had about a tenth of a second of mild surprise as his BrainPal informed him that as his superior officer, Brahe had limited access to his BrainPal, and then that datum was superseded by the fact that suddenly there were fifteen other people in Jared's head, and he was in the heads of fifteen other people. An uncontrolled bolt of information seared through Jared's consciousness as fifteen life stories poured into him and his own meager store of experiences branched into fifteen pipelines. Salutations and introductions were unnecessary and superfluous; in an instant Jared knew and felt everything he would need to know about these fifteen strangers who were now as intimately part of him as any human could be with another human. It was a mercy that each of these lives was unnaturally short.
Jared collapsed.
::That was interesting,:: Jared heard someone say. Almost instantaneously he recognized the comment as coming from Brian Michaelson, even though he'd never communicated with him before.
::I hope he's not planning to make a habit out of that,:: another voice said. Steve Seaborg.
::Give him a break,:: said a third voice. ::He was born without being integrated. It's a lot to handle all of a sudden. Come on, let's get him up off the floor.::
Sarah Pauling.
Jared opened his eyes. Pauling was kneeling down next to him; Brahe and his other training mates formed a curious semicircle above him.
::I'm fine,:: Jared sent to all of them, keying his response to the squad-wide communication channel, which included Brahe. The choice to do this came naturally, part of the info dump of the integration. ::I didn't know what to expect. I didn't know how to handle it. But I'm fine now.::
From his training mates radiated emotions like auras, each different: concern, confusion, irritation, indifference, amusement. Jared followed the amused emotion back to its source. Pauling's amusement was visible not only as an emotional aura but from the quirky smile on her face.
::Well, you don't seem all that much worse for wear,:: Pauling said. She stood up and then extended her hand. ::Up you go,:: she said. Jared reached up, took her hand, and pulled himself up.
::Sarah's got a pet,:: Seaborg said, and there was a ripple of amusement among some of the squad, and a strange emotional ping that Jared suddenly recognized as a form of laughter.
::Shut up, Steve,:: Pauling said. ::You hardly know what a pet is.::
::Doesn't make him less of one,:: Seaborg said.
::Doesn't make you less of a jerk,:: Pauling said.
::I'm not a pet,:: Jared said, and suddenly all eyes turned to him. He found it less intimidating than the first time, now that he had all of them in his head. He focused his attention on Seaborg "Sarah was simply being kind to me. It doesn't make me a pet, it doesn't make her my master. It just means she was nice enough to help me off the floor.::
Seaborg audibly snorted and then removed himself from the semicircle, intently finding something else to be interested in. A few others broke off to join him. Sarah turned to Brahe. -.".Does this happen with every training squad?:: she asked.
Brahe smiled. ::Did you think being inside each other's heads would make it easier for you to get along? There's no place to hide. What's really surprising is that one of you hasn't taken a punch at someone else yet. Usually by this time I have to pry a couple of trainees apart with a crowbar.:: Brahe turned to Jared. ::You going to be all right?::
::I think so,:: Jared said. ::I need a little time to sort everything out. I have a lot in my head, and I'm trying to figure out where it all goes.::
Brahe looked back over to Pauling. ::You think you can help him sort it out?::
Pauling smiled. "Sure,:: she said.
::You've got Dirac-watch, then,:: Brahe said. ::We start training tomorrow. See if you can get him up to speed with everything before then.:: Brahe walked off.
::I guess I really am your pet,:: Jared said.
A wash of amusement flowed off Pauling toward Jared : .You're a funny man,:: she said.
::You're the second person to tell me that today,:: Jared said.
::Yeah?:: Pauling said. ::Know any good jokes?::
Jared told Pauling the one about Sherlock Holmes. She laughed out loud.
Training for Special Forces soldiers takes two weeks. Gabriel Brahe began the training of Jared's squad—formally the 8th Training Squad—by asking its members a question. ::What makes you different than other human beings?:: he asked. ::Raise your hand when you have the answer.:: The squad, arrayed in a ragged semicircle in front of Brahe, was silent. Finally Jared raised his hand. "We're smarter, stronger and faster than other humans,:: he said, remembering the words of Judy Curie.
::Good guess,:: Brahe said. ::But wrong. We are designed to be stronger, faster and smarter than other humans. But we're that way as a consequence of what makes us different. What makes us different is that alone among humans, we were born with a purpose. And that purpose is simple: to keep humans alive in this universe.::
The members of the squad looked around at each other. Sarah Pauling raised her hand. ::Other people help to keep humans alive. We saw them on Phoenix Station, on our way here.::
::But they weren't born for it,:: Brahe said. "Those people you saw—the realborn—are born without a plan. They're born because biology tells humans to make more humans; but it doesn't consider what to do with them after that. Realborn go for years without the slightest clue what they're going to do with themselves. From what I understand, some of them never actually figure it out. They just walk through life in a daze and then fall into their graves at the end of it. Sad. And inefficient.
::You may do many things in your life, but walk though it in a daze will not be one of them,:: Brahe continued. ::You are born to protect humanity. And you are designed for it. Everything in you down to your genes reflects that purpose. It's why you are stronger, and faster, and smarter than other humans::—Brahe nodded toward Jared—::and why you are born as adults, ready to fight quickly, effectively and efficiently. It takes the Colonial Defense Forces three months to train realborn soldiers. We do the same training—and more—in two weeks.::
Steve Seaborg raised his hand. ::Why does it take the realborn so long to train?:: he asked.
::Let me show you,:: Brahe said. "Today is the first day of training. Do you know how to stand at attention, or other basic drill maneuvers?:: The members of the training squad looked at Brahe blankly. "Right,:: Brahe said. "Here come your instructions.::
Jared sensed his brain flooding with new information. The perception of this knowledge sat thickly upon his consciousness, unorganized; Jared sensed his BrainPal funneling the information into the right places, the now-familiar unpacking process launching branching paths of information that connected with things that Jared, now a full day old, already knew.
Now Jared knew the military protocols of parade drilling. But more than that came an unexpected emotion that arose natively in his own brain, and was amplified and augmented by the integrated thoughts of his training squad: Their informal array in front of Brahe, with some standing, some sitting and some leaning back on the steps of their barracks, felt wrong. Disrespectful. Shameful. Thirty seconds later they were in four orderly rows of four, standing at attention.
Brahe smiled. "You got it on the first try,:: he said. ::Parade rest.:: The squad shifted into parade rest position, feet apart, hand behind backs. ::Excellent,:: Brahe said. ::At ease.:: The squad visibly relaxed.
::If I told you how long it takes to train Realborn to do just that much just as well as you did, you wouldn't believe me,:: Brahe said. ."Realborn need to drill, to repeat, to practice again and again to get things right, to learn to do the things you that you will learn and absorb in one or two sessions.::
::Why don't the realborn train this way?:: asked Alan Millikan.
::They can't,:: Brahe said. ::They have old minds, set in their ways. They have a hard enough time just learning to use a Brain-Pal. If I tried sending them the drill protocols like I just sent to you, their brains simply couldn't handle it. And they can't integrate— they can't share information between themselves automatically like you do, and like all Special Forces do. They're not designed for it. They're not born to it.::
"We're superior, but there are realborn soldiers,:: Steven Seaborg said.
::Yes,:: Brahe said. "Special Forces are less than one percent of the entire CDF fighting force.::
::If we're so good, why are there so few of us?:: asked Seaborg.
::Because the realborn are scared of us,:: Brahe said.
"What?:: asked Seaborg.
"They doubt us,:: Brahe said. ::They've bred us for the purpose of defending humanity, but they're not sure we're human enough. They've designed us to be superior soldiers but they worry our design is flawed. So they see us as less than human and assign us the jobs they fear might make them less than human. They make just enough of us for those jobs but no more than that. They don't trust us because they don't trust themselves.::
::That's stupid,:: Seaborg said.
"That's ironic,:: Sarah Pauling said.
::It's both,:: Brahe said. .-.Rationality is not one of humanity's strong points.::
::It's hard to understand why they think that way,:: Jared said.
::You're right,:: Brahe said, looking at Jared. ::And you've unintentionally hit on the racial flaw of the Special Forces. Real-born have a hard time trusting the Special Forces—but Special Forces have a hard time understanding the realborn. And it doesn't go away. I'm eleven years old::—a sharp pinging of amazement ricocheted through the squad; none of them could conceive of being that ancient—::and I swear to you I still don't get the realborn most of the time. Their sense of humor, which you and I have discussed, Dirac, is only the most obvious example of this. This is why in addition to physical and mental conditioning, Special Forces training also includes specialized training into the history and culture of the realborn soldiers you will meet, so you can understand them, and how they see ms.::
::Seems like a waste of time,:: Seaborg said. ::If the realborn don't trust us, why should we protect them?::
::It's what we were born to do—:: Brahe said.
::I didn't ask to be born,:: Seaborg said.
::—and you're thinking like a realborn,:: Brahe said. ::We are human too. When we fight for humans, we fight for ourselves. No one asks to be born, but we are born, and we are human. We fight for ourselves, as much as for any other human. If we don't defend humanity, we'll be just as dead as the rest of them. This universe is implacable.::
Seaborg lapsed into silence, but his irritation broadcast itself.
::Is this all we do?:: Jared asked.
::What do you mean?:: Brahe said.
::We are born for this purpose,:: Jared said. ::But can we do something else too?::
"What do you suggest?:: Brahe asked.
::I don't know,:: Jared said. ::But I'm only a day old. I don't know much.:: This got pings of amusement, and a smile from Brahe.
::We are born to this, but we're not slaves,:: Brahe said. ::We serve a term of service. Ten years. After that, we can choose to retire. Become like the realborn and colonize. There's even a colony set aside for us. Some of us go there; some of us choose to blend in with the realborn in the other colonies. But most of us stay with the Special Forces. I did.::
::Why?:: Jared asked.
::It's what I was born for,:: Brahe repeated. "And I'm good at it. You're all good at it. Or will be, soon enough. Let's get started.::
::We do a lot of things faster than realborn,:: Sarah Pauling said, dipping into her soup. ::But I'm guessing that eating isn't one of them. If you ate too fast you'd choke. That'd be funny, but it would also be bad.::
Jared sat across from her at one of the two mess tables assigned to the 8th Training Squad. Alan Millikan, curious about the differences between realborn and Special Forces training, discovered that realborn trained in platoons, not squads, and that Special Forces training squads were not the same size as squads in the CDF. Everything that Millikan learned on the subject was sent to the other members of the 8th and added to their store of information. Thus another benefit of integration made itself known: Only one member of the 8th had to learn something in order for all the other members to know it.
Jared slurped at his own soup. ::I think we eat faster than realborn,:: he said.
::Why is that?:: Pauling said.
Jared took a big spoonful of soup. "Because if they talk and eat soup at the same time, this happens," he said, drooling soup out of his mouth as he spoke.
Pauling put her hand to her mouth to stifle a laugh. ::Uh-oh,:: she said, after a second.
"What?:: Jared said.
Pauling glanced left, then right. Jared looked around, and saw the entire mess hall looking at him. Jared belatedly realized that everyone could, in fact, hear him speak when he used his mouth. Nobody else in the mess hall had spoken with their mouth during the entire meal. Jared suddenly realized that the last time he'd heard anyone else speak was when Lieutenant Cloud offered his farewells. Speaking out loud was weird.
::Sorry,:: he said, on a general band. Everyone returned to their food.
::You're making a fool of yourself,:: Steven Seaborg, down the table, said to Jared.
::It was just a joke,:: Jared said.
::"It was just a joke,":: Seaborg said, mockingly. ::Idiot.::
"You're not very nice,:: Jared said.
::"You're not very nice,":: Seaborg said.
: Jared may be an idiot, but at least he can think up his own words,:: Pauling said.
::Hey, shut up, Pauling,:: Seaborg said. ::No one asked you to butt in.::
Jared began to respond when an image popped up in his visual field. Squat, misshapen humans were arguing about something in high-pitched voices. One of them began to mock the other by repeating his words, like Seaborg had been doing to Jared.
::Who are these people?:: Seaborg asked. Pauling too looked mystified.
Gabriel Brahe's voice popped into their heads. ::They're children,:: he said. "Immature humans. And they're having an argument. I'll have you note they are arguing just like you were.::
::He started it,:: Seaborg said, looking for Brahe in the mess hall. He was at a far table, eating with other officers. He didn't turn to look at the trio.
::One of the reasons the realborn don't trust us is because they're convinced we're children,:: Brahe said. "Emotionally stunted children in adult-sized bodies. And the thing about that is, they're right. We have to learn to control ourselves like adults do, just like all humans do. And we have far less time to learn how to do it.::
::But—:: Seaborg began.
::Quiet,:: Brahe said. ::Seaborg, after our afternoon drill you have an assignment. From your BrainPal you can access Phoenix's data net. You get to research etiquette and interpersonal conflict resolution. Find out as much as you can, and share it with the rest of the 8th by the end of the evening. Do you understand me?::
::Yes,:: Seaborg said. He glanced over at Jared accusingly and then lapsed silently into his food.
::Dirac, you get an assignment too. Read Frankenstein. See where it takes you.::
::Yes, sir,:: Jared said.
::And don't drool any more soup,:: Brahe said. ::You look like an ass.:: Brahe dropped his connection.
Jared looked over to Pauling. ::How come you didn't get in trouble?:: he asked her.
Pauling dipped the spoon into her soup. ::My food stays where it's supposed to,:: she said, and swallowed. ::And I don't act like a child.:: And then she stuck out her tongue.
The afternoon drill introduced the 8th to their weapon, the MP-35A "Empee" assault rifle. The rifle was bonded to its owner by use of BrainPal authentication; from that point forward only its owner or another human with a BrainPal could fire the rifle. This cut down on the chance of a CDF soldier having his own weapon used against him. The MP-35A was additionally modified for Special Forces soldiers to take advantage of their integration abilities; among other things, the MP-35A could be fired remotely. Special Forces had used this ability to fatally surprise any number of curious aliens over the years.
The MP-35A was more than a simple rifle. It could, at the discretion of the soldier using it, fire rifled bullets, shot, grenades, or small guided missiles. It also featured flamethrower and particle beam settings. Any of this panoply of ammunition was constructed on the fly by the MP-35A out of a heavy metallic block of nanobots. Jared wondered idly how the rifle managed the trick; his BrainPal obligingly unpacked the physics behind the weapon, leading to a massive and terribly inconvenient unpacking of general physical principles while the 8th was on the shooting range. Naturally all of this unpacked information was forwarded onto the rest of the squad, all of whom looked over at Jared with varying levels of irritation.
::Sorry,:: Jared said.
By the end of the long afternoon, Jared had mastered the MP-35A and its myriad of options. Jared and another recruit named Joshua Lederman focused on the options the Empee allowed for its rifled bullets, experimenting with different designs of the bullets and assessing the advantages and disadvantages of each, duly noting each to the other members of the squad.
When they were ready to move on to the other ammunition options available to them, Jared and Lederman took ample advantage of the information about those weapons fed in by other members of the 8th to master those options as well. Jared had to admit that whatever personal problems he might have with Steven Seaborg, if he ever needed someone to wield a flamethrower for him, Seaborg was going to be his first choice. Jared told him so as they hiked back to the barracks; Seaborg ignored him and pointedly started a private conversation with Andrea Gell-Mann.
After dinner, Jared staked out a spot on the steps of the barracks. After a brief tutorial from his BrainPal (and taking care to cache his explorations so as not to repeat his embarrassing data spill from earlier in the day), he signed on the Phoenix's public data net and secured a copy of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, revised third edition, 1831.
Eight minutes later he finished it and was in something of a state of shock, intuiting (correctly) why Brahe had him read it: He and all the members of the 8th—all of the Special Forces soldiers— were the spiritual descendants of the pathetic creature Victor Frankenstein had assembled from the bodies of the dead and then jolted into life. Jared saw how Frankenstein felt pride in creating life, but how he feared and rejected the creature once that life had been given; how the creature lashed out, killing the doctor's family and friends, and how creator and created were finally consumed in a pyre, their fates interlocked. The allusions between the monster and the Special Forces were all too obvious.
And yet. As Jared considered whether it was the fate of the Special Forces to be as misunderstood and reviled by the realborn as the monster was by his creator, he thought back on his brief encounter with Lieutenant Cloud. Cloud certainly didn't seem terrified or repulsed by Jared; he'd offered his hand to him, a gesture that Victor Frankenstein, pointedly, refused from the monster he created. Jared also considered the fact that while Victor Frankenstein was the creator of the monster, his creator—Mary Shelley— implicitly offered pity and empathy to the monster. The real human in this story was a rather more complex person than the fictional one, and more inclined toward the creature than its fictional creator.
He thought about that for a good, solid minute.
Jared greedily sought out links to the text, quickly alighting on the famous 1931 motion picture version of the story and devouring it at ten times speed, only to find himself greatly disappointed; the eloquence of Shelley's monster was replaced by a sad shambling grunter. Jared quickly sampled other filmed versions but was continually disappointed. The monster he identified with was almost nowhere to be seen in any of these, even in the versions that paid lip service to the original text. Frankenstein's monster was a joke; Jared gave up on filmed versions before he reached the end of the twenty-first century.
Jared tried another tack and sought out stories of other created beings, and was soon acquainted with Friday, R. Deneel Olivaw, Data, HAL, Der Machinen-Mensch, Astro Boy, the various Terminators, Channa Fortuna, Joe the Robot Bastard and all manner of other droids, robots, computers, replicants, clones and genetically-engineered whatsits that were as much the spiritual descendants of Frankenstein's monster as he was. Curious, Jared moved backward in time from Shelley to find Pygmalion, golems, homunculi and clockwork automatons.
He read and watched the sad and often dangerous humorless-ness of many of these creatures, and how it was used to make them objects of pity and comic relief. He now understood why Brahe was touchy about the whole sense of humor issue. Implicit in that touchiness was the idea that Special Forces were misrepresented in their depictions by the realborn, or so Jared thought until he went searching for literature or recorded entertainments featuring the Special Forces as main characters.
There were none. The Colonial era was rife with entertainments about the Colonial Defense Forces and its military battles and events—the Battle for Armstrong seemed a particularly revisited topic—but in none of them were the Special Forces even hinted at; the closest thing was a series of pulpy novels published on Rama colony featuring the adventures of a secret force of erotic superhuman soldiers, who mostly overcame fictional alien species by having energetic sex with them until they surrendered. Jared, who at this time understood sex largely in the reproductive sense, wondered why anyone would think this was a viable way to conquer one's enemies. He decided that he was probably missing something important about this sex thing and filed it away to ask Brahe about later.
In the meantime there was the mystery of why, from the point of view of the fiction output of the colonies, the Special Forces didn't exist.
But that was for another night, perhaps. Jared was eager to share his current explorations with his squad mates. He uncached his findings and released them to the others. As he did he became aware that he wasn't the only one sharing discoveries; Brahe had assigned homework to the majority of the 8th, and these explorations came flooding into his perception. Among them, etiquette and the psychology of conflict resolution from Seaborg (whom Jared could sense rolling his eyes at almost all of the material he was passing along); major battles of the Colonial Defense Forces from Brian Michaelson; animated cartoons from a recruit named Jerry Yukawa; human physiology from Sarah Pauling. Jared made a note to make fun of her later for giving him grief about his own assignment earlier in the day. His BrainPal merrily began to unpack everything Jared's mates had learned. Jared leaned back into the stairs and watched the sunset as the information branched and expanded.
Phoenix's sun had well and truly set by the time Jared had unpacked all his new learning; he sat inside the small pool of light illuminating the barracks and watched Phoenix's analogue to insects zip around the light. One of the more ambitious of these small creatures landed on Jared's arm and plunged a needle-like proboscis into his flesh to suck out his fluids. A few seconds later it was dead. The nanobots in Jared's SmartBlood, alerted to their situation by his BrainPal, self-immolated inside the tiny animal, using the oxygen they carried as a combustible agent. The poor creature crisped from the inside; miniscule and almost invisible wisps of smoke vented out of its spicules. Jared wondered who it was who programmed that sort of defensive response into his BrainPal and SmartBlood; it seemed hateful of life in its intent.
Maybe the realborn are right to fear us, Jared thought.
From inside the barracks Jared could perceive his squad mates arguing about what they'd learned that night; Seaborg just declared Frankenstein's monster a bore. Jared launched himself inside to defend the monster's honor.
During the morning and afternoons of the first week, the 8th learned to fight, to defend, and to kill. In the evenings they learned everything else, including some things Jared suspected were of questionable value.
In the early evening of the second day, Andrea Gell-Mann introduced the 8th to the concept of profanity, which she picked up at lunch and shared just before dinner. At dinner members of the 8th enthusiastically told each other to pass the fucking salt, you fucking sack of shit, until Brahe told them to quit that goddamn shit, cocksuckers, because it got old pretty goddamn quick. There was general agreement that Brahe was correct, until Gell-Man taught the squad to swear in Arabic.
On the third day, members of the 8th asked for, and received, permission to enter the mess hall kitchens and use the ovens and certain ingredients. The next morning the other training squads at Camp Carson were presented with enough sugar cookies for every recruit (and their superior officers).
On the fourth day the members of the 8th tried to tell each other jokes they'd found on the Phoenix data net, and mostly failed to make them work; by the time their BrainPals unpacked the context of the joke, it was no longer funny. Only Sarah Pauling seemed to be laughing most of the time, and it was eventually determined she was laughing because she thought it was funny that none of the rest of them could tell a joke. No else thought that was funny, to which Pauling laughed hard enough to fall off her cot.
They all agreed that was funny.
Also, puns were all right.
On the fifth day, during which the afternoon was spent in an informational session about the disposition of the human colonies and their relationship with other intelligent species (which was to say, bad all the time), the 8th critically evaluated pre-Colonial era speculative fiction and entertainments about interstellar wars with aliens. The verdicts were reasonably consistent. The War of the Worlds met with approval until the ending, which struck the 8th as a cheap trick. Starship Troopers had some good action scenes but required too much unpacking of philosophical ideas; they liked the movie better, even though they recognized it was dumber. The Forever War made most of the 8th unaccountably sad; the idea that a war could go on that long was almost unfathomable to a group of people who were a week old. After watching Star Wars everyone wanted a lightsaber and was irritated that the technology for them didn't really exist. Everyone also agreed the Ewoks should all die.
Two classics stuck with them. Ender's Game delighted them all; here were soldiers who were just like them, except smaller. The main character was even bred to fight alien species like they were. The next day the members of the 8th greeted each other with the salutation ::Ho, Ender,:: until Brahe told them to knock it off and pay attention.
The other was Charlie's Homecoming, one of the last books before the Colonial era began, and one of the last books, therefore, to be able to imagine a universe other than what it was—one where the alien species humanity would meet greeted them with a welcome instead of a weapon. The book was eventually adapted into a film; by that time it was clear it wasn't science fiction, but fantasy, and a bitter one at that. It was a flop. The members of the 8th were transfixed by both the book and film, captivated by a universe they could never have, and one which would never have had them, because they wouldn't be needed.
On the sixth day, Jared and the rest of the 8th finally figured out what that sex thing was all about.
On the seventh day, and as a direct consequence of the sixth day, they rested.
::They're not of questionable value,:: Pauling said to Jared about the things they had learned, as they lay together in her cot late on the seventh day, intimate but not sexual. ::Maybe all of these things don't have any use in themselves, but they bring all of us closer together.::
::We are closer together,:: Jared agreed.
::Not just like this.:: Pauling pressed herself into Jared briefly, and then released. ::Closer as people. As a group. All of those things you mentioned are silly. But they're training us how to be human.::
It was Jared's turn to press himself into Pauling, snuggling into her chest. ::I like being human,:: he said.
::I like you being human too,:: Pauling said, and then audibly giggled.
::For fuck's sake, you two,:: Seaborg said. ::I'm trying to sleep over here.::
::Grump,:: Pauling said. She looked down at Jared to see if he would add anything, but he had fallen asleep. She kissed him lightly on the top of his head and then joined him.
::In your first week, you physically trained to do all the things realborn soldiers can do,:: Brahe said. ::Now it's time to train you to do things only you can do.::
The 8th stood at the beginning of a long obstacle course.
"We've already run this course,:: said Luke Gullstrand.
"Good of you to notice, Gullstrand,:: Brahe said. "For your observational skills, you get to be the first one to run it today. Stay here. The rest of you spread out over the length of the course, please, as equally as possible.::
Presently members of the 8th were strung along the course. Brahe turned to Gullstrand. "You see the course?:: he asked.
::Yes,:: Gullstrand said.
::Do you think you could run it with your eyes closed?::
::No,:: Gullstrand said. ::I don't remember where everything is. I'd trip over something and kill myself.::
::Do you all agree?:: Brahe asked. There were pings of affirmation. ::And yet, all of you will run this course with your eyes closed before we leave here today. Because you have an ability that will allow you to do this: your integration with your squad members.::
From around the squad came varying levels of skepticism. ::We use our integration to talk and to share data,:: said Brian Michaelson. ::This is something entirely different.::
::No. Not different at all,:: Brahe said. ::The nighttime assignments of the last week were not just punishments and frivolity. You already knew that through your BrainPal and your pre-birth conditioning you could learn quickly by yourself. In the last week—without realizing it—you've learned to share and absorb immense amounts of information between yourselves. There is no difference between that information and this. Pay attention.::
Jared gasped audibly, as did other members of the 8th. In his head was not only the presence of Gabriel Brahe but an intimate sensation of his physical presence and personal situation, overlaid on Jared's own consciousness.
::Look through my eyes,:: Brahe said. Jared focused on the command and then had a sickening sense of vertigo as his perspective wheeled from his own vantage point to Brahe's. Brahe panned left and right and Jared saw himself, looking toward Brahe. Brahe snapped off the view.
::It gets easier the more you do it,:: Brahe said. ::And from now on, in every combat practice you will do it. Your integration gives you situational awareness that is unique in this universe. All intelligent species share information in combat however they can—-even realborn soldiers keep a communication channel open through their BrainPals during battle. But only Special Forces have this level of sharing, this level of tactical awareness. It's at the heart of how we work and how we fight.
::As I said, last week you covered the basics of fighting like the realborn—you learned how to go into combat as an individual. Now it's time to learn to fight like Special Forces, to integrate your combat skills with your squad. You will learn to share and you will learn to trust what is shared with you. It will save your life and it will save the life of your squad mates. This will be the hardest and most important thing you learn. So pay attention.::
Brahe turned back to Gullstrand. ::Now, close your eyes.::
Gullstrand hesitated. ::I don't know if I can keep my eyes closed,:: he said.
::You're going to have to trust your squad,:: Brahe said.
::I trust the squad,:: Gullstrand said. ::I just don't trust myself.:: This got a sympathetic round of pings.
::That's part of the exercise as well,:: Brahe said. ::Off you go.::
Gullstrand closed his eyes and took a step. From his vantage point halfway down the course, Jared could see Jerry Yukawa, in the first position, lean in slightly, as if physically attempting to close the distance between his mind and Gullstrand's. Gullstrand's passage through the obstacle course was slow but became progressively steadier; just before reaching Jared, and just after balancing on a wood beam suspended over mud, Gullstrand began to a smile. He had become a believer.
Jared felt Gullstrand reach for his point of view. Jared give him full access to his senses and passed along a feeling of encouragement and assurance. He sensed Gullstrand receiving it and briefly passing along his thanks; then Gullstrand focused on scaling the rope wall Jared stood to the side of. At the top, he felt Gullstrand move on to the next squad member in the line, fully confident. By the end of the course, Gullstrand was moving nearly at full speed.
::Excellent,:: Brahe said. ::Gullstrand, take over that last position. Everybody else move down one position. Yukawa, you're up.::
Two run-throughs later, not only were members of the squad sharing their perspective with the squad mate running the course; the squad mate on the course was sharing his shared perspective with them, giving everyone who hadn't run through the course a preview of what was coming up next. The next run-through after that had the squad mates on the side sharing vantage points with the person one station up from them, so they could better help the person on the course when they shifted into the position. By the time Jared was himself on the court, the entire squad had fully integrated their perspectives and were getting the hang of quickly sampling another perspective and picking out the relevant information without breaking from their own point of view. It was like being in two places at once.
When Jared was on the course himself, he exulted in the strange intelligence of it all, at least until the beams over the mud, when his borrowed visual vantage point suddenly wheeled away from where his feet were. Jared missed his footing and fell flat into the mud.
::Sorry about that,:: said Steven Seaborg a few seconds later, as Jared pulled himself out, eyes open. ::Got bit by something. Distracted me.::
::Bullshit,:: Alan Millikan sent to Jared, privately. ::I was one station down and looking right at him. He didn't get bit:.:
Brahe cut in. "Seaborg, when you're in combat, letting a squad mate get killed because of a bug bite is the sort of thing that gets you on the unfortunate side of an airlock,:: he said. ::Keep it in mind. Dirac, keep moving.::
Jared closed his eyes and put one foot in front of the other.
::What does Seaborg have against me, anyway?:: Jared asked Pauling. The two of them were practicing fighting with their combat knives. The squad members practiced for five minutes with each other member of the squad, with their integration sense on full. Fighting someone who was intimately aware of your internal state of mind made it an interesting extra challenge.
::You really don't know?:: Pauling said, circling with her knife held casually in her left hand. ::It's two things. One, he's just a jerk. Two, he likes me.::
Jared stopped circling. ::What?:: he said, and Pauling attacked viciously, feinting right and then slashing upward toward Jared's neck with her left hand. Jared stumbled backward and right to avoid the slashing; Pauling's knife switched hands and stabbed downward, missing Jared's leg by about a centimeter. Jared righted himself and settled into a defensive position.
::You distracted me,:: he said, circling again.
::You distracted yourself,:: Pauling said. ::I just took advantage of it when it happened.::
::You won't be happy until you cut open an artery,:: Jared said.
::I won't be happy until you shut up and focus on trying to kill me with that knife,:: Pauling said.
::You know,:: Jared began, and suddenly leaned back; he felt Pauling's intent to slash a fraction of a second before she made her lunge. Before she could pull back Jared leaned back in, inside the reach of her extended arm, and brought up the blade in his right hand to touch it lightly to her rib cage. Before it got there Pauling brought her head up and jammed it into the bottom of Jared's jaw. There was an audible clack as Jared's teeth slammed together; Jared's field of vision whited out. Pauling took advantage of Jared's stunned pause to step back and sweep his legs out from under him, spilling him flat on his back. When Jared came to, Pauling had pinned his arms with her legs and held her knife directly on top of a carotid artery.
::You know,:: Pauling said, mocking Jared's last words, ::if this were real combat I'd have sliced four of your arteries by now and moved on to whoever was next.:: Pauling sheathed her knife, and took her knees off his arms.
.-.Good thing we're not in real combat,:: Jared said, and propped himself up.::About Seaborg—::
Pauling punched Jared square in the nose; his head snapped back. Pauling's knife was back at his throat, and her legs pinning his arms, a fraction of a second later.
::What the hell?:: Jared said.
::Our five minutes aren't up,:: Pauling said. ::We're still supposed to be fighting.::
::But you—:: Jared began. Pauling jabbed him in the neck and drew SmartBlood. Jared exclaimed aloud.
::There's no "but you—":: Pauling said. ::Jared, I like you, but I've noticed that you don't focus. We're friends, and I know you think that means that we can have a nice conversation while we're doing this. But I swear to you that the next time you give me an opening like you did just now, I'm going to cut your throat. Your Smart-Blood will probably keep you from dying. And it'll keep you from thinking that just because we're friends doesn't mean I won't seriously hurt you. I like you too much. And I don't want you to die in real combat because you're thinking about something else. The things we'll be fighting in real combat aren't going to pause for conversation.::
::You'd watch out for me in combat,:: Jared said.
::You know I would,:: Pauling said. ::But this integration thing only goes so far, Jared. You have to watch out for yourself.::
Brahe told them their five minutes were up. Pauling let Jared off the floor. ::I'm serious, Jared,:: Pauling said, after she hauled him up. ::Pay attention next time, or I'll cut you bad.::
::I know,:: Jared said, and touched his nose. ::Or punch me.::
"True,:: Pauling said, and smiled. ::I'm not picky.::
::So all that about Seaborg liking you was just to distract me,:: Jared said.
::Oh, no,:: Pauling said. ::It's completely true.::
::Oh,:: Jared said.
Pauling laughed aloud. ::There you go, getting distracted again,:: she said.
Sarah Pauling was one of the first to get shot; she and Andrea Gell-Mann were ambushed as they were scouting a small valley. Pauling went down immediately, shot in the head and the neck; Gell-Mann managed to identify the locations of the shooters before a trio of shots in the chest and abdomen brought her down. In both cases their integration with the rest of the squad collapsed; it felt as if they were ripped out bodily from the squad's pooled consciousness. Others fell in short order, gutting the squad and sending its remaining members into disarray.
It was a bad war game for the 8th.
Jerry Yukawa compounded the problem by getting shot in the leg. The training suit he was wearing registered the "hit" and froze the mobility to the limb; Yukawa fell midstride and barely kicked his way behind the boulder Katherine Berkeley had gotten behind a few seconds before.
::You were supposed to lay down suppressing fire,:: Yukawa said, accusingly.
::I did,:: Berkeley said. ::I am. There is one of me and five of them. You do better::
The five members of the 13th Training Squad who had trapped Yukawa and Berkeley behind the boulder sent another volley their way. The members of the 13th felt the simulated mechanical kick of their training rifles while their BrainPals visually and aurally simulated the bullets tearing down the tiny cul-de-sac of a valley; Yukawa and Berkeley's BrainPals correspondingly simulated some of these bullets smacking the bulk of the boulder and others whining as they shot past. The bullets weren't real but they were as real as fake could get.
::We could use a little help here,:: Yukawa said to Steven Seaborg, who was the commander for the exercise.
::We hear you,:: Seaborg said, and then turned to look at Jared, his only other surviving soldier, who was standing mutely looking at him. Four members of the 8th were still standing (only figuratively speaking in the case of Yukawa), while seven members of the 13th were roaming the forest. The odds weren't good.
::Stop looking at me like that,:: Seaborg said. ::This isn't my fault.::
::I didn't say anything,:: Jared said.
::You were thinking it,:: Seaborg said.
::I wasn't thinking it, either,:: Jared said. ::I was reviewing data.::
::Of what?:: Seaborg asked.
::Of how the 13th moves and thinks,:: Jared said. "From the other members of the 8th before they died. I'm trying to see if there's something we can use.::
::Can you do it a little quicker?:: Yukawa said. "Things are looking mighty bleak on this end.::
Jared looked over to Seaborg. Seaborg sighed. ::Fine,:: he said. "I'm open to suggestion. What have you got.::
::You're going to think I'm crazy,:: Jared said. "But there's something I've noticed. So far, neither us or them look up very much.::
Seaborg looked up into the forest canopy, looking at the sunlight peek through the canopy of native Terran trees and their Phoenix equivalent, thick, bamboo-like stalks that threw off impressive branches. The two types of flora did not compete genetically—they were naturally incompatible because they developed on different worlds—but they competed for sunlight, reaching as far into the sky as possible and branching thickly to offer scaffolding for leaves and leaf-equivalents to do their photosynthetic work.
::We don't look up because there's nothing up there but trees,:: Seaborg said.
Jared started counting off seconds in his head. He got as far as seven before Seaborg said, ::Oh.::
::Oh,:: Jared agreed. He popped up a map. "We're here. Yukawa and Berkeley are here. There's forest all the way between here and there.::
::And you think we can get from here to there in the trees,:: Seaborg said.
::That's not the question,:: Jared said. ::The question is whether we can do it fast enough to keep Yukawa and Berkeley alive, and quietly enough not to get ourselves killed.::
Jared quickly discovered that walking through the trees was an idea better in theory than in execution. He and Seaborg almost fell twice within the first two minutes; moving from branch to branch required rather more coordination then either expected. The Phoenix trees' branches were not nearly as load bearing as they assumed and the Terran trees featured a surprising number of dead branches. Their progress was slower and louder than they would have liked.
A rustling came from the east; in separate trees Jared and Seaborg hugged trunks and froze. Two members of the 13th walked out of the brush thirty meters away and six meters below Jared's position. The two were alert and wary, looking and listening for their quarry. They didn't look up.
Out of the corner of his eye, Jared saw Seaborg slowly reach toward his Empee. ::Wait,:: Jared said. ::We're still in their peripheral vision. Wait until we're behind them.:: The two soldiers edged forward, putting Jared and Seaborg behind them; Seaborg nodded to Jared. They silently unslung their Empees, stabilized as best they could, and sighted in on the backs of the soldiers. Seaborg gave the order; bullets flew in a short burst. The soldiers stiffened and fell.
::The rest have Yukawa and Berkeley pinned down,:: Seaborg said. ::Let's get cracking.:: He set off. Jared was amused at how Seaborg's take-charge spirit, so recently dampened, had suddenly returned.
Ten minutes later, Yukawa and Berkeley were down to the last of their ammunition, and Jared and Seaborg caught sight of the remaining members of the 13th. To the left of them, eight meters below, two soldiers were camped behind a large fallen tree; to the right and about thirty meters forward, another pair were behind a collection of boulders. These soldiers were keeping Yukawa and Berkeley busy while the fifth soldier quietly flanked their position. All of them had their backs to Jared and Seaborg.
"I'll take the ones by the log; you take the ones at the boulders,:: Seaborg said. "I'll tell Berkeley about the flanker but tell her not to get him until we get our guys. No point giving ourselves away.:: Jared nodded; now that Seaborg was feeling confident, his planning was getting better. Jared filed that datum away to consider later, and moved to steady himself in their tree, putting his back against the trunk and hooking his left foot under a lower branch for additional support.
Seaborg moved one branch lower on the tree to get around a branch that was impeding his sight line. The branch he stepped on, dead, cracked loudly under his weight and collapsed, falling out of the tree in what seemed the loudest possible way. Seaborg lost his footing and grabbed wildly at the branch below where he had stepped, dropping his Empee; four soldiers on the ground turned, looked up and saw him dangling there helplessly. They raised their weapons.
::Shit,:: Seaborg said, and looked up at Jared.
Jared fired in automatic-burst mode at the two soldiers at the boulders. One seized up and fell; the other dove around the boulders. Jared swiveled and fired on the soldiers at the log; he didn't hit anything but unnerved them long enough to switch his Empee to guided-missile mode and fire at the space between the two soldiers. The simulated rocket peppered both with virtual bits of shrapnel. They fell. Jared turned just in time to see the remaining soldier at the boulder lining up her shot. He launched a guided missile at her as she pulled her trigger. Jared felt his ribs go stiff and painful as his training suit constricted, and fumbled his Empee. He'd been shot, but the fact he didn't drop out of the tree told him he was still alive.
Training exercise! Jared was so pumped full of adrenaline that he thought he might pee himself.
::A little help here,:: Seaborg said, and reached over with his left hand for Jared to pull him up just as the fifth soldier, who had circled back, shot him in the right shoulder. Seaborg's entire arm stiffened in its suit; he let go of the branch he was dangling from. Jared grabbed at his left hand and caught him before his fall had gained momentum. Jared's left leg, still hooked under its branch by the foot, strained painfully from the additional load put on it.
On the ground, the soldier lined up his shot; virtual bullets or not, Jared knew if he were shot the stiffening of his suit would make him drop Seaborg and probably fall himself. Jared reached over with his right hand, grabbed his combat knife and threw hard. The knife buried itself in the meat of the soldier's left thigh; the soldier collapsed, screaming and pawing gingerly at the knife until Berkeley came up behind him and shot him into immobility.
::The 8th wins the war game,:: Jared heard Brahe say. ::I'm relaxing the training suits now for everyone who is still frozen. Next war game matchups in thirty minutes.:: The pressure on Jared's right side was suddenly and considerably relieved, as was the stiffness of Seaborg's suit. Jared hauled him up and then they both carefully picked their way to the forest floor to retrieve their weapons.
The unfrozen members of the 13th were waiting for them, breaking off from their squad mate, who was still moaning on the ground. ::You fuck,:: one of them said, getting directly into Jared's face. "You threw a knife into Charlie. You're not supposed to try to kill anyone. That's why it's called a war game,::
Seaborg jammed in between Jared and the soldier. "Tell that to your friend, asshole,:: he said. ::If your friend had shot us, I would have dropped eight meters without any way to control my fall. He didn't seem particularly worried about me dying as he was lining up his shot. Jared knifing your friend saved my life. And your friend will survive. So fuck him, and fuck you.::
Seaborg and the soldier sized each other up for another few seconds before the other soldier turned his head, spat on the ground, and walked back to his squad mate.
::Thanks,:: Jared said to Seaborg.
Seaborg glanced over to Jared, and then to Yukawa and Berkeley. ::Let's get out of here,:: he said. ::We've got another war game.:: He stomped off. The three of them followed.
On the way back, Seaborg dropped back to pace Jared. ::It was a good idea to use the trees,:: he said. ::And I'm glad you caught me before I dropped. Thank you.::
::You're welcome,:: Jared said.
::I still don't like you much,:: Seaborg said. ::But I'm not going to have a problem with you anymore.::
::I'll take that,:: Jared said. ::It's a start, anyway.::
Seaborg nodded and picked up his pace again. He was silent the rest of the way in.
"Well, look who we have here," Lieutenant Cloud said, as Jared entered the shuttle with the other former members of the 8th. They were on their way back to Phoenix Station for their first assignments. "It's my pal Jared."
"Hello, Lieutenant Cloud," Jared said. "It's good to see you again."
"It's Dave," Cloud said. "Done with your training, I see. Damn, I wish my training had just been two weeks."
"We still cover a lot," Jared said.
"I don't doubt that in the least," Cloud said. "So what's your assignment, Private Dirac? Where will you be headed?"
"I've been assigned to the Kite," Jared said. "Me and two of my friends, Sarah Pauling and Steven Seaborg." Jared pointed at Pauling, who had already sat down; Seaborg had yet to get on the shuttle.
"I've seen the Kite," Cloud said. "Newer ship. Nice lines. Never been on it, of course. You Special Forces types keep to yourselves."
"That's what they tell me," Jared said. Andrea Gell-Mann came on board, bumping Jared slightly. She pinged an apology to him; Jared looked over and smiled.
"Looks like it's going to be a full-up flight," Cloud said. "You can sit up in the copilot's seat again if you like."
"Thanks," Jared said, and glanced over to Pauling. "I think I'll sit with my other friends this time."
Cloud looked over at Pauling. "That's entirely understandable," Cloud said. "Although remember you owe me some new jokes. I hope in all that training you did they gave you some time to work on your sense of humor."
Jared paused for a minute, recalling his first conversation with Gabriel Brahe. "Lieutenant Cloud, did you ever read Frankenstein?" he asked.
"Never did," Cloud said. "I know the story. Saw the most recent movie version not too long ago. The monster talked, which I'm told means it's closer to the actual book than not."
"What did you think of it?" Jared said.
"It was all right," Cloud said. "The acting was a little over-the-top. I felt sorry for the monster. And the Dr. Frankenstein character was something of an asshole. Why do you ask?"
"Just curious," Jared said, and nodded toward the seating compartment, which was now almost completely full. "We all read it. Gave us a lot to think about."
"Ah," said Cloud. "I see. Jared, allow me to share with you my philosophy of human beings. It can be summed up in four words: I like good people. You seem like good people. I can't say that's all that matters to everyone, but it's what matters to me."
"That's good to know," Jared said. "I think my philosophy runs the same way."
"Well then, we're going to get along just fine," Cloud said. "Now: Any new jokes?"
"I might have a few," Jared said.
"We'll talk out loud here, if you don't mind," General Szi-lard said to Jane Sagan. "It makes the waitstaff nervous to see two people staring intently at each other without actually making any sounds. If they don't see we're talking, they'll come over every other minute to see if there's anything we need. It's distracting."
"As you wish," Sagan said.
The two of them sat in the general's mess, with Phoenix spinning above them. Sagan stared. Szilard followed her gaze.
"It's amazing, isn't it," he said.
"It is," Sagan said.
"You can see the planet out of any portal on the station, at least some of the time. But no one ever looks," Szilard said. "And then you come here, and you just can't stop staring at it. I can't, in any event." He pointed to the crystal dome that encased them. "This dome was a gift, did you know that?" Sagan shook her head. "The Ala gave it to us as we built this station. It's diamond, this whole thing. They said it was a natural diamond that they carved out of an even larger crystal they hauled up from the core of one of their system's gas giants. The Ala were amazing engineers, so I've read. The story might even be true."
"I'm not familiar with the Ala," Sagan said.
"They're extinct," Szilard said. "A hundred fifty years ago they got into a war with the Obin over a colony. They had an army of clones and the means to make those clones quickly, and for a while it looked like they were going to beat the Obin. Then the Obin tailored a virus keyed to the clones' genetics. The virus was initially harmless and transmitted by air, like a flu. Our scientists estimated it spread through the entire Alaite army in about a month, and then a month after that the virus matured and begun to attack the cellular reproduction cycle of every single Ala military clone. The victims literally dissolved."
"All at once?" Sagan asked.
"It took about a month," Szilard said. "Which is why our scientists estimated it took that long to infect the entire army in the first place. With the Alaite army out of the way the Obin wiped out the civilian population in short order. It was a fast and brutal genocide. The Obin are not a compassionate species. Now all the Alaite planets are owned by the Obin, and the Colonial Union learned two things. One, clone armies are a very bad idea. Two, stay out of the way of the Obin. Which we have done, until now."
Sagan nodded. The Special Forces battle cruiser Kite and her crew had recently begun recon and stealth raids in Obin territory, to gauge the Obin's strength and response capabilities. It was dangerous work since the Obin were unforgiving of assaults, and technically speaking the Obin and the Colonial Union were not in a state of hostilities. Knowledge of the Obin-Rraey-Eneshan alliance was a closely guarded secret; the majority of the Colonial Union and the CDF were unaware of the alliance and its threat to humans. The Eneshans even maintained a diplomatic presence on Phoenix, in the Colonial capital of Phoenix City. Strictly speaking, they were allies.
"Do you want to talk about the Obin raids?" Sagan said. In addition to being a squad leader on the Kite, she was the ship's intelligence officer, charged with force assessment. Most Special Forces officers held more than one post and also led combat squads; it kept the ship rosters lean, and keeping officers in combat positions appealed to the Special Forces' sense of mission. When you are born to protect humanity, no one is above combat.
"Not now," Szilard said. "This isn't the place for it. I wanted to talk to you about one of your new soldiers. The Kite has three new recruits, and two of them will be under you."
Sagan bristled. "They will, and that's a problem. I had only one hole in my squad, but I have two replacements. You took one of my veterans to make room." Sagan remembered the helpless look on Will Lister's face when his transfer order to the Peregrine came through.
"The Peregrine is a new ship and it needs some experienced hands," Szilard said. "I assure you there are other squad leaders on other ships just as irritated as you. The Kite had to give up one of its veterans, and as it happens I had a recruit I wanted to place under you. So I had the Peregrine take one of yours."
Sagan opened her mouth to complain again, then thought better of it and clammed up, stewing. Szilard watched the play of emotions on her face. Most Special Forces soldiers would have said the first thing that came into their heads, an artifact of not having social niceties banged into their head through a childhood and adolescence. Sagan's self-control was one of the reasons why she had come to Szilard's attention; that and other factors.
"Which recruit are we talking about?" Sagan said finally.
"Jared Dirac," Szilard said.
"What's so special about him?" Sagan asked.
"He's got Charles Boutin's brain in him," Szilard said, and watched again as Sagan fought back an immediate visceral response.
"And you think this is a good idea," is what eventually came out of her mouth.
"It gets better," Szilard said, and sent over Dirac's entire classified file, complete with technical material. Sagan sat silently, digesting the material; Szilard sat, watching the junior officer. After a minute one of the mess staff approached their table and asked if there was anything they needed. Szilard ordered tea. Sagan ignored the waiter.
"All right, I'll bite," Sagan said, after she was done examining the file. "Why are you sticking me with a traitor?"
"Boutin's the traitor," Szilard said. "Dirac has just got his brain."
"A brain that you tried to imprint with a traitor's consciousness," Sagan said.
"Yes," Szilard said.
"I submit the question to your attention once more," Sagan said.
"Because you have experience with this sort of thing," Szilard said.
"With traitors?" Sagan asked, confused.
"With unconventional Special Forces members," Szilard said. "You once temporarily had a realborn member of the CDF under your command. John Perry." Sagan stiffened slightly at the name; Szilard noted it but chose not to comment. "He did quite well under you," Szilard said. This last sentence was a bit of an ironic understatement; during the Battle of Coral, Perry carried Sagan's unconscious and injured body over several hundred meters of battlefield to get her medical attention, and then located a key piece of enemy technology as the building it was in collapsed around him.
"The credit for that goes to Perry, not me," Sagan said. Szilard sensed another play of emotion from Sagan at Perry's name, but again left it on the table.
"You are too modest," Szilard said, and paused as the waiter delivered the tea. "My point is, Dirac is something of a hybrid," he continued. "He's Special Forces, but he may also be something else. I want someone who has experience with something else."
" 'Something else,' " Sagan repeated. "General, am I hearing that you think Boutin's consciousness is actually somewhere inside Dirac?"
"I didn't say that," Szilard said, in a tone that implied that perhaps he had.
Sagan considered this and addressed the implicit rather than the expressed. "You are aware, of course, that the Kite's next series of missions will have us engaging both the Rraey and the Enesha," she said. "The Eneshan missions in particular are ones of great delicacy." And ones I needed Will Lister for, Sagan thought, but did not say.
"I am of course aware," Szilard agreed, and reached for his tea.
"You don't think having someone with a possibly emergent traitorous personality might be a risk," Sagan said. "A risk not only to his mission but to others serving with him."
"Obviously it's a risk," Szilard said, "for which I rely on your experience to deal with. But he may also turn out to be a trove of critical information. Which will also need to be dealt with. In addition to everything else, you're an intelligence officer. You're the ideal officer for this soldier."
"What did Crick have to say about this?" Sagan said, referring to Major Crick, the commanding officer of the Kite.
"He didn't have anything to say about it because I haven't told him," Szilard said. "This is need-to-know material, and I've decided he doesn't need to know. As far as he knows he simply has three new soldiers."
"I don't like this," Sagan said. "I don't like this at all."
"I didn't ask you to like it," Szilard said. "I'm telling you to deal with it." He sipped his tea.
"I don't want him playing a critical role in any of the missions that deal with the Rraey or the Enesha," Sagan said.
"You'll treat him no differently from any other soldier under your command," Szilard said.
"Then he could get killed like any other soldier," Sagan said.
"Then for your sake you'd better hope it's not by friendly fire," Szilard said, and set down his cup.
Sagan was silent again. The waiter approached; Szilard impatiently waved him off.
"I want to show this file to someone," Sagan said, pointing to her head.
"It's classified, for obvious reasons," Szilard said. "Everyone who needs to know about it already does, and we don't want to spread it around to anyone else. Even Dime doesn't know about his own history. We want to keep it that way."
"You're asking me to take on a soldier who has the capability to be an immense security risk," Sagan said. "The least you can do is let me prepare myself. I know a specialist in human brain function and BrainPal integration. I think his insights on this could be useful."
Szilard considered this. "This is someone you trust," he said.
"I can trust him with this," Sagan said.
"Do you know his security clearance?" Szilard asked.
"I do," Sagan said.
"Is it high enough for something like this?"
"Well," Sagan said. "That's where things get interesting."
"Hello, Lieutenant Sagan," Administrator Cainen said, in English. The pronunciation was bad, but that was hardly Cainen's fault; his mouth was not well formed for most human languages.
"Hello, Administrator," Sagan said. "You're learning our language."
"Yes," Cainen said. "I have time to learn, and little to do." Cainen pointed to a book, written in Ckann, the predominant Rraey language, nestled next to a PDA. "Only two books here in Ckann. I had choice of language book or religion book. I chose language. Human religion is…"—Cainen searched his small store of English words—"… harder."
Sagan nodded toward the PDA. "Now that you have a computer, you should have more reading options."
"Yes," Cainen said. "Thank you for getting that to me. It makes me happy."
"You're welcome," Sagan said. "But the computer comes with a price."
"I know," Cainen said. "I have read files you asked me to read."
"And?" Sagan said.
"I must change to Ckann," Cainen said. "My English does not have many words."
"All right," Sagan said.
"I've looked at the files concerning Private Dirac in depth," Cainen said, in the harsh but rapid consonants of the Ckann language. "Charles Boutin was a genius for rinding a way to preserve the consciousness wave outside of the brain. And you people are idiots for how you tried to stuff that consciousness back in."
"Idiots," Sagan said, and cracked the smallest of smiles, the translation of the word in Ckann coming from a small speaker attached to a lanyard around her neck. "Is that your professional assessment, or just an editorial comment?"
"It's both," Cainen said.
"Tell me why," Sagan said. Cainen moved to send files from his PDA to her, but Sagan held up her hand. "I don't need the technical details," she said. "I just want to know if this Dirac is going to be a danger to my troops and my mission."
"All right," Cainen said, and paused for a moment. "The brain, even a human one, is like a computer. It's not a perfect analogy, but it works for what I'm going to tell you. Computers have three components for their operation: There's the hardware, there's the software, and there's the data file. The software runs on the hardware, and the file runs on the software. The hardware can't open the file without the software. If you place a file on a computer that lacks the necessary software, all it can do is sit there. Do you understand me?"
"So far," Sagan said.
"Good," Cainen said. He reached over and tapped Sagan on the head; she suppressed an urge to snap off his finger. "Follow: The brain is the hardware. The consciousness is the file. But with your friend Dirac, you're missing the software."
"What's the software?" Sagan asked.
"Memory," Cainen said. "Experience. Sensory activity. When you put Boutin's consciousness into his brain, that brain lacked the experience to make any sense of it. If that consciousness is still in Dirac's brain—if—it's isolated and there's no way to access it."
"Newborn Special Forces soldiers are conscious from the moment they are woken up," Sagan said. "But we also lack experience and memory."
"That's not consciousness they're experiencing," Cainen said, and Sagan could sense the disgust in his voice. "Your damned BrainPal forces open sensory channels artificially and offers the illusion of consciousness, and your brain knows it." Cainen pointed to his PDA again. "Your people gave me a rather wide range of access to brain and BrainPal research. Did you know this?"
"I did," Sagan said. "I asked them to let you look at any file you needed to help me."
"Because you knew that I would be a prisoner for the rest of my life, and that even if I could escape I would soon be dead of the disease you gave me. So it couldn't hurt to give me access," Cainen said.
Sagan shrugged.
"Hmmmp," Cainen said, and continued. "Do you know that there's no explainable reason why a Special Forces soldier's brain absorbs information so much more quickly than a regular CDF? They're both unaltered human brains; they're both the same BrainPal computer. Special Forces brains are preconditioned in a different way from the regular soldiers' brains, but not in a way that should noticeably speed up the rate at which the brains process information. And yet the Special Forces brain sucks down information and processes it at an incredible rate. Do you know why? It's defending itself, Lieutenant. Your average CDF soldier already has a consciousness, and the experience to use it. You Special Forces soldiers have nothing. Your brain senses the artificial consciousness your BrainPal is pressing on it and rushes to build its own as quickly as it can, before that artificial consciousness permanently deforms it. Or kills it."
"No Special Forces soldiers have died because of their Brain-Pal," Jane said.
"Oh, no, not now," Cainen said. "But I wonder what you would find if you went back far enough."
"What do you know?" Sagan asked.
"I know nothing," Cainen said, mildly. "It's merely idle speculation. But the point here is that you can't compare Special Forces waking up with 'consciousness' with what you were trying to do with Private Dirac. It's not the same thing. It's not even close."
Sagan changed the subject. "You said that it's possible Boutin's consciousness might not even be in Dirac's brain anymore," she said.
"It's possible," Cainen said. "The consciousness needs input; without it, it dissipates. That's one reason why it's near impossible to keep a consciousness pattern coherent outside the brain, and why Boutin's a genius for doing it. My suspicion is that if Boutin's consciousness was in there, it's already leaked away, and you've got just another soldier on your hands. But there's no way to tell whether it's in there or not. Its pattern would be subsumed by Private Dirac's consciousness."
"If it is in there, what would wake it up?" Sagan asked.
"You're asking me to speculate?" Cainen asked. Sagan nodded. "The reason you couldn't access the Boutin consciousness in the first place is that the brain didn't have memory and experience.
Maybe as your Private Dirac accumulates experiences, one will be close enough in its substance to unlock some part of that consciousness."
"And then he'd become Charles Boutin," Sagan said.
"He might," Cainen said. "Or he might not. Private Dirac has his own consciousness now. His own sense of self. If Boutin's consciousness woke up, it wouldn't be the only consciousness in there. It's up to you to decide whether that's good or bad, Lieutenant Sagan. I can't tell you that, or what would truly happen if Boutin got woken up."
"Those are the things I needed you to tell me," Sagan said.
Cainen gave the Rraey equivalent of a chuckle. "Get me a lab," he said. "Then I might be able to give you some answers."
"I thought you said you would never help us," Sagan said.
Cainen switched back to English. "Much time to think," he said. "Too much time. Language lessons not enough." And then back to Ckann. "And this doesn't help you against my people. But it helps you."
"Me?" Sagan said. "I know why you helped me this time; I bribed you with computer access. Why would you help me beyond this? I made you a prisoner."
"And you struck me with a disease that will kill me if I don't get a daily dose of antidote from my enemies," Cainen said. He reached into the shallow desk moulded from the wall of the cell and pulled out a small injector. "My medicine," he said. "They allow me to self-administer. Once I decided not to inject myself, to see if they would let me die. I'm still here, so that's the answer to that. But they let me writhe on the floor for hours first. Just like you did, come to think of it."
"None of this explains why you would want to help me," Sagan said.
"Because you remembered me," Cainen said. "To everyone else, I am just another one of your many enemies, barely worth providing a book to keep me from going insane with boredom. One day they could simply forget my antidote and let me die, and it would be all the same to them. You at least see me as having value. In the very small universe I live in now, that makes you my best and only friend, enemy though you are."
Sagan stared at Cainen, remembering the haughtiness of him the first time they met. He was pitiful and craven now, and that momentarily struck Sagan as the saddest thing she'd ever seen.
"I'm sorry," she said, and was surprised the words came out of her mouth.
Another Rraey chuckle from Cainen. "We were planning to destroy your people, Lieutenant," Cainen said. "And we still might. You needn't feel too apologetic."
Sagan had nothing to say to that. She signaled to the brig officer that she was ready to leave; a guard came and stood with an Empee while the cell door opened.
As the door slid shut behind her, she turned back to Cainen. "Thank you for your help. I will ask about a lab," she said.
"Thank you," Cainen said. "I won't get my hopes up."
"That's probably a good idea," Sagan said.
"And Lieutenant," Cainen said. "A thought. Your Private Dirac will be participating in your military actions."
"Yes," Sagan said.
"Watch him," Cainen said. "In humans and Rraey both, the stress of battle leaves permanent marks on our brains. It's a primal experience. If Boutin is still in there, it might be war that brings him out. Either by itself or through some combination of experiences."
"How do you suggest I watch him in battle?" Sagan asked.
"That's your department," Cainen said. "Except for when you captured me, I've never been to war. I couldn't begin to tell you. But if you're worried about Dirac, that's what I would do if I were you. You humans have an expression: 'Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.' It seems like your Private Dirac could be both. I'd keep him very close indeed."
The Kite caught the Rraey cruiser napping.
The Skip Drive was a touchy piece of technology. It made interstellar travel possible not by propelling ships faster than the speed of light, which was impossible, but by punching through space-time and placing spaceships (or anything equipped with a Skip Drive) into any spot within that universe those using the Skip Drive pleased.
(Actually, this wasn't exactly true; on a logarithmic scale Skip Drive travel became less reliable the more space there was between the initiation point and the destination point. The cause of what was called the Skip Drive Horizon Problem was not entirely understood, but its effects were lost ships and crews.
This kept humans and other races that used the Skip Drive in the same interstellar "neighborhood" as their home planets in the short run; if a race wanted to keep control of its colonies, as almost all did, its colonial expansion was ruled by the sphere defined by the Skip Drive horizon. In one sense this point was moot; thanks to the intense competition for real estate in the neighborhood humanity lived in, no intelligent race save one had a reach that came close to its own Skip Drive horizon. The exception was the Consu, whose technology was so advanced relative to the other races in the local space that it was an open question as to whether it used the Skip Drive at all.)
Among the many quirks of the Skip Drive, which had to be tolerated if one were to employ it, were its departure and arrival needs. When departing, the Skip Drive needed relatively "flat" space-time, which meant the Skip Drive could only be activated when the ship using it was well outside the gravity well of close-by planets; this required travel in space using engines. But a ship using the Skip Drive could arrive as close to a planet as it wanted—it could even, theoretically, arrive on a planet surface, if a navigator confident enough of his or her skill could be found to do it. While landing a spacecraft on a planet via Skip Drive navigation was officially and strongly discouraged by the Colonial Union, the Colonial Defense Forces recognized the strategic value of sudden and unexpected arrivals.
When the Kite arrived over the planet its human settlers called Gettysburg, it popped into existence within a quarter of a light-second from the Rraey cruiser, and with its dual rail guns warmed up and ready to fire. It took the Kite's prepared weapons crew less than a minute to orient and target the hapless cruiser, which only at the end could be seen trying to respond, and the magnetized rail-gun projectiles needed less than two and a third seconds to travel the distance between the Kite and its quarry. The sheer speed of the rail-gun projectiles was more than sufficient to pierce the hide of the Rraey craft and tunnel through its innards like a bullet through soft butter, but the projectile designers hadn't left it at that; the projectiles themselves were designed to expand explosively at the merest contact with matter.
An infinitesimal fraction of a second after the projectiles penetrated the Rraey craft, they fragmented and shards vectored crazily relative to their initial trajectory, turning the projectile into this universe's fastest shotgun blast. The expenditure of energy required to change these trajectories was naturally immense and slowed down the shards considerably. However, the shards had energy to spare, and it simply meant each shard had more time to damage the Rraey vessel before it exited the wounded ship and began a long and frictionless journey through space.
Thanks to the relative positions of the Kite and the Rraey cruiser, the first rail-gun projectile struck the Rraey cruiser forward and starboard; the fragments from this projectile tunneled through diagonally and upward, not-so-cleanly chewing through several levels of the ship and turning a number of the Rraey crew into bloody mist. The entrance wound of this projectile was a clean circle seventeen centimeters wide; the exit wound was a ragged hole ten meters wide with a gout of metal, flesh and atmosphere blasting silently into the vacuum.
The second rail-gun projectile entered aft of the first, following a parallel directory, but failed to fragment; its exit wound was only marginally larger than its entrance wound. It made up for this failure by breaching one of the engines of the Rraey craft. The cruiser's automatic damage controls slammed down bulkheads, isolating the damaged engine, and took the other two engines offline to avoid a cascading failure. The Rraey ship was switched to emergency power, which offered it only a minimum of offensive and defensive options, none of which would be at all effective against the Kite.
The Kite, its own power partially drained (but recharging) through the use of the rail guns, sealed the deal by launching five conventional tactical nuclear missiles at the Rraey cruiser. It would take them more than a minute to reach the cruiser, but the Kite now had the luxury of time. The cruiser was the only Rraey ship in the area. A small flash issued forth from the Rraey ship: The doomed cruiser was launching a Skip drone, designed to quickly get to Skip distance and let the rest of the Rraey military know what happened to it. The Kite launched a sixth and final missile toward the drone, which would be overtaken and destroyed less than ten thousand klicks from Skip distance. By the time the Rraey found out about their cruiser, the Kite would be light-years away.
Presently the Rraey cruiser was an expanding debris field, and Lieutenant Sagan and her 2nd Platoon received their clearance for their part of the mission.
Jared tried to calm the first-mission nerves, and the mild fear brought by the choppiness of the troop transport's descent into the Gettysburg atmosphere, by trying to close out distractions and focus his energies. Daniel Harvey, sitting next to him, was making that difficult.
::Goddamn wildcat colonists,:: Harvey said, as the troop transport plunged through the atmosphere. "They go off and build illegal colonies and then come crying to us when some other fucking species is crawling up their holes.::
"Relax, Harvey,:: said Alex Roentgen. "You're going to give yourself a migraine.::
::What I want to know is how these fuckers even manage to get to these places,:: Harvey said. ::The Colonial Union doesn't bring 'em out here. And you can't go anywhere without CU say-so.::
"Sure you can,:: Roentgen said. "The CU doesn't control all interstellar travel, just the travel that humans do.::
::These colonists are human, Einstein,:: Harvey said.
::Hey,:: said Julie Einstein. ::Leave me out of this.::
"It's just an expression, Julie,:: Harvey said.
::The colonists are human, but the people who are transporting them aren't, you idiot,:: Roentgen said. "Wildcat colonists buy transport from aliens the CU trades with, and the aliens take them where they want to go.::
::That's stupid,:: Harvey said, and looked around the platoon for agreement. Most of the platoon were either resting with their eyes closed or studiously avoiding the discussion; Harvey had a reputation as an argumentative blowhard. ::The CU could stop that if they wanted to. Tell the aliens to stop picking up wildcat passengers. That would save us from having to risk getting our asses shot off.::
From the forward seat, Jane Sagan turned her head toward Harvey. "The CU doesn't want to stop wildcat colonists,:: she said, in a bored tone.
"Why the hell not?:: Harvey asked.
"They're troublemakers,:: Sagan said. "The sort of person who will defy the CU and start a wildcat colony is the sort of person who could cause trouble at home if he wasn't allowed to go. The CU figures it's not worth the trouble. So they let them go, and look the other way. Then they're on their own.::
::Until they get in trouble,:: Harvey sneered.
::Usually even then,:: Sagan said. ::Wildcatters know what they're getting into.::
::Then what are we doing here?:: Roentgen said. ::Not to take Harvey's side, but these are wildcat colonists.::
"Orders,:: Sagan said, and closed her eyes, ending the discussion. Harvey snorted and was about to reply when the turbulence suddenly became especially bad.
"Looks like the Rraey on the ground just figured out we're up here,:: Chad Assisi said from the pilot's seat. "We've got three more missiles on their way. Hang on, I'm going to try to burn them before they get too close.:: Several seconds later came a low, solid hum; the transport's defensive maser fired up to deal with the missiles.
::Why don't we just plaster these guys from orbit?:: Harvey said. "We've done that before.::
::There are humans down there, aren't there?:: Jared said, venturing a comment. "I'd guess we'd want to avoid using tactics that would injure or kill them.::
Harvey gave Jared the briefest of glances and then changed the subject.
Jared glanced over to Sarah Pauling, who gave him a shrug. In the week they had been attached to the 2nd Platoon, the best adjective to describe relations was frosty. Other members of the platoon were diffidently polite when forced to be but otherwise ignored the two of them whenever possible. Jane Sagan, the platoon's superior officer, let them know briefly that this was par for the course for new recruits until their first combat mission. ::Just deal with it,:: she said, and returned to work of her own.
It made both Jared and Pauling uneasy. Being casually ignored was one thing, but the two of them were also denied full integration with the platoon. They were lightly connected and shared a common band for discussion and sharing information concerning the upcoming mission, but the intimate sharing offered by their training squad was not in evidence here. Jared looked back at Harvey and not for the first time wondered if integration was simply a training tool. If it was, it seemed cruel to offer it to people only to take it away later. But he'd seen evidence of integration among his platoon mates: the subtle movements and actions that suggested an unspoken common dialogue and a sensory awareness beyond one's own senses. Jared and Pauling yearned for it but also knew the lack of it was a test to see how they would respond.
To combat the lack of integration with their platoon, Jared and Pauling's integration was defensively intimate; they spent so much time in each other's heads that by the end of the week, despite their affection together, they were very nearly sick of each other. There was, they discovered, such a thing as too much integration. The two of them diluted their sharing slightly by inviting Steven Seaborg to integrate with them informally. Seaborg, who had been receiving the same cold shoulder from the 1st Platoon but who had no training mates in the platoon to keep him company, was almost pathetically grateful for the offer.
Jared glanced down at Jane Sagan and wondered if the platoon leader would tolerate having him and Sarah unintegrated during the mission; it seemed dangerous. For him and Pauling, at the very least.
As if responding to his thoughts, Sagan glanced up at him and then spoke. ::Assignments,:: she said, and sent a map of the tiny Gettysburg colony to the platoon with their assignments overlaid. ::Remember this is a sweep and clean. There's been no Skip drone activity, so either they're all dead or they're all herded somewhere where they can't get a message out. The idea is to clean out the Rraey with a minimum of structural damage to the colony. That's minimal, Harvey,:: staring pointedly at the soldier, who squirmed uncomfortably. ::I don't mind blowing things up when necessary but anything we destroy is something these settlers have less of.::
::What?:: Roentgen said. ::Are you seriously suggesting we're going to let these people stay? If they're still alive?::
::They're wildcatters,:: Sagan said. ::We can't force them to act intelligently.::
::Well, we could force them,:: Harvey said.
::We won't force them,:: Sagan said. ::We have new people to take under our wings. Roentgen, you're responsible for Pauling. I'll take Dirac. The rest of you, two by two to your assignments. We land here::—a small landing zone illuminated—::and I'll let you use your own creativity to get to where you need to be. Remember to note your surroundings and the enemy; you're looking for all of us.::
::Or at least some of us,:: Pauling said privately to Jared. Then the both of them felt the sensuous rush of integration, the hyper-awareness of having so many points of view overlaid on one's own. Jared struggled to control a gasp.
::Don't cream yourself,:: Harvey said, and there were a few pings of amusement in the platoon. Jared ignored this and drank in the emotional and informational gestalt offered by his platoon mates: the confidence in their abilities to confront the Rraey; a substrata of early planning for their paths to their mission destinations; a tense and subtle anticipatory excitement that seemed to have little to do with the combat to come; and shared communal feeling that taking care to keep structures intact was pointless, since the colonists were almost certainly dead already.
::Behind you,:: Jared heard Sarah Pauling say, and he and Jane Sagan turned and fired even as they received the image and data, from Pauling's distant point of view, of three Rraey soldiers moving silently but not invisibly around a small general-purpose building to ambush the pair. The trio stepped out into a hail of bullets from Jared and Sagan; one dropped dead while the other two broke and ran in separate directions.
Jared and Sagan quickly polled the viewpoints of the other members of the platoon to see who might pick up one or both of the fleeing soldiers. Everyone else was engaged, including Pauling, who had returned to her primary task of flushing out a Rraey sniper on the edge of the Gettysburg settlement. Sagan audibly sighed.
::Get that one,:: she said, taking off after the second. ::Try not to get killed.::
Jared followed the Rraey soldier, who used its powerful, bird-like legs to build a considerable lead on him. As Jared raced to catch up, the Rraey spun and shot wildly at him with a one-handed grip on its weapon; the kick knocked the gun up and out of the Rraey's hand. The bullets spat up dirt directly in front of Jared, who veered for cover as the weapon clattered to the ground. The Rraey ran on without retrieving its weapon and disappeared into the colony's motor pool garage.
::I could use some help,:: Jared said, at the bay of the garage.
::Join the club,:: Harvey said, from somewhere. ::These fuckers outnumber us at least two to one.::
Jared entered the garage through the bay. The quick glance showed that the only other way out was a door on the same wall as the bay and one of a series of windows designed to ventilate the garage. The windows were both high and small; it seemed unlikely the Rraey had gone through those. It was still somewhere inside the garage. Jared moved to one side and started a methodical search of the shop.
A knife shot out from a tarp on a low shelf and slashed Jared in his calf. The nanobotic fabric of Jared's military unitard stiffened where the knife blade made contact. Jared didn't receive a scratch. But his own shocked movement tripped him up; he went sprawling on the floor, ankle twisted, his Empee clattering out of his hand. The Rraey scrambled out of its hiding place before Jared could get to it, clambered over Jared and pushed the Empee with the fist that still held the knife. The Empee danced out of reach and the Rraey stabbed Jared's face, cutting him savagely in the cheek and drawing SmartBlood. Jared yelled; the Rraey scrambled off him and toward the Empee.
When Jared spun around the Rraey had the Empee trained on him, its elongated fingers awkwardly but solidly on the stock and trigger. Jared froze. The Rraey squawked something and pulled the trigger.
Nothing. Jared remembered that the Empee was trained to his BrainPal; it wouldn't fire for a nonhuman. He cracked a smile in relief; the Rraey squawked again and jammed the Empee hard into Jared's face, tearing into the cheek it had already slashed. Jared screamed and scrambled back in pain. The Rraey threw the Empee onto a high shelf, out of the reach of both of them. It reached onto a counter to grab a tire rod and advanced on Jared, swinging viciously.
Jared blocked the swing with his arm; his unitard stiffened again but the hit made his arm ache in pain. On the next swing he reached to grab the rod but misjudged the speed of the approach; the rod came down hard on his fingers, breaking bones in the ring and middle fingers of his right hand and driving down his arm. The Rraey moved the iron sideways and clocked Jared in the head with it; he went down to his knees, dazed, retwisting the ankle he'd fallen on earlier. Jared groggily went for his combat knife with his left hand; the Rraey kicked the hand, hard, sending the knife spinning out of his grip. A second rapid kick tapped Jared on the chin, driving his teeth into his tongue, causing SmartBlood to spurt into his mouth and over his teeth. The Rraey pushed him over, pulled out its knife, and bent down to cut Jared's throat. Jared's mind suddenly ricocheted back to a training session with Sarah Pauling, when she straddled him with her knife on his throat and told him he lacked focus.
He focused now.
Jared sucked in suddenly and spat a gobbet of SmartBlood at the Rraey's face and eye band. The creature recoiled, revulsed, giving Jared the time he needed to instruct his BrainPal to do with the SmartBlood on the Rraey's face what it did when it was ingested by the bloodsucking bug on Phoenix: combust.
The Rraey screamed as the SmartBlood began to burn into its face and eye band, dropping its knife as it clawed at its face. Jared grabbed the knife and drove it into the side of the Rraey's head. The Rraey issued an abrupt, surprised cluck and then went boneless, slumping backwards on the floor. Jared followed its example, lying silently, doing nothing but resting his eyes and becoming more and more aware of the heavy, acrid smell of smoldering Rraey.
::Get up,:: someone said to him some time later, and prodded him with a boot toe. Jared winced and looked up. It was Sagan. ::Come on, Dirac. We got them all. You can come out now.::
::I hurt,:: Jared said.
::Hell, Dirac,:: Sagan said. ::I hurt just looking at you.:: She motioned over to the Rraey. "Next time, just shoot the damn thing.::
::I'll keep that in mind,:: Jared said.
::Speaking of which,:: Sagan said, ::where's your Empee?::
Jared looked up at the high shelf the Rraey had flung it onto. ::I think I need a ladder,:: Jared said.
::You need stitches,:: Sagan said. ::Your cheek is about to come off.::
::Lieutenant,:: Julie Einstein said. "You're going to want to come over here. We found the settlers.::
::Any of them alive?:: Sagan said.
::God, no,:: Einstein said, and through the integration both Sagan and Jared felt her shudder.
::Where are you?:: Sagan asked.
::Um,:: Einstein said. ::Maybe you should come and see.::
A minute later Sagan and Jared were at the colony slaughterhouse.
::Fucking Rraey,:: Sagan said as they walked up. She turned to Einstein, who was waiting outside for her. ::They're in here?::
::They're here,:: Einstein said. ::In the cold room in the back.::
::All of them?:: Sagan asked.
::I think so. It's hard to tell,:: Einstein said. ::They're mostly in parts.::
The cold room was crammed with meat.
Special Forces soldiers gaped up at the skinned torsos on hooks. Barrels below the hooks were filled with offal. Limbs in various states of processing lay stacked on tables. On a separate table lay a collection of heads, skulls sawed open to extract the brains. Discarded heads rested in another barrel next to the table.
A small pile of unprocessed bodies was heaped under a tarp. Jared went to uncover it. Children lay underneath.
::Christ,:: Sagan said. She turned to Einstein. ::Get someone over to the colony administration offices,:: she said. ::Pull up any medical and genetic records you can find, and pictures of the colonists. We're going to need them to identify people. Then get a couple of people to dig through trash cans.::
::What are we looking for?:: Einstein asked.
:: Scraps,:: Sagan said. ::Whoever the Rraey already ate.::
Jared heard Sagan give her orders as a buzz in his head. He crouched and stared, transfixed, at the pile of small bodies. At the top lay the body of a small girl, elfin features silent, relaxed and beautiful. He reached over and gently touched the girl's cheek. It was ice-cold.
Unaccountably Jared felt a hard stab of grief. He turned away with a retching sob.
Daniel Harvey, who had found the cold room with Einstein, stood over Jared. ::First time,:: he said.
Jared looked up. ::What?:: he said.
Harvey motioned to the bodies with his head. -.This is the first time you've seen children. Am I right?::
::Yes,:: Jared said.
::This is how it happens with us,:: Harvey said. ::The first time we see colonists, they're dead. The first time we see children, they're dead. The first time we see an intelligent creature who isn't human, it's dead or trying to kill us, so we have to kill it. Then it's dead. It took me months before I saw a live colonist. I've never seen a live child.::
Jared turned back to the pile. ::How old is this one?:: he asked.
::Shit, I don't know,:: Harvey said, but looked anyway. ::I'd guess three or four years old. Five, tops. And you know what's funny? She was older than both of us put together. She was older than both of us put together twice. It's a fucked-up universe, my friend.::
Harvey wandered away. Jared stared at the little girl for another minute, then covered her and the pile with the tarp. He went looking for Sagan, who he found outside the colony's administration building.
::Dirac,:: Sagan said as he approached. ::What do you think of your first mission?::
::I think it's pretty awful,:: Jared said.
::That it is,:: Sagan said. "Do you know why we're here? Why we're out here at a wildcat settlement?" she asked him.
It took Jared a second to realize she had spoken the words out loud. "No," he said, responding in kind.
"Because the leader of this settlement is the son of the Secretary of State for the Colonial Union," Sagan said. "The dumb bastard wanted to prove to his mother that the Colonial Union regulations against wildcat settlements were an affront to civil rights."
"Are they?" Jared asked.
Sagan looked over at Jared. "Why do you ask?"
"I'm just curious," Jared said.
"Maybe they are, and maybe they aren't," Sagan said. "But either way, the last place to prove that point would have been this planet. It's been claimed by the Rraey for years, even if they didn't have a settlement on it. I guess the asshole thought that because the CU beat the Rraey in the last war maybe they'd look the other way for fear of retaliation. Then ten days ago the spy satellite we put in over the planet got shot out of the sky by that cruiser we took out. It got a picture of the cruiser first. And here we are."
"It's a mess," Jared said.
Sagan laughed mirthlessly. "Now I've got to go back into that fucking cold room and test corpses until I find the secretary's son," she said. "Then I'll have the pleasure of telling her that the Rraey chopped up her son and his family for food."
"His family?" Jared asked.
"Wife," Sagan said, "and a daughter. Four years old."
Jared shuddered violently, thinking of the girl on the pile. Sagan watched him intently. "Are you okay?" she asked.
"I'm fine," Jared said. "It just seems a waste."
"The wife and kid are a waste," Sagan said. "The dumb bastard who brought them here got what he deserved."
Jared shuddered again. "If you say so," he said.
"I do say so," Sagan said. "Now, come on. Time to identify the colonists, or what's left of them."
::Well,:: Sarah Pauling said to Jared, as he came out of the Kite's infirmary. ::You sure don't do things the easy way.:: She reached out to his cheek, to the welt that remained there despite the nano-stitching. ::You can still see where you got cut.::
::It doesn't hurt,:: Jared said. ::Which is more than I can say about my ankle and my hand. The ankle wasn't broken, but the fingers will take a couple of days to fully heal.::
::Better that than being dead,:: Pauling said.
::This is true,:: Jared admitted.
::And you taught everybody a new trick,:: Pauling said. -Things you didn't know you could do with SmartBlood. They're calling you Red-Hot Jared now.::
"Everybody knows you can get SmartBlood to heat up,:: Jared said. ::I saw people using it to fry up bugs on Phoenix all the time.::
::Yes, everyone uses it to smoke the little bugs,:: Pauling said, ::But it takes a certain kind of mind to think of using it to smoke the big bugs.::
::I wasn't really thinking about it,:: Jared said. ::I just didn't want to die.::
::Funny how that will make a person creative,:: Pauling said.
"Funny how it makes you focus,:: Jared said. ::I remembered you telling me I needed to work on that. I think you may have saved my life.::
"Good,:: Pauling said. "Try to return the favor sometime.::
Jared stopped walking for a moment. "What?:: Pauling asked.
::Do you feel that?:: Jared asked.
::Feel what?:: Pauling asked.
::I'm feeling like I really want to have sex,:: Jared said.
"Well, Jared,:: Pauling said. "You stopping abruptly in a hallway is not usually how I know you really want to have sex.::
::Pauling, Dirac,:: Alex Roentgen said. ::Rec room. Now. Time for a little after-battle celebration.::
::Oooh,:: Pauling said. ::A celebration. Maybe there will be cake and ice cream.::
There was no cake or ice cream. There was an orgy. All the members of the 2nd Platoon were there, save one, in various stages of undress. Couples and trios lay on couches and cushions, kissing and pressing into each other.
::This is an after-battle celebration?:: Pauling asked.
::The after-battle celebration,:: Alex Roentgen said. ::Every battle we do this.::
"Why?:: Jared asked.
Alex Roentgen stared at Jared, mildly incredulous. -You actually need a reason to have an orgy?:: Jared began to respond, but Roentgen held up his hand. ::One, because we've been through the valley of the shadow of death and come through the other side. And there's no better way to feel alive than this. And after the shit we've seen today, we need to get our minds off it right quick. Two, because as great as sex is, it's even better when everyone you're integrated with is doing it at the same time.::
::So this means you're not going to pull the plug on our integration?:: Pauling asked. She said it teasingly, but Jared sensed the smallest thread of anxiety in the question.
::No,:: Roentgen said, gently. -.You're one of us now. And it's not just sex. It's a deeper expression of communion and trust. Another level of integration.::
::That sounds suspiciously like bullshit to me,:: Pauling said, smiling.
Roentgen sent a ping of high amusement. ::Well, you know. I won't deny that we're in it for the sex too. But you'll see.:: He held out a hand to Pauling. ::Shall we?::
Pauling looked over at Jared, winked, and took Roentgen's hand. ::By all means,:: she said. Jared watched them walk off, and then felt a poke on his shoulder. He turned. Julie Einstein, nude and perky, stood there.
"I've come to test the theory that you are red-hot, Jared,:: she said.
Some indefinite time later Pauling found her way to Jared and lay next to him.
::This has been an interesting evening,:: she said.
::That's one way to put it,:: Jared said. Roentgen's comment that sex was different when everyone with whom you're integrated is involved turned out to be a rather dramatic understatement. Everyone but one, Jared corrected. ::I wonder why Sagan wasn't here,:: Jared said.
::Alex said she used to participate but now she doesn't,:: Pauling said. ::She stopped after a battle where she nearly died. That was a couple of years ago. Alex said participation is strictly optional; no one gives her grief for it.::
At the name "Alex," Jared felt a sharp pang; he'd glimpsed Roentgen and Pauling together earlier while Einstein was on him. "That would explain it,:: Jared said, awkwardly.
Pauling sat up on an arm. ::Did you have a good time? With this?:: she asked.
::You know I did,:: Jared said.
::I know,:: Pauling said. ::I could feel you in my head.::
::Yes,:: Jared said.
::And yet, you don't seem entirely happy,:: Pauling said.
Jared shrugged. ::I couldn't tell you why,:: he said.
Pauling reached over, kissed Jared lightly. ::You're cute when you're jealous,:: she said.
::I don't mean to be jealous,:: Jared said.
::No one means to be jealous, I think,:: Pauling said.
::I'm sorry,:: Jared said.
::Don't be,:: Pauling said. "I'm happy we've been integrated. I'm pleased to be a part of this platoon. And this is a lot of fun. But you are special to me, Jared, and you always have been. You are my best beloved.::
"Best beloved,:: Jared agreed. ::Always.::
Pauling smiled widely. "Glad to get that settled,:: she said, and reached down. ::Now,:: she said. ::Time for me to get the benefit of my best beloved privileges.::
"Thirty klicks,:: Jane Sagan said. "Everyone off the bus.::
The soldiers of the 2nd Platoon removed themselves from the troop transport and fell into the night sky over Dirluew, the capital city of the Eneshan nation. Below them, explosions pocked the sky; not the violent, potentially transport-shattering eruptions that would mark anti-craft defenses, but the pretty multicolored flashes that signaled fireworks. It was the final evening of Chafalan, the Eneshan celebration of rebirth and renewal. Eneshans worldwide were out in their streets, partying and carrying on in a manner appropriate for the time of day where they were, most the Eneshan equivalent of slightly drunk and horny.
Dirluew was especially raucous this Chafalan. In addition to the usual festivities the celebration this year had also included the Consecration of the Heir, in which Fhileb Ser, the Eneshan hierarch, officially pronounced her daughter Vyut Ser as the future ruler of Enesha. To commemorate the consecration, Fhileb Ser had provided a sample of the royal jelly she fed to Vyut Ser and allowed a mass-produced synthetic version to be produced, in diluted form, placed in tiny jars and offered as gifts to the citizens of Dirluew for the final night of Chafalan.
In its natural form, and fed to a pre-metamorphic Eneshan, the royal jelly caused profound developmental changes that resulted in clear physical and mental advantages once the Eneshan developed into adult form. In its diluted and synthesized version, the royal jelly gave adult Eneshans a truly excellent hallucinogenic buzz. Most of the citizens of Dirluew had consumed their jelly prior to the city's fireworks display and light show and were now sitting in their private gardens and public parks, clacking their mouthpieces together in the Eneshan equivalent of ooooh and aaaaah as the naturally brilliant and explosive nature of the fireworks was pharmaceutically extended across the entire Eneshan sensory spectrum.
Thirty klicks up (and descending rapidly), Jared could not see or hear the dazzled Eneshans, and the fireworks below were brilliant but distant, the sound of their explosions lost in the distance and the thin Eneshan stratosphere. Jared's perception was occupied with other things: the location of his squad mates, the rate of his descent and the maneuvering required to ensure he was both where he needed to be at landing and yet well out of the way when certain events transpired not too far in the future.
Locating his squad mates was the easiest task. Every member of the 2nd Platoon was blanked out visually and through most of the electromagnetic spectrum by their blackbody nanobiotic unitards and equipment covers, save for a small tightbeam transmitter/receiver each platoon member wore. These polled the position of the other platoon members before the jump and continued doing so at microsecond intervals since. Jared knew that Sarah Pauling was forty meters fore and starboard, Daniel Harvey sixty meters below and Jane Sagan two hundred meters above, the last out of their transport. The first time Jared participated in a nighttime high-altitude jump, not long after Gettysburg, he managed to lose the tightbeam signal and landed several klicks away from his squad, disoriented and alone. He received no end of shit for that.
Jared's final destination lay now less than twenty-five klicks below him, highlighted by his BrainPal, which also offered up a descent pathway computed to get him where he needed to be. The pathway was updated on the fly as the BrainPal took into consideration wind gusts and other atmospheric phenomena; it also tracked carefully around three closely grouped virtual columns, superimposed on Jared's vision. These columns stretched down from the heavens to terminate in three areas of a single building: the hierarch's Palace, which served as both the residence of Fhileb Ser and her court, and the official seat of the government.
What these three columns represented became apparent when Jared and the 2nd Platoon had descended to less than four kilometers and three particle beams appeared in the sky, lancing downward from the satellites the Special Forces had positioned in low orbit above Enesha. One beam was dim, one furiously bright and the third was dimmest of all and with a curious flicker. The citizenry of Dirluew cooed over the sight and the resonant thunderclap wall of sound that accompanied their appearance. In their simultaneously heightened and diminished state of awareness, they thought the beams were part of the city's light show. Only the invaders and the actual coordinators of Dirluew's light show initially knew any different.
Particle beam-producing satellites are not something the Enesha planetary defense grid would have failed to notice; noticing enemy weapons is what planetary defense grids are for. In this particular case, however, the satellites were well-disguised as a trio of repair tugs. The tugs had been planted months earlier—not long after the incident at Gettysburg—as part of the routine service fleet for the Colonial Union's diplomatic berths at one of Enesha's three major space stations. They did, in fact, work perfectly fine as rugs. Their rather unusually modified engines were not apparent externally or by internal systems checks, the latter due to clever software modifications that hid the engines' capabilities to all but the most determined of investigators.
The three tugs had been assigned to haul in the Kite after the ship appeared in Eneshan space and asked for permission to repair damage done to its hull and systems after a recent battle with a Rraey cruiser. The Kite had won the exchange but had to retreat before its damage could be totally repaired (the Kite had picked a fight at one of the Rraey's more moderately defended colonies, where the military strength was strong enough to repel a single Special Forces craft but not strong enough to blast it wholly out of the sky). A routine courtesy tour of the Kite for the Eneshan military was offered by its commander but declined as a matter of course by the Eneshan military, who had already confirmed the Kite's story through its informal intelligence channels with the Rraey. The Kite also asked for and received permission for members of its crew to have shore leave at Tresh, a resort that had been set aside for Colonial Union diplomats and staff stationed on Enesha. Tresh lay to the southeast of Dirluew, which was just north of the flight path the troop transport carrying two squads' worth of "vacationing" members of the 2nd Platoon had filed.
As the troop transport passed near Dirluew, it reported an atmospheric disturbance and changed course northward to avoid chop, edging briefly into the no-fly zone over the Dirluew airspace. Eneshan transport command noted the correction but required the transport to return to its previous flight plan as soon as it edged past the turbulence. The transport did, its load two squads lighter, a few minutes later.
It was interesting what you could do, when your enemy was officially your ally. And unaware you knew it was your enemy.
The particle beams seared forth from the tugs assigned to the Kite and struck the Hierarch's Palace. The first, the strongest of the beams by a significant margin, tore through six levels of palace, into the guts of the place, to vaporize the palace's backup generator and, twenty meters below that, the main power line. Severing the main power line switched the palace's electrical systems to the backup, which had been destroyed milliseconds earlier. In the absence of centralized backup power, various local backups sprang to life and locked down the palace through a system of security doors. The designers of the palace's electrical and security systems reasoned that if both the main power and the backup power were taken down, the entire palace itself would probably be under attack. This was correct as far as it went; what the designers did not expect or intend was for the decentralized system of local backups to play an integral part in the attacker's plans.
This beam caused relatively little secondary damage; its energies were tuned specifically to stay contained within its circumference and to bore deep into the Eneshan ground. The resulting hole was more than eighty yards deep before some of the debris thrown up from the beam's work (and some of the debris from the six levels of palace) filled the bottom of the hole to a depth of several meters.
The second beam pierced the palace's administrative wing. Unlike the first beam, this beam was tuned wide and designed to throw off a massive amount of waste heat. The administrative wing of the palace buckled and sweated where the beam struck. Superheated air tore through the offices, blasting wide doors and windows and igniting everything inside with a combustion point below 932 degrees centigrade. More than three dozen Eneshan night-shift government workers, military guards and janitors immolated, broiling instantly within their carapaces. The hierarch's private office and everything in it, directly in the focused center of the beam, turned to ash only fractions of a second before the firestorm the beam's heat and energy created blew those ashes to all corners of the rapidly deconstructing wing.
The second beam was by far the most destructive but the least critical of the three beams. The Special Forces certainly didn't intend or expect to assassinate the hierarch in her private office; she was rarely in it on any evening and would absolutely not have been in it on this night, when she was attending to public functions as part of the Chafalan celebrations. She was on the other side of Dirluew entirely. It would have been a clumsy attempt attest. But the Special Forces wanted it to look like a clumsy attempt on the hierarch's life, so the hierarch—and her immense and formidable personal security detail—would be kept far from the palace while the 2nd Platoon accomplished its actual goal.
The third beam had the lowest power of any of them and flickered as it surgically battered away at the roof of the palace, like a surgeon cauterizing and removing skin one layer at a time. The goal of this beam was not terror or wholesale destruction but to cut a direct pathway to a palace chamber, in which resided the 2nd Platoon's goal, and the lever that, it was hoped, would serve to pry the Eneshans out of their tripartite plan to attack humanity.
::We're going to kidnap what now?:: asked Daniel Harvey.
::We're going to kidnap Vyut Ser,:: Jane Sagan said. ::Heir to the Eneshan throne.::
Daniel Harvey gave a look of sheer incredulousness, and Jared was reminded why Special Forces soldiers, despite their integration, actually bothered to meet physically for briefings: In the end, nothing could really top body language.
Sagan forwarded the intelligence report on the mission and the mission specs, but Harvey piped up again before the information could unpack completely. "Since when have we gotten into the kidnapping business?:: Harvey asked. "That's a new wrinkle.::
::We've done abductions before,:: Sagan said. ::This is nothing new.::
"We've abducted adults,:: Harvey said. ::And generally speaking they've been people who mean us harm. This kidnapping actually involves a kid.::
::It's more like a grub,:: said Alex Roentgen, who by now had unpacked the mission briefing and had begun to go through it.
::Whatever,:: Harvey said. ::Grub, kid, child. The point is, we're going to use a young innocent as a bargaining chip. Am I right? And that's the first time we've done that. It's scummy.::
::This from the guy who usually has to be told not to blow shit up,:: Roentgen said.
Harvey glanced over to Roentgen. "That's right,:: he said. ::I usually am the guy you have to tell not to blow shit up. And I'm telling you that this mission stinks. What the fuck is wrong with the rest of you?::
::Our enemies don't have the same high standards as you, Harvey,:: Julie Einstein said, and forwarded a picture of the pile of children's corpses at Gettysburg. Jared shivered again.
::Does that mean we have to have the same low standards as they do?:: Harvey said.
::Look,:: Sagan said. "This isn't up to a vote. Our intelligence people tell me the Rraey, the Eneshans and the Obin are getting close to a big push into our space. We've been harassing the Rraey and the Obin on the margins but we haven't been able to move against the Eneshans because we're still working under the polite fiction that they're our allies. This has given them the time to prepare, and despite all the disinformation we've been feeding them they still know too much about where our weak points are. We've got solid intelligence that says the Eneshans are right up front on any plan of attack. If we move against the Eneshans openly, all three of them will be at our necks, and we don't have the resources to fight them all. Harvey's right: This mission takes us into new territory. But none of our alternative plans have the same impact this one does. We can't break the Eneshans militarily. But we can break them psychologically.::
By this time Jared had absorbed the entire report. "We're not stopping with kidnapping,:: he said to Sagan.
::No,:: Sagan said. "Kidnapping alone won't be enough to make the hierarch agree to our terms.::
::Christ,:: Harvey said. He'd finally absorbed the entire briefing. ::This shit stinks.::
::It beats the alternative,:: Sagan said. "Unless you really think the Colonial Union can take on three enemies at once.::
::Can I just ask one question?:: said Harvey. ::Why do we get stuck with this crap?::
::We're Special Forces,:: Sagan said. "This is the sort of thing we do.::
::Bullshit,:: Harvey said. ::You said it yourself. We don't do this. Nobody does this. We're being made to do this because no one else wants to do this.::
Harvey looked around in the briefing room. ::Come on, we can admit this, to ourselves at least,:: he said. ::Some realborn asshole in military intelligence thought up this plan and then a bunch of realborn generals signed off on it, and then the Colonial Defense Forces' realborn commanders didn't want to have anything to do with it. So we get it, and everyone thinks we won't mind because we're a bunch of two-year-old amoral killers. Well, I have morals, and I know everyone in this room does too. I won't back away from a stand-up fight. All of you know that about me. But this isn't a stand-up fight. This is bullshit. First-class bullshit.::
::All right, it's bullshit,:: Sagan said. ::But this is also our mission.::
::Don't ask me to be the one who snatches the thing,:: Harvey said. "I'll have the back of whoever does it, but that's one cup I'll ask to have passed from me.::
::I won't ask you,:: Sagan said. ::I'll find something else for you to do.::
::Who are you going to get to do the deed?:: Alex Roentgen said.
::I'll do it myself,:: Sagan said. -.-.I'll want two volunteers to go with me.::
::I already said I'd have your back,:: Harvey said.
::I need someone who will make the snatch if I get a bullet in the head, Harvey,:: Sagan said.
::I'll do it,:: Sarah Pauling said. ::Harvey's right that this shit stinks, though::
::Thank you, Pauling,:: Harvey said.
::You're welcome,:: Pauling said. ::Don't get cocky.::
::That's one,:: Sagan said. ::Anyone else?::
Everyone in the briefing room turned to look at Jared.
::What?:: Jared said, suddenly defensive.
::Nothing,:: said Julie Einstein. "It's just that you and Pauling are usually a matched pair.::
::That's not true at all,:: Jared said. ::We've been with the platoon for seven months now and I've had all your backs at one time or another.::
::Don't get worked up about it,:: Einstein said. ::No one said you were married. And you have had all our backs. But everyone tends to pair off on missions with one person more than others. I get paired with Roentgen. Sagan gets stuck with Harvey because no one else wants to deal with him. You pair up with Pauling. That's all.::
::Stop teasing Jared,:: Pauling said, smiling. ::He's a nice guy, unlike the rest of you degenerates.::
::We're nice degenerates,:: Roentgen said.
::Or nicely degenerate, anyway,:: said Einstein.
::If we're all done with our fun,:: Sagan said, ::I still need another volunteer.::
::Dirac,:: Harvey prompted.
::Stop already,:: Sagan said.
::No,:: Jared said. "I'll do it.::
Sagan seemed about to object, but stopped herself. ::Fine,:: she said, and then continued on with her briefing.
::She did it again,:: Jared sent to Pauling, on a private channel, as the briefing continued. ::You saw it, didn't you? How she was about to say "no."::
::I saw it,:: Pauling said. "But she didn't. And when it comes down to it she's always treated you just like she treats anyone.::
::I know,:: Jared said. ::I just wish I knew why she doesn't seem to like me.::
::She doesn't really seem to like anyone all that much,:: Pauling said. ::Stop being paranoid. Anyway, I like you. Except when you're paranoid.::
::I'll work on that,:: Jared said.
::Do,:: Pauling said. ::And thank you for volunteering.::
::Well, you know,:: Jared said. "Give the crowd what they want.::
Pauling giggled audibly. Sagan shot her a look. "Sorry,:: Pauling said, on a common channel.
After a few minutes Jared hailed Pauling on a private channel. ::Do you really think this mission is a bad one?::
::It fucking stinks,:: Pauling said.
The beams ceased, and Jared and the rest of the 2nd popped their parafoils. Charged nanobots extended in tendrils from backpacks and formed individual gliders. Jared, no longer free-falling, tilted himself toward the palace and the smoking hole left by the third beam—a hole that led to the heir's nursery.
At roughly the size of St. Peter's Basilica, the Hierarch's Palace was no small edifice, and outside the main hall where the hierarch held formal court and the now-shattered administrative wing, no non-Eneshans were allowed to enter. There were no architectural plans of the palace in the public record, and the palace itself, constructed in the fluid and chaotically natural Eneshan architectural style that resembled nothing so much as a series of termite mounds, did not lend itself to easy discovery of significant areas or rooms. Before the plan to kidnap the Eneshan heir could be put into action, it had to be discovered where the heir's private chambers lay. Military Research considered it a pretty puzzle, but one without a lot of time to be solved.
Their solution was to think small; indeed, to think single-celled—to think of C. xavierii, a Eneshan prokaryotic organism evolutionarily parallel to bacteria. Just as strains of bacteria live in happily symbiotic relationships with humans, so did C. xavierii with Eneshans, primarily internally but also externally. Like many humans, not all Eneshans were fastidious about their bathroom habits.
Colonial Union Military Research cracked C. xavierii open and resequenced it to create the subspecies C. xavierii movere, which coded to construct mitochondrion-sized radio transmitters and receivers. These tiny organic machines recorded the movements of their hosts by polling their positions relative to C. xavierii movere housed by other Eneshans within their transmitting range. The recording capacity of these microscopic devices was small— they had the capacity to store less than an hour's worth of movement—but each cellular division created a new recording machine, tracking movement anew.
Military Research introduced the genetically-modified bug into the Hierarch's Palace by way of a hand lotion, provided to an unsuspecting Colonial Union diplomat who had regular physical contact with her Eneshan counterparts. These Eneshans then transmitted the germ to other members of the palace staff simply through everyday contact. The diplomat's personal brain prostheses (and those of her entire staff) were also surreptitiously modified to record the tiny transmissions that would soon emanate from the palace staff and all its inhabitants, including the hierarch and her heir. In less than a month Military Research had a complete map of the internal structure of the Hierarch's Palace, based on the movement of its staff.
Military Research never told the Colonial Union diplomatic staff of its unintentional espionage. Not only was it safer for the diplomats, but they would have been appalled at how they had been used.
Jared reached the roof of the palace and dissolved his glider, landing away from the hole in case it collapsed. Other members of the 2nd were landing or had landed and were preparing for their descent by securing rappelling lines. Jared spotted Sarah Pauling, who had walked up the hole and was now peering down through the smoke and debris cloud.
"Don't look down,:: Jared said to her.
::Too late for that,:: she replied, and sent him a vertiginous image from her point of view. Through their integration Jared could sense her anxiety and anticipation; he felt that way himself.
The rappelling lines were secure. ::Pauling, Dirac,:: said Jane Sagan. "Time to move.:: It had been less than five minutes since the beams had torn down from the sky, and each additional second brought the increased chance that their quarry had been moved. They were also working against the eventual arrival of troops and emergency responders. Blowing up the executive wing would distract and delay attention to the 2nd Platoon, but not for long.
The three clipped in and dropped down four levels, straight into the hierarch's residential apartments. The nursery was directly beyond; they had decided not to send the beam down directly on top of the nursery to avoid an accidental collapse. As Jared dropped he sensed the wisdom of that decision; "surgical" or not, the beam had made a mess of the three floors above the hierarch's apartments, and much of the damage had fallen straight down.
::Activate your infrared,:: Sagan said, as they rappelled. ::The lights are down and there's a lot of dust down there.:: Jared and Pauling did as they were told. A glow suffused the air, heated by the exertions of the beam and the smoldering remains below.
Residential guards assigned to the hierarch's apartments flowed into the chamber as the three rappelled down, battering through doors to get at the invaders. Jared, Sagan and Pauling undipped and dropped heavily into the debris pile below them, hastened by Enesha's heavier gravity. Jared could feel the debris attempting to impale him as he struck it; his unitard stiffened to avoid that. The three swept the room visually and with infrared to locate the guards, and sent the information upward. A few seconds later there were several sharp cracks from the roof. The residential guards dropped.
::You're clear,:: said Alex Roentgen. ::The wing is sealed off and we're not seeing any more guards. More of us are coming down.:: As he said this Julie Einstein and two other members of the 2nd began their descent on the lines.
The nursery adjoined the hierarch's private chamber, and for security purposes the rooms were a single sealable unit, impenetrable to most violent attempts at entry (save massively powerful particle beams shot down from space). Because the two rooms were assumed to be externally secure, the internal security between the rooms was light. A gorgeously carved but single-bolted door was the nursery's only security from the hierarch's chamber. Jared shot the lock and entered the room as Pauling and Sagan covered him.
Something hurtled toward Jared as he checked his corners; he ducked and rolled, and looked up to find an Eneshan attempting to bring an improvised club crashing down on his head. Jared blocked the hit with his arm and kicked upward, connecting with the Eneshan between its forward lower limbs. The Eneshan roared as the kick cracked its carapace. In his peripheral vision Jared registered a second Eneshan in the room, huddled in the corner and holding something that was screaming.
The first Eneshan lunged again, bellowing, and then stopped bellowing but kept lunging, collapsing in a pile on top of Jared. After the Eneshan lay on top of him Jared realized that somewhere in there he'd heard a burst of gunfire. He looked around the body of the Eneshan and saw Sarah Pauling behind it, reaching over to grab the Eneshan's mantle, to pull the corpse off Jared.
::You could have tried killing it when it wasn't moving toward me,:: Jared said.
"Complain again and I'll leave you underneath the damn thing,:: Pauling said. ::Also, if you wouldn't mind pushing, we'll get it off you quicker.:: Pauling pulled and Jared pushed, and the Eneshan rolled to the side. Jared crawled out and got a good look at his attacker.
::Is it him?:: Pauling asked.
::I can't tell,:: Jared said. "They kind of all look alike.::
"Move,:: Pauling said, and came in close to get a look at the Eneshan. She accessed her mission briefing. ::It's him,:: she said. ::It's the father. It's the hierarch's consort.::
Jared nodded. Jahn Hio, the hierarch's consort, chosen for political reasons to sire the heir. The matriarchal traditions of the Eneshan royalty dictated that the father of the heir was directly responsible for the heir's pre-metamorphic care. Tradition also dictated the father would stay awake at the side of the heir after her consecration ceremony for three Eneshan days, to symbolize the acceptance of his paternal duties. This—among other reasons related to the consecration ceremony—was why the kidnapping was planned when it was. Jahn Hio's assassination was a secondary but critical part of the mission.
::He died for protecting his child,:: Jared said.
"It's how he died,:: Pauling said. ::It's not why he died.::
::I don't think the distinction matters much to him,:: Jared said.
::This mission stinks,:: Pauling agreed.
A burp of gunfire erupted from the corner of the room. The screaming that had been constant in the room since their entrance stopped briefly and then started up again even more urgently. Sagan came out of the corner, Empee in one hand, a wriggling white mass secured in the other against the crook of her arm. The second Eneshan slumped where Sagan shot it.
::The nanny,:: Sagan said. ::She wouldn't give me the heir.::
::You asked?:: Pauling said.
::I did,:: Sagan said, pointing to the small translation speaker she had clipped on to her belt. It would have use later in the mission. ::I tried, anyway.::
"Our killing the consort probably didn't help,:: Jared said.
The screaming thing in Sagan's arm twisted mightily and nearly got out of her grip. Sagan dropped her Empee to get a better grip on it. It screamed ever louder as she squeezed it securely between her arm and body. Jared peered intently to look at it.
::So that's the heir,:: Jared said.
::This is it,:: Sagan said. ::She, actually. Pre-metamorphic Eneshan. Like a big, screaming maggot.::
::Can we sedate her?:: Pauling asked. ::She's pretty loud.::
::No,:: Sagan said. ::We need the hierarch to see that she's still alive.:: The heir wriggled again; Sagan began to stroke it with her free hand in an attempt to soothe it. ::Get my Empee for me, Dirac,:: she said. Jared bent down to retrieve the rifle.
The lights went on.
::Oh, shit,:: Sagan said. "Power's back.::
::I thought we blasted the backup generator,:: Jared said.
::We did,:: Sagan said. ::Looks like there was more than one. Time to go.:: The three backed out of the nursery, Sagan with the heir, Jared with his Empee and Sagan's up and ready.
In the main apartment, two members of the platoon were shimmying up the ropes. Julie Einstein had positioned herself to cover the two doors into the apartment.
::They're going to cover the two levels above us,:: Einstein said. ::The hole goes through rooms on those levels with only one entrance to them. At least that's what the floor plan says. Top level is wide open, though.::
"Transport on its way,:: Alex Roentgen said. "We've been spotted up here and we're starting to take fire.::
::We need people to cover us coming up,:: Sagan said. ::And to lay down suppressing fire on the first level. It's open; that's where they're going to come through.::
::On it,:: Roentgen said.
Sagan handed the heir to Pauling, unslung her equipment pack and pulled out a shoulder sling with a pouch sized to accommodate the heir. She stuffed the squalling heir into the pouch with some difficulty, secured it and placed the sling across her body with the strap over her right shoulder.
::I'm center line,:: Sagan said. ::Dirac, you're left; Pauling, right. Einstein will cover us as we climb, and then you two cover her and the other two from the top as they get out. Clear?::
::Clear,:: Jared and Pauling said.
::Reload my Empee and give it to Einstein,:: Sagan said to Jared. ::She won't have time to reload.:: Jared cleared the magazine from Sagan's Empee, reloaded it with one of his spares, and handed it to Einstein. She took it and nodded.
::We're ready for you,:: Roentgen said from above. ::You better hurry.::
As they went to their lines they heard the sound of heavy Eneshan footfalls. Einstein began firing as they started to climb. At each of the next two levels Jared's platoon mates were calmly waiting, sighted in on their sole entrances. Jared's integration told him they were both scared shitless and waiting for the shoe to drop.
From above Jared new firing began. The Eneshans had come through on the top level.
Sagan was weighed down by the heir but lacking her Empee or her equipment pack; on balace* she was traveling light, and flew up her line, ahead of Jared and Pauling. The pair of bullets that stitched across her shoulder hit her as she was within reach of the top, and grasping for the hand of Julian Lowell to pull her up. A third bullet slipped past Sagan's shoulder and struck Lowell directly above his right eye, passing through his brain before ricocheting off the inside of his skull and burying itself in his neck, severing his carotid in the process. Lowell's head snapped back and then forward, his body slumping and falling forward into the hole. He collided with Sagan as he fell, tearing the final scrap of fabric that kept intact the sling holding the heir. Sagan felt the tear and the sling falling away but was too occupied trying to keep herself from falling to do anything about it.
::Catch it,:: she said, and was grabbed by Alex Roentgen and pulled to safety.
Jared grabbed and missed; it was too far away. The sling rippled past Pauling, who snatched it as it fell and then swung as it described an arc around her.
From below, Jared sensed a surprised shock of pain from Julie Einstein. Her Empee went silent. The rustling sound that followed was the sound of Eneshans climbing into the hierarch's chambers.
Pauling looked up at Jared. ::Climb,:: she said.
Jared climbed without looking down. As he passed the upper level of the palace he glimpsed the bodies of a score of dead Eneshans, and more live Eneshans behind them firing at Jared as he climbed, while Jared's platoon mates fired back with bullets and grenades. Then he was beyond them, pulled up by an unseen platoon mate onto the roof of the palace. He turned back to see Sarah Pauling on her line, sling in hand, Eneshans below her aiming upward at her. Holding the sling, she could not climb.
Pauling looked at Jared, and smiled. ::Beloved,:: she said, and flung the sling to him as the first of the bullets struck her body. Jared reached as she danced on her line, moved by the force of the projectiles that overwhelmed the defenses of her unitard and tore into her legs, torso, back and skull. He caught the sling as she fell, and pulled it from the hole as she found its bottom. He felt the last second of her life and then it was gone.
He was screaming as they pulled him into the transport.
The Eneshan culture is both matriarchal and tribal, as befits a race whose far distant ancestors were hive-dwelling, insect-like creatures. The hierarch comes to power through the vote of the matriarchs of the major Eneshan tribes; this makes the process sound rather more civilized than it is, since the vote-gathering process can involve years of unspeakably violent civil war, as the tribes battle to make their own matriarch ascendant. To avoid massive unrest at the end of every hierarch's reign, once a hierarch is chosen the position becomes hereditary, and aggressively so: A hierarch must produce and consecrate a viable heir within two Eneshan years of assuming the mantle—thus assuring an orderly transfer of power for the future—or have the hierarchical rule of her tribe end with her reign.
Eneshan matriarchs, fed hormonally-dense royal jellies that produce sweeping changes in their bodies (another artifact of their ancestry), are fertile lifelong. The ability to produce an heir was rarely an issue. What would become an issue was from which tribe to choose the father. Matriarchs do not marry for love (strictly speaking, Eneshans don't marry at all), so political considerations would now come into play. The tribes unable to achieve hierarchy now competed (on a much subtler and usually less violent level) to produce a consort, with the reward being social advantages for the tribe directly, and the ability to influence hierarchical policies as part of the "dowry" provided the consortial tribe. Hierarchs from newly-ascendent tribes traditionally took their consort either from their tribe's greatest ally, as a reward for service, or from the tribe of their greatest enemy, if the hierarchical "vote" had been particularly messy and there was a perception that the entire Eneshan nation needed to be cobbled back together. Hierarchs from established lines, on the other hand, had far greater leeway in choosing their consorts.
Fhileb Ser was the sixth hierarch in the current Ser line (the tribe had held the hierarchy three times previous over the last several hundred Eneshan years). Upon ascending she chose her consort from the Hio tribe, a tribe whose expansionist colonial ambitions eventually led to the decision to ally in secret with the Rraey and the Obin, in order to attack human space. For its primary role in the war, Enesha would come away with some of the Colonial Union's prime real estate, including the Colonial Union home planet of Phoenix. The Rraey would come away with somewhat fewer planets but would get Coral, the planet that was the site of their recent humiliation by the Colonial Union.
The Obin, cryptic to the last, offered to contribute forces only slightly less expansive than the Eneshans but asked only for a single planet: the overpopulated and resource-stripped Earth, which was in such apparent poor repair that the Colonial Union had it under quarantine. Both the Eneshans and the Rraey were happy to cede the planet.
Hierarchical policy, prompted by the Hio, inclined the Enesha to plan a war with the humans. But although united by hierarchical rule, each Eneshan tribe kept its own counsel. At least one tribe, the Geln, strongly opposed attacking the Colonial Union, since humans were reasonably strong, distressingly tenacious and not especially principled when they felt threatened. The Geln felt that the Rraey would have been a far better target, given that race's long-standing enmity with the Eneshans and its weak military state after being crushed by the humans at Coral.
Hierarch Fhileb Ser chose to ignore the Gelns' counsel in this matter, but, noting the tribe's apparent fondness for humanity, selected one of the Gelns' tribal counselors, Hu Geln, as Enesha's ambassador to the Colonial Union. Hu Geln, recently recalled to Enesha to witness the Consecration of the Heir and to celebrate Chafalan with the hierarch. Hu Geln, who was with the hierarch when the 2nd Platoon attacked, and who was with her now, in hiding, as she was hailed by the humans who had murdered her consort and stolen her heir.
::They've stopped firing at us,:: Alex Roentgen said. ::Looks like they've figured out we have the heir.::
::Good,:: Sagan said. Pauling and Einstein were dead but she had other soldiers stuck in the palace and she wanted to get them out. She signaled them to make their way to the transport. She winced as Daniel Harvey tended to her shoulder; her unitard blocked the first hit completely but the second managed to get through and did some real damage. For now, her right arm was entirely useless. She motioned with her left hand to the small gurney in the middle of the transport, where the wriggling form of Vyut Ser, heir to the hierarch, lay securely strapped in. The heir no longer screamed but mewled, her fear tempered by exhaustion.
::Someone needs to give her the shot,:: Sagan said.
"I'll do it,:: Jared said, stood before anyone else could volunteer, and retrieved the long needle stored in a medical kit below Sagan's transport seat. He turned and stood over Vyut Ser, hating the thing. An overlay popped into his vision, via his BrainPal, showing him where to insert the needle and how far to push into the heir's guts to deliver what was inside the syringe.
Jared jabbed the needle savagely into Vyut Ser, who screamed horribly at the invasion of the cold metal. Jared pressed the button on the syringe that shot half the contents into one of the heir's two immature reproductive sacs. Jared extracted the needle and plunged it into Vyut Ser's second reproductive sac, emptying the syringe. Inside the sacs nanobots coated the interior walls and then burned, searing the tissues dead, rendering their owner irreversibly sterile.
Vyut Ser wailed in confusion and pain.
"I've got the hierarch on the line,:: Roentgen said. ::Audio and video.::
::Pipe her into the general feed,:: Sagan said. ::And Alex, stand by the gurney. You get to be the camera.::
Roentgen nodded and stood in front the gurney, fixing on Sagan and allowing the audio and visual feeds to his BrainPal from his ears and eyes to serve as microphone and camera.
::Piping in now,:: Roentgen said. In Jared's field of vision—and in the field of vision of everyone in the transport—the Hierarch of Enesha appeared. Even without knowing the map of Eneshan expressions, it was clear the hierarch was incandescent with rage.
"You fucking piece of human shit," the hierarch said (or the translation said, eschewing a literal translation for something that expressed the intent behind the words). "You have thirty seconds to give me my daughter or I will declare war on every last one of your worlds. I swear to you I will reduce them to rubble."
"Shut up," Sagan said, the translation coming from her belt speaker.
From the other end of the line came multiple loud clacks, indicating absolute shock from the hierarch's court. It was simply inconceivable someone would speak to her that way.
"I beg your pardon," the hierarch said, eventually, shocked herself.
"I said, 'shut up,'" Sagan said. "If you are smart you will listen to what I have to say to you and spare both our peoples needless suffering. Hierarch, you won't declare war on the Colonial Union here because you've already declared war on us. You, the Rraey and the Obin."
"I don't have the slightest—" the hierarch began.
"Lie to me again and I'll cut off your daughter's head," Sagan said.
More clacks. The hierarch shut up.
"Now," Sagan said. "Are you at war with the Colonial Union?"
"Yes," the hierarch said, after a long moment. "Or will be, presently."
"I think not," Sagan said.
"Who are you?" the hierarch said. "Where is Ambassador Hartling? Why I am negotiating with someone who is threatening to kill my child?"
"I imagine Ambassador Hartling is in her office right now, trying to figure out what's going on," Sagan said. "As you did not feel the need to enlighten her concerning your military plans, neither did we. You are negotiating with the person who has threatened to kill your child because you have threatened to kill our children, Hierarch. And you are negotiating with me because at the moment I am the negotiator you deserve. And you can be assured on this matter you will not be able to negotiate with the Colonial Union again."
The hierarch fell silent again. "Show me my daughter," she said, when she spoke again.
Sagan nodded to Roentgen, who turned and showed Vyut Ser, who had once again downshifted into whimpering. Jared saw the reaction of the hierarch, who was reduced from the leader of a world to merely a mother, feeling the pain and fear of her own child.
"What are your demands?" the hierarch said, simply.
"Call off your war," Sagan said.
"There are two other parties," the hierarch said. "If we back out they will want to know why."
"Then continue preparing for war," Sagan said. "And then attack one of your allies instead. I would suggest the Rraey. They are weak, and you could take them by surprise."
"And what of the Obin?" the hierarch said.
"We'll deal with the Obin," Sagan said.
"Will you, now," the hierarch said, clearly skeptical.
"Yes," Sagan said.
"Are you suggesting we can simply hide what happened here tonight?" the hierarch said. "The beams you used to destroy my palace could be seen for a hundred miles."
"Don't hide it, investigate it," Sagan said. "The Colonial Union will gladly help our Eneshan friends in their investigation. And when it's discovered the Rraey are behind it, you'll have your rationale for war."
"Your other demands," the hierarch said.
"There is a human, named Charles Boutin," Sagan said. "We know he's helping you. We want him."
"We don't have him," the hierarch said. "The Obin do. You can ask them for him, for all I care. Your other demands."
"We want assurances that you will call off your war," Sagan said.
"You want a treaty?" the hierarch asked.
"No," Sagan said. "We want a new consort. One of our choosing."
This generated the loudest clack of all from the court.
"You murder my consort, and then you demand to pick the next one?" the hierarch said.
"Yes," Sagan said.
"To what end?" the hierarch implored. "My Vyut has been consecrated! She is the legal heir. If I meet your demands and you let my daughter go, she is still of the Hio clan and by our traditions they will still have political influence. You would have to kill my daughter to break their influence"—the hierarch paused brokenly, then continued—"and if you do that, why would I fulfill any of your demands?"
"Hierarch," Sagan said, "your daughter is sterile."
Silence.
"You didn't," the hierarch said, pleading.
"We did," Sagan said.
The hierarch rubbed her mouthpieces together, creating an unworldly keening noise. She was crying. She got up from her seat, out of frame, keening, and then suddenly reappeared, too close to the camera. "You are monsters!" the hierarch screamed. Sagan said nothing.
The Consecration of the Heir cannot be undone. A sterile heir means the death of a hierarchical line. The death of a hierarchical line means years of unyielding and bloody civil war as tribes compete to found a new line. If the tribes knew an heir was sterile, they would not wait for the natural span of the heir's life to begin their internecine warfare. First the sitting hierarch would be assassinated, to bring the sterile heir to power. Then she would be a constant assassination target as well. When power is within reach, few will wait patiently for it.
By making Vyut Ser sterile, the Colonial Union had sentenced the Ser hierarchical line to oblivion and the Enesha to anarchy. Unless the hierarch gave in to their demands and consented to something unspeakable. And the hierarch knew it.
She fought it anyway. "I will not allow you to choose my consort," the hierarch said.
"We will inform the matriarchs your daughter is sterile," Sagan said.
"I will destroy your transport where it sits, and my daughter with you," the hierarch screamed.
"Do it," Sagan said. "And all the matriarchs will know that your incompetence as hierarch led us to attack you and caused the death of your consort and your heir. And then you may find that while you may choose a tribe to provide you with a consort, the tribe itself may not agree to provide one. No consort, no heir. No heir, no peace. We know Eneshan history, Hierarch. We know the tribes have withheld consorts for less, and that those boycotted hierarchs didn't last long after that."
"It won't happen," the hierarch said.
Sagan shrugged. "Kill us, then," she said. "Or refuse our demands, and we'll give you back your sterile daughter. Or do it our way and have our cooperation in extending your hierarchical line and keeping your nation from civil war. These are your choices. And your time is almost up."
Jared watched emotions play the hierarch's face and body, strange because of their alien nature but no less powerful for that. It was a quiet and heartrending struggle. Jared was reminded that at the briefing for the mission Sagan said that humans couldn't break the Eneshans militarily; they had to break them psychologically. Jared watched as the hierarch bent and bent and bent and then broke.
"Tell me who I am to seize upon," the hierarch said.
"Hu Geln," Sagan said.
The hierarch turned to look at Hu Glen, standing quietly in the background, and gave the Eneshan equivalent of a bitter laugh. "I am not surprised," she said.
"He is a good man," Sagan said. "And he will counsel you well."
"Try to console me again, human," the hierarch said, "and I will send us all into war."
"My apologies, Hierarch," Sagan said. "Do we have agreement?"
"Yes," the hierarch said, and began her keening again. "Oh, God," she cried. "Oh, Vyut. Oh, God."
"You know what you have to do," Sagan said.
"I can't. I can't," the hierarch cried. At the sound of the cries, Vyut Ser, who had been silent, stirred and cried for her mother. The hierarch broke anew.
"You have to," Sagan said.
"Please," the most powerful creature on the planet begged. "I can't. Please. Please, human. Please help me."
::Dirac,:: Sagan said. ::Do it.::
Jared unsheathed his combat knife and approached the thing that Sarah Pauling had died for. She was strapped to a gurney and she wriggled and cried for her mother, and she would die alone and frightened, and far away from anyone that ever loved her.
Jared broke too. He did not know why.
Jane Sagan walked over to Jared and took his knife and raised it. Jared turned away.
The crying stopped.