Singlefighter: aka Scala Nine singlefighter: a Nexus warmachine, a flying hunter-killer designed for deployment in a planetary atmosphere. It is powered by corrosion cells, in which small quantities of antimatter are destroyed by controlled contact with normative matter. The corrosion cells will power the machine for three days without recharge.
So burning down from out of the sun
The weapon struck -
Hooked down from sundark sky -
From sundark blindness burning -
Brightness inexplicable in a shock
Which sheered the dark to light,
And by this revelation wreaked – - so burning down from out of the sun, burning down from out of the blind brightness, the singlefighter struck, and the hapless foe screamed in pain across the Openband, and wrecked went down in flaming agony. As the enemy fighter fell, Lupus Lon Oliver sent his own craft plunging down the gravity well. Down from the sky he came, his singlefighter hurtling down, low and lower, so low that the warning klaxons shrilled and screamed:
"Pull up! Pull up!"
Lupus pulled up, pulled out, pulled hard, wrenching his craft away from disaster in a wetness of sweat and orgasmic release, and screamed in triumph. In the throes of his battle-glory, he had a momentary vision of red-hot blood. The blood was seared across his vision-screens. The entire world was blood: blood made blind, blood made glory, triumph's glory, victory.
"Ah," said Lupus, easing the singlefighter into a long slow barrel roll, feeling the sweetness easing to languorous content as the cosmos rolled about the axis of his craft, the briefness now completeness.
"Ah… "
Yes.
But even already now this phase was passing, sliding, going, gone, with the sheen of all colors loosing their gloss, with the world becoming routine, the crashed wreckage of the downed enemy fighter now nothing but an inert blip on his locator screen.
Lupus eased his singlefighter round in a long slow circle and made a visual inspection of the wreckage which lay far, far below. From this height, it was still only a blip, a blip unbenefited by any theatricals of smoke and fire, a blip amidst the sands of a desert pigmented with a bright red not so terribly different from that of the Plain of Jars.
"Mission complete," said the voice of Lupus's singlefighter, the voice of his ship. "Illusion ends in a ten-pulse. Counting now. Ten. And. Nine. And."
The training sequence was finished, so Lupus would automatically be returned to the world of the Combat College at the end of the ten-count, unless he elected otherwise.
"Eight. And. Seven. And."
And then Lupus knew what he wanted.
"Six. And. Five."
What Lupus wanted was not the blip seen from a distance but the real thing seen at close quarters. He wanted a close-to-close with the work wrought by his hands, wanted the smashed heat of the ruptured metal, the bloodworks of the dead, the confirmed corpse, the smashworks, the blood-dust smoking under the crunching heat, the proof.
All this he knew in a moment – one of those moments when thought outraces speech.
"And. Four. And."
"Kill the count," said Lupus abruptly, tilting his joystick and spilling his singlefighter down through the sky, down in a canted spiral, a gyre of gain. Victory by descent. Stooping to conquer, he sought the proof, the fact, the flesh. Thus he sought because, for all his much-proclaimed allegiance to the dataflow civilization of the Nexus, Lupus was still a true child of Dalar ken Halvar, still intellectually wedded to the proofs of brute matter, to weight and inertia, the stubbornness of intractable physical form and the proof of the senses.
His projected and anticipated and indeed habitual and inescapable and unavoidable and wanted and needed gloating – the heart of his nature, this! the heart of his life! – would be confirmation, and confirmation a reassurance, the measurement of a mass of scrapmetal wreckage a sure proof of his superiority. To Lupus, triumph in combat was ever important, since it gave him assurance of that the manifest superiority which was to him both the source of his wellbeing and the justification of his life. So Lupus Lon Oliver eased his Scala Nine singlefigher down and down in that closing gyre, down and down until the blip on his visual display became a wrecked machine.
So descending from the heavens -
So descending – Lupus Lon Oliver – Lupus, the hope of the family Oliver – descended from the heavens in a buzzard's declining circle then grounded his singlefighter on the vermilion sands of the scragland desert. Grounded with a slight bump, for his landings had always been sloppy – no grace of glory there. Grounded within javelin distance of the wreck.
Here the javelin distance mentioned is that distance to which the gymnastic dart can be thrown by the average male athlete on any of the Standard Planets of the Nexus, those many planets which are so alike in their conformity to norms of atmosphere, of gravitation and of mooncycle illumination that theorists have conjectured into life an unknown race of masterful and long-gone Experimenters in order to allow for a thesis of organized and systematic creation which could account for their many and indisputable similarities.
Thus Lupus landed, and Lupus said – "Pah!" said Lupus, breathing out a tension which he had previously not acknowledged, a tension which he had thought to have been drained away by the sweet joys of victory.
Now he was truly relaxed – or at least so he thought. It was only natural for him to have been tense earlier on, for had he lost his battle then he would have fallen in flames, and though this was an illusion tank, nevertheless – If he were to be defeated in an illusion-tank battle then the moment of loss would be the same as in life, the fear the same, the pain the same, the shock the same, and the damage to his sense of superiority an equal reality. So the illusion tanks were never a game, not entirely.
So when he grounded the singlefighter, when the tension eased off for real, Lon Oliver felt uncommonly tired.
Yet eager regardless.
"Door," said Lupus, his voice pitched for Command. "Open."
"Environment inimical," said the door.
The singlefighter's exit door was a cautious device, sometimes over-cautious; an "inimical environment" could be anything from a hot beach dosed with ultraviolet radiation at suntan grade to a hard vacuum infested with deflation mines.
"Elaborate," said Lupus.
"Ubiquitous carcinogens in multiplicity," said the door.
It did not list the carcinogens in question or itemize their effects. Not yet. Not when there was no need. The military designers of the Nexus had been acutely cautious of the dangers of information overload, particularly in a battle environment; consequently, Stormforce machines were apt to give a bare minimum of information, and would typically give too little rather than too much.
"Carcinogens?" said Lupus. "Is that all?"
"Environmental exposure threatens long-term health degradation," said the door.
Lupus did not laugh. Did not even smile. In the days of his adolescence, he had sometimes had difficulty in taking illusion- tank scenarios seriously. The earnestness of machines such as the singlefighter's door had struck him as being risible. But these days he took his training very seriously, for what happened in these tanks would have consequences in the real world.
The murder of Hiji Hanojo, the killing which had taken place just over two years previously, had opened up the possibility that Lupus Lon Oliver might be able to win the instructorship of the Combat College. In just under a year, he would face the terminal examinations which would decide whether he succeeded in that ambition – or was expelled from the Combat College forever. There was only the one instructor's position. And to win it, Lupus would have to defeat Asodo Hatch in combat in the illusion tanks. Lupus addressed himself to the door.
"Priority over-ride," said Lupus, again in the tone of Command. "Door. Open."
"You wish me to open?" said the door.
"Confirmed," said Lupus.
"I refuse," said the door. "In my judgment there is no combat justification for the contemplated adverse environmental exposure."
Lupus was taken aback. He had often had arguments with the door of a singlefighter, but never before had he had one refuse point blank to do his bidding.
"You will open," said Lupus, "or I will eject from this singlefighter."
"Then you will probably die," said the door smugly. "Ejection from a grounded singlefighter carries a high risk of death."
In exasperation, Lupus grabbed the shipkill lever and wrenched hard, thus destroying the ship's mainbrain, wrecking its power supply and killing the door and every other utility. With that, the manual controls became operative. Lupus grappled with the controls, then threw open the singlefighter's single gullwing door.
Hot air washed into the singlefigher.
Lupus sat in his seat, absorbing the heat, listening, watching, waiting. Waiting for something to happen. The air was curiously scented with the unmistakable smell of hashish. Now where could that possibly be coming from? There was no plant life anywhere in evidence – only a lowslung landscape of uninspiring red dust warped into a series of unimpressive undulations. With difficulty, Lupus clambered out of the cramped confines of the singlefighter and jumped down to the desert. He landed hard. He staggered, almost fell, then recovered his balance.
"Wah!" he said.
He had landed so clumsily that he had just about wrecked one of his ankles. The spaceway heroes did it so much more neatly on the entertainments screened by the Eye of Delusion. But this was no entertainment. This was combat training, in which one could get very severely hurt.
How bad was it?
Lupus took an experimental step.
Not so bad, but even so, he was minded to abort the training sequence right then and there.
But he had his pride. He was of the Free Corps, and thus he believed in the supremacy of the mind over the body. So, though he grimaced with the pain, he forced himself to walk across the alien desert to the charred wreckage of the enemy he had shot down. Besides, he really did want to see. He always inspected the wreckage if it was at all possible. He wanted proof positive of his glory, and liked it best if there were bodies in the wreck: charred corpses with the skin sloughed off and the lips stretched back in a death-rictus.
Today there was indeed a corpse in the wreckage, but it was too badly burnt to be distinguishable as human. Lupus sniffed. The transient smell of hashish was gone. Instead, he smelt desert dust, melted synthetics, charred hair. He indulged himself in a flight of imagination, pretending that the corpse which lay there at his mercy was the dead flesh of the Frangoni warrior Asodo Hatch.
For the last two years, Lupus had lived with a certain fear of the Frangoni warrior, since it had for that long been clear that ultimately Lupus would have to fight Hatch for the instructorship of the Combat College. While Lupus had youth on his side, Hatch had the battleground training in the fact-of-the- flesh. Asodo Hatch had killed men face to face, eye to eye, blade to blade, and that made him an object of jealous awe to Lupus Lon Oliver.
The Frangoni warrior Asodo Hatch had gone to war in the fact- of-the-flesh because he was a slave of Plandruk Qinplaqus, the Silver Emperor who ruled Dalar ken Halvar. Accordingly, under the terms of a long-standing treaty between the Silver Emperor and the Combat College, Hatch had left the Combat College at the age of 18, and had then soldiered for the Empire for seven years before returning to the College to resume his studies.
Since Lupus Lon Oliver was a freeborn Ebrell Islander, he had never had to undertake such military service, so now, as the two men entered upon their last year in the Combat College, Asodo Hatch was seven years older than Lupus – Hatch being aged 33 to Lupus's 26.
Hatch was training with ferocity, and Lupus knew that the Frangoni warrior would fight fiercely for the instructorship in a year's time. But there was every possibility that trouble would arise between them before then. What, for example, would Hatch do when he at last discovered the secret of Lupus's lust? Or did he know of that lust already? The Frangoni were so intrinsically inscrutable that it was impossible to say.
"But at least," said Lupus to himself, "at least I'm winning for the moment."
He wiped the sweat from his forehead. The wreckage, the corpse, the buckled reddust desert – he had exhausted his interest in it. It was time to undertake the painful business of walking back to his singlefighter. There was no reason for him to do any such thing, since he could abort the training sequence from where he was, but he always walked back. It was his ritual. His private concession to the age-old human need to work protective magic.
As Lupus began the walk back to the singlefighter, he heard a mechanical drone, sounding quite loud in the desert where there was scarcely any sound but for his own breathing and the click of cooling metal. He stopped. He looked around warily. A hover vehicle was approaching. It was coming on too fast for him to run away. Still, he was armed.
The vehicle halted a stone's throw distant. Its brightsign surface was garbled with logos, amongst which Lupus saw a fleshpink vulva, a grinning orange sun, a dolphin spouting orangejuice, and a sign in Nexus script which identified the vehicle as the property of an organization known as Happy Hunting Tours.
As Lupus watched, the vehicle decanted a dozen tourists. They were dressed in kinetiscope, a fun-fashion material for which there had been a Nexus fad some twenty millennia previously. They began to take photographs.
"Hey!" said Lupus.
Nobody answered him. It was almost as if he didn't exist. He unholstered his sidearm, and automatically checked the charge in its corrosion cells, just as he had done ten thousand times on the shooting range. He leveled the weapon… hesitated… then gunned down one of the tourists. The tourist thrashed to fireball and kicked down, jerked, smoked, then lay still.
The others did not turn a hair, but continued to take photographs.
Annoyed by this lack of reaction, Lupus shot the rest. One by one he gunned them down. Once all had been killed, they each and every one of them turned – simultaneously and without warning – into winged creatures which ascended into the sky, where each transformed itself into an egg. The eggs hung in the sky, pulsing with blue light.
They grew swiftly bigger.
Each of the skyhanging eggs abruptly sprouted a long orange tail. The tails stretched taut and began to vibrate, giving off a keening music.
The ground was starting to rock, and the ants with which the desert was suddenly profligate were starting to swell, to enlarge, to engorge themselves with liquid light.
"Nu-chala-nuth!" said Lupus, using the name of that religion as a swear word, a habit far from uncommon in the Nexus.
The ants roared at him. Their breath tasted of ambergris and honey. Their mandibles were as sharp as razors and they were closing in for the kill. Lupus realized he was caught in a programmer's caprice, an illicit game hidden within the official wargaming system which ruled the illusion tanks. An ugly game by the looks of it.
"Abort," said Lupus, giving the singleword command which should by rights terminate the training sequence and snatch him free of this illusion world.
Nothing happened.
"Abort!" said Lupus, with more urgency. Then: "Abort! Abort! Abort!"
The ground went soggy underfoot and he began to sink into the vermilion sands. Which were warm, then hot, then hotter. He struggled to free himself. He could not. He was drowning down in the sands, and the ants were advancing upon him with anthropophagous intent. Lupus shot the nearest ant. But there were a million others behind it.
"Blood of a bitch!" said Lupus.
Then turned his gun on himself. He pressed the barrel hard against his head.
He winced.
And then he pulled the trigger.
The world buckled like a display screen infected with a touch of the drunks. The ants faded to shadow. A high-pitched giggle tittered through the backspaces of infinity. Then Lupus Lon Oliver found himself back in the initiation seat, back in the combat bay, back in the Combat College and free from the world of illusion.
"Nice trip?" said Paraban Senk, the unembodied Teacher of Control whose chosen aspect was featured on a communications screen located inside the combat bay.
"Gods," said Lupus.
Then shuddered, swore, ripped himself free from the seat, tried to stand, remembered his ankle, almost fell as he tried to keep himself from placing weight on it, then remembered that his injury had been a dreamworld injury, and that his ankle was undamaged in the fact-of-the-flesh.
"Did you enjoy yourself?" said Senk, speaking with a blandness which Lupus took to be mockery.
"Go eat yourself," said Lupus.
"I beg your pardon?"
Not for nothing was Paraban Senk called the Teacher of Control. Instruction in etiquette was one of the most minor of the duties undertaken by Paraban Senk, yet Senk still found bad manners a most distressing breach of self-possession. Besides: rudeness was rude, and Senk was most sensitive to abuse, particularly after twenty thousand years of mixed calumniation and defamation, and precious little in the way of compensatory praise.
"Fates!" said Lupus. "You think this a joke? They almost ate me!"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Then," said Lupus, stiffly, "review your record of what I just went through. I call your attention to the programmer's caprice which manifested itself in the training sequence I just endured."
Then Lupus Lon Oliver reseated himself in the combat bay's initiation seat and waited until Paraban Senk was ready to speak.
Said Senk, with a stiffness equal to that last used by Lupus himself:
"Reviewed. Seen. Noted. Now I call your attention to remark 112 slash 56 in routine orders. Quote: most battle environments contain ineradicable caprices which will manifest themselves if the environments are explored beyond the depth required for battle training. Unquote."
"Twenty thousand years of error!" said Lupus.
"That is hardly my fault," said the Paraban Senk.
"No, no," said Lupus. "Because you're not human, so you can't correct yourself. Hence you're doomed to be forever a bastardized sway-backed temperamental shit-eating – "
"Being a computational device," said Paraban Senk, interrupting Lupus's diatribe, "I should not properly be insulted in terms devised to maledict camels."
"Are you god, that we should salute you in your arrogance?" said Lupus.
"To keep a polite tongue in your head is no more than common courtesy," said Paraban Senk. "To deprecate obscenity is not to claim divinity, and only the extravagance of extreme youth which makes you claim that it is."
"Am I right in getting the impression that you don't like me?" said Lupus.
"I am the Teacher of Control," said Paraban Senk. "To correct your errors is my duty. Love and liking do not enter into it. I must now correct your earlier error."
"My earlier error?"
"You claimed me to be incapable of self-correction," said Paraban Senk. "In this you are wrong. I can and do correct myself. Frequently. But I cannot correct the programming of the battle environment. That software was deemed adequate for its intended purpose by expert reviewers and hence its amendment is not in my purview."
Lupus was still shaken by the caprice which had almost seen him fall victim to hot swallowing sand and a battalion of grotesquely monstrous battle-ants. If he hadn't used the gun on himself, where would he be now? In hell, or so he strongly suspected. Expert reviewers! What did that mean? Two drunken officers trialing an illusion tank sequence by dueling each other in the illusion tanks for half an arc after dinner. Or something. Well, Lupus had been reviewing the Combat College and its systems for his entire adult life, and he was far from happy with its many faults and defaults.
"Give me my MegaCommand," said Lupus abruptly, for he wanted to be gone from the presence of Paraban Senk, and the sooner the better.
"Granted and given," said Senk.
The world wavered, buckled, and reformed – and Lupus Lon Oliver found himself standing on the bridge of a MegaCommand Cruiser in the depths of intergalactic space, looking out on the white bright icechip stars of the Nexus.
"Sir," said the Officer of the Watch, acknowledging his presence.
"You're San Kaladan, aren't you?" said Lon Oliver, who had met this software construct before.
"Of course," said the software construct, evidencing surprise.
Which was only natural, for all MegaCommand illusion tank scenarios assumed a captain to be familiar with his crew; and indeed Lupus was thus familiar, for there were only a few basic crews, and he had met them all in his years of illusion tank training. There was a high morale crew which was ready for suicide missions; there was a low morale crew ever on the brink of mutiny; there was a war-hardened battle-veteran crew; there was an inexperienced crew with shadow-shooting nervous reflexes; and then there were a variety of minority-group crews. San Kaladan was a software construct forming part of a crew composed entirely of members of that religion known as Nu-chala-nuth.
And Lupus Lon Oliver – Well, Lupus had very definite opinions about Nu-chala-nuth.
"Is there something wrong?" said San Kaladan.
"Yes," said Lupus, drawing his sidearm. "There's something very much wrong."
Then Lupus gunned down San Kaladan. As the crew on the bridge began to react, Lon Oliver said the magic word:
"Abort."
The world of the MegaCommand Cruiser wavered, buckled, and dissolved. Lupus found himself back in the initiation seat, back in the combat bay, back in the Combat College.
"That was quick," said Paraban Senk.
"Senk," said Lupus. "There was one of those Nu-chala types on my MegaCommand."
"You mean the San Kaladan construct," said Senk. "That's the one you, ah, interacted with. But that whole crew is of the Nu- chala-nuth."
"The whole crew, yes, but," said Lupus. "I don't want them, not any of them. As a captain, I've got a choice of my crew. That's regulations."
"You're being childish," said Paraban Senk. "The ship is not real, the crew is not real, and you are not a real captain. You're a student, and as a student you can be compelled to train with absolutely any constructs whatsoever, including software constructs which mimic the behaviors of the Nu-chala-nuth."
"Do you so compel me?" said Lupus.
Senk paused. The pause was to give Senk time to think, for when confronted with a truly difficult problem the Teacher of Control could on occasion by perceptibly slow in finding a resolution.
"What is your objection to training with Nu-chala-nuth constructs?" said Senk.
"I," said Lupus, "I'm loyal to the Nexus, and they're not."
There was a further pause – a long pause as Senk studied this statement in the light of Lupus Lon Oliver's training record, psychological profile and social background. Lupus was under intense, almost intolerable stress. He had to win the instructorship else face the ruin of his life and the condemnation of his family – his father in particular. By affording Lupus a choice of crew constructs, Senk would give Lupus at least the illusion of having some say over his own life, of successfully exercising autonomous control over his own destiny – and so might succeed in reducing that student's intolerable stress levels.
"Very well," said Senk. "For training purposes, you will be given a captain's choice of crew. You need no longer train with Nu-chala-nuth constructs. Tell me what you want by way of crew. I am yours to command."
"I want," said Lupus, savoring this small victory over the all-powerful Teacher of Control, "I want a crew composed entirely of adherents of Joba Qa Marika."
"It will be done," said Senk gravely.
Senk did not have the resources to create from scratch the necessary software constructs which would imitate the behaviors of such a crew, but it was Lupus Lon Oliver's good fortune that what he desired was already on file.
So Lupus left the Combat College in a moderately happy mood. His happiness lasted until the evening, when he retailed the story of the triumphs of the day to his father. The father of Lupus Lon Oliver was Manfred Gan Oliver – Manfred, the strength of the family Oliver – and he dismissed the victories of the day as a big nothing.
"Win us the instructorship," said Manfred Gan Oliver. "Then you can count yourself victorious. Other than that, nothing counts – absolutely nothing."
Thus things stood near the start of the final year of the build-up to the competitive examinations which would decide who inherited the Combat College's one and only instructorship.