“Shut up,” Brian said. “I get your point, okay. Please, just shut up, now.”
“Don’t get angry at me for your own shortcomings,” Hayter-Ross said. “I’m doing this for your own good.”
“I don’t see what good this does me,” Brian said. “I have a problem thinking before I act. Fine. Now let me go help my friends.”
“Not yet,” Hayter-Ross said. “You recognize you have a problem. That’s the first step. Now you’re ready to learn what you have to tell your friends. It’s not going to be easy, and your first impulse will be to ignore the advice—or would have been, before I showed you this. Now you may be willing to listen to reason.”
“And what is that?” Brian said.
“I’m not going to tell you,” Hayter-Ross said.
“Jesus fucking Christ, woman,” Brian said. “You are the single most irritating person I’ve ever come across in either of my lifetimes.”
“Thank you, Brian,” Hayter-Ross said. “Coming from an eighteen-year-old, that means a lot.”
“Why did you show me this if you’re not going to tell me how to help my friends?” Brian asked.
“I’m not going to tell you, because I’m going to show you,” Hayter-Ross said. “Or rather, I’m going to show you, and it’ll be up to you to see if you can understand it.”
“I mentioned you were irritating, right?” Brian said.
“You did,” Hayter-Ross said. “Let’s just take it as a given from here. And let me direct your attention back to this battle. As I’m sure you know by now, the Battle of Pajmhi was an unmitigated disaster for the UNE: Half of the human forces were either killed or wounded over two Chagfun days, including you. That’s an awful waste of humans, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes,” Brian said.
“Excellent,” Hayter-Ross said. “Then here’s what we’re going to do. You and I are going to recreate the Battle of Pajmhi—the whole thing, down to the very last soldier. You’ll be the UNE, and I’ll be the Chagfun rebels. You need to find a way to get through the battle without losing so damn many lives. The answer to how you’ll help your friends is inside these simulations.”
“If I promise to believe you, can we skip all this?” Brian asked.
“This is exactly your problem, Brian,” Hayter-Ross said. “Always trying get around the hard work. This isn’t a Gordian knot you can slice through. You’re going to have to unravel this a thread at a time. Also, you’re going to have to find processing power for your side of the simulation.”
“Excuse me?” Brian said.
“Having both of us control roughly 100,000 combatants is different from splicing together all those recorded video feeds,” Hayter-Ross said. “And it’s different from creating a garden. We’re going to need a little more room for this one.”
“Fine,” Brian said. “I know just the place.”
Bill Davison was simulating Hurricane Britt smashing into the Outer Banks (and not without some small satisfaction, as his former in-laws had beachfront property in Okracoke), when he noticed the simulation throttling back processing to non-useful levels. Bill grabbed his desk comm and punched through to Sid Gravis, who he knew was modeling a line of storms erupting in the Ohio valley.
“Goddamn it, Sid,” Bill said. “You know that hurricanes trump inland storms in the processing hierarchy. It’s like the first law of NOAA computer time apportionment.”
“It’s not me,” Sid said. “I’m taking cycle hits myself. I thought it was you.” Bill opened his mouth to respond but shut it as his boss popped his head through his office door and told him that the entire system had suddenly ground to a halt.
Three minutes later, Chaz McKean, the department’s tech geek, figured it out. “Someone’s running a huge fucking simulation out of the IBM,” he said. “And whoever’s doing it slaved up most of the other processors.”
“I thought we took the IBM out of circulation,” said Jay Tang, Bill’s boss.
“We did,” McKean said. “But we didn’t take it off the network. So whoever’s using it could still hijack the other processors on the network.”
“Well, who’s the asshole?” Sid said.
“That’s just it,” McKean said. “No one’s the asshole. No one here’s been logged into the IBM since we took it out of service. It’s like it developed a brain of its own.”
“Right now I don’t care who the asshole is,” Tang said. “We need our computers back. Get into the IBM and shut down the simulation.”
“I already tried,” McKean said. “But it’s locked me out. I can’t send any commands.”
“Then unplug the goddamned thing,” Tang said.
“If we do that, we could tube the entire network,” McKean said. “Whoever’s set up this simulation has got it locked up good and tight. Realistically, the only thing we can do with it is ride it out.”
Tang cursed and stomped away. Bill went back into his office, pulled out his secret flask of whiskey, took a slug, and hoped to Christ that whatever it was Creek was doing, it’d be done before anyone could trace the disruption back to him.
Come on, Harry, he thought. Get your ass in gear.
In simulation after simulation, Brian got his ass handed to him.
Certain facts became obvious after the first few dozen simulations. The first was that the rebel informational advantage was simply too great to overcome. Even though the rebels had shown they could manipulate the Nidu computer network, the Nidu arrogantly sent combat details through the network as if it were uncompromised. The rebels knew when the UNE forces were landing, which forces were landing where, and what the weaknesses of the various forces would be. UNE forces were constrained by working under Nidu military command, in which clan and chain of command loyalty were more important than military skill. The UNE forces were also misled by the Nidu both about the strength of the enemy and the amount of useful information the Nidu possessed about the rebels and their plans.
The Chagfun rebels were under no such constraints. Their leadership showed surprising adaptability (considering it consisted of former Nidu officers) and the rebels were deeply motivated, both by the prospect of living on a planet with self-rule and by the knowledge of what would happen to them if they failed to repulse the attack. Time and again the rebels would outflank, outthink, and outperform the UNE forces. Every simulation ended with tens of thousands of UNE soldiers dead and wounded—including, time and again, members of Brian’s own unit.
Brian improvised and as much as possible tried to work around the chain of command, but to only limited success. Troops saved in one area were counterbalanced by increased losses in others. Aggressive tactics led to appalling losses early and often. Defensive tactics led to the UNE forces flanked, pressed, and bled dry. Death, massive and arterial in its strength, stalked the UNE forces in every simulation, a constant companion to Brian’s leadership. The satisfaction Brian felt when UNE forces inflicted similar-sized numbers of casualties to the rebels was cold comfort when he considered how many soldiers he had condemned to die again and again in the struggle. After more than 200 simulations and untold millions of simulated deaths, Brian felt like giving up.
So he did.
Or more accurately, his soldiers did. Fuck you, Andrea Hayter-Ross, Brian thought, as the first troops hit the Pajmhi plain and immediately dropped their weapons, put up their hands, and waited for the rebels to take them prisoner. Wave after wave of UNE troops landed and surrendered, meekly allowing themselves to be herded up by the rebels, who were themselves constrained by the rules of combat to accept the surrenders. At the end of the simulation, 100,000 UNE troops stood in the center of the Pajmhi plain, fingers interlaced behind their heads, while the rebels milled at the periphery.
Not exactly your usual battle tactic, Brian admitted to himself. One the other hand, the simulation ended with no deaths on either side.
No deaths.
“Holy shit,” Brian said.
The plain of Pajmhi melted away and Brian was back i
n Hayter-Ross’s garden. “Now you see,” Hayter-Ross said, from her table.
“The only way to survive was to surrender,” Brian said.
“Not only survive, but to thwart the Nidu in the bargain,” Hayter-Ross said. “In the actual Battle of Pajmhi, the Nidu bombed the plain of Pajmhi almost as soon as the humans left—they dropped their planet crackers and turned one of Chagfun’s most fertile and populated areas into a lava-strewn ruin, not to mention throwing the entire planetary weather system into a profound depression that caused famine and death all over the globe. None of that could have been accomplished if human prisoners had remained on Chagfun.”
“Now I see why you had me do this,” Brian said. “I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t have seen it.”
“You wouldn’t have believed it if you hadn’t seen the UNE troops killed scores of times, either,” Hayter-Ross pointed out. “It’s the whole experience that matters. And now you see what your friends must do.”
“Surrender to the Nidu,” Brian said.
“Exactly so,” Hayter-Ross said.
“It’s going to be tough to convince Harry of that,” Brian said.
“He’s not in possession of all the facts,” Hayter-Ross said. “And come to think of it, neither are you.”
“What new hoops are you going to make me jump through to get them?” Brian said.
“We’re done with the hoops for now,” Hayter-Ross said. “You’ve been a good boy with a pleasing learning curve. I think I’ll just come right out and tell you.”
And she did.
chapter 14
There’s a small detail about entering and exiting n-space that captains and their navigators don’t bother sharing with the general population; namely, that they are completely blind when they do it.
Entering n-space completely blind isn’t actually much of a problem. N-space doesn’t have anything in it, at least not in a “whoops we’ve just hit an iceberg” sense; it’s a complicated mishmash of theoretical states and nested dimensions and undetermined probabilities that even higher order physicists admit, after two beers or six, that they just don’t goddamn get. The races of the CC use n-space to get around because they know it works, even if on a fundamental level they are not entirely clear why it works. It drives the physicists mad and every few years one will snap and begin raving that sentient beings should nae fuck with that which they ken nae unnerstan’.
Meanwhile, captains and navigators and everyone who travels in n-space on a regular basis shrug (or whatever their species equivalent of such an action may be) because in over 40,000 years of recorded space travel, not a single ship has ever been lost entering or using n-space. A few have been lost because someone entered bad coordinates prior to entry and thereby ended up hundreds, thousands, or millions of light-years from where they intended. But that was mere stupidity. N-space couldn’t be blamed for that.
No, it was the coming out of n-space that gets you. Objects coming out of n-space—much to the disappointment of special effects professionals across the galaxy—don’t flash, streak, blur, and fade into existence. They simply arrive, filling up what is sincerely hoped to be empty vacuum with their mass. And if it isn’t empty vacuum, well, then there’s trouble as the atoms of the object coming out n-space and the object that was already there fight it out in a quantum-level game of musical chairs to see who gets to sit in the space they both wish to occupy.
This only occasionally results in a shattering release of atomic energy annihilating both objects. Most of the time there was simply a tremendous amount of conventional damage. Of course, even “conventional” damage is no picnic, as anyone who has just had a hole ripped out of the skin of her ship will tell you, if she survives, which she generally will not.
For this reason, it is extremely rare for a ship filled with living entities to blithely pop out of n-space in a random spot near an inhabited planet. The near space of nearly every inhabited planet is well-nigh infested with objects ranging from communication satellites and freight barges to trash launched overboard to burn up in a planet’s atmosphere and the wreckage of personal cruisers whose drivers manage to find someone or something to crash into well beyond their planet’s ionosphere. A captain who just dropped his ship into a stew of that density might not actually be considered a suicide risk by most major religions, but after a couple of these maneuvers he would find it extremely difficult to find a reputable insurer.
The solution was simple: Designated drop-in zones, cubes of space roughly three kilometers to a side, which were assiduously kept clear of small debris by a cadre of basketball-sized monitor craft, and of large debris by tow barges. Every inhabited world has dozens of such zones devoted to civilian use, whose coordinates are well known and whose use is scheduled with the sort of ruthless efficiency that would make a Prussian quartermaster tingle. In the case of ships like cruise liners, which have set, predictable itineraries, drop-in zones are scheduled weeks and sometimes months in advance, as the Neverland’s was, to prevent potential and catastrophic conflicts.
This is why the Nidu had all the time in the world to prepare for the arrival of the Neverland. They knew when it would arrive, they knew where, and they knew that there would be no witnesses for what came next.
“Relax, Rod,” Jean Schroeder said. “This is all going to be over in about an hour.”
“I remember someone saying that to me before the Arlington Mall,” Rod Acuna said. He paced the small guest deck of Ambassador win-Getag’s private transport. The transport floated off to the side of a Nidu gunship, whose Marines would perform the boarding of the Neverland to take the girl, and which would then take care of the cruise liner after they returned.
“This really isn’t the Arlington Mall,” Schroeder said. “We’re in Nidu space. The Neverland will be floating in space. There’s a damn huge Nidu gunship ready to blast the thing to pieces. If the Nidu Marines don’t kill Creek dead, he’ll be dead when the Neverland gets turned into dust.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Acuna said.
“Believe it, Rod,” Schroeder said. “Now relax. That’s an order.” Schroeder waved in the direction of a corner. “Look at your flunky over there. He’s relaxed. Take a page from him.”
Acuna glanced over at Takk, who had his face jammed in the same book he’d been reading for the last couple of days, the one he’d gotten off the geek before he ate him. Acuna had mocked Takk earlier for taking a souvenir; Takk had just looked at him with a flat, expressionless stare that Acuna figured wouldn’t have been out of place on a cow. He hadn’t actually been aware Takk could read, or read English, in any event.
“He’s relaxed because he’s got the IQ of furniture,” Acuna said, and walked back over to the strip of manufactured crystal that served as the deck’s window. The limb of Chagfun was visible at the bottom left. “I can’t believe I’m back at this shit hole,” he said.
“That’s right, this is where the Battle of Pajmhi was,” Schroeder said, in a tone of voice that exactly expressed his total lack of interest in the topic. Acuna glanced over at him and not for the first time wondered what it would be like to crack that smug head like a melon. Acuna wasn’t the sort to get “band of brothers” emotional, but even he treated the battle with something that approached (for Acuna) grim and quiet contemplation. Schroeder’s casual oblivousness to it was insulting.
Acuna shook it off. Regardless of how much Schroeder could benefit from a metal bar across the teeth, if one were applied to him, Acuna wouldn’t get paid afterward. And it certainly wouldn’t help him in his desire to serve it up to Creek.
“There she is,” Schroeder said, and stood up to look out the window, where the Neverland had just popped into existence a second earlier. “Right about now their captain should be noticing that his communications are jammed, and in about a minute the Nidu are going to tell him to stand down and prepare to be boarded.”
Acuna was lost in thought for a moment. “That ship is here to do some sort of
ceremony, right?” he asked Schroeder.
Schroeder shrugged. “You tell me, Rod,” he said. “It was your little newsletter that brought us here.”
“Yeah, they were,” Acuna said. “They were going to do some sort of memorial service. That’s why they’re here in the first place.”
Schroeder glanced over, slightly annoyed. “So?”
Acuna walked back over to the window. “Landing shuttles, Jean,” he said. “Prepared and ready to go. Creek isn’t stupid. Once he figures out what’s happening, he’s going to look for a bolt hole. He’s got one waiting. You better hope those Nidu marines are good at their job. If you give him a chance to get out, he’s going to take it. And if he gets away and gets down to the planet, they’re never going to find him. He survived this fucking rock when 100,000 of these reptilian bastards had guns and rockets pointed at his head. He’ll survive it again.”
Harry picked up the communicator on the third ring and glanced at the hour as he flipped it open: 3:36 a.m., ship’s time. “Hello?” he said.
“Creek,” Captain Lehane said. “You and your friend have trouble coming.”
Harry felt cold. “How do you know—” he said.
“I’ve known since Caledonia,” Lehane said, cutting him off. “There’s no time to talk about it now. We’re being boarded by Nidu marines, Creek. They’re jamming our outbound transmissions and they’ve told me to stand down while they take your friend off the ship. They say they’re at war with her, whatever the hell that means. You two need to get moving. If they’re jamming our transmissions that means they don’t want to let anyone know we’re here. I think once they take your friend they mean to blow us out of the sky. The longer you two stay away from them, the longer I have to think of a way out of this. Get going. Good luck.” Lehane switched off.
Creek shook Robin, who was dozing in her bunk. “Robin,” he said. “Wake up. We’re in trouble.”