The Ghost Brigades

  “Like what?” Jared asked.

  “Like that your consciousness would be entirely wiped out as the new one comes in,” Wilson said.

  “Ah,” Jared said.

  “You can see how it’s problematic,” Cainen said.

  “I don’t think I want to do that one,” Jared said.

  “We didn’t think so,” Cainen said. “In which case, we have a rather less invasive plan B.”

  “Which is?” Jared said.

  “A trip down memory lane,” Wilson said. “Jellybeans were only the beginning.”

  NINE

  Colonel James Robbins looked up at Phoenix, hovering over him in the sky. Here I am again, he thought.

  General Szilard noticed Robbins’s discomfort. “You don’t really like the general’s mess, do you, Colonel?” he asked, and jammed more steak in his mouth.

  “I hate it,” Robbins said, before he quite knew what was coming out of his mouth. “Sir,” he added, quickly.

  “Can’t say that I blame you,” Szilard said, around the beef. “The whole thing of barring non-generals from eating here is six kinds of stupid. How’s your water, by the way?”

  Robbins glanced down at the sweating glass in front of him. “Delightfully refreshing, sir,” he said.

  Szilard motioned with his fork to encompass the entire general’s mess. “This is our fault, you know,” he said. “The Special Forces, I mean.”

  “How so?” asked Robbins.

  “Special Forces generals would bring anyone in their command structure in here—not just officers, but their enlisted too. Because outside of combat situations, no one in Special Forces really gives a shit about rank. So you had all these Special Forces troops in here, eating the nice steaks and ogling Phoenix overhead. It got on the other generals’ nerves—not just that there were enlisted in here, but that they were Ghost Brigade enlisted. This was in the early days, when the idea of soldiers less than a year old gave you realborn the creeps.”

  “It still does,” Robbins said. “Sometimes.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Szilard said. “But you people hide it better now. Anyway, after a while the realborn generals let it be known that this was their own playpen. And now all anyone else gets in here is one of those delightfully refreshing glasses of water you’ve got there, Colonel. So on behalf of the Special Forces, I apologize to you for the inconvenience.”

  “Thank you, General,” Robbins said. “I’m not hungry anyway.”

  “Good for you,” Szilard said, and ate some more of his steak. Colonel Robbins eyed the general’s meal. In fact, he was hungry, but it wouldn’t have been politic to note it. Robbins made a mental note for the next time he was summoned to a meeting in the general’s mess: Eat something first.

  Szilard swallowed his steak and turned his attention back to Robbins. “Colonel, have you heard of the Esto system? Don’t look it up, just tell me if you know it.”

  “I’m not aware of it,” Robbins said.

  “How about Krana? Mauna Kea? Sheffield?”

  “I know the Mauna Kea on Earth,” Robbin said. “But I assume that’s not the one you’re talking about.”

  “It’s not.” Szilard motioned again with his fork, waving it to indicate some point past the eastern limb of Phoenix. “Mauna Kea system is that way, just short of Phoenix’s Skip Drive horizon. New colony there.”

  “Hawaiians?” Robbins asked.

  “Of course not,” Szilard said. “It’s mostly Tamils, from what my data tell me. They don’t name the system, they just live there.”

  “What’s so interesting about this system?” Robbins said.

  “The fact that less than three days ago a Special Forces cruiser disappeared in it,” Szilard said.

  “It was attacked?” Robbins asked. “Destroyed?”

  “No,” Szilard said. “It disappeared. No contact once it arrived in the system.”

  “Did it hail the colony?” Robbins asked.

  “It wouldn’t have done that,” Szilard said, in a flat tone that suggested to Robbins that he shouldn’t pursue the details.

  He didn’t. “Maybe something happened to the ship when it reentered real space,” he said instead.

  “We skipped in a sensor done,” Szilard said. “No ship. No black box. No debris along the projected flight path. Nothing. It’s gone.”

  “That’s weird,” Robbins said.

  “No,” Szilard said. “What’s weird is that it was the fourth Special Forces ship this has happened to this month.”

  Robbins stared at Szilard blankly. “You’ve lost four cruisers? How?”

  “Well, if we knew that, Colonel, we’d be off stomping on someone’s neck,” Szilard said. “That fact that what I’m actually doing is eating this steak in front of you should be an indication we are as in the dark as anyone.”

  “But you do think someone is behind this,” Robbins said. “And it’s not just an issue with the ships or their Skip Drives.”

  “Of course we do,” Szilard said. “Having one ship disappear is a random incident. Having four disappear in a month is a fucking trend. This is not a problem with the ships or the drives.”

  “Who do you think is behind it?” Robbins said.

  Szilard set down his utensils, irritable. “Christ, Robbins,” he said. “Do you think I’m talking to you because I don’t have friends?”

  Robbins smiled wryly, in spite of himself. “The Obin, then,” he said.

  “The Obin,” Szilard said. “Yes. The ones who have Charles Boutin tucked away somewhere. All the systems our ships disappeared from either are close to Obin space or are planets the Obin contested for at one point or another. That’s a slender thread, but it’s what we have at the moment. What we don’t have is the how or why, and that’s where I was hoping you might be able to shed some light.”

  “You want to know where we are with Private Dirac,” Robbins said.

  “If you don’t mind,” Szilard said, and picked up his utensils again.

  “It’s slow going,” Robbins admitted. “We think the memory breach happened because of stress and sensory input. We can’t put the same sort of pressure on him that combat did, but we have been introducing him to parts of Boutin’s life one piece at a time.”

  “His records?” Szilard asked.

  “No,” Robbins said. “At least not the reports and files on Boutin that were written or recorded by other people. Those aren’t from Boutin himself, and we don’t want to introduce an outside point of view. Cainen and Lieutenant Wilson are working with primary sources—Boutin’s recordings and notes—and with Boutin’s things.”

  “You mean things Boutin owned?” Szilard asked.

  “Things he owned, things he liked—remember the jellybeans—or things from other people that he knew. We’ve also taken Dirac to the places where Boutin lived and grew up. He was originally from Phoenix, you know. It’s just a quick trip down by shuttle.”

  “It’s nice he gets field trips,” Szilard said, only a little dismissively. “But you said it was slow going.”

  “More of Boutin is coming out,” Robbins said. “But much of it seems to be in personality. I’ve read Private Dirac’s psychological profile; up to now he’s been something of a passive character. Things happened to him rather than him making them happen. And for the first week or so he was with us he was like that. But over the last three weeks he’s been becoming more assertive and more directed. And that’s more in line with who Boutin was, psychologically speaking.”

  “So he’s becoming more like Boutin. Fine,” Szilard said. “But is he remembering anything?”

  “Well, that’s just it,” Robbins said. “There’s very little memory coming back. What’s coming back is mostly about his family life, not his work. We’ll run him recordings of Boutin making voice notes of his projects and he’ll listen to them blankly. Show him a picture of Boutin’s little girl, and he gets twitchy for a minute, and then he’ll tell you about what was going on in the picture. It’s frustrating.?
??

  Szilard chewed for a moment, thinking. Robbins took advantage of the pause to enjoy his water. It wasn’t quite as refreshing as he’d previously suggested.

  “The memories of his little girl don’t lead to any tangential memories coming up?” Szilard asked.

  “Sometimes,” Robbins said. “A picture of Boutin and his daughter at some research base he was stationed at reminded him of some of the work he’d been doing there. Some early research on consciousness buffering, before he came back to Phoenix Station and started working on it using the technology we’d gotten from the Consu. But he didn’t remember anything useful, in terms of why Boutin would decide to turn traitor.”

  “Show him another picture of Boutin’s daughter,” Szilard said.

  “We showed him all we could find,” Robbins said. “There aren’t that many. And there aren’t any of her physical things around—no toys or drawings or anything like that.”

  “Why not?” Szilard asked.

  Robbins shrugged. “She died before Boutin came back to Phoenix Station,” he said. “I guess he didn’t want to bring her things with him.”

  “Now that’s interesting,” Szilard said. His eyes looked like they were focused on something at a distance, a sign he was reading something off his BrainPal.

  “What?” Robbins said.

  “I pulled Boutin’s file while you were talking,” Szilard said. “Boutin’s a colonial, but his work for the Colonial Union required him to be stationed at Military Research facilities. The last place he worked before coming here was at Covell Research Station. Ever hear of it?”

  “It sounds familiar,” Robbins said. “But I can’t place it.”

  “Says it was a zero-g-capable research facility,” Szilard said. “They did some biomedical work, which is why Boutin was there, but it was mostly weapons and navigation systems. This is interesting: The station was actually positioned directly above a planetary ring system. It was just a klick above the ring plane. Used the ring debris to test their close-quarter navigation systems.”

  Now Robbins got it. Rocky planets with ring systems were rare, and ones with human colonies rarer still. Most colonists preferred not to live where stadium-sized chunks of falling rock plunging through the atmosphere were a common occurrence rather than a once-in-a-millennium sort of thing. One with a Military Research station orbiting overhead—that was pretty singular.

  “Omagh,” Robbins said.

  “Omagh,” Szilard agreed. “Which we no longer own. We could never prove that the Obin originally attacked the colony or the station. It’s possible the Rraey attacked the colony, and then the Obin attacked them when they were weakened from fighting us and before they could be reinforced. Which is one reason we never went to war with them over it. But we know they decided to claim the system for their own pretty damn quickly, before we could mount a force to take it back.”

  “And Boutin’s daughter was on the colony,” Robbins said.

  “She was on the station, from what the casualty lists say,” Szilard said, sending over the list for Robbins to view. “It was a large station. It would have had family quarters.”

  “Jesus,” Robbins said.

  “You know,” Szilard said, casually, forking the last bite of steak into his mouth, “when Covell Station was attacked, it wasn’t entirely destroyed. In fact, we have reliable data that suggest the station is largely intact.”

  “Okay,” Robbins said.

  “Including the family quarters.”

  “Oh, okay,” Robbins said, the light coming on. “I can already tell you I don’t like where this is going.”

  “You said that Dirac’s memory responds most strongly to stress and sensory input,” Szilard said. “Taking him to the place where his daughter died—and where all her physical things are likely to be—would qualify as a significant sensory input.”

  “There is the minor problem that the system is now owned and patrolled by the Obin,” Robbins said.

  Szilard shrugged. “That’s where the stress comes in,” he said. He set his utensils into the “done” position on his plate and pushed it away from him.

  “The reason General Mattson took over Private Dirac is because he didn’t want him to die in combat,” Robbins said. “Dropping him into Omagh space seems rather counter to that desire, General.”

  “Yes, well, the general’s desire to keep Dirac out of harm’s way has to be tempered by the fact that as of three days ago, four of my ships and more than a thousand of my people have up and disappeared, as if they never even existed,” Szilard said. “And at the end of the day, Dirac is still Special Forces. I could force the issue.”

  “Mattson wouldn’t like it,” Robbins said.

  “Neither would I,” Szilard said. “I have a good relationship with the general, despite his patronizing attitude toward Special Forces and me.”

  “It’s not just you,” Robbins said. “He’s patronizing to everyone.”

  “Yes, he’s an equal opportunity asshole,” Szilard said. “And he’s aware of it, which he thinks means it’s okay. Be that as it may, as much as I don’t want to get on his bad side, I will if I have to. But I don’t think I will have to.”

  A waiter came over to take Szilard’s plate; Szilard ordered dessert. Robbins waited until the server left. “Why don’t you think you’ll have to?” he asked.

  “What would you say if I told you we already had Special Forces at Omagh, making preparations to take back the system?” Szilard asked.

  “I’d be skeptical,” Robbins said. “That sort of activity would be noticed sooner or later, and the Obin are ruthless. They wouldn’t tolerate their presence if they found out about it.”

  “You’re right about that,” Szilard said. “But you’d be wrong to be skeptical. Special Forces have been at Omagh for over a year now. They’ve even been inside Covell Station. I think we can get Private Dirac in and out without raising too much attention.”

  “How?” Robbins asked.

  “Very carefully,” Szilard said. “And by using a few new toys.”

  The waiter returned with the general’s dessert: Two large Toll House cookies. Robbins stared at the plate. He loved Toll House cookies. “You realize that if you’re wrong, and you can’t sneak Dirac past the Obin, they’ll kill him, your secret Omagh reclamation project will be exposed, and any information Dirac has about Boutin will die with him,” Robbins said.

  Szilard took a cookie. “Risk,” he said. “It’s always in the equation. If we do this and we botch it, then we are well and truly fucked. But if we don’t do it, we risk Dirac never recovering Boutin’s memories, and then we’re vulnerable to what the Obin have planned next. And then we’ll be well and truly fucked then. If we’re going to be fucked, Colonel, I prefer to get fucked on my feet instead of on my knees.”

  “You have a way with mental imagery, General,” Robbins said.

  “Thank you, Colonel,” Szilard said. “I try.” He reached over, took the second cookie, and offered it to Robbins. “Here,” he said. “I saw you coveting it.”

  Robbins stared at the cookie, then looked around. “I can’t take that,” he said.

  “Sure you can,” Szilard said.

  “I’m not supposed to eat anything here,” Robbins said.

  “So what?” Szilard said. “Screw ’em. It’s a ridiculous tradition and you know it. So break it. Take the cookie.”

  Robbins took the cookie and stared at it glumly.

  “Oh, good God,” Szilard said. “Do I have to order you to eat the damn thing?”

  “It might help,” Robbins said.

  “Fine,” Szilard said. “Colonel, I’m giving you a direct order. Eat the fucking cookie.”

  Robbins ate it. The waiter was scandalized.

  “Behold,” Harry Wilson said to Jared, as they walked into the cargo hold of the Shikra. “Your chariot.”

  The “chariot” in question consisted of a carbon fiber basket seat, two extremely small ion engines of limited power and
maneuverability, one on each side of the basket seat, and an office-refrigerator–sized object positioned directly behind the seat.

  “This is an ugly chariot,” Jared said.

  Wilson chuckled. Jared’s sense of humor had improved over the last few weeks, or at the very least it had become more to Wilson’s liking—it reminded him of the sarcastic Charles Boutin he knew. Wilson felt both pleasure and wariness about this: pleasure that his and Cainen’s work was making a difference; wariness because Boutin was, after all, a traitor to humanity. Wilson liked Jared enough not to wish that fate on him.

  “It’s ugly but it’s state-of-the-art,” Wilson said. He walked over and slapped the refrigerator-looking object. “This is the smallest Skip Drive ever created,” he said. “Hot off the assembly line. And not only is it small, but it’s an example of the first real advance we’ve had in Skip Drive technology in decades.”

  “Let me guess,” Jared said. “It’s based on that Consu technology we stole from the Rraey.”

  “You make it sound like a bad thing,” Wilson said.

  “Well, you know,” Jared said, tapping his head. “I’m in this predicament because of Consu technology. Let’s just say I’m not neutral on its uses.”

  “You make an excellent point,” Wilson said. “But this is sweet. A friend of mine worked on this; we’d talk about it. Most Skip Drives require you to get out into flat time-space before you can engage them. You have to get far away from a planet. This one is less picky: it can use a Lagrange point. So long as you’ve got a planet with a reasonably large moon, you’ve got five nearby spots in space where it’s gravitationally flat enough to engage this drive. If they can work out the kinks, it could revolutionize space travel.”

  “‘Work out the kinks’?” Jared said. “I’m about to use this thing. Kinks are bad.”

  “The kink is that the drive is touchy about the mass of the object it’s attached to,” Wilson said. “Too much mass creates too much of a local warp on the time-space. Makes the Skip Drive do weird things.”

  “Like what?” Jared asked.

  “Like explode,” Wilson said.