“That’s not encouraging,” Jared said.
“Well, explode is not quite the accurate word,” Wilson said. “The physics for what really goes on are much weirder, I assure you.”
“You can stop now,” Jared said.
“But you don’t have to worry about it,” Wilson continued. “It takes about five tons of mass before the drive gets wobbly. That’s why this sled looks like a dune buggy. It falls well under the mass threshold, even with you in it. You should be fine.”
“Should be,” Jared said.
“Oh, stop being a baby,” Wilson said.
“I’m not even one year old,” Jared said. “I can be a baby if I want. Help me get into this thing, would you.”
Jared negotiated his way into the sled’s basket seat; Wilson strapped him in, and stowed his Empee in a storage box to the side of the seat. “Do a systems check,” Wilson said. Jared activated his BrainPal and connected with the sled, checking the integrity of the Skip Drive and the ion engines; everything was nominal. The sled had no physical controls; Jared would control it with his BrainPal. “The sled’s fine,” Jared said.
“How’s the unitard?” Wilson asked.
“It’s fine.” The sled had an open cockpit; Jared’s unitard was formatted for hard vacuum, including a cowl that would slide down completely over his face, sealing him in. The nanobotic fabric of the unitard was photosensitive and passed visual and other electromagnetic information directly to Jared’s BrainPal. As a result Jared would be able to “see” better with his eyes covered by the cowl than he could if he were using them. Around Jared’s waist was a rebreather system that could, if necessary, provide breathable air for a week.
“Then you’re good to go,” Wilson said. “Your coordinates are programmed in for this side, and you should also have them to get back from the other side. Just put them in and sit back and let the sled do the rest. Szilard said that the Special Forces recovery team will be ready for you on the other side. You’ll be on the lookout for a Captain Martin. He’s got a confirmation key for you to verify his identity. Szilard says to follow his orders to the letter. Got it?”
“Got it,” Jared said.
“Okay,” Wilson said. “I’m out of here. We’re going to start cycling out the air. Suit up. As soon as the bay doors open, activate the nav program and it will handle it from there.”
“Got it,” Jared repeated.
“Good luck, Jared,” Wilson said. “Hope you find something useful.” He walked out of the bay to the sound of the Shikra’s life-support system sucking the air out of the bay. Jared activated his cowl; there was momentary blackness followed by a rather impressive gain in Jared’s peripheral awareness as the unitard’s visual signal kicked in.
The rushing noise of air thinned into nothingness; Jared was sitting in vacuum. Through the metal of the ship and the carbon fibers of the sled, he could feel the bay doors sliding open. Jared activated the sled’s navigation program; the sled lifted from the floor of the bay and slid gently out the door. Jared’s vision included the visual track of his flight plan, and its destination more than a thousand klicks away: the L4 position between Phoenix and its moon Benu, currently unoccupied by any other object. The ion engines kicked in; Jared felt his weight under the engines’ acceleration.
The Skip Drive activated as the sled intersected the L4 position. Jared noted the sudden and impressively disconcerting appearance of a broad system of rings less than a klick above his point of view, girding the limb of a blue, Earth-like planet to his left. Jared’s sled, which had been previously moving forward at an impressive rate of speed, was motionless. The ion engines had stopped firing just before the Skip translation and the inertial energy of the sled did not carry forward after it. Jared was glad about this. He doubted the tiny ion engines would have been able to stop the sled before it would have wandered into the ring system and squashed him into a tumbling rock.
::Private Dirac,:: Jared heard, as a verification key pinged his BrainPal.
::Yes,:: he said.
::This is Captain Martin,:: Jared heard. ::Welcome to Omagh. Please be patient; we’re coming to get you.::
::If you send me directions, I could come to you,:: Jared said.
::We’d rather you didn’t,:: Martin said. ::The Obin have been scanning the area more than usual recently. We’d prefer not to give them anything to see. Just sit tight.::
A minute or so later, Jared noticed three of the rings’ rocks moving slowly his way. ::It looks like I’ve got some debris headed toward me,:: he sent to Martin. ::I’m going to maneuver out of the way.::
::Don’t do that,:: Martin said.
::Why not?:: Jared asked.
::Because we hate chasing after shit,:: Martin said.
Jared directed his unitard to focus on the incoming rocks and magnify. Jared noticed the rocks had limbs, and that one of them was dragging what looked like a tow cable. Jared watched as they approached and finally arrived at the sled. One of them maneuvered itself in front of Jared while the other two attached the two cables. The rock was human-sized and irregularly hemispherical; up close it looked like a turtle shell without an opening for a head. Four limbs of equal length sprouted in quadrilateral symmetry. The limbs had two joints of articulation and terminated in splayed hands with opposable thumbs on either side of the palm. The underside of the rock was flat and mottled, with a line that went down the center, suggesting the underside could open. Across the topside of the rock were flat, glossy patches that Jared suspected were photosensitive.
::Not what you were expecting, Private?:: said the rock, using Martin’s voice.
::No, sir,:: Jared said. He accessed his internal database of the few intelligent species that were friendly to (or at least not openly antagonistic toward) humans but was coming up with nothing that was even remotely like this creature. ::I was expecting someone human.::
Jared felt a sharp ping of amusement. ::We are human, Private,:: Martin said. ::As much as you are.::
::You don’t look human,:: Jared said, and immediately regretted it.
::Of course we don’t,:: Martin said. ::But we don’t live in typical human environments, either. We’ve been adapted for where we live.::
::Where do you live?:: Jared asked.
One of Martin’s limbs motioned around him. ::Here,:: he said. ::Adapted for life in space. Vacuum-proof bodies. Photosynthetic stripes for energy.:: Martin tapped his underside. ::And in here, an organ that houses modified algae to provide oxygen and the organic compounds we need. We can live out here for weeks at a time, spying on and sabotaging the Obin, and they don’t even know we’re here. They keep looking for CDF spaceships. It confuses the hell out of them.::
::I’ll bet,:: Jared said.
::Okay, Stross tells me we’re good to go,:: Martin said. ::We’re ready to reel you in. Hang on.:: Jared felt a jolt and then felt a small vibration as the tow cable was reeled in, dragging the sled into the ring. The rocks kept pace, manipulating small jet packs with their hind limbs.
::Were you born this way?:: Jared asked.
::I wasn’t,:: Martin said. ::They created this body type three years ago. Everything new. They needed volunteers to test it. It was too extreme to drop a consciousness into without testing. We needed to see if people could adapt to it without going insane. This body is almost entirely a closed system. I get oxygen, nutrients and moisture from my algae organ, and my waste gets dumped back into it to feed the algae. You don’t eat and drink like people are supposed to. You don’t even pee normally. And not doing things you’re hardwired to do will make you nuts. You wouldn’t think that not peeing could prey on your mind. But trust me, it does. It was one of the things they had to find a way around when they went into full production.::
Martin pointed toward the other two rocks. ::Stross and Pohl, now, they were born in these bodies,:: Martin said. ::And they’re perfectly at home in them. I tell them about eating a hamburger or taking a dump, they look at me like I’m insane. And trying
to describe regular sex to them is just a complete loss.::
::They have sex?:: Jared asked, surprised.
::You don’t want to screw with the sex drive, Private,:: Martin said. ::That’s bad for the species. Yes, we have sex all the time.:: He motioned to his underside. ::We open up here. The edges of our cowl can seal with someone else’s. The number of positions we can perform are a bit more limited than the ones you can. Your body is more flexible than ours. On the other hand, we can fuck in total vacuum. Which is a neat trick.::
::I’d say so,:: Jared said. He felt the captain was veering into “too much information” territory.
::But we are a different breed, no doubt about it,:: Martin said. ::We even have a different naming scheme than the rest of Special Forces. We’re named after old science fiction writers, instead of scientists. I even took a new name, when I switched over.::
::Are you going to switch back?:: Jared asked. ::To a normal body?::
::No,:: Martin said. ::When I first switched over, I would have. But you get used to it. This is my normal now. And this is the future. The CDF made us to give them an advantage in combat, just like they made the original Special Forces. And it works. We’re dark matter. We can sneak up on a ship and the enemy thinks we’re debris, right until the pocket nuke we stuck on their hull as we scraped by goes off. And then they don’t think about anything anymore.
::But we’re more than that,:: Martin continued. ::We’re the first people organically adapted to living in space. Every body system is organic, even the BrainPal—we’ve got the first totally organic BrainPals. That’s one improvement that’s going to be passed down to the general Special Forces population the next time they do a new body edition. Everything we are is expressed in our DNA. If they can find a way to let us breed naturally, we’ll have a new species: Homo astrum, who can live between the planets. We won’t have to fight anyone for real estate then. And that means humans win.::
::Unless you don’t want to look like a turtle,:: Jared said.
Martin sent a sharp ping of amusement. ::Fair enough,:: he said. ::There is that. And we know it. We call ourselves the Gamerans, you know.::
Jared fuzzed a moment until the reference came into his head, from back in the evenings at Camp Carson, watching science fiction films at ten times speed. ::Like the Japanese monster?::
::You got it,:: Martin said.
::Do you shoot fire too?:: Jared asked.
::Ask the Obin,:: Martin said.
The sled entered the ring.
Jared saw the dead man almost as soon as they slipped through the hole in the side of Covell Station.
The Gamerans had informed Special Forces that Covell Station was largely intact, but “largely intact” clearly meant something different to troops who thrive in hard vacuum. Covell Station was airless and lifeless and gravityless, although some electrical systems remarkably still had power, thanks to solar panels and hardy engineering. The Gamerans knew the station well; they had been in it before, retrieving files, documents, and objects that had not already been destroyed or looted by the Obin. The one thing they didn’t retrieve was the dead; the Obin still came to the station from time to time and might notice if the number of the dead dramatically reduced over time. So the dead remained, floating cold and desiccated through the station.
The dead man was wedged up against a corridor bulkhead. Jared suspected he hadn’t been there when the hole in the hull they slipped through was made: The explosive decompression would have sucked him right out into space. Jared turned to confirm this with Martin.
::He’s new,:: Martin confirmed. ::To this section, anyway. The dead drift a lot around here, along with everything else. Is that someone you’re looking for?::
Jared drifted toward the dead man. The man’s body was parched and dried, all the moisture long since boiled away. He would have been unrecognizable even if Boutin had known him. Jared looked at the man’s lab coat; the name tag claimed him to be Uptal Chatterjee. His papery skin was green. The name was right for a colonist, but he’d clearly been a citizen of a Western nation at one point.
::I don’t know who he is,:: Jared said.
::Come on, then,:: Martin said. He grabbed the railing with both left hands and propelled himself down the corridor. Jared followed, letting go of the railing on occasion to get past a dead body bumping through the corridor. He wondered if he might find Zoë Boutin floating in the corridors or other part of the station.
No, a thought said. They never found her body. They found hardly any colonist bodies.
::Stop,:: Jared said to Martin.
::What is it?:: Martin said.
::I’m remembering,:: Jared said, and closed his eyes, even through they were behind his cowl. When he opened them, he felt sharper and more focused. He also knew exactly where he wanted to go.
::Follow me,:: Jared said.
Jared and Martin had entered the station in the weapons wing of the station. Coreward lay navigation and biomedical research; in the center was a large zero-g lab. Jared led Martin coreward and then clockwise through the corridors, pausing occasionally to let Martin pry open deactivated emergency doors with a jack-like piston. Corridor lights, fed by the solar panels, glowed feebly but more than enough for Jared’s enhanced vision.
::Here,:: Jared said, eventually. ::This is where I did my work. This is my laboratory.::
The laboratory was filled with detritus and bullet holes. Whoever had come through was not interested in preserving the technical work of the lab; they had just wanted everyone dead. Blackened, dried blood was visible on tabletops and down the side of a desk. At least one person had been shot here, but there was no body.
Jerome Kos, Jared thought. That was the name of my assistant. He was originally from Guatemala but immigrated to the United States when he was a kid. He was the one to solve the buffer overflow—
::Crap,:: Jared said. The memory of Jerry Kos floated in his head, looking for context. Jared scanned the room, looking for computers or memory storage devices; there was nothing. ::Did your people take the computers from here?:: he asked Martin.
::Not from this room,:: Martin said. ::Some of the labs were missing computers and other equipment before we ever got a chance to swing through. The Obin or whoever must have taken them.::
Jared pushed himself over to a desk he knew was Boutin’s. Whatever had been on the top of the desk had long since floated away. Jared opened the desk drawers to find office supplies, hanger folders and other, not particularly useful things. As Jared was closing the drawer with the hanger folders, he saw the papers in one of them. He stopped and pulled one out; it was a drawing, signed by Zoë Boutin with more enthusiasm than precision.
She drew me one a week, in Wednesday art period, Jared remembered. I would take the new one and hang it with a pushpin, and take the old one and file it. I never threw any away. Jared glanced up at the corkboard above the desk; there were pushpins in it, but no picture. The last one was almost certainly floating somewhere in the room. Jared had to fight off the urge to look for it until he found it. Instead he pushed off from the desk toward the door, slipping out into the corridor before Martin could ask him where he was going. Martin raced to keep up.
The work corridors of Covell Station were clinical and sterile; the family quarters worked hard to be the opposite. Carpeting—albeit of the industrial sort—covered the floors. Children in art classes had been encouraged to paint the corridor walls, which featured suns and cats and hills with flowers in pictures that were not art unless you were a parent and could be nothing but if you were. The debris in the corridor and occasional dark smear against the wall worked against the cheer.
As a research head with a child, Boutin received larger quarters than most, which still meant it was almost unbearably compact; space is at a premium in space stations. Boutin’s apartment lay at the end of C corridor (C for cat—the walls were painted with anatomically divergent cats of all sorts), apartment 10. Jared pulled himself down the corridor
toward apartment 10. The door was closed but unlocked. Jared slid the door open and let himself in.
As everywhere, objects floated silently in the room. Jared recognized some things but not others. A book that was a gift from a college friend. Some picture in a frame. A pen. A rug he and Cheryl bought on their honeymoon.
Cheryl. His wife, dead from a fall while hiking. She died just before he left for this posting. Her funeral was on the second-to-last day before he came here. He remembered holding Zoë’s hand at the funeral, listening to Zoë ask why her mother had to leave and making him promise he would never leave her. He promised, of course.
Boutin’s bedroom was compact; Zoë’s, one room over, would have been uncomfortable for anyone who wasn’t five. The tiny child’s bed was shoved along one corner, so securely wedged there that it hadn’t floated away; even the mattress stayed stuck. Picture books, toys and stuffed animals hovered. One caught Jared’s eye, and he reached for it.
Babar the Elephant. Phoenix had been colonized before the Colonial Union stopped accepting colonists from wealthy countries; there was a large French population, from which Boutin was descended. Babar was a popular children’s character on Phoenix, along with Asterix, Tintin and the Silly Man, reminders of childhoods on a planet so distant from Phoenix that no one thought much about it. Zoë had never seen an elephant in real life—very few of them ever made it into space—but she had nonetheless been delighted with the Babar when Cheryl gave it to her on her fourth birthday. After Cheryl died Zoë made Babar a totem; she refused to go anywhere without it.
He remembered Zoë crying for it while he was dropping her off at Helene Greene’s apartment, as he prepared to travel to Phoenix for several weeks of late-stage testing work. He was already late for the shuttle; he had no time to get it. He finally settled her down by promising to find her a Celeste for her Babar. Placated, she gave him a kiss and went into Kay Greene’s room to play with her friend. He then promptly forgot about Babar and Celeste until the day he was scheduled to return to Omagh and Covell. He was thinking of some reasonable excuse to explain why he was coming home empty-handed when he was pulled aside and told that Omagh and Covell had been attacked, and that everyone on the base and on the colony was dead, and that his daughter, best beloved, died alone and frightened, and far away from anyone that ever loved her.