The Ghost Brigades (21 page)

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.

“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.::