Implied Spaces (28 page)

Every single soldier would rise a servant of Vindex.

The plan to assassinate Lin was dropped. Lin hardly mattered when every trained soldier in the multiverse would soon be able to impose the will of Vindex on all the worlds within the Sol system.

At last came the point in Aristide’s training in which he and his unit would be introduced to his brand-new combat suit. He’d had to back himself up in a pool of life first, “in case of a training accident,” an order that did not create confidence in the technology.

Still, the object was impressive. Standing upright in the base hangar, the suit looked like a silver metal Henry Moore gorilla, with a hole on the head where a sensory complex would soon be installed. The upper part of the suit was detachable, and the lower part was worn like a pair of oversized waders. The complex feeding and sanitary arrangements had yet to be installed, and the soldiers had yet to be modified to suit them—but today’s exercise was to be a get-acquainted stroll, not an endurance competition. A familiar AI voice—Aristide had installed Bitsy’s personality—helped Aristide slip into the webbing and adjust the biofeedback sensors, then seal the suit. The air in the suit smelled of plastic and lubricant.

While waiting for others in his unit to finish suiting up, Aristide performed communication checks and looked out at the world through the limited sensory array that had been patched in as a stopgap, until the more advanced sensor turret could be completed and installed.

“Perhaps,” Aristide said, “I’ll amuse the others by performing a sword form.”

“I suggest you start by moving your arms,” said Bitsy.

Aristide duly moved his arms. He flexed his fingers. A virtual target appeared in his display, and he pressed the bull’s-eye repeatedly with each finger.

Behind him somewhere he heard a fan switch on. He felt a breath of cool air against the small of his back.

“Right,” Bitsy said. “Try moving your head within the harness. Left-right, then up-down.”

“What’s that smell?” Aristide asked.

“I’ll check. Probably lubricant in the fan.”

Aristide moved his head as instructed. He felt only gentle resistance from the harness that was designed to protect him from concussion and from being thrown around inside the suit.

The movements left him slightly lightheaded. He took a deep breath.

“That smell is stronger,” he said.

“Fan lubricant,” Bitsy said.

Aristide’s head swam. He took another breath and a wave of narcosis seemed to pour through his skull.

“There’s something wrong,” he said.

“Can you be more specific?”

“I’m feeling ill,” Aristide said. “Open the suit.”

“Are you sure it’s not claustrophobia? Try to fight it—you don’t want to wash out after all this time.”

Aristide continued his exercises while his mind drifted slowly through a dark, warm sea. Only gradually did the idea of treachery penetrate his thoughts. He had been betrayed.

In sudden panic, he began to struggle to pull his arms out of the harness so that he could hammer at the seals on the inside of the suit and reach fresh air. But he could no longer feel his arms and so couldn’t tell whether he was succeeding or not.

“Open!” he gasped.

“Afraid not, Pops. Orders from headquarters.”

Aristide realized that he’d got one hand free when he managed to hit himself accidentally in the face. He pounded on the inside of the suit. He felt like he was punching a great block of foam.

Vindex
, he thought, in grief,
I have failed
.

15

He rose through the blood-warm liquid and opened his eyes. The light was dim and welcoming; the air was warm; in the shadowy light he saw three silhouettes.

He turned on one side and efficiently expelled fluid from his lungs. The fluid cooperated and flowed out in one long stream. He drew in a welcome breath. Alveoli crackled in his chest as they expanded with air.

His eyes adjusted. There was a technician in a baseball cap, an unknown man with pale skin, and he recognized the third.

“Commissar,” he said.

“Doctor.”

He passed a hand over his damp hair.

“Was it zombies?” he asked.

“Not exactly.”

Aristide looked down at the silvery fluid that was draining from his coffin-shaped pool of life. “How long have I lost?”

“About a week.”

Aristide blinked, then looked up at Lin in sudden wonder.

“I’ve been working for the other side.”

Lin nodded. “You and tens of thousands of other people. We found a piece of pipe on the sailboat with your blood on it, which indicated that someone had whacked you on the skull. And Daljit’s hyoid bone was broken, which suggested that you’d strangled her. Bitsy and I worked out what had happened by tracing your use of the AI just before you were killed, and the queries you made about Daljit’s colleagues.” He took a breath. “We’re correcting all that as quickly as we can.”

Bitsy jumped up on the edge of the pool, and crouched on her haunches. Her green eyes glittered.

“I had to put you to sleep for a while,” she said. “I hope you’ll manage to forgive me.”

There had been nearly two hundred people in Aristide’s training cadre of six hundred who had been clients of Vindex. All had been rendered unconscious in the same moment, hauled out of their combat suits by their surprised comrades, then restrained and debriefed under drugs.

The remaining cadets had been equipped with both lethal and non-lethal weapons and sent after the thousands of pod people who hadn’t joined the army. A few escaped, but most had been apprehended and likewise debriefed.

After the captives had told all they knew, they were quietly liquidated. No one had yet worked out how to undo the tampering that had been done with their brains, and so it was decided to reload them all from the last backup.

“How did they alter our incarnations to begin with?” Aristide asked.

“It was extremely subtle,” Bitsy said. “Certain changes in the programming were made by those with the authority to do so. Each alteration was checked, and found harmless. But taken
together
…”

“They created pod people.”

“So they did.”

Aristide looked at Bitsy.

“And you didn’t notice.”

Bitsy lifted her nose into the air. “I believe we have already had the discussion concerning my lack of omniscience, and the reasons for it.”

Aristide left the pool, rubbed himself with a towel, and dressed in his own clothing that Bitsy had arranged to deliver from his hotel room.

“Where is Daljit?” he asked.

Lin gave him a speculative look from his widely spaced eyes.

“In the next room,” he said.

The mole was back on the proper side of her face. It gave him confidence.

Aristide took her to the
Fathom Deep
. It had worked twice before.

She had not backed up her memories since before the assassination of Tumusok, and he felt an unfair burden of exposition.

It was a warm evening, and they sat by one another in the cockpit with the gusting wind rattling the halliards, the brilliant lightscape of the city behind them, and ahead the green light at the end of the pier. Bitsy went forward somewhere, out of earshot.

“Tumusok died,” he told her. “He was reincarnated from a backup, and briefed by Lin and Endora.”

He looked at her hopefully. She gazed at him in return. “And…?” she said, knowing there was more.

“You and I became lovers that night,” he said, “here on the
Fathom Deep
.”

He could have wished that there weren’t such a look of surprise on her face.

“I—” She searched for words. “I hadn’t anticipated that.”

“No? Because—speaking as one who was there—it seemed as much your idea as mine.”

“After all these years apart? It must have—” She left the thought unfinished. Her brown eyes gazed into his.

He realized that Daljit had not come to him, after her last resurrection, as one lover to another, but as an agent of Vindex to a useful recruit.

“We must have been rather successful,” she said, “or you wouldn’t be bringing it up.”

“We planned to meet again the next night. But you’d been infected by then, and you tried to kill me with a kitchen knife.”

“
I
was the zombie?” Her surprise was complete. “I assumed I’d been
killed
by a zombie.”

“You were killed by me,” Aristide said, “in self defense. I threw you off your balcony.”

For a moment her lips worked, but she said nothing.

“And you came back as a pod person,” Aristide went on, “because the agents of the enemy had corrupted the Life Institute software. After which you murdered me, here on the boat, though apparently I managed to kill you as well. And then we were both clients of Vindex for a while, until Lin and Endora worked out what had happened, and took steps to correct the matter.” He spread his hands.

“So here we are,” he said.

“I’m tempted to say that you’re making this up.”

“I wish I were. But if you have any doubts, you can check the latest news.”

Daljit turned away. Anger flushed her cheeks. “Sex and violence are the staples of the popular media,” she said. “Our story would make a properly tawdry romance.” Her voice shifted, mocked an announcer’s voice, and even threw an extra set of quotes into her tone. “‘Played against the backgrounds of the many worlds at war, the star-crossed lovers…’” Her tone faded. “Love-crossed zombies. Cross-starred frighteners. Star-fraught strivers. Fright-starred failures.”

She rose, took a pace toward the wheel. “I think it will take me some time to absorb this,” she said.

“I expect it will.”

Daljit turned to him. “May I use your car?”

“Yes.” He rose. “I hope you will let me know…” He could think only of hopeless ways to finish the sentence. “How you are,” he finished.

The city painted her face in many-colored light.

“I’ll try to keep in touch,” she said.

“I hope you will,” he said. “I’ve always found war a desperately lonely business.”

The city glittered in her eyes. “You lost your family,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I can’t imagine what that was like.”

“It’s best,” he said, perhaps too sharply, “that you don’t.”

There was silence. A flag snapped over the stern of a nearby motor yacht. Finally he gave an apologetic sigh.

“One last question,” he said, “and I’ll let you go.”

She looked at him without expression.

“Are you afraid of me?” he asked.

Her eyes widened.

“And if you
are
afraid,” Aristide continued, “are you afraid I’ll kill you, or kiss you?”

A muscle moved in her cheek. “It’s a fair question,” she said.

She turned and left the boat. He watched her retreat, and silently sent a message to the Destiny to take her where she wished to go.

He turned and made his way forward. With a hand on the foremast he viewed the bows, the green light at the end of the pier, the gust-galled sea.

“That didn’t go well, I take it,” said Bitsy. She was crouched like a sphinx on the foredeck, eyes shut.

“It didn’t.” Over the bowsprit was a platform from which harpoons could be hurled at large game fish, and Aristide stepped out onto it, the boat bobbing under his weight. There was a splash somewhere beneath him, and he jumped as a surprised pelican thrashed a few yards into open water, then folded its wings and made off at a less urgent pace.

“When I mourn our uncoupling,” he said, “even a bird makes me start.”

Bitsy was looking at him. Half-closed eyes glowed like tiny moons in the light of the pier’s lamp.

“I told you that you’d turn it into poetry,” she said.

“Not me,” he said. “Tu Fu.”

“Your translation, though.”

“Yes,” he said, and looked down at his empty cup. “That is mine, at least.”

Veditur

[a villanelle]

The forms of love will not suffice

The soul a scatter of dry bone

The sad fact is I killed her twice

The wind burns cold as polar ice

Past the worn and tumbled stone

The forms of love will not suffice

From death’s cold hand now fall the dice

The heart’s wild wager overthrown

The sad fact is I killed her twice

How desolate the final price

Our history all overgrown

The forms of love will not suffice

Our certainties, now imprecise

Our melody a grating tone

The sad fact is I killed her twice

The scent of flesh was sweet and spice

The sweetness caught and torn and flown

The forms of love will not suffice

The sad fact is I killed her twice.

16

The sun was hidden in a black cloud with a glowing core of eerie red. Missile flares and flashes dotted the darkness, blazing in complete silence. The great disk of Courtland, seen nearly edge-on, was alive with pinpricks of light.

Then the image of Courtland began to dance as Aristide’s transport made a frantic change of course.

Aristide’s bones were not rocked by the sudden change of course. He felt no jolting, no acceleration, no inertia, no sensation of motion whatever.

Aristide’s military transport was slightly less than two meters long. It was powered by antimatter, and capable of ferocious acceleration. It also contained a wormhole that led to a pocket universe, a rather small one, but one filled with half a million soldiers.

The invasion was under way. Aristide was on his way to drop onto the surface of the rebel Courtland.

The solar system was three months into the war, and during that time Vindex had more than held his own. His antiproton beams had chopped the Loyal Ten into ribbons until they’d launched their own antimatter weapons, whole armadas of them at once, and then Courtland began to receive damage as well.

Just at the moment when the United Powers began to get the upper hand in the exchange, Vindex launched his countermeasures. Satellites began to flood into space between Courtland and the Loyal Ten, satellites with antimatter-powered generators that produced potent magnetic fields. These bent the electron beams that carried the antiproton packets to their targets, and caused most to miss Courtland completely. If the fields from the satellites had been consistent, the United Powers could have compensated for the presence of the magnetic fields by aiming off-center and allowing the field to correct the beam to its proper target, but when they attempted this, they realized that the magnetic fields were programmed to shift randomly, and that it was impossible to compensate for them—but because Vindex knew which way the satellites were directing their magnetic fields at any instant, he was able to hit wherever he pleased. For nearly three weeks the rebel barrage ripped unhindered into loyalist targets, until the Powers could design, build, and launch their own satellite array.