Space Eater (12 page)

Rossa started to talk then, low and all on one note. “Did you ever read the ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol,’

Ken? No? No? I suppose you wouldn’t have. That’s about an execution, a little too prettified to be true;

‘_we waited for the stroke of eight, each tongue was thick with thirst_.’ I
am
thirsty but it’s only 1450, isn’t it? I thought of it because there’s a line or two in it for you, Ken, for us...

’
For he who lives more lives than one,

More deaths than one must die.’

I found when I tried to say something back to her that my tongue was stuck in my mouth, dried up like an old rag that had glued itself to the washhouse floor. So I was thirsty too. And I
still
wanted a piss. And Rossa’s mouth quivered until I was afraid she was going to stand there laughing herself out of control.

She did come out with a kind of strangled giggle before catching hold again...

All of which rather spoiled Wui’s gag as he moved into view, longish hair and stiff beard black against that hard white circle of light, and raised his voice above the humming to call out: “The doctor will see you now—“

Ten

There were arc lights blazing down on the chilly steel table where they’d made me lie. It had wobbled on its wheels as I got up there, which wasn’t encouraging, and I was hardly cheered up a lot when I noticed the drainage channels on all four sides of the working surface. Waste not, want not. Everything was blurred by the lights; it was easiest to stare straight up between them and not try to think, but out of the corners of my eyes I could see Ngabe and his medic/6 checking out a trolley of instruments that clinked, including a couple of big, nasty saws, and Wui doing things at one shoddy rack of equipment after another. The double doors to the storage complex beyond the lab were standing open; they’d taken Rossa away down there, maybe so she wouldn’t have to watch me being processed, maybe because they thought a woman shouldn’t peep at naked me. (Of course, there was Ellan—I could hear an irregular beep-beep as she punched things into a video terminal—but somehow I reckoned Ellan saw human bodies as chunks of 3D geometry ...)

The lights threw everything out of perspective as I lay there with the steel sucking every last drop of heat away where I touched it. For the duration I was just about colorblind, everything blinding white or blacker than black with vague gray shadows in between. The glinting highlights made the machinery I could see look sinister; even the familiar grab-arm of the crane looked insect-jointed and alien. That must be the “piston” in place over the MT rig over to my left. And I was still learning that going out on the training ground to meet the big D, adrenalin squirting from the glands like a geyser, was not the same as lying with hot lights above and cold metal underneath, waiting for it to come to you. I wasn’t even sure of my own sense of time, one thou-sand two thou-sand three thou-sand ... how many goddamn everlasting thousands did it take to reach 1500? Around and around in the head. Bright. Cold. A draft from a fan somewhere. Beepbeepbeep, whirr, confusion of footsteps, a low hum of power, Wui muttering to himself, worst of all the tiny chink-chink of metal things being rearranged on top of a surgeon’s instrument trolley. One point nine centimeters. One point nine centimeters.

One of the arcs went into eclipse as Ngabe came looming, dark eyes showing between his surgeon’s cap and mask.

“I want you to relax completely, Ken,” he said in a deeper voice than I’d heard from him before. “It’s nearly time. Close your eyes. Try to go limp, utterly limp, try to become relaxed and sleepy...”

I went as limp as I could, and discovered that being all tensed up had at least held a few areas of my skin from that damned freezing tabletop. Eyes shut. Fine. A drop of sweat tickled me as it oozed through hairs in my left armpit. Where was the anesthetic, then? Ngabe went on slowly, quietly, soothingly; I didn’t need any eyes to feel he was leaning further over, as if maybe he wanted to climb right on top of me. A tiny pricking high up on my chest, perhaps the touch of a monitor electrode, or the pen that was going to mark the incision paths, or—

An icicle slammed clear through my chest, and I screamed.

Once upon a time I had fallen onto that bloody great spike in the pit. The spike was nothing to this. I could feel my heart as it ripped across—eyes open to the dazzle—hand going up without my needing to tell it to, going up to take Ngabe by the throat, then losing all its strength before I could get a good grip.

Quick photoflash sight of flat steel handle sticking from between my ribs, thick red tide spilling out and over; then
thud
somewhere at the back of my head as it pivoted down to the table and hit. I could feel body systems shutting down, arc-lights going gray, and at my side a steady dripping that tickled like the drop of sweat crawling in my armpit, like a runny nose. Vision grayed out, but that solid column of pain held me fixed to the steel table, limp like so many kilos of cold meat. Sounds came echoing down a long tunnel to me, first a strangled sort of cough and then Ngabe muffled by his mask—

“Interesting, highly interesting. I am most
impressed
by Force reflexes. My throat is quite bruised; another second or so and he might seriously have damaged me!”

Wui: “For Christ’s sake, did you have to do it like that? I can just about swallow the doubletalk on skipping additional drugs to get lab conditions for the tank—but I imagined you opening a vein, not making like bloody Jack the Ripper.”

Ngabe: “Keep back, please. Keep back from the sterile area and have the transfer containers ready.

This was the quickest termination I could reasonably devise, you must understand. Now...” (Coldness pressed against me here and here and there; but everything was cold cold cold ...) “Yes. I pronounce Forceman Jacklin clinically dead. We proceed.”

Not yet
, I wanted to shout.
I’m not dead yet
. I couldn’t. Dark and cold. Even my thoughts were seizing up and thinking was like pushing through stiff jelly. I’d never known. I’d never known before, the moment when I died. I felt the knife grate on bone as it pulled free: that was bad. Hearing faded as Ngabe was asking for the number-six heavy scalpel. Poor Rossa. Her turn next. Thank God they didn’t process her first, her and her broadcast. In cold and silence and dark I could feel the first slashing incisions,
zip, zip
. Pain signals don’t make much sense when they’re the whole universe and seven-eighths of your brain is trying to make dead lips open and scream, but I think they were still scientifically gutting me when everything shriveled to a white-hot core of pain somewhere in my belly, and then went out.

Part Two

Death and the Raven

The circles of the stormy moon

Slide westward toward the River Plate,

Death and the Raven drift above

And Sweeney guards the horned gate.

T.S. Eliot,
Sweeney Among the Nightingales

Eleven

...low over the choppy water that showed like a puckered gray sheet in the screen, red bar of the altimeter reading to one side, blips that were other missiles cruising over in this same wave, far off to the left and right. I’ve seen the ground-level viewpoint on the simulations too, of course, swarms of little bullet-shaped cruisers with their tiny, silly wings coming over the horizon at hedge-height like a cloud of flies. You stand ready to swivel the laser cannon’s mirror whichever way the first one comes, or pump the brainless interceptors into the air aiming just the right distance ahead of the bright ramjet trail. I was in one of those bullets now, and the first thing you must do is scatter, weave, evade—if they
do
strike lucky and trigger your nuke the chances are it’s a fratricide incident, radiation shock from your fireball swatting away your mates to right and left, above and below. The neutron shower is bad medicine too, heating the plutonium cores until they’re useless lumps that can spread contamination but never make a proper fireball of their own ... Shoreline ahead, below, cliffs almost too close for comfort with a sudden updraft as you cross the edge, green fields—

The laser cannon were popping off now, vertical lightning bolts with jagged ionization paths twisting brightly for milliseconds after the flash. I kept on dodging, lying there at full length, feet working the attitude flaps, hands on thrust and soar sticks (each capped with
the
red button, and there’s a backup prox-fuse in the nosecap), staring straight down into the tilted mirrors that let your eyes focus on screen and meters without strain. Landscape was streaming past underneath like blowing cloud: brown fields now, scraggy bushland, desert sand and rock, lasers striking up from invisible holes, thicker to the south.

I felt terrible.

A near-miss whited out the screen with its ionization for maybe a second, a long time in this sort of war; it cleared in streaks; could have been luck, could have been my dodging wasn’t random enough. A computer a good sight smaller than Central’s would have sorted out my evasion pattern in nothing flat and tossed a laser spear to plus or minus half a millimeter into heart, brain, left testicle, you name it; but this whole wave carried jammers and micro-electronics was interdicted throughout the strike. Jammers are an AP thing; they screw up communication and quantum effects both together; I felt it like white noise behind the eyes. If I could have scratched there—but anyway there’s no room to move in a cruiser, the lining’s custom-built, warm and close, just the screen and red emergency lights burning in the cozy dark.

An interceptor, heat-seeking probably, got on my tail and I dropped dangerously low to scrape it off against a high dune—these things follow your hot exhaust clear into the ground if you can lay the trail low enough, no room for subtle logic in them—WHAM and the concussion hit me from behind and to one side—

That was how the game was played. A microcomp would have played it better than me in the cruiser. A microcomp would have tracked me better in the interceptor, in the laser foxholes, and not only knocked me out easy as swatting a fly but made damn sure it scored maximum bonus on the fratricide scale as well. But jammers were running full time on both sides now; the big machines were down for the duration of the attack; we both had to play with the next best thing, soggy thoughts crawling about the heads of your actual human beings ... And why did I feel so terrible?

The few scraps of circuitry in a cruiser use little acorn-sized valves; they keep tinkering with other substitutes for micrologic, like Babbage clockwork or that twentieth-century dead-end called fluidics.

The old ways are the best ways, our instructor used to say with a smile on just one side of his face.

Old-fashioned cigar hull looking so like that century’s cruise missiles you couldn’t tell the difference without a measuring scale to show you how ours are longer and fatter to squeeze in the old-fashioned control system: me. Even the rusty old micronuke a little way up the axis from my head, a subcritical mass waiting to be supercompressed when I hit the red button ... or was it? was it? We’ve never spilled the cruiser swarm south over the Libyan deserts in realtime yet. It’s enough Africa knows we could. No need to rock the boat. I’ve been on these missile runs from both ends, time and again in the simulator, dodge and weave low in the air, follow the contours of the dunes to the cities and military bases way down south ... every time a simulation in another of the training grounds, every time doped a little to keep you off-balance so you take it as reality. We all knew that if ever the time came it’d be the same procedure, into the capsule, click click click as you’re slotted into your cruiser: maybe one day you find yourself in that swarm coming over someone’s horizon and you’ll never be quite sure until the final whiteout at ground zero. And, of course, I supposed, perhaps not even then.

My head hurt. Maybe it was the jammer twanging at the atomic energy levels, flipping e/m photons end-for-end and stirring my forebrain like an unscratchable tickle, deep down in the sinuses. I ached all over, in fact, more than you’d ever expect from the cramp in this journey time. A sick feeling...

But there’s no time to think whether it’s real or another run on the training ground. Hugely complicated patterns of interceptors were crisscrossing in the sky ahead, and the laser barrage was like a thunderstorm under the clear sky. I didn’t watch all this in perfect focus, you understand; the tiny screen glowed with blue sky and yellow-brown desert below, fuzzed more than usual by the jammer, bright streaks or fast-moving blips where lasers and interceptors were clawing after me. Down lower still where lasers couldn’t track and windblown sand rasped at my belly—concussions again from behind as some of the following wave was clobbered—and through, again, as I’d done in the simulations before, through the continent-wide Tibesti Line with interceptors stalling and looping the loop as they tried to shake off their launch velocity and dive back on me. A patter of fused sand on my ablative hull: one had come down quite near me there. This low-approach trick was a winner and bloody difficult to bring off; and one day the Tibesti Line might be improved with endless picket-fences of high steel poles to discourage the maneuver. (A dull and deep-down pain all over, all through. Don’t tell me they’ve come up with a new secret weapon, the fearsome pain ray, something like that.) Time to choose targets. No diving interceptors now, not in the populated zones where the lion-colored desert had switched to bright patchy green; low over the cities it’ll be interceptor planes instead of missiles, and more laser cannon in the Places Which Must Be Defended. Roads unreeling under me; new white city with patches that were greener still, even blue pools of water (I was really low, oh, that everlasting ache): imagine roaring low down the main street buzzing coaches and bicycles—not likely, with those powerlines dangling from pole to pole, unguarded powerlines! rich sods ... No,
there
, there it was, flat painted design like a kiddy toy over the rim of the city: airport. Planes still scrambling, silver blips peeling themselves off the runways: it couldn’t be anything but a military airport. Hit that or go for the industrial zones about 20 km further in? Aching decision; everything dull and dreamy; it was a game I was playing because I was bored so much it hurt and there was nothing else in the world that I could do.