When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition) (11 page)

A real star, I remember thinking, looking out through the one little porthole my engineering space possessed, looking ever so much like pictures of manhome’s Sun, original giver of life.

Another conversation, far in the background, “I envy you having been there, seeing the real thing.”

Dûmnahn’s reply: “It’s not so different, really. Bigger, brighter, hotter, but then you see it from so much farther away.”

I suddenly realized Dûmnahn might actually have memories source-coded on the surface of Earth itself. That’d be... a wonderful thing. I wanted to ask, I really did, when I talked to him alone, when the two of us seemed like no more than... men together: How much of you began as a man? Just an idea, in the mind of a man?

I wish I had, but it seemed so rude.

And what if all he remembers of Earth is the inside of some construction node, deep in bowels of rock, occluded from the Sun? You don’t want to carry a friend back to bitter memories do you? Not when there are so many happy memories to...

o0o

Glow-Ice 9 was no more than a faraway twinkle in the sky when it began, a long streak of red here, then another one there. Two. Three. Ten. A hundred. Chatter of voices on the fleet’s secure DataTrack.

Tally-Ho.

Hard blue stars suddenly winking on all around us as the fleet’s battlecraft lit off their moduli in unison, drives so much more technically advanced than the cheap insystem fusion rockets that were all the colonists had to work with.

Where are the SOCO troopers? I remember wondering. They’ll have... real ships, real weapons, real...

Flash
.

Orange globe, momentarily blinding, then a dull, small sphere of pale fire fading, fading. Gone.

Flash
.
Flash
.
Flash
.

More pale, fading orange fire. People and machines turned so suddenly to vapor, souls gone Orb knows where. Reabsorbed by Uncreated Time.

There was a sudden rattle on the hull, Enemy fire? Violet’s quiet voice: No. I flew through a debris field. Harmless bits that used to be... something.

I checked my sensors anxiously, did my job, making sure everything was as it should be.

Hard flare of brilliant yellow light gouting in space not so far away, shockwave rocking our ship just a little bit, then more debris, like a cheap drum inches from my ears. Enemy fire? I looked in the DataTrack. Yes, a hit on one of the troop transports, a big SOCO ship bringing the soldiers of
IX
down to mix it up with their friends from
XXIII
.

No damage at all. Missile deflected. Exploded. Little dings and cracks on our hull healing themselves as bits of missile hardware ricocheted and were gone.

Hard voice from nowhere: “
Athena 7, flyer down
!
Sector 823-five-Alpha
.
Your baby
.”

The ship tipped hard under my back, inertial force tickling right through the shields as Violet sent us plunging through the battlesky, lights flaring and popping all around us now. My job. My job. Orb. I held on, adjusting this field, poking at that one, working my control systems, making the modulus do what Violet wanted. Sure. Sure. Easy as hell.

I could imagine her complimenting my work later.

Felt a sharp little sexual thrill.

And, outside my window, Glow-Ice 9 grew from faraway glitter to circular world, to a flat, red ice landscape, flying by below.

“
There
!
There
!” shouted Dûmnahn. “Got ‘im! Go down!
Down
!”

As the ship heeled over, stooping out of the sky, something went
wang
on the hull, groundfire, smallarms projectile, suggested the hull computer, then we were down, skimming behind a long, low ridge of pale, crystalline hills, coming up fast on a dull blue glow, hovering above some kind of mess from which long plumes of vapor jetted like so many frantic old ghosts.

Down
.

The ship fell, landing legs extended, rattled on the ground, and was still. Silence for a long, empty moment, then the world groaned softly in my ears as Dûmnahn opened the medbay ramp. There was a machine-gun rattle, the sound of his feet as he ran down the ramp and...

Go. Get up. Do your fucking job!

I unharnessed, slid out of my hole into the medevac bay, brilliant red light pouring in through the open door. There was Violet, meshed in her pilot’s nest, doing her own job and... yes, looking up briefly, seeing me as I ran out the hatch. I imagined warmth in her bright yellow eyes and...

Orb
.

Ice 9 was a crystalline mirror under a hard pink sky, ringed by hills and mountains of metal and glass. The most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, this fantastic Glow-Ice world. Dûmnahn was already beside the crashed and burning warship, not waiting for me, arms extended, extended right through a plume that must be burning his sensors terribly, cutting. Cutting.

Somewhere inside, I realized, grabbing the antifire gun from its socket on
Athena
’s hull, somewhere inside that tangled mess, there are living men, men like me, women like Violet. Broken, torn men and women, men and women praying for salvation, praying otherwise for immediate death, praying as they burned.

I clicked on the sensors, let the gun figure out what was actually burning, opened fire. Flames winked out, like that and that, the jetting plumes fell away, and Dûmnahn’s voice burbled in my ear, “Christ! Thanks! So fucking
hot
...”

Twin spears of brilliant blue fire suddenly jetted from the side of his carapace and described a quick square on one reasonably intact face of the warship’s hull. Metal and plastic fell away with a faint, tinny
clatterclang
to the red ice ground, sounds propagated through knife-thin alien air, barely transmitted through my skinshield.

And there they were.

Soft voice, a man’s voice, from somewhere in the tangled ruin, “Oh. Oh my God.” Soft liquid coughing. Then silence.

Dûmnahn sighed, “Well. Let’s see if we can get them out of here.”

I can’t remember the rest of it.

Sorry.

 o0o

A little while later, survivors and dead and all the bits and scraps of the warship’s crew we could find in our fragment of allotted time safe in Dûmnahn’s medevac lockers, I hung in my harness down in the engineering pod, worked my controls and watched my sensors and tried to think of nothing but the welfare of my machines as
Athena
scurried low over the landscape, heading for the battlefield.

Impossible not to think about... oh, not the horrible things I’d seen, so unexpectedly stark, so different from the homely little horrors of my father’s practice. Thought about the men and women stowed away above me. Some of them whole, merely asleep, awaiting repair. Others quite dead, awaiting hope of resurrection.

I remember suddenly picking up a hand, a little hand, as though from a child, turning it over and over, looking at long fingernails, painted powder blue. A woman’s hand. I remember a woman from the barracks we shared, a small, pretty, slim woman with small hands, a woman with long red hair and powder blue nails.

Dûmnahn’s voice: “Get aboard, Murph. We’re all done here.”

I gave him the hand without a word, got back down in my space, and
Athena
flew on.

Fire outside now.

Habitat 155, Iridium extraction facility, crew of 700, under assault by
SOCO IX
.

Brilliant blue fire; something like a pink mushroom cloud.

Crisp, terrible sound, Dûmnahn whispering, “Like lightning. Like being struck by lightning...” Then we were down, down and out on the surface, doing what we could, filling
Athena
’s lockers with the meat of the fallen, fallen and slain.

This one a SOCO soldier, ours or theirs no way to tell, sprawled dead in his armor, surrounded by a hard-frozen puddle of bodily fluids, red ice hardly distinguishable from the substance of the ground beneath him. Dead. Helmet and head nowhere to be found.

Dûmnahn: “Save him for parts, I guess. Maybe his head’ll turn up someplace else.”

Save him for parts? But Dûmnahn, this is a
man
...

No reply.

Just pick up the pieces.

Pick up the pieces and go.

Later, down inside the habitat among smashed furniture, melted walls, ruins blackened by fire, the command circuit opened and we heard Squadron Leader Chamônix: “We’re falling behind the timeline people, get a move on! Command directive: Pick up anything that looks like it might be part of a Standard employee. Pick up SOCO troops from either side. Leave the colonists.”

I was looking at a boy when I heard that, boy sprawled in one corner of a habitat room, holding something that might once have been a toy spaceship. How old? Nine? Ten? His eyes opened suddenly, little slits showing pale brown irises, eyes looking at me for just a second, then closing again.

Dûmnahn’s voice whispered in my ear: “We’ve got to go, Murph. Work to be done.”

Outside in the hallway lay a SOCO soldier in cracked armor who sighed when I appeared, sighed and said, “Millie Bolduc,
SOCO XXIII
, yielding parole. Glad to see you, medic...”

By the time I got her back to the ship, she was unconscious. I peeled her out of the ruined armor, a pretty girl with a hundred broken bones, arms and legs bending in places and ways so unexpected I kept recoiling from her touch. Laid her tenderly down in a meatlocker, took a good look before closing the hatch.

Pretty, pretty girl. Nice little pink-nippled breasts. Lovely blonde gate that looked like it’d last you all through a long, happy night. I closed the hatch and, when I looked around, Violet was watching me from her pilot’s nest.

She said, “You’re doing just fine, Murph. Just fine.”

Dûmnahn came back, bearing the last of them, closed the hatch behind himself, and then we flew away, taking our bloody cargo home.

o0o

Final interludes, the usual scenes of war.

Running toward RS67 with a cargo of dead souls, I lay with Violet in her pilot’s nest, bright stars swirling all around us as we flew, Dûmnahn below, quiet, working in his medevac hold. I know, down there, he is saving lives, but we’re up here, together among the stars, where no lives but our own seem to matter.

Violet has finished now with telling me tales of other battles, in other wars, is lying half on top of me, leaning out of her harness, holding my face between her hands, the way she always does, something she learned, I think, from an old DataTrack romance, struggling with the aberrant shapes of our faces, so we can learn how to kiss, like proper lovers.

It does work, too, I think, feeling the strange form of her face on mine, the line of her teeth where no woman’s teeth have ever fallen before.

They’re human teeth. This is not how I imagine kissing a fox might be.

There are real humans with faces this shape, dark black women from history tracks about New Guinea, about Ethiopia; women with that fabled hayrick head of hair, as different from my own as Violet’s silky fur.

Violet backed away from me with a girl’s sigh, looking at me, at my human face, with her lovely yellow eyes. What does
she
see? Something as alien as me?

No. Her world’s been full of humans, human men, since the day she was... No, I remind myself. Not born. Violet, like all optimods, was decanted.

Less human in that regard than Beebee and Mrs. Trinket’s kits.

Then why, I wonder, did they give her this?

My hand was between her legs, feeling wet fur, all too human female genital structures, rubbing that familiar swollen knob forward of the gate itself, up on the rounded prominence of her altar-bone.

Let my finger slip inside, feeling the albuminous ridges of a birth canal no baby would ever transit.

No way to ask why. No one to ask.

Maybe it never occurred to her engineers to leave these inessential parts off.

Violet purred in my face like a contented kitten, straddled my hips, lowered herself onto me, and, down below, I could hear Dûmnahn humming softly to himself as he went about his work.

o0o

One night, subsumed in the eternal night of RS67, a transport-load of SOCO mercenaries came in, freighter-like starship looming in our sky, black hulk glowing with fire here and there and it grew larger, then larger still, blue fire from her exhaust baffles, red fire in patches, places on her hull blasted by Glow-Ice weaponry. Soldiers of SOCO IX coming in for a spot of rest.

And, someone said, picking through our wards for survivors of defeated SOCO XXIII, looking to enroll them.

Good fight, lads. Come with us and we’ll do you one better.

Stalwart men, men my brothers, all that historical tommyrot.

Glorious tommyrot, they say.

So far,
I’d
seen only blood and death.

Blood and death in the service of rich men’s money.

The bars filled up with SOCO soldiers, big, muscular, tough-looking men and women. We got into fights with them, barroom brawls just like in all the old wartime dramas, until I felt like I’d fallen right into the datatracks, was living back in the days of World War Ten, when Earth was so badly damaged humanity was finally forced to reach for the worlds beyond the sky, reach out or die sitting home.

Found myself trying to defend Violet against poachers, silly when she could defend herself so well. Had an interesting few minutes watching Violet tear the living shit out of a lanky SOCO blonde who’d taken a shine to me.

“Interesting woman you’ve got there.”

I turned to face the voice, a beefy blond man with a lantern jaw and brilliant mulberry eyes, hair neatly combed, dressed in immaculate SOCO fatigues, corporal’s chevrons on his arm, six campaign badges on his breast.

He held out a big hand and said, “Meyer Sonn-Atem, IXth.” A nod over his shoulder. “My friend, Finn mac Eye.”

The other man... oh, nothing special, I... Well. Shorter, slimmer, much darker, mustache on upper lip, unkempt hair, uniform just a little bit shabby. Then he looked at me with eyes as empty as... I don’t know, just empty, and I felt a pang shoot through me.