Old Man's War Boxed Set 1 (18 page)

“He thinks we’re all inhuman monsters,” Alan said.

“Oh,
that,
” Lieutenant Keyes said, and turned to me. “How long have you been in, Perry?”

“Almost a year,” I said.

Lieutenant Keyes nodded. “You’re right on schedule, then, Perry. It takes about a year for most people to figure out they’ve turned into some soulless killing machine with no conscience or morals. Some sooner, some later. Jensen here”—he indicated one of the other squadron leaders—“got to about the fifteen-month point before he cracked. Tell him what you did, Jensen.”

“I took a shot at Keyes,” Ron Jensen said. “Seeing as he was the personification of the evil system that turned me into a killing machine.”

“Nearly took off my head, too,” Keyes said.

“It was a lucky shot,” Jensen allowed.

“Yeah, lucky that you missed. Otherwise I’d be dead and you’d be a brain floating in a tank, going insane from the lack of outside stimuli. Look, Perry, it happens to everyone. You’ll shake it off when you realize you’re not actually an inhuman monster, you’re just trying to wrap your brain around a totally fucked-up situation. For seventy-five years you lead the sort of life where the most exciting thing that happens is you get laid from time to time, and the next thing you know you’re trying to blast space octopi with an Empee before they kill you first. Christ. It’s the ones that don’t eventually lose it that I don’t trust.”

“Alan hasn’t lost it,” I said. “And he’s been in as long as I have.”

“That’s true,” Keyes said. “What’s your answer to that, Rosenthal?”

“I’m a seething cauldron of disconnected rage on the inside, Lieutenant.”

“Ah, repression,” Keyes said. “Excellent. Try to avoid taking a potshot at me when you finally blow, please.”

“I can’t promise anything, sir,” Alan said.

“You know what worked for me,” said Aimee Weber, another squad leader. “I made a list of the things that I missed about Earth. It was sort of depressing, but on the other hand, it reminded me that I wasn’t totally out of it. If you miss things, you’re still connected.”

“So what did you miss?” I asked.

“Shakespeare in the Park, for one,” she said. “My last night on Earth, I saw a production of
Macbeth
that was just perfection. God, that was great. And it’s not like we’re getting any good live theater around these here parts.”

“I miss my daughter’s chocolate chip cookies,” said Jensen.

“You can get chocolate chip cookies on the
Modesto,
” Keyes said. “Damn fine ones.”

“They’re not as good as my daughter’s. The secret is molasses.”

“That sounds disgusting,” Keyes said. “I hate molasses.”

“Good thing I didn’t know that when I shot at you,” Jensen said. “I wouldn’t have missed.”

“I miss swimming,” said Greg Ridley. “I used to swim in the river next to my property in Tennessee. Cold as hell most of the time, but I liked it that way.”

“Roller coasters,” said Keyes. “Big ones that made you feel like your intestines would drop out through your shoes.”

“Books,” said Alan. “A big fat hardcover on a Sunday morning.”

“Well, Perry?” Weber said. “Anything you’re missing right about now?”

I shrugged. “Only one thing,” I said.

“It can’t be any stupider than missing roller coasters,” Keyes said. “Out with it. That’s an order.”

“The only thing I really miss is being married,” I said. “I miss sitting around with my wife, just talking or reading together or whatever.”

This got utter silence. “That’s a new one on me,” Ridley said.

“Shit, I don’t miss that,” Jensen said. “The last twenty years of my marriage were nothing to write home about.”

I looked around. “Don’t any of you have spouses who joined up? Don’t you keep in touch with them?”

“My husband signed up before I did,” Weber said. “He was already dead by the time I got my first posting.”

“My wife is stationed on the
Boise,
” Keyes said. “She drops me a note occasionally. I don’t really get the feeling she’s missing me terribly. I guess thirty-eight years of me was enough.”

“People get out here and they don’t really want to be in their old lives anymore,” Jensen said. “Sure, we miss the little things—like Aimee says, that’s one of the ways you keep yourself from going nuts. But it’s like being taken back in time, to just before you made all the choices that gave you the life you had. If you could go back, why would you make the same choices? You already lived that life. My last comment aside, I don’t regret the choices I made. But I’m not in a rush to make those same choices again. My wife’s out here, sure. But she’s happy to live her new life without me. And, I must say, I’m not in a hurry to sign up on that tour of duty again, either.”

“This isn’t cheering me up, people,” I said.

“What is it about being married you miss?” Alan asked.

“Well, I miss my wife, you know,” I said. “But I also miss the feeling of, I don’t know, comfort. The sense you’re where you’re supposed to be, with someone you’re supposed to be with. I sure as hell don’t feel that out here. We go places that we have to fight for, with people who might be dead the next day or the day after that. No offense.”

“None taken,” Keyes said.

“There’s no stable ground out here,” I said. “There’s nothing out here I feel really safe about. My marriage had its ups and downs like anyone’s, but when it came down to it, I knew it was solid. I miss that sort of security, and that sort of connection with someone. Part of what makes us human is what we mean to other people, and what people mean to us. I miss meaning something to someone, having that part of being human. That’s what I miss about marriage.”

More silence. “Well, hell, Perry,” Ridley finally said. “When you put it that way, I miss being married, too.”

Jensen snorted. “I don’t. You keep missing being married, Perry. I’ll keep missing my daughter’s cookies.”

“Molasses,” Keyes said. “Disgusting.”

“Don’t start that again, sir,” Jensen said. “I may have to go get my Empee.”

Susan’s death was very nearly the flip side of Thomas’. A drillers’ strike on Elysium had severely reduced the amount of petroleum being refined. The
Tucson
was assigned to transport scab drillers and protect them while they got several of the shut-down drilling platforms back online. Susan was on one of the platforms when the striking drillers attacked with improvised artillery; the explosion knocked Susan and two other soldiers off the platform and down several dozen meters to the sea. The other two soldiers were already dead when they hit the water but Susan, severely burned and barely conscious, was still alive.

Susan was fished out of the sea by the striking drillers who had launched the attack; they decided to make an example of her. The Elysium seas feature a large scavenger called a gaper, whose hinged jaw is easily capable of taking up a person in a single swallow. Gapers frequent the drilling platforms because they feed off the trash the platforms shed into the sea. The drillers propped Susan up, slapped her into consciousness, and then reeled off a hurried manifesto in her general direction, relying on her BrainPal connection to carry their words to the CDF. They then found Susan guilty of collaborating with the enemy, sentenced her to death, and pushed her back into the sea directly below the platform’s trash chute.

A gaper was not long in coming; one swallow and Susan was in. At this point Susan was still alive and struggling to exit the gaper from the same orifice from which she entered. Before she could manage this, however, one of the striking drillers shot the gaper directly below the dorsal fin, where the animal’s brain was located. The gaper was killed instantly and sank, taking Susan with it. Susan was killed, not from being eaten and not even from drowning, but from the pressure of the water as she and the fish that had swallowed her sank into the abyss.

Any celebration by the striking drillers over this blow to the oppressor was short-lived. Fresh forces from the
Tucson
swept through the drillers’ camps, rounded up several dozen ringleaders, shot them and fed them all to the gapers. Except for the ones who killed Susan, who were fed to gapers without the intermediary step of being shot first. The strike ended shortly thereafter.

Susan’s death was clarifying to me, a reminder that humans can be as inhuman as any alien species. If I had been on the
Tucson,
I could see myself feeding one of the bastards who killed Susan to the gapers, and not feeling in the least bit bad about it. I don’t know if this made me better or worse than what I had feared I was becoming when we battled the Covandu. But I no longer worried about it making me any less human than I was before.

Those of us who were at the Battle for Coral remember where we were when we first heard the planet had been taken. I was listening to Alan explain how the universe I thought I knew was long gone.

“We left it the first time we skipped,” he said. “Just went up and out into the universe next door. That’s how skipping works.”

This got a nice, long mute reaction from me and Ed McGuire, who were sitting with Alan in the battalion’s “At Ease” lounge. Finally Ed, who had taken over Aimee Weber’s squad, piped up. “I’m not following you, Alan. I thought that the skip drive just took us up past the speed of light or something like that. That’s how it works.”

“Nope,” Alan said. “Einstein’s still right—the speed of light is as fast as you can go. Besides which, you wouldn’t want to start flying around the universe at any real fraction of the speed of light, anyway. You hit even a little chunk of dirt while you’re going a couple hundred thousand klicks a second and you’re going to put a pretty good hole in your spaceship. It’s just a speedy way to get killed.”

Ed blinked and then swept his hand over his head. “Whoosh,” he said. “You lost me.”

“All right, look,” Alan said. “You asked me how the skip drive works. And like I said, it’s simple: It takes an object from one universe, like the
Modesto,
and pops it into another universe. The problem is that we refer to it as a ‘drive.’ It’s not really a drive at all, because acceleration is not a factor; the only factor is location within the multiverse.”

“Alan,” I said. “You’re doing another flyby.”

“Sorry,” Alan said, and looked thoughtful for a second. “How much math do you guys have?” he asked.

“I vaguely recall calculus,” I said. Ed McGuire nodded in agreement.

“Oy,” Alan said. “Fine. I’m going to use small words here. Please don’t be offended.”

“We’ll try not to,” Ed said.

“Okay. First off, the universe you’re in—the universe we’re in right at this moment—is only one of an infinite number of possible universes whose existence is allowed for within quantum physics. Every time we spot an electron in a particular position, for example, our universe is functionally defined by that electron’s position, while in the alternate universe, that electron’s position is entirely different. You following me?”

“Not at all,” said Ed.

“You nonscientists. Well, just trust me on it, then. The point is: multiple universes. The multiverse. What the skip drive does is open a door to another one of those universes.”

“How does it do that?” I asked.

“You don’t have the math for me to explain it to you,” Alan said.

“So it’s magic,” I said.

“From your point of view, yes,” Alan said. “But it’s well allowed in physics.”

“I don’t get it,” Ed said. “We’ve been through multiple universes then, yet every universe we’ve been in has been exactly like ours. Every ‘alternate universe’ I ever read about in science fiction has major differences. That’s how you know you’re in an alternate universe.”

“There’s actually an interesting answer to that question,” Alan said. “Let us take as a given that moving an object from one universe to another is a fundamentally unlikely event.”

“I can accept that,” I said.

“In terms of physics, this is allowable, since at its most basic level, this is a quantum physics universe and pretty much anything
can
happen, even if as a practical matter it doesn’t. However, all other things being equal, each universe prefers to keep unlikely events to a bare minimum, especially above the subatomic level.”

“How does a universe ‘prefer’ anything?” Ed asked.

“You don’t have the math,” Alan said.

“Of course not,” Ed said, rolling his eyes.

“But the universe does prefer some things over others. It prefers to move toward a state of entropy, for example. It prefers to have the speed of light as a constant. You can modify or mess with these things to some extent, but they take work. Same thing here. In this case, moving an object from one universe to another is so unlikely that typically the universe to which you move the object is otherwise exactly like the one you left—a conservation of unlikeliness, you might say.”

“But how do you explain us moving from one place to another?” I asked. “How do we get from one point in space in one universe, to an entirely different point in space in another?”

“Well, think about it,” Alan said. “Moving an entire ship into another universe is the incredibly unlikely part. From the universe’s point of view,
where
in that new universe it appears is really very trivial. That’s why I said that the word ‘drive’ is a misnomer. We don’t really
go
anywhere. We simply
arrive
.”

“And what happens in the universe that you just left?” asked Ed.

“Another version of the
Modesto
from another universe pops right in, with alternate versions of us in it,” Alan said. “Probably. There’s an infinitesimally small chance against it, but as a general rule, that’s what happens.”

“So do we ever get to go back?” I asked.

“Back where?” Alan said.

“Back to the universes where we started from,” I said.

“No,” Alan said. “Well, again, it’s theoretically possible you
could,
but it’s extremely unlikely. Universes are continually being created from branching possibilities, and the universes we go to are generally created almost instantly before we skip into them—it’s one of the reasons why we
can
skip to them, because they are so very close to our own in composition. The longer in time you’re separated from a particular universe, the more time it has to become divergent, and the less likely you are to go back to it. Even going back to a universe you left a second before is phenomenally unlikely. Going back to the one we left over a year ago, when we first skipped to Phoenix from Earth, is really out of the question.”

“I’m depressed,” Ed said. “I liked my universe.”

“Well, get this, Ed,” Alan said. “You don’t even come from the same original universe as John and I, since you didn’t make that first skip when we did. What’s more, even the people who
did
make that same first skip with us aren’t in the same universe as us now, since they’ve since skipped into different universes because they’re on different ships—any versions of our old friends that we meet up with will be alternate versions. Of course, they will look and act the same, because except for the occasional electron placement here and there, they
are
the same. But our originating universes are completely different.”

“So you and I are all that’s left of our universe,” I said.

“It’s a pretty good bet that universe continues to exist,” Alan said. “But we are almost certainly the only two people from it in
this
universe.”

“I don’t know what to think about that,” I said.

“Try not to let it worry you too much,” Alan said. “From a day-to-day point of view, all this universe hopping doesn’t matter. Functionally speaking, everything is pretty much the same no matter what universe you’re in.”

“So why do we need starships at all?” Ed asked.

“Quite obviously, to get where you’re going once you’re in your new universe,” Alan said.

“No, no,” Ed said. “I mean, if you can just pop from one universe to another, why not just do it planet to planet, instead of using spaceships at all? Just skip people directly to a planet surface. It’d save us from getting shot up in space, that’s for sure.”

“The universe prefers to have skipping done away from large gravity wells, like planets and stars,” Alan said. “Particularly when skipping to another universe. You can skip very close
to
a gravity well, which is why we enter new universes near our destinations, but skipping out is much easier the farther away you are from one, which is why we always travel a bit before we skip. There’s actually an exponential relationship that I could show you, but—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, I don’t have the math,” Ed said.

Alan was about to provide a placating response when all of our BrainPals flicked on. The
Modesto
had just received news of the Coral Massacre. And in whatever universe you were in, it was horrifying stuff.

Coral was the fifth planet humans settled, and the first one that was indisputably better acclimated for humans than even Earth itself. It was geologically stable, with weather systems that spread a temperate growing zone across most of its generous landmasses, and laden with native plant and animal species genetically similar enough to Earth’s that they fulfilled human nutritional and esthetic needs. Early on, there was talk of naming the colony Eden, but it was suggested that such a name was karmically tantamount to asking for trouble.

Coral was chosen instead, for the corallike creatures that created gloriously diverse island archipelagos and undersea reefs around the planet’s equatorial tropical zone. Human expansion on Coral was uncharacteristically kept to a minimum, and those humans who did live there largely chose to live in a simple, almost pre-industrial way. It was one of the few places in the universe where humans attempted to adapt to the existing ecosystem rather than plow it over and introduce, say, corn and cattle. And it worked; the human presence, small and accommodating, dovetailed into Coral’s biosphere and thrived in a modest and controlled way.

It was therefore entirely unprepared for the arrival of the Rraey invasion force, which carried in its numbers a one-to-one ratio of soldiers to colonists. The garrison of CDF troops stationed above and on Coral put up a brief but valiant fight before being overwhelmed; the colonists likewise made the Rraey pay for their attack. In short order, however, the colony was laid waste and the surviving colonists literally butchered, as the Rraey had long ago developed a taste for human meat when they could get it.

One of the snippets broadcast to us via BrainPal was a segment of an intercepted food program, in which one of the Rraey’s most famous celebrity chefs discussed the best way to carve up a human for multiple food uses, neck bones being particularly prized for soups and consommés. In addition to sickening us, the video was anecdotal proof that the Coral Massacre was planned in enough detail that they brought along even second-rate Rraey celebrities to take part in the festivities. Clearly, the Rraey were planning to stay.

The Rraey wasted no time toward their primary goal for the invasion. After all the colonists had been killed, the Rraey transported down platforms to begin strip-mining Coral’s islands. The Rraey had previously tried to negotiate with the Colonial government to mine the islands; corallike reefs had been extensive on the Rraey homeworld until a combination of industrial pollution and commercial mining had destroyed them. The Colonial government refused permission for mining, both because of Coral’s colonists’ wishes to keep the planet whole, and because the Rraey’s anthropophagous tendencies were well known. No one wanted the Rraey overflying the colonies, looking for unsuspecting humans to turn into jerky.

The Colonial government’s failing was in not recognizing what a priority the Rraey had made coral mining—beyond its commerce, there was a religious aspect involved that Colonial diplomats grossly misinterpreted—or the lengths that the Rraey were willing to go to undertake the operation. The Rraey and the Colonial government had mixed it up a few times; relations were never good (how comfortable can you really be with a race that sees you as a nutritious part of a complete breakfast). By and large, however, they kept to their knitting and we to ours. It was only now, as the last of the Rraey’s native coral reefs choked toward extinction, that the extent of their desire for Coral’s resources came to slug us in the face. Coral was theirs, and we’d have to hit them harder than they had hit us to get it back.

“It’s pretty fucking grim,” Lieutenant Keyes was telling the squad leaders, “and it’s going to be grimmer by the time we get there.”

We were in the platoon ready room, cups of coffee growing cold as we accessed page upon page of atrocity reports and surveillance information from the Coral system. What skip drones weren’t blasted from the sky by the Rraey reported back a continuing stream of inbound Rraey ships, both for battle and for hauling coral. In less than two days after the Coral Massacre, almost a thousand Rraey ships hovered in the space above the planet, waiting to begin their predation in earnest.

“Here’s what we know,” Keyes said, and popped up a graphic of the Coral system in our BrainPals. “We estimate that the largest portion of Rraey ship activity in the Coral system is commercial and industrial; from what we know of their ship design, about a quarter of the ships, three hundred or so, have military-grade offensive and defensive capabilities, and many of those are troop transports, with minimal shielding and firepower. But the ones that are battleship class are both larger and tougher than our equivalent ships. We also estimate up to one hundred thousand Rraey forces on the surface, and they’ve begun to entrench for invasion.

“They’re expecting us to fight for Coral, but our best intelligence suggests they expect us to launch an attack in four to six days—the amount of time it will take us to maneuver enough of our big ships into skip position. They know CDF prefers to make overwhelming displays of force, and that is going to take us some time.”

“So when are we going to attack?” Alan asked.

“About eleven hours from now,” Keyes said. We all shifted uncomfortably in our chairs.

“How can that work, sir?” Ron Jensen asked. “The only ships we’ll have available are those that are already at skip distance, or those that will be in the next few hours. How many of those can there be?”

“Sixty-two, counting the
Modesto,
” Keyes said, and our BrainPals downloaded the list of available ships. I briefly noted the presence of the
Hampton Roads
in the list; that was the ship to which Harry and Jesse were posted. “Six more ships are increasing speed to reach skip distance, but we can’t count on them to be there when we strike.”