Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 90 Page 2

  Laporte:

  Just got word of your transfer. You may remember me from the Nauticus incident. I’m de facto squadron leader aboard Yangtze. Lorna Simms and I go way back.

  Admiral Netreba is about to select ships for a big joint operation against the Alliance. Two months ago the Indus would have been top of the list, and Simms with it. But they’ve been on the front too long, and the scars are starting to show.

  I hear reports of a 200% casualty rate. Simms and Ehud Levi are the only survivors of the original squadron. I hear that Simms doesn’t give new pilots callsigns, that she won’t let the deck crew paint names on their ships. If she’s going to lose her people, she’d rather not allow them to be people.

  It’s killing morale. Simms won’t open up to her replacements until they stop dying, and they won’t stop dying until she opens up.

  I want the Indus with us when we make our move, but Netreba won’t pick a sick ship. See if you can get through to Simms.

  Regards,

  Karen Ng

  Laporte takes this shit seriously. When Simms takes her out for a training sortie, a jaunt around the Martian sensor perimeter, she’s got notes slipped into the plastic map pockets on her flightsuit thighs, gleaned from gossip and snippy FLEETNET posts: responds well to confidence and plain talk, rejects overt empathy, accepts professional criticism but will enforce a semblance of military discipline. No pictures, though.

  She knows she’s overthinking it, but fuck, man, it’s hard not to be nervous. Simms is her new boss, her wartime idol, the woman who might get her killed. Simms is supposed to teach her how to live with—with all this crazy shit. And now it turns out she’s broken too? Is there anyone out here who hasn’t cracked?

  Maybe a little of that disappointment gets into Laporte’s voice. Afterwards, because of the thing that happens next, she can’t remember exactly how she broached it—professional inquiry, officer to superior? Flirtatious breach of discipline? Oafishly direct? But she remembers it going bad, remembers Simms curling around from bemusement to disappointment, probably thinking: great, Solaris is shipping me its discipline cases so I can get them killed.

  Then the Alliance jumps them. Four Nyx, a wolfpack out hunting stragglers. Bone-white metal cast in shark shapes. Shadows on the light of their own fusion stars.

  Simms, her voice a cutting edge, a wing unpinioned, shedding all the weight of death she carries: “Morrigan, Lead, knock it off, knock it off, I see jump flash, bandits two by two.” And then, realizing as Laporte does that they’re not getting clear, that help’s going to be too long coming: “On my lead, Morrigan, we’re going in. Get your fangs out.”

  And Laporte puts it all away. Seals it up, like she’s never been able to before. Just her and the thirty-ton Kentauroi beneath her and the woman on her wing.

  They hit the merge in a snarl of missile and countermeasure and everything after that blurs in memory, just spills together in a whirl of acceleration daze and coilgun fire until it’s pointless to recall, and what would it mean, anyway? You don’t remember love as a series of acts. You just know: I love her. So it is here. They fought, and it was good. (And damn, yes, she loves Simms, that much has been apparent for a while, but it’s maybe not the kind of love that anyone does anything about, maybe not the kind it’s wise to voice or touch.) She remembers a few calls back and forth, grunted out through the pressure of acceleration. All brevity code, though, and what does that mean outside the moment?

  Two gunships off Yangtze arrive to save them and the Alliance fighters bug out, down a ship. Laporte comes back to the surface, shaking off the narcosis of the combat trance, and finds herself talking to Simms, Simms talking back.

  Simms is laughing. “That was good,” she says. “That was good, Morrigan. Damn!”

  Indus comes off the line less than twelve hours later, yielding her patrol slot to another frigate. Captain Simms takes the chance to drill her new pilots to exhaustion and they begin to loathe her so profoundly they’d all eat a knife just to hear one word of her approval. Admiral Netreba, impressed by Indus’ quick recovery, taps the frigate for his special task force.

  Laporte knows her intervention made a difference. Knows Simms felt the same exhilaration, flying side by side, and maybe she thought: I’ve got to keep this woman alive.

  Simms just needed to believe she could save someone.

  Alliance forces in the Sol theater fall under the command of Admiral Steele, a man with Kinshasa haute-couture looks and winter-still eyes. Sometimes he gives interviews, and sometimes they leak across the divide.

  “Overwhelming violence,” he answers, asked about his methods. “The strategic application of shock. They’re gentle people, humane, compassionate. Force them into violent retaliation, and they’ll break. The Ubuntu philosophy that shapes their society cannot endure open war.”

  “Some of your critics accuse you of atrocity,” the interviewer says. “Indiscriminate strategic bombing. Targeted killings against members of the civilian government in Sol.”

  Steele puts his hands together, palm to palm, fingers laced, and Laporte would absolutely bet a bottle cap that the sorrow on his face is genuine. “The faster I end the war,” he says, “the faster we can stop the killing. My conscience asks me to use every tool available.”

  “So you believe this is a war worth winning? That the Security Council is right to pursue a military solution to this crisis?”

  Steele’s face gives nothing any human being could read, but Laporte, she senses determination. “That’s not my call to make,” he says.

  This happens after the intervention, after Simms teaches Laporte to be a monster (or lets her realize she already was), after they manage the biggest coup of the war—the capture of the Agincourt. Before they fall into the sun, though.

  They take some leave time, Simms and Laporte and the rest of the Indus pilots, and the Yangtze’s air wing too. Karen Ng has a cabin in Tharsis National Park, on the edge of Mars’ terraformed valleys. Olympus Mons fills the horizon like the lip of a battered pugilist, six-kilometer peak scraping the edge of atmosphere. Like a bridge between where they are and where they fight.

  Barbeque on the shore of Marineris Reservoir. The lake is meltwater from impacted comets, crystalline and still, and Levi won’t swim in it because he swears up and down it’s full of cyanide. They’re out of uniform and Laporte should really not take that as an excuse but, well, discipline issues: she finds Simms, walking the shore.

  “Boss,” she says.

  “Laporte.” No callsign. Simms winds up and hurls a stone. It doesn’t even skip once: hits, pierces, vanishes. The glass of their reflections shatters and reforms. Simms chuckles, a guarded sound, like she’s expecting Laporte to do something worth reprimand, like she’s not sure what she’ll do about it. “Been on Mars before?”

  “Uh, pretty much,” Laporte mumbles, hoping to avoid this conversation: she was at Hellas for Martin Mandho’s speech ten years ago, but she was a snotty teenager, Earthsick, and single-handedly ruined Mom’s plan to see more of the world. “Never with a native guide, though.”

  “Tourist girl.” Simms tries skipping again. “Fuck!”

  “Boss, you’re killing me.” Laporte finds a flat stone chip, barely weathered, and throws it—but Mars gravity, hey, Mars gravity is a good excuse for that. “Mars gravity!” she pleads, while Simms laughs, while Laporte thinks about what a bad idea this is, to let herself listen to that laugh and get drunk. Fleet says: no fraternization.

  They walk a while.

  “You really hate them?” Laporte asks, forgetting whatever wit she had planned the instant it hits her tongue.

  “The colonists? The Alliance?” Simms squints up Olympus-ways, one boot up on a rock. The archetypical laconic pioneer, minus only that awful Mongolian chew everyone here adores. “What’s the alternative?”

  “Didn’t you go to school?” Ubuntu never found so many ears on hardscrabble Mars. “They gave it to us every day on Solaris: love them, understan
d them, regret the killing.”

  “Ah, right. ‘He has a husband,’ I remember, shooting him. ‘May you find peace,’ I pray, uncaging the seekers.” Simms rolls the rock with her boot, flipping it, spinning it on its axis. “And you had this in your head, the first time you made a kill? You cut into the merge and lined up the shot thinking about your shared humanity?”

  “I guess so,” Laporte says. A good person would have thought about that, so she’d thought about it. “But it didn’t stop me.”

  Simms lets the rock fall. It makes a flinty clap. She eyes Laporte. “No? You weren’t angry? You didn’t hate?”

  “No.” She thinks of Kassim. “It was so easy for me. I thought I was sick.”

  “Huh,” Simms says, chewing on that. “Well, can’t speak for you, then. But it helps me to hate them.”

  “Hate’s inhumane, though.” Words from a conscience she’s kept buried all these months. “It perpetuates the cycle.”

  “I wish the universe gave power to the decent. Protection to the humane.” Simms shrugs, in her shoulders, in her lips. “But I’ve only seen one power stop the violent, and it’s a closer friend to hate.”

  She’s less coltish down here, like she’s got more time for every motion, like she’s set aside her haste. “Hey,” Laporte says, pressing her luck. “When I transferred in. You were—in a tough place.”

  Simms holds up a hand to ward her off. “You can see the ships,” she says.

  Mars is a little world with a close horizon and when she looks up Laporte feels like she’s going to lose her balance and fall right off, out past Phobos, into a waiting wolfpack, into the Eos dawnbringers from over the horizon. She takes a step closer to Simms, towards the stanchion that keeps her down.

  High up there some warship’s drive flickers.

  “I was pretty sure,” Simms says, “that everyone I knew was going to die, and that I couldn’t stop it. That’s where I was, when you transferred in.”

  “And now?” Laporte asks, still watching the star. It’s a lot further away, a lot safer.

  “Jury’s out,” Simms says. Laporte’s too skittish to check whether she’s joking. “Look. Moonsrise. You’ve got to tell me a secret.”

  “Are you fucking with me?”

  “Native guide,” Simms says, rather smugly.

  “When I was a kid,” Laporte says, “I had an invisible friend named Ken. He told me I had to watch the ants in the yard go to war, the red ants and the black ones, and that I had to choose one side to win. He said it was the way of things. I got a garden hose and I—I took him really seriously—”

  Simms starts cracking up. “You’re a loon,” she chokes. “I’m glad you’re on my side.”

  “I wonder what we’ll do after this,” Laporte says.

  Simms sobers up. “Don’t think about that. It’ll kill you.”

  Laporte listens to the flight data record of that training sortie, the tangle with the Nyx wolfpack, just to warm her hands on that fire, to tremble at the inarticulate beauty of the fight:

  “—am spiked, am spiked, music up. Bandit my seven high, fifteen hundred, aspect attack.”

  “Lead supporting.” The record is full of warbling alarms, the voices of a ship trying to articulate every kind of danger. “Anchor your turn at, uh—fuck it, just break low, break low. Padlocking—”

  “Kill him, boss—”

  “Guns.” A low, smooth exhalation, Simms breathing out on the trigger. “Guns.”

  “Nice. Good kill. Bandit your nine low—break left—”

  Everything’s so clear. So true. Flying with Simms, there’s no confusion.

  They respond to a distress call from a civilian vessel suffering catastrophic reactor failure. Indus jumps on-scene to find an Alliance corvette, Arethusa, already providing aid to the civilian. Both sides launch fighters, slam down curtains of jamming over long-range communications, and prepare to attack.

  But neither of them have enough gear to save the civilian ship—the colonists don’t have the medical suite for all her casualties; Indus can’t provide enough gear to stabilize her reactor. Captain Sorensen negotiates a truce with the Arethusa’s commander.

  Laporte circles Indus, flying wary patrol, her fingers on the master arm switch. Some of the other pilots talk to the colonists on GUARD. They talk back, their accents skewed by fifty years of linguistic drift, their humanity still plain. One of the enemy pilots, callsign Anansi, asks for her by name: there’s a bounty on her head, an Enemy Ace Incentive, and smartass Anansi wants to talk to her and live to tell. She mutes the channel.

  When she stops and thinks about it, she doesn’t really believe this war is necessary. So it’s quit, or—don’t think about it. That’s what Simms taught her: you go in light. You throw away everything about yourself that doesn’t help you kill. Strip down, sharpen up. Weaponize your soul.

  Another Federation frigate, Hesperia, picks up the distress signal, picks up the jamming, assumes the worst. She has no way to know about the truce. When she jumps in she opens Arethusa’s belly with her first salvo and everything goes back to being simple.

  Laporte gets Anansi, she’s pretty sure.

  Fresh off the Agincourt coup, they make a play for the Carthage—Indus, Yangtze, Altan Orde, Katana, and Simms riding herd on three full squadrons. It’s a trap. Steele’s been keeping his favorite piece, the hunter-killer Imperieuse, in the back row. She makes a shock jump, spinal guns hungry.

  Everyone dies.

  The last thing Laporte hears before she makes a crash-landing on Indus’ deck is Captain Simms, calling out to Karen Ng, begging her to abandon Yangtze, begging her to live. But Karen won’t leave her ship.

  Indus jumps blind, destination unplotted, exit vector unknown. The crash transition wrecks her hangar deck, shatters her escape pods in their mounts.

  She falls into light.

  So Laporte was wrong, in the end. The death of everyone Simms knew was inevitable.

  Monsters win.

  Laporte stacks her bottlecaps and waits for Simms to offer her a word.

  The game is just a way to pass the time. Not real speech, not like the chatter, like the brevity code. Out there they could talk. And is that why they’re alive, just the two of them? Even Levi, old hand Levi, came apart at the end, first in his head when he saw the bodies spilling out of Altan Orde and then in his cockpit when the guns found him. But Simms and Laporte, they flew each other home. Home to die in this empty searing room with the bolted-down frame chairs and the bottle caps and their cells rotting inside them.

  Or maybe it’s just that Simms hated harder than anyone else, hesitated the least. And Laporte, well—she’s never hesitated at all.

  “It’s my fault we’re here,” Laporte says, even though it’s not her turn.

  “Yeah?” Simms, she’s got red in her eyes, a tremor in her frame.

  “If I hadn’t listened to Karen’s note, if I hadn’t done whatever I did to wake you up.” If they’d never met. “Netreba never would’ve picked Indus for the task force. We wouldn’t have been at the ambush. Wouldn’t have watched Imperieuse kill our friends.”

  “All you did was fly my wing,” Simms says. “It’s not your fault.” But she knows exactly what Laporte’s talking about.

  Simms picks up a bottle cap and puts it between them. “I’m transferring you to Eris,” she says. “Netreba’s flagship. On track for a squadron command.”

  “Bullshit.” Because they’re not going to live long enough to transfer anywhere.

  Simms wraps the cap up in her shaking hand and draws it back. “I already put the order in,” she says. “Just in case.”

  A dosage alarm shrieks and stops: someone from damage control, silencing the obvious. Beams of ionizing radiation piercing the torn armor, arcing through the crew spaces as Indus tumbles and falls.

  Is this the time to just give up on protocol? To get her boss by the wrists and beg: wait, stop, please, let me explain, let me stay? We’ll make it, rescue will come, we’
ll fly again? But she gets it. She’s got that Ubuntu empathy bug. She can feel it in Simms, the old break splintering again: I can’t watch these people die.

  Laporte’s the only people she’s got left. So Simms has to send her away.

  “Boss,” she says. “You taught me—without you I wouldn’t—”

  Killing, it’s like falling into the sun: you’ve got all this compassion, all this goodwill, keeping you in the human orbit. All that civilization that everyone before you worked to build. And somehow you’ve got to lose it all.

  Only Laporte never—

  “Without me,” Simms says, and she’s got no mercy left in her tongue, “you’d be fine. You’ll be fine. You’re a killer. That’s all you need—no reasons, no hate. It’s just you.”

  She lets her head loll back and exhales hard. The lines of her arched throat kink and smooth.

  “Fuck,” she says. “It’s hot.”

  Laporte opens her hand. Asking for the cap. She doesn’t have the spit to say: true.

  Captain Simms makes herself comfortable, flat on her back across three chairs. “Your turn,” she says.

  “Boss,” Laporte rasps. “Fuck. Excuse me.” She clears her throat. Might as well go for it: it begs to be said. “Boss, I . . . ”

  But Simms has gone. She’s asleep, breathing hard. It’s lethargy, the radiation pulling her down. Giving her some peace.

  Laporte calls a medical team. While she waits she tries to find a blanket, but Simms seems to prefer an uneasy rest. She breathes a little easier when Laporte touches her shoulder, though, and Laporte thinks about clasping her hand.

  But, no, that’s too much.

  Federation ships find them. A black ops frigate, running signals intelligence in deep orbit, picks Indus’ distress cries from the solar background. Salvage teams scramble to make her ready for one last jump to salvation.

  Laporte’s waiting by her Captain’s side when they come for her. The medical team, and the woman with the steel eyes.

  “Laporte,” the new woman says. “The Indus ace. Came looking for you.”

  By instinct and inclination Laporte stands to shield her Captain from the grey-clad woman, from her absent insignia and hidden rank. She can’t figure out a graceful way to drop the bottle cap so she just holds it like a switch for some hidden explosive, for the grief that wants to get out any way it can. “I need to stay with my squadron leader,” she says.