Livesuit, p.1
Livesuit, page 1
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2024 by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck
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ISBN: 9780316575348 (ebook)
E3-20240801-JV-NF-ORI
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Kirin thought of the structure he had come to destroy as a bridge, because it vaguely looked like one. It had ends on either bank of what seemed to be a river. It had stanchions that sank down into the turgid flow of the liquid below and held it up. His brain continued to insist this meant it was a bridge. Kirin knew that the river was bromine and long-chain hydrocarbons and the stanchions were built of chitin. The things that used it didn’t travel across its top, but budded, grew, lived, and shriveled to death in place like sponges in a tide pool. But in the thousands of systems where life had solved the complex problem of defying entropy, there were only so many shapes. Sometimes weird shit was going to look familiar. An enemy alien was going to look like a tree or a vulva or a bird because there were too many things and not enough room in design space for all of them.
So, Bridge.
Maybe the wars were about that as much as anything. Who got to keep what shapes. Who got to define what they meant.
His suit squeezed his wrist to get his attention and put up a mission-change notification. The augmented reality of his heads-up display stopped highlighting the base of the bridge nearest his team, and the gentle glow jumped to a stanchion in the flow.
“Acknowledge change of target,” Corval said on the group channel. Kirin said Acknowledged at the same time all the others on the strike team did, their voices blending into a single sound that the suit parsed for him—their names going from yellow to green on his display. All of them except Piotr, who sent his in the text channel; he didn’t speak aloud anymore, and hadn’t for months. Corval’s suit sent the replies to Command-and-Control so they didn’t try to assign any of the other groups the same target while the team reassessed how to get the charges where they needed to be. They hadn’t been planning to go deep enough into the red-brown river that they’d have to do more than wade.
“Want me to send the mosquitoes out?” Gleaner asked. “Get a better look?”
“Not yet,” Corval said, and a moment later his heads-up announced a swirl of enemy insects floating from the top of the bridge like a tendril of smoke.
Gleaner grunted. “Good call.”
“Some days you’re lucky,” Corval said, but they all knew it was more than that. “Group one is me, Piotr, and Noor. Kirin, you’re group two lead. Take Gleaner and Ross with you. We’ll cover you. Sing out if you see any bugs.”
The chorus of acknowledgments followed. And the one in text from Piotr.
Kirin slung the explosive belt over his shoulder and moved toward the river’s edge. The microdrones—mosquitoes—might have been able to swim to map still water—liquid, whatever—but Kirin didn’t think they could handle the flow. The ground crackled and gave under his feet like a memory of snow.
When he reached the river, he knelt and put a hand into its oily darkness. The glove thumped twice like his palm being tapped by a soft hammer. Half a second later, his suit laid an image of the riverbed over the dark, rippling surface. There were shadows. Holes in the map where the sonar return hadn’t been strong enough to be sure what it was seeing. Kirin traced a path to the target, moving from shallow to shallow, sandbar to sandbar. He didn’t know how soft the riverbed would be, but they didn’t have a raft and he didn’t have time to improvise something.
He marked the path, sent it to Gleaner and Ross, and stepped in. The flow felt wrong. Simultaneously too light and somehow greasy. Intellectually, he knew that nothing he experienced here was going to be like home, but his body had still expected the river to feel like water.
“Heads-up,” Gleaner said. “Two o’clock.”
On the far bank, a wide, pale shape moved. It had the sinuousness of a snake but carried by a dozen bone-like legs. Kirin had seen them before on a number of other enemy-controlled planets. Whether they were dogs or drones or soldiers was a question of semantics and metaphor shear. They were one of a thousand aspects of the enemy, and Kirin knew this one hadn’t sensed their presence because it wasn’t actively trying to kill them. He let himself sink into the river until his eyes were barely above the waterline. He remembered a picture of a crocodile floating in a bayou on Edderith or New Cannat. Something he’d seen when he was a boy.
“Hang back,” he said to Gleaner and Ross. He didn’t need to tell them to stay still. They all knew that the snake-thing cued off motion. He was a little over ten meters from the target. He could do that. Kirin slid one foot forward along the riverbed, shifted his weight, felt the silt rising up around his boot, and moved forward slowly enough that the enemy wouldn’t notice him. He hoped. His suit offered him a sedative, but he rejected it. He needed his sharpness now more than he needed to be calm.
One slow, careful step at a time, he moved forward. Caught by the pull of the river, the explosive charge tugged at his shoulder like a child trying to get his attention. As he passed the first stanchion, the glass-legged snake on the far bank turned away and started wandering into the alien landscape. He paused, letting it get a little more distance.
That was his mistake.
The mud under his left foot shuddered, shifted. He started pulling back before he’d fully registered the sensation, and he was already too late. Something closed on his ankle like a mouth biting down. The small bones of his foot ground against each other, and the pain blinded him for a brief moment before his suit flooded him with anesthetics. The crushing and grinding in his foot and ankle became intellectual awarenesses rather than his hindbrain screaming in panic. He drew the knife from his belt, bending double to slash at whatever it was. The black river swallowed him. He felt the explosive charge slide off his shoulder, and he didn’t try to catch it.
“I’m down. Corval, I’m down.”
“Understood,” Corval said. “Piotr and Noor, with me. Go to group one channel. Gleaner and Ross, move to assist Kirin.”
In the darkness, Kirin’s hands found the attacker. It felt like vines or rope wrapped around his leg to the calf. He drew the serrated edge of the blade across it, and it clamped down again. Something deep in his ankle ripped, cutting through the fog of the anesthetic, and Kirin screamed.
Time was a property of space: a statement about relative velocity, the nearness to the limit that was lightspeed, and the temporal lensing that the brane-slip engines invoked when they got around it. By one reckoning, Kirin had seen the news eight years before. By another, forty. For him it had become a meaningless question. There was before, and there was after, and trying to make sense out of duration between the two was a fast track to madness.
Before, it had been a sun-soaked day at the end of spring on Kaladon. The birds sang in the pines. The clouds were swirls of green and orange and gold that seemed to tower up to the edge of space. By the common calendar, he was twenty-three, and for almost half a year, he had been living in a two-room apartment in the ski valley north of Broad Serlath, sharing his bed with Mina and working mobile medical assistance on a team with, among other people, Piotr. That particular day was his off duty, and he sat on the wooden porch that looked out over the valley with a cigar between his fingers and half a bottle of white wine still cold enough to sweat on the little table at his side. The apartment’s system played the latest news from across the governance zone.
Another solar system had just been killed.
The reports played on his little house system, but they’d traveled across thousands of light years to get there. And they followed the same pattern as the ones before. The system this time was called Aumpaena, and Kirin had nev
The enemy ships had swarmed the planets and cities and towns and stations of Aumpaena. The images that slipped out before the comm relay system collapsed were of violence. Not just killing, though there was plenty of that. The locals were also being rounded up in pens, linked leg to leg and neck to neck with cables that might have been metal or polymer or something alive. Lined up like slaves or cattle. Men who could have been him. Women who could have been Mina. The images shifted to other systems—Desinun three years before, Trium four years before that.
The pattern and timing of the attacks were, the reports said, being analyzed by the best that the special services had to coordinate. Strong evidence about the nature and origin of the enemy was already coming clear. As terrible as the loss of Aumpaena was, it might well give the critical insight that turned the tide of the war. The central government, the reports assured him, was preparing a decisive response.
Mina came out from the house dressed in a work smock and comfortable shoes. Her hair was still wet. When she leaned over for the perfunctory kiss on the crown of his head, she smelled of the cedar shampoo that she favored. She lifted his hand from the wrist to take a puff from his cigar and blew the smoke at the system screen as a way of pointing.
“What’s this about?”
“The war,” Kirin said.
Mina sobered. There was nothing like talk of the war to take the joy and beauty out of the sky. The screen shifted to a group of livesuit infantry drilling in a desert somewhere, and Kirin muted it.
“I didn’t think you were working tonight,” he said.
“Mr. Bulsara’s in the home stretch,” she said, using the hospice-care euphemism for someone in the last hours of their life. “It’s easier for me to be with him than it is for his family.”
“Yeah?”
“They all knew him before he got sick. When they see him, they’re remembering who he used to be. The things he used to be able to do. What his personality was like before he got sick. For me, he’s always been this.”
“You’re a strong woman,” he said, half joking, half serious.
“Mine’s easier than yours. Medical rescue is all about trying to keep people from dying. In the long run, you’re going to lose. I just need to make their last hours as comfortable as I can. I don’t have to fight the inevitable.”
“Are you going to be okay?” They both knew he wasn’t talking about the dying patient but the war. Not the one death but the billions.
“I’ll live,” she said. Kirin felt like there should have been something comforting that he could say, but her footsteps were already creaking down the stairs toward the road. Kirin heard when she reached the gravel, and then the pause. Her voice, and someone answering her. A different pattern of footsteps came up the stairs, as individual as a laugh or a handshake.
Piotr was a thin-framed man with fine, dark hair and a sharp face with a pencil mustache that actually suited him. Kirin didn’t remember when they’d met. It was one of those relationships that had begun as being background players in the dramas of each other’s lives. The man on the other side of the party, the one who arrived just as you were leaving, the vague shape across the bonfire on the beach. By the time they knew each other, they’d known each other for a long time. It was only since Kirin had started working mobile medical assistance that they’d become friends, and even that felt like a continuation of something neither of them had specifically begun. Since then, Kirin had watched Piotr carry an injured child halfway down a mountain while he carried the bag of fluid keeping the infant alive. They’d traded off emergency rebreathing for a man whose wife was shrieking in fear and pain. They’d watched people die together, many times. And so when he saw his face, he knew before his friend spoke that something had changed.
Piotr pulled a rough wooden stool over to the rail, sat, spread his arms out behind him in a way that should have looked relaxed and didn’t. “Watching the reports,” he said.
Kirin took a last drag on his cigar, then nodded as he stubbed it out. “Ugly.”
“Yeah,” Piotr said. “It really is.”
Kirin turned off the system. The wider world around them seemed to come into better focus with the screens gone. The distant clouds were warming as the sun tracked toward the western horizon. By the time sunset came, the sky would be scarlet and gold.
Piotr swallowed. “I wanted you to hear it from me. I’m quitting the assistance team.”
He could have said he’d decided to become a sparrow. It would have made as much sense. “Did you get another position?” Kirin asked. It was the first thing he could think of, even though he couldn’t think what work Piotr would rather have. Something in the advanced medical center, maybe. Or a guide job that had all the time outside and fewer trauma victims. Neither one seemed likely.
“I’ve enrolled for military service,” Piotr said. “Livesuit infantry.”
“Really? And give all this up? What more could you want than a beer, the open sky…”
It was a joke they all shared on the medical assistance team that wasn’t really funny, except through the repetition. Piotr smiled and finished the stock phrase.
“… and all the paperwork you can eat.” He sobered.
“You saw all the same reports I did. They’re killing us.”
Kirin took a deep breath, let it out slowly. The war suffered the same strangeness of time that everything did. It had been going on since before Kirin was born, and the time dilation of relays jumping through brane space to deliver their message made it hard to have any timeline of the violence. News of attacks, of loss, or wave after wave after wave of alien malice and murder didn’t necessarily mean that they were losing. It could have been an artifact of the flow of information across interstellar space. Humanity might have been holding its own. Might even have been making some progress. It took a lot of effort to believe that, though.
“I keep thinking about it,” Piotr said. “You know how you get a bad one and there’s that rush when you know they would have died if you hadn’t been there? That thing where you know that you being in that place at that time changed a life?”
“I do.”
“I see the news coming in, and I don’t feel that anymore,” Piotr said. “Even when we save them, I keep thinking that we’re saving them so that those fuckers can slaughter them all later. And us too. All of us.”
Kirin looked out to the sky again, trying to find the beauty that had been in it before the news had come of another loss. The clouds looked the same. The sky too. Something had changed, and Kirin couldn’t tell what it was, except that he didn’t like it. Mina’s line about fighting the inevitable echoed in his mind.
“The central government—” he began, and Piotr shook his head.
“The government’s just people. A bunch of clueless assholes just like us who get paid to take the fact that there’s a bunch of monsters out there looking to kill us and put a brave face on it. They just want to make sure we don’t panic.”
“Or they don’t.”
Piotr grinned. “Right?”
A sparrow flew past, hardly more than a flutter of brown in the corner of Kirin’s vision. “Livesuit infantry?”
“Eight years, subjective,” Piotr said. “Full pension after one tour, even if the war’s over two years in. You know, assuming we win. But with dilation and brane travel…”
Piotr shrugged. He meant that once he left, he wouldn’t be back. Couldn’t be. When he landed someplace at the end of his service, it would be a different world, even if it were this one. Kirin looked for something like Congratulations or It’s been a good run or I respect the decision and good luck with it. Instead, the silence stretched between them until Piotr broke it.
