Breach the Hull Read online

  The flier came down low and popped the cargo hatch, exposing four tethered Angels reaching out for me, shouting words of encouragement my wounded ears could not hear. I stumbled toward them, but they still had to bring the flier dangerously close to the building and half drag me into the rear hatch. They hauled me in, closed the hatch and the pilot punched the engines.

  Once the speed stabilized, a medic came over and shined a light in my eyes. He mouthed some more words at me. Events unfolded on every side, but I felt discon-nected from them all. One woman, whose name I knew I should know, took the ava-lanche drive and secured it . . . somewhere. Other soldiers, each name blurrier than the one before, strapped me into my seat. They kept asking questions, so I pointed at my ears and shrugged until finally they left me alone. The medic inserted an IV of something into my arm and hung it on my seat above my head. We went ever higher, caught between the peaceful stars of the sky above and the violent stars of warfare below. The pilot angled the flier, preparing to fire off the nuclear reaction engines for our flight into space.

  I closed my eyes as tears leaked from them freely. I knew that soon I would be asked questions, and I would have to answer. They would ask what had happened, and I wondered what I could say. What HAD happened? What was real? Nothing seemed real except for Her. I tried to envision Her, explain Her, categorize Her, but nothing could encompass the smallest of Her features. It was like trying to fathom the mind of God.

  I tried to comfort myself with the idea that I had survived, but my thoughts dwelled on the next few hours, to my debriefing, where they would ask me questions and I would have nothing to say.

  Not one word.

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  FORGOTTEN CAUSES

  John C. Wright

  I WOKE UP TO A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN’S VOICE WHISPERING DIRECTLY INTO MY EAR: “WE ARE NOW IN a secure mission posture. All information hereafter will be on a need-to-know basis.”

  I was in zero gravity, warm, comfortable, floating. No doubt I was back aboard the Ship, safe at the perihelion of some wide elliptic orbit, nice and far, far away from the deadly danger of the Suspects . . .

  Wait. What Suspects? Who were they? And . . .

  And who exactly was I again? I seemed to have misplaced my name.

  Furthermore, there was an irksome pain in my arm, a stabbing pain, as if the intravenous needle built into the elbow-joint of my armor had missed the vein. Funny. Why would I be wearing my full kit heavy battle-armor if I were back asleep in my little brain-womb aboard the Ship?

  I pried an eye open and saw a grand, stately movement of blue and white swirls slowly passing across my face-plate screen. To one side, as I rotated, was a pretty flower-shape of blazing red with arms of floating black.

  It took me a moment to focus. Blue ocean. White clouds. Flaming wreckage formed an expanding cloud out from me. Smoking shards of hull-ceramic spun giddy trails of smoke. No. Not ‘out from’ me. Up. I was in an atmosphere. A planet. I was at least a thousand feet up. And I was in free-fall only because I was freely falling.

  Hey—Was that my landing craft that just got shot down?

  My limbs jerked, trying to grab something. But nothing moved. A coffin would be roomy compared to power-armor with the power off. Imagine having a ton of composite alloy wrapped skin-tight around each limb. I was trapped.

  “Where the hell am I? Who am I?”

  A beautiful woman’s voice, like the voice of an angel. It was the Ship. “I’m sorry, but you are not cleared to know that at the present time. The mission has assumed a secure posture and all information hereafter will be on a need-to-know basis . . .”

  A good marine probably would have just said, ma’am yes ma’am! Ready to splatter! Wilco! But I just screamed and swore a blue streak.

  She said: “You are apparently fully conscious. I am returning battle-suit control to you.”

  Now my limbs moved. Joint motors amplified my panicky flailing so that I began to roll and tumble. Reflexes took over. I spread my arms and triggered altitude jets. And kicked the switch with my chin to snap the airsickness bag over my mouth. I had to remember to thank the Designer back on Earth for that one.

  If I could remember who the hell the Designer was. And why did a sensation of cold desolation creep up my spine at that thought?

  The Ship’s lovely voice: “Attention. You have three targets approaching mach 4.1 north-northeast. No confirmation exists that these are hostile forces . . . ” With a shock, light exploded into my eyes. No. Not my eyes. It only seemed that way. There were a dozen pin-point cameras dotting the hull of my battle-suit; the information from all those points of view were flooding directly into my visual cortex. “ . . . You may fire in your own self-defense if you or your mission are threatened. Avoid collateral damage where possible . . .”

  There were a dozen more cameras and reader-heads in the noses of little microrocket remotes which were fanning out from the wreckage of my downed lander. Think its hard to integrate the viewpoint of two eyes into proper perspective? Try doing it with two dozen.

  “. . .You are not, I say again, not required to commit suicide to avoid capture. . . ” I could see the radio-noise and thermal exhaust radiating from the bodies approaching. They had hard radar-reflective surfaces. The favorite object a marine ever sees: Big, hot, slow, and made of metal.

  “ . . . The amnesia drug has removed those memories tagged with security neurolinkages from your brain . . .”

  I directed (how? just by wishing it, like pointing a finger) two of my remotes at each target, to get overlapping fields of fire, and I set their idiot-brains on DefCon two, which is, shoot if they change energy levels, alter course, or open fire. Then I sent two more remotes toward the group at high-speed, instruments cranked over to high-sensitivity, active scan, double-readings. Were the incoming bodies armed?

  “ . . . You may cooperate with your captors in any way which does not endanger the mission.”

  My brain had been tampered with. No one can interpret visual images from twenty viewpoints on twenty bands of the spectrum, infrared, IR, UV, radar, magnetic anomaly. What else had been done to me . . . ? What else had the Designer done to me . . . ?

  (Just the word made me recoil slightly. I wondered then whether the Designer was an It, not a He.)

  But I didn’t let the prospect of imminent death in battle distract me.

  “Ship! Am I going to be rescued, damn you? Where are the other members of my . . .” I was going to say ‘my squad’ or ‘my unit’ or something. But I stopped. The words sounded wrong.

  Loneliness. Terrible loneliness rose like bile in my throat. I knew what she was about to say before she said it.

  She said: “There are no other human beings.”

  That sentence seemed to hang in my ears for a moment, echoing.

  The lead incoming aerospace craft (old-fashioned, using a ram-jet and rocket combination for low-troposphere to high-atmosphere theater) blossomed with heat in the armpits of its stubby triangular wings, and fired two beam-guided missiles in my direction.

  “What’s my mission?”

  “I am not certain if you are cleared to know that. Please stand by while I consult instruction scenarios . . .”

  My remotes had already sliced the lead enemy craft from stem to stern, and issued an electromagnetic pulse powerful enough to scramble any avionics and sterilize any unshielded men aboard. The other two remotes were beeping plaintively for instructions; their simple-minded threat-response software couldn’t decide if the other two craft were ‘part of’ the first craft’s attack.

  I toggled them over to DefCon One (which is, shoot if they sneeze.)

  My altimeter alarm went off. I had been deceived by my Earthly instincts. The globe was smaller than Earth; the horizon closer; and the surface was a hell of a lot closer than I thought.

  The helmet monitor lit up: Deploy chute? Yes/No

  “Damn you, Ship! You told me not to do anything to endanger the mission! To carry out that order, you�
�ve got to tell me what the mission is—” The craft on the left sneezed. Remotes three and four blotted it out. A smear of oily flame and radioactive debris unrolled across the sky.

  “Your mission parameters are: Determine if the suspect world is responsible for the destruction of the surface biosphere of Earth. If so, execute suspect world, regardless of civilian collateral damage.”

  My mind went blank. Earth dead?

  In that stunned blankness, one little thought asked plaintively: Who would do it? Who would or could launch an attack to a target light-years away? An attack which would not arrive till their great-grandchildren had died of old age? It was insane . . .

  There could not be that many suspect worlds. Multi-generation colony-ships were very big and very expensive and very slow. And it was very, very hard to find volunteers. Besides, within a thousand light-years of Earth, only six planets were capable of sustaining human life.

  And evidently I was falling toward one of them.

  Her voice continued: “If not, determine if suspect world has any weapons or weapons technology capable of large-scale interstellar attacks. Disarm suspect world. Use any means necessary. Inform the population of the Law.”

  “The Law . . . ?”

  But I knew the Law. Thou shalt not kill worlds.

  The third incoming aerospace craft wasn’t what it seemed. When it flinched, the particles beams from my remotes bounced off its inner hull, which was made of something a damn sight tougher than the phony outer hull; and then it swatted half my remotes out of the sky with a sweep of hard radiation.

  The nose tilted up till the craft was vertical. The stubby wings fell off; a column of white light and white noise erupted out of the engines. My neutrino counter ran up to five digits 99999! and burned out. Whatever the hell they were burning wasn’t old-fashioned chemical rockets.

  I could see, on higher wavelengths, beams like searchlights drop into synch with the tight-beam shining from the radio-laser horn of my helmet. The beam pointed up. The super-rocket or hell-craft or whatever it was shot straight up. Same direction. My remotes didn’t have a chance of keeping pace.

  And remember those two big, dumb slow rockets coming for me? They suddenly got a lot faster, and they peeled open into segments almost as small and almost as hard to see as my remotes.

  An automatic circuit in my battle-suit began jinking me back and forth with ran-dom bursts from my retroes. Yanked up, jerked left, swatted right, knocked spinning. Instantly, I was one huge bruise across my whole body. This was supposed to keep me safe?

  My counter-electronics flashed. Screaming little super-missiles flashed to my left and right, missing the target, or got tricked into exploding early.

  Deploy chute? Yes/No. (WARNING Chute cannot deploy while retroes are firing)

  “Ship! Ship! What the hell do I . . . ”

  A man’s voice, in a language which I somehow knew, broke in: “Terran! The Military Arm of the Avernian Collective requires your immediate surrender!” What the hell? Were they asking me to surrender? Me?!! I decided then and there that I knew one thing about myself. I didn’t give up. The Ship: “This channel is compromised. Do not break radio silence. Out.” It was true. They were tracing my communication beam. The hell-craft had climbed almost out of the range even of my godlike sight. It was headed to some spot in low orbit, the source of the lovely female voice which was my only link with my life. Whoever the hell I was.

  The man’s voice was still talking to me: “Shut down your active systems! Let your energetic and nucleonic radiations drop to equal background readings to display submission! This is a necessary ordainment!”

  The on-board computer in my suit flashed good news: Enemy signal protocols algorithm solved. Engage signal falsification routine? Yes/No.

  And bad news: WARNING Below safe descent ceiling. Initiate emergency crash-landing procedures? Yes/No.

  (Yanked left, jerked up, swatted down-left, knocked right.)

  They must have done something to my brain. I was able to see what no one could see; I was able to know things I knew I didn’t know. I saw that fast little super-missiles mugging me were being guided by beams pointing at me from some distant source. (And I knew that the guide-beams were coming from six kilometers away, a large metallic craft 50 meters below the ocean surface.)

  And when I wondered if my suit could impersonate those guide-beams and point those fast little bastards at some better targets . . . (For example, at the disappearing hell-craft up above closing in on my siren-voiced Ship. Or at the source of the beamguides themselves. Or toward the source of the irksome voice asking me to surrender. Or at all three . . . ) I wondered; I knew; I willed it.

  It happened.

  And the nasty little super-rockets, now my toys, flipped 180 and screamed away. Fast enough, maybe, to get the hell-craft.

  Then, it all happened at once:

  Man’s Voice: “. . . willing to recognize your absurd claim to be the Terran emissary, Marshall Lamech . . .” (Lamech! My name was Lamech!) “ . . . and extend you grant of ambassadorial immunity, if only you will stop these brutal and unprovoked attacks on Avernus and her satellites . . . ”

  Unprovoked? My lander was shot down! (Had my lander been firing? I had a dim memory of a streamlined dart of a machine, every forward surface studded with weapon-tubes, launch-ports, deflection and evasion arrays.)

  Deploy Chute? Yes/No. WARNING You are below safe descent threshold.

  Ambassador? Did he just call me an Ambassador? (And I thought they arrived in limousines, not in Armored Assault Re-Entry Vehicles.)

  WARNING Incoming particle beam weapon from submarine source. Outer ablative material breached. Return Fire? Yes/No.

  And then roaring, fire, pain, light, noise, confusion.

  And then darkness. I don’t remember what happened then.

  Isn’t it funny how you dream in black and white?

  In the first part of the dream, I was sinking, sinking, numb with shock, all my bones were broken, and my helmet was filling up with blood. In the second part of the nightmare, I was crawling along the ocean bottom, along the muddy floor of some sea-trench sunlight never reached, and slow clouds of murk swirled between the fingers of my gauntlets as I moved. Lamp-eyed transparent fish and blind insects swarmed in my face, attracted to my helmet-lights. I screamed each time I moved, because it wasn’t me moving. The joint-motors of my power-armor were running on automatic. Pull right arm; drag left knee. Pull left arm; drag right knee. Every time my limp limbs were yanked by the metal sleeves through the movements of that painful crawl, I could feel the jagged bone-ends grind-ing together inside me.

  And then some huge armored machine, like a bathysphere on treads, rose up from the mud and gloom and speared me with a spotlight. A manipulator-claw reached out . . .

  The third part of the nightmare was worst of all. I was strapped to some sort of morgue-slab or inquisition rack or something, and some sort of torture sur-geons, faceless shapes in gray, were tearing off my skin, flaying me alive. Except it wasn’t my skin they were tearing off, but my armor, prying me like an oyster out of its shell.

  Days or years of pain went by; the room changed size and color once or twice, or maybe I was moved. Then, voices I could somehow understand: “Officer-surgeon of the Collective! Observe here. Neural actions. The Envoy Lamech is awake—!”

  “Illogical. Cortex tissues were destroyed with a number-five laser-scalpel. Nervous tissue does not regenerate.”

  “Yet, see, Luminous One!”

  My eyes were open. Some sort of instrument clamped around my eyelids kept my eyeballs moist with drops of mist. Nice of them.

  ‘Them’ consisted of gaunt, tall figures in gray airtight suits, with faceplates of mirror-white. A battery of blinding lights, like a nest of snakes, coiled from the over-head, and writhed to peer across their shoulders, turning as they turned, pointing lamps whatever direction the figures glanced. The one on the left had a set of cables and medical appliances, clamps and pro
bes and scalpels, growing in place of his right arm.

  The other one—evidently a superior officer—was speaking. “Recall that our ancestors were modified to survive this planet, and modified again to serve the Collective. He is not Homo Sapiens Superior Eugenicus. He is merely a Human Being. Some quirk in his atavistic neuro-chemistry might account for these readings.”

  “Yet, ponder, Sagacious One, how long ago our ancestors set out from the Once-Home-World, and how slow the giant ships! The science of Earth may have grown in one hundred centuries! He could be infested with nanomachines, bodies in his cell fluid too small for our instruments to detect, programmed to repair his tissues. Even brain tissue.”

  “Nanomachines are a myth. Earth is a myth. Dead tissues and dead worlds do not spring to life again!”

  “Yet look at the readings, All-Imposing One! He stirs; his eyes track our movements! I implore you! Look! Look!”

  “Hm. Even so, with all his weapons and armor removed—what can he do? We are safe.”

  “Sir! This is an Earthman!”

  “Ah. Perhaps you are right, loyal one. Sign the death-warrant in my name, and note the time. Stun him with six hundred volts of neuro-suppressor. I will apply a lethal impulse directly into his skull.”

  So the guy on the right picked up something like a shiny pistol and leaned over

  me.

  I raised my arm (I had to jerk—my hand was stuck for a moment) and took the pistol (funny how his fingers just came apart in my grip, like bags of jelly, like dry twigs) and pointed the business end at his head and pulled the trigger.

  When his brains exploded all over me, they were yellow, gray and red. Bright red. And I thought you couldn’t see colors in dreams.

  I was distracted for a moment by my hand. My wrist was dangling with severed cables and broken chains thick enough to bind an elephant. I watched the broken chain-ends swinging idly. Did I do that . . . ?