Sarah Zettel - Fool's War

“You have no reason to listen to me. After all, what is one more life to you?”

“What?” she asked, turning so she could keep Curran fixed in the center of her face plate

“Your crew was successful in their efforts. My people did not manage a tidy withdrawal from Earth. It has cost us dearly.”

From Earth? Al Shei’s heart beat hard. You were supposed to be attacking the IBN. Merciful Allah, what’s been happening?

“They were not completely successful, mind you,” Curran went on. “Some of us will escape yet, even though the Fool’s Guild will be combing the network for us. We will be able to regroup and begin again. I wanted to be very sure you knew that.”

Al Shei could barely hear him over the roar in her blood. The AIs had failed. Whatever they had tried, it hadn’t worked.

She licked her dry lips. “What do you think you’re going to gain by that? We’ll hunt you down like dogs in the street. We’ll make war on you for a hundred years if that’s what it takes.”

Curran barked out a laugh. “Oh, no, ‘Dama. You overestimate your fellow Humans. Some of you will indeed fight us, for awhile, but not all of you. Some of you will bargain when you realize we can take your networks, your worlds, your very selves hostage whenever we please. Some of you will agree to our terms, and we will let you have free passage through our country. The rest of you will see that the fight isn’t worth it and you will eventually treat with us.” He rolled over and smiled slowly at her. “And you will take the price we set for your hands and your eyes. You will work for us and be glad about it.”

Al Shei felt herself begin to laugh. Her diaphragm bounced painfully against her injured abdomen, but she couldn’t stop. Tears bounced around the inside of her helmet, smacking her face at random.

“You poor, stupid fool !” she cried. “You don’t understand do you?” He was twisting so he was standing now and for the first time, anger darkened his calm face. “You don’t know how slowly time moves for us. Members of my religion committed a capital error five hundred years ago, and we are still hated for it. There are still people willing to harangue us, even kill us, for being Muslim.” She stabbed a finger toward the hatchway. “Ask the Jews, ask the Christians and the Witches and the Freers and the Purists, they will all tell you how badly their ancestors were persecuted in wars that were over two and three thousand years ago. Now, you’re going to start a new war and you think human beings will take your deals and be happy.” She gasped and got a lungful of her own tears. The coughing fit sent spasms of pain through her. Curran was drifting closer.

“Maybe some of us will deal, like you say,” she wheezed, “but I tell you, not everyone will.” Reflexively, she reached up to try to brush the tears away. Her hand just slapped against her helmet, and her elbow knocked against her cutting torch. “You might win the major battle but you’ll be left with a thousand guerilla wars. Every hacker with a grudge, every cracker who lost a friend will tell their children how to fight you and they will come after you because they know where you are. We had to run away from each other, Curran, to achieve what peace we’ve got. We ran like the wind to the farthest places we could reach. You…you’ve got nowhere to go. You’ll be under siege in the networks for a thousand years!”

She shook her head. “You cannot beat us all. You can’t even keep your own kind under control!”

“I don’t have to beat you all.” He reached out and closed his hand around her wrist. “Not all of you.”

Al Shei froze. Curran smiled and from his tool belt, he drew a long, razor-bladed splicing knife. “All I have to do is destroy enough of you and yours for the rest to realize that peace is less costly.”

He hauled her towards him, holding the knife out straight. Al Shei’s free hand closed on the firing stud of the cutter and the gout of flame caught him in the chest. He screamed and kept on screaming. The force of the flame knocked them away from each other. The knife spun off into mid-air as Curran splayed all his limbs out. The scream echoed over the roar of the flame. Al Shei gripped the torch in both hands and kept it aimed at him until the black spot had spread across his chest until his corpse had stopped screaming.

Other voices were shrieking now, out of the intercom. “No! No! Murderer! She killed him! She killed him!”

Al Shei swallowed. They’d be coming for her. The waldos were already rising from the walls. She didn’t want to die in here. She didn’t want to let Curran’s followers take her apart. Her abdomen throbbed and every joint ached with exhaustion. She’d never make it out the air lock, no matter how quickly she could find it. A waldo snatched at her. She shoved Curran’s body towards it.

The window, Beloved!

Al Shei lit the torch again and played it against the window. The waldos snapped their pincers at her, but couldn’t reach quite this far. Nothing needed to be repaired on the window. There had been no need for them to reach this far.

The glass heated orange, red, white under her flame. “Somebody get up here!” screamed a voice at her back. “She’s going out the window!” A spiderweb of cracks began to creep out from around her torch flame. It was probably one of the self-repairing varieties, but it wasn’t meant to stand up to constant heat. The awful, sick whistle of escaping air shrilled in her helmet and its rush pressed her right against the glass. Her face plate turned coal black. All she could see was the glowing point in front of her and the thickening cracks around it. All she could feel was the mounting pressure at her back. It squeezed against her, pressing her spine into her breast bone. It hurt, it hurt, it hurt, Beloved and the wind was loud and there were alarms going off in her suit and outside her suit and someone was screaming.

The window burst open and Al Shei flew toward the stars on the back of the wind.

Dobbs heard voices.

Almost. Almost, said the voice.

There’s no one there.

We can’t just leave it here.

I’ve gone insane.

We can’t bring it either. It’s too slow. It won’t survive.

I’m dying.

It won’t survive on its own either.

I can’t die. I’m not done yet!

Leave it.

Silence. Absolute silence.

It took a long moment for Dobbs to realize she was awake, and she really was alone. She reached for the paths to the nearest transmitter and found nothing but thread thin conduits. She stretched in all directions, calling along the entire length of herself, and got no answer. The world had grown small. It fit tightly around her, and only her thinnest finger could reach any distance at all. Had Curran won? Had he trapped her inside some kind of bubble in Earth’s dead network?

Be still. Think, Dobbs slowed her thoughts and reined in her increasingly frantic motions.

Cohen was here, and Brooke, and… others. You were holding the network together. What’s the last thing you remember?

The answer sent a throb of terror through her. Dobbs pulled back in on herself. Huddling into a ball, she reached inside and found the familiar patterns tangled beyond redemption in her own engorged coils.

It was a long time before she could make herself stop screaming.

When Guild Master Havelock found her, it took him even longer to recognize who she was.

Can 56 drifted lazily through space. Yerusha had muted the monitor carrying the Landlords voices ordering everyone away from the area and demanded to know what the impounded Pasadena was doing out here.

A big, bulbous tugger was trying to angle itself toward the can so it could get a grip on the rogue object with the gigantic waldo protruding from its bow. Its torch flickered on and off like a dying Christmas light. Yerusha imagined the pilot uttering some of the same curses she was.