John Adams - Federations

“Worthless to us,” Yarrow said, scratching at the ribbon of black hair that ran all the way from her brow to fluke. “But evidently not too ratty.”

“What if the Royalists left supplies on the splinter? She could be aiming to refuel before the final hop to their side of the Swirl.”

Yarrow gave me her best withering look.

“Yeah, okay,” I said. “Not my smartest ever suggestion.”

Yarrow nodded sagely. “Ours is not to question, Spirey. Ours is to fire and forget.”

Six hours after the quackheads had been launched from Mouser, Yarrow floated in the bridge, fluked tail coiled beneath her. She resembled an inverted question mark, and if I’d been superstitious I’d have said that wasn’t necessarily the best of omens.

“You kill me,” she said.

An older pilot called Quillin had been the first to go siren —first to swap legs for tail. Yarrow followed a year later. Admittedly it made sense, an adaptation to the fluid-filled environment of a high-gee thickship. And I accepted the cardiovascular modifications that enabled us to breathe thick, as well as the biomodified skin, which let us tolerate cold and vacuum far longer than any unmodified human. Not to mention the billions of molecule-sized demons that coursed through our bodies, or the combat-specific psycho-modifications. But swapping your legs for a tail touched off too many queasy resonances in me. Had to admire her nerve, though.

“What?” I said.

“That neurodisney shit. Isn’t a real space war good enough for you?”

“Yeah, except I don’t think this is it. When was the last time one of us actually looked a Royalist in the eye?”

She shrugged. “Something like four hundred years.”

“Point made. At least in Solar War Three you get some blood. See, it’s all set on planetary surfaces—Titan, Europa, all those moons they’ve got back in Sol system. Trench warfare, hand-to-hand stuff. You know what adrenalin is, Yarrow?”

“Managed without it until now. And there’s another thing: don’t know much about Greater Earth history, but there was never a Solar War Three.”

“It’s conjectural,” I said. “And in any case it almost happened; they almost went to the brink.”

“Almost?”

“It’s set in a different timeline.”

She grinned, shaking her head. “I’m telling you, you kill me.”

“She made a move yet?” I asked.

“What?”

“The defector.”

“Oh, we’re back in reality now?” Yarrow laughed. “Sorry, this is going to be slightly less exciting than Solar War Three.”

“Inconsiderate,” I said. “Think the bitch would give us a run for our money.” And as I spoke the weapons readout began to pulse faster and faster, like the cardiogram of a fluttering heart. “How long now?”

“One minute, give or take a few seconds.”

“Want a little bet?”

Yarrow grinned, sallow in the red alert lighting. “As if I’d say no, Spirey.”

So we hammered out a wager; Yarrow betting fifty tiger-tokens the rat would attempt some last-minute evasion. “Won’t do her a blind bit of good,” she said. “But that won’t stop her. It’s human nature.”

Me, I suspected our target was either dead or asleep.

“Bit of an empty ritual, isn’t it.”

“What?”

“I mean, the attack happened the best part of five minutes ago, realtime. The rat’s already dead, and nothing we can do can influence that outcome.”

Yarrow bit on a nicotine stick. “Don’t get all philosophical on me, Spirey.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it. How long?”

“Five seconds. Four…”

She was somewhere between three and four when it happened. I remember thinking that there was something disdainful about the rat’s actions: she had deliberately waited until the last possible moment, and had dispensed with our threat with the least effort possible.

That was how it felt, anyway.

Nine of the quackheads detonated prematurely, far short of kill-range. For a moment the tenth remained, zeroing in on the defector—but instead it failed to detonate, until it was just beyond range.

For long moments there was silence while we absorbed what had happened. Yarrow broke it, eventually.

“Guess I just made myself some money,” she said.

Colonel Wendigo’s hologram delegate appeared, momentarily frozen before shivering to life. With her too-clear, too-young eyes she fixed first Yarrow and then me.

“Intelligence was mistaken,” she said. “Seems the defector doctored records to conceal the theft of those countermeasures. But you harmed her anyway?”

“Just,” said Yarrow. “Her quackdrive’s spewing out exotics like Spirey after a bad binge. No hull damage, but…”

“Assessment?”

“Making a run for the splinter.”

Wendigo nodded. “And then?”

“She’ll set down and make repairs.” Yarrow paused, added: “Radar says there’s metal on the surface. Must’ve been a wasp battle there, before the splinter got lobbed out of the Swirl.”

The delegate nodded in my direction. “Concur, Spirey?”

“Yes sir,” I said, trying to suppress the nervousness I always felt around Wendigo, even though almost all my dealings with her had been via simulations like this. Yarrow was happy to edit the conversation afterward, inserting the correct honorifics before transmitting the result back to Tiger’s Eye—but I could never free myself of the suspicion that Wendigo would somehow unravel the unedited version, with all its implicit insubordination. Not that any of us didn’t inwardly accord Wendigo all the respect she was due. She’d nearly died in the Royalist strike against Tiger’s Eye fifteen years ago—the one in which my mother was killed. Actual attacks against our two mutually opposed comet bases were rare, not happening much more than every other generation—more gestures of spite than anything else. But this had been an especially bloody one, killing an eighth of our number and opening city-sized portions of our base to vacuum. Wendigo was caught in the thick of the kinetic attack.

Now she was chimeric, lashed together by cybernetics. Not much of this showed externally—except that the healed parts of her were too flawless, more porcelain than flesh. Wendigo had not allowed the surgeons to regrow her arms. Story was she lost them trying to pull one of the injured through an open airlock, back into the pressurized zone. She’d almost made it, fighting against the gale of escaping air. Then some no-brainer hit the emergency door control, and when the lock shut it took Wendigo’s arms off at the shoulder, along with the head of the person she was saving. She wore prosthetics now, gauntleted in chrome.

“She’ll get there a day ahead of us,” I said. “Even if we pull twenty gees.”

“And probably gone to ground by the time you get there, too.”

“Should we try a live capture?”

Yarrow backed me up with a nod. “It’s not exactly been possible before.”

The delegate bided her time before answering. “Admire your dedication,” she said, after a suitably convincing pause. “But you’d only be postponing a death sentence. Kinder to kill her now, don’t you think?”

Mouser entered kill-range nineteen hours later, a wide pseudo-orbit three thousand klicks out. The splinter—seventeen by twelve klicks across—was far too small to be seen as anything other than a twinkling speck, like a grain of sugar at arm’s length. But everything we wanted to know was clear: topology, gravimetrics, and the site of the downed ship. That wasn’t hard. Quite apart from the fact that it hadn’t buried itself completely, it was hot as hell.