John Adams - Federations

Except the damn thing turned to follow me.

Now a second flanked it, shepherding me through the thickest zone of wasp corpses. Did they have some significance for the defector? Maybe so, but I couldn’t see it. The corpses were a rough mix of machines from both sides: Royalist wasps marked with yellow shell symbols, ours with grinning tiger-heads. Generation thirty-five units, if I remembered Mil-Hist, when both sides toyed with pulse-hardened optical thinkware. In the seventy-odd subsequent generations there’d been numerous further jumps: ur-quantum logics, full-spectrum reflective wasp armor, chameleoflage, quackdrive powerplants, and every weapon system the human mind could devise. We’d tried to encourage the wasps to make these innovations for themselves, but they never managed to evolve beyond strictly linear extrapolation. Which was good, or else we human observers would have been out of a job.

Not that it really mattered now.

A third geyser had erupted behind me, and a fourth ahead, boxing me in. Slowly, the four points of fire began to converge. I stopped, but kept holding Yarrow. I listened to my own breathing, harsh above the basso tremor of the drumming ground.

Then steel gripped my shoulder.

She said we’d be safer underground. Also that she had friends below who might be able to do something for Yarrow.

“If you weren’t defecting,” I began, as we entered a roughly hewn tunnel into the splinter’s crust, “what the hell was it?”

“Trying to get home. Least that was the idea, until we realized Tiger’s Eye didn’t want us back.” Wendigo knuckled the ice with one of her steel fists, her suit cut away to expose her prosthetics. “Which is when we decided to head here.”

“You almost made it,” I said. Then added: “Where were you trying to get home from?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“Then you did defect.”

“We were trying to make contact with the Royalists. Trying to make peace.” In the increasingly dim light I saw her shrug. “It was a long shot, conducted in secrecy. When the mission went wrong, it was easy for Tiger’s Eye to say we’d been defecting.”

“Bullshit.”

“I wish.”

“But you sent us.”

“Not in person.”

“But your delegate—”

“Is just software. It could be made to say anything my enemies chose. Even to order my own execution as a traitor.”

We paused to switch on our suit lamps. “Maybe you’d better tell me everything.”

“Gladly,” Wendigo said. “But if this hasn’t been a good day so far, I’m afraid it’s about to go downhill.”

There had been a clique of high-ranking officers who believed that the Swirl war was intrinsically unwinnable. Privy to information not released to the populace, and able to see through Tiger’s Eye’s own carefully filtered internal propaganda, they realized that negotiation—contact—was the only way out.

“Of course, not everyone agreed. Some of my adversaries wanted us dead before we even reached the enemy.” Wendigo sighed. “Too much in love with the war’s stability—and who can blame them? Life for the average citizen in Tiger’s Eye isn’t that bad. We’re given a clear goal to fight for, and the likelihood of any one of us dying in a Royalist attack is small enough to ignore. The idea that all of that might be about to end after four hundred years, that we all might have to rethink our roles… well, it didn’t go down too well.”

“About as welcome as a fart in a vac-suit, right?”

Wendigo nodded. “I think you understand.”

“Go on.”

Her expedition—Wendigo and two pilots—had crossed the Swirl unchallenged. Approaching the Royalist cometary base, they had expected to be questioned—perhaps even fired upon—but nothing had happened. When they entered the stronghold, they understood why.

“Deserted,” Wendigo said. “Or we thought so, until we found the Royalists.” She expectorated the word. “Feral, practically. Naked, grubby subhumans. Their wasps feed them and treat their illnesses, but that’s as far as it goes. They grunt, and they’ve been toilet-trained, but they’re not quite the military geniuses we’ve been led to believe.”

“Then…”

“The war is… nothing we thought.” Wendigo laughed, but the confines of her helmet rendered it more like the squawking of a jack-in-the-box. “And now you wonder why home didn’t want us coming back?”

Before Wendigo could explain further, we reached a wider bisecting tunnel, glowing with its own insipid chlorine-colored light. Rather than the meandering bore of the tunnel in which we walked, it was as cleanly cut as a rifle barrel. In one direction the tunnel was blocked by a bullet-nosed cylinder, closely modeled on the trains in Tiger’s Eye. Seemingly of its own volition, the train lit up and edged forward, a door puckering open.

“Get in,” Wendigo said. “And lose the helmet. You won’t need it where we’re going.”

Inside I coughed phlegmy ropes of thick from my lungs. Transitioning between breathing modes isn’t pleasant—more so since I’d breathed nothing but thick for six weeks. But after a few lungfuls of the train’s antiseptic air, the dark blotches around my vision began to recede.

Wendigo did likewise, only with more dignity.

Yarrow lay on one of the couches, stiff as a statue carved in soap. Her skin was cyanotic, a single, all-enveloping bruise. Pilot skin is a better vacuum barrier than the usual stuff, and vacuum itself is a far better insulator against heat loss than air. But where I’d lifted her my gloves had embossed fingerprints into her flesh. Worse was the broad stripe of ruined skin down her back and the left side of her tail, where she had lain against the splinter’s surface.

But her head looked better. When she hit vac, biomodified seals would have shut within her skull, barricading every possible avenue for pressure, moisture, or blood loss. Even her eyelids would have fused tight. Implanted glands in her carotid artery would have released droves of friendly demons, quickly replicating via nonessential tissue in order to weave a protective scaffold through her brain.

Good for an hour or so—maybe longer. But only if the hostile demons hadn’t screwed with Yarrow’s native ones.

“You were about to tell me about the wasps,” I said, as curious to hear the rest of Wendigo’s story as I was to blank my doubts about Yarrow.

“Well, it’s rather simple. They got smart.”

“The wasps?”

She clicked the steel fingers of her hand. “Overnight. Just over a hundred years ago.”

I tried not to look too overwhelmed. Intriguing as all this was, I wasn’t treating it as anything other than an outlandish attempt to distract me from the main reason for my being here, which remained killing the defector. Wendigo’s story explained some of the anomalies we’d so far encountered—but that didn’t rule out a dozen more plausible explanations. Meanwhile, it was amusing to try and catch her out. “So they got smart,” I said. “You mean our wasps, or theirs?”

“Doesn’t mean a damn anymore. Maybe it just happened to one machine in the Swirl, and then spread like wildfire to all the trillions of other wasps. Or maybe it happened simultaneously, in response to some stimulus we can’t even guess at.”

“Want to hazard a guess?”

“I don’t think it’s important, Spirey.” She sounded as though she wanted to put a lot of distance between herself and this topic. “Point is, it happened. Afterward, distinctions between us and the enemy—at least from the point of view of the wasps—completely vanished.”

“Workers of the Swirl unite.”