Elizabeth Bear - Hammered

Like outwaiting the enemy. The first to move is often the one to die.

There’s a tug and a sting as Valens seats the lower cord. He’s not as good at it as Simon. Or maybe not as gentle. I couldn’t raise my head from the cradle if I tried, but I hear the others in the theater moving behind Valens. “With the patient’s voluntary muscles relaxed,” he says, and I know he’s talking to the observers, “her neural impulses will be translated by the computer, resulting in normal movement of her icon through a virtual space. The effect is much more realistic than the VR suits and goggles most of you will be familiar with. And that realism is the basis of the technology we are pioneering here. In a moment, you’ll be directed down the hall to a holotheater. The monitors will transmit images of everything Master Warrant Officer Casey experiences once the linkage is complete.”

The observers are suits, not the doctors and students I once was used to seeing. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Valens finishes his lecture and turns his attention back to me. My body numbs as he finishes the connection and lifts his hands. “All right, Casey?”

“Fine,” I mumble. He dismisses the observers. For a moment, I close my eyes, relishing a cheerful recollection of the sensation of Valens’s shoulder breaking under a poorly aimed punch. I really wish I’d gotten to hit him twice.

“Comfortable?”

“Couldn’t tell if I wasn’t, Fred.”

He chuckles. “I want you to put some thought into your new arm, by the way. Since you won’t be taking it into combat, there’s no reason not to lay pseudoskin over it and match your complexion. More or less. It’ll still look a little off, of course.”

I think about it for a minute. Imagine something that might pass for a normal hand. From a distance. From six feet. “No.”

“No?”

I tell myself I have no intention of going through with the surgery. That I am arguing to string him along, stretch things out. Once I’ve got proof that Valens and Barb are somehow linked to Mashaya Duclose’s death, I can count coup, show brave, pay my debts. Get myself killed in the process or go home and die in peace.

I tell myself all that. Except. Gabe kissed me, damn him. “Steel. I want it the same as the old one. Armored.”

“Yes. We put the ‘skin’ over the armor. That’s what gives you the fingertip sensitivity. Fingertip, flat palm, back of the hand. Process developed by a Dr. Evans in the U.S. The arm itself stays numb, unfortunately. We’d overload your nervous system if we tried full-surface tactile. We can’t match the delicacy of the electrical impulses the human nervous system uses. Yet.” He turns and steps toward the door. “See you in cyberspace, Casey.”

I raise my voice with an effort. “I want steel, Valens. Make the skin transparent if you have to.” Why are you arguing? Why do you care?

I can see his booties, the bottom of his scrubs. And Valens strolls two more steps, stops, turns back to me, and draws a slow breath. “If that’s what it takes, then. That’s what we’ll do.”

I close my eyes as he walks through the door. The normal noises of the operating room resume, and someone — nurse, assisting physician, technician — asks me, “All set, Ms. Casey?”

“Locked and loaded,” I answer, numb on the padded table, and then even that falls away.

Nowhere and neverwhen

Stars.

Stars, and cold stillness like frost crystallizing on motionless skin. Heat like an iron stroked down my body on the opposite side. Light that should be blinding-bright, eye searing, casts white-sharp edges over a tumbling stone hanging either below or above; I’m not sure which.

Farther, a rustred curve, and I know where I am. Mother fucker. That’s Mars.

Which is when I realize:

I’m not flying the spaceship.

I am the spaceship.

“Valens, you cocksucker, you could have warned me.” I yelp out loud, and I’m surprised when I hear my own voice, clear and strangely external, as if recorded and played back.

And then I hear him laughing in my ear, self-satisfied as a cat. “I thought it would be more fun as a surprise. Pretty good, isn’t it?”

And it is. It is. I stretch and wriggle into the skin of the ship, the Indefatigable, Valens called it. Her. I can’t think of her as an object. Not when I’m living inside her, sailing serenely along in areosynchronous orbit. I spend a long moment realizing that there’s facility built into this beast for all the functions you would expect of a real space cruiser — some back-brain fraction of my awareness is tracking life support, hull integrity, the tickle of the solar wind on the edges of my furled solar sails. Diagnostics read full capability, and it reaches my conscious mind as an intoxicating euphoria, a spring-day desire to leap over fences.

“Valens, I’m going to kick this thing into gear.”

“Gently, Casey,” he offers. “Use the sails at first. And the attitude rockets. You want to nudge yourself higher before you hit the stardrive. Oh, and you don’t want to be pointing at the sun when you do it.”

Stardrive? “Wilco.” It’s incredible. Peaceful. There’s no pain, and not a scrap of fear. The solar sails unfurl like the wings of a swan, and I boost and turn myself, back to the solar wind that feels more like a gale. It’s hours — days — but they go by like time spent lying in bed on Sunday with a lover.

“Valens, aren’t your suits getting bored out there?”

“Actually, we’re altering your time sense a bit. We’ve been watching for fifteen minutes.”

“Oh.” That freaks me out; my course wobbles. I correct. It’s easier than learning to walk. Again.

I reach for cynicism, for the armor of biting wit and savage dismissal. It’s not there, not hanging in the closet where it should be, next to my raincoat. There’s nothing but the stars, and an old slow dull ache inside me like coming home.

“Status, Casey?”

“I can’t feel Mars tugging on my boots anymore.”

“Stow the sails.”

“Check.” Like furling wings, they slither into the embrace of my body. I — the Indefatigable —am shaped rather like a doughnut stuck halfway down a carving fork. The tines would point backward. The doughnut spins. Silly-looking thing.

“Sails stowed, Colonel.”

“Widen the focus on your navigation charts?”

“Got ’em.”

“You’re going perpendicular to the plane of the elliptic. Do you know what that means?”

Supercilious son of a bitch. “Up.” Brief silence. I picture the scene in the holotheater as he pauses and mutes what I can hear. I envision him punctuating his lecture with a jabbing finger, as he informs his audience that I’ve never been exposed to the software before today, that this is a dry run to show what a trained pilot can do even with unfamiliar tech — tech that can save lives, when applied to the birds and beasts of mechanized war. He’ll say just that. Save lives.

His voice comes back, then. “Roger that, Casey. We’ve put you back on real time. What’s going to happen now is that you’re going to take that baby up, out of the solar system. There’s a course plotted. It’ll take you to Alpha Centauri, which is a nearby star. There will be unexpected obstacles along the way… Dark matter, planetesimals. Virtually speaking, your craft is going to be moving faster than the speed of light, which means you’ll have no reliable visual input. Copy?”

“Copy. So how am I supposed to steer this thing, sir?” And I want to bite my tongue as soon as I’ve said it, imagining the satisfied expression on his face. Sir. You can take the girl out of the army, but you can’t take the army out of the girl.