Subterrene War 03: Chimera (43 page)
“At least,” I said, “he’ll be in the real world. Not some semi-aware’s idea of what the world is like. He’ll get to choose and won’t have to worry about Assurance deciding that he’s a security risk because he used the word
bomb
twice in one sentence.”
“If he lives.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
Momson started kicking at the ground absentmindedly, and I knew what was coming.
“There’s the little matter of Sunshine. We’ll need to debrief you and figure out what you missed in case we need to go back for another collect. You’re going to have to come back with us—at least for a while.”
I shook my head. “I can give you data taken from Chen’s lab, and Jihoon can fill you in on operational details. Hell. If you want data on Chinese forces, I can probably give you a whole genetic. But I’m not going back. This is my home now.”
Momson looked about to piss himself with glee. He grinned now and wouldn’t stop nodding. “But you want your son. The data for Phillip, is that the deal?”
“I want my kid. That’s the deal.”
He waved at the plane and Phillip emerged, negotiating the ramp downward; when he reached the ground, he saw me and sprinted so that I knelt and caught him in my arms, kissing the top of his head.
“I’ve got you now.” It was the only thing I could think to say and Phillip didn’t respond; it was the quietest I’d ever seen him.
“I figured I might need him here,” said Momson. “So I brought him along. Now the data.”
I turned to Lucy. “Can you give him one of the Chinese?”
She nodded and left, jogging into the tunnel. I handed all the chits then to Momson, and he tucked them quickly into a pouch before pointing at one of the
Gra Jaai.
“Can they fight?” he asked.
“Better than you.”
“I’ve heard stories, Bug. Christ. You want to stay here with a bunch of religious whack-jobs and expose your kid to them during the most formative years of his life? Forget about the fact that this is war, do you
really
want him to wind up like them—half-drugged in some quest for enlightenment through killing?”
From the main entrance you heard the artillery. If you looked up the mountain, you could see the bright flashes of plasma impacting over the
Gra Jaai
trenches, and the ground vibrated with the deeper booming of the satos’ new plasma weapons returning fire. The temple still looked odd. Its stone had cracked and gave me the feeling of being part of an ancient story, one that had been written a long time ago and that I couldn’t have escaped, even if I wanted to—which I didn’t.
All my life I’d been a killer. All my life I’d gone home to a peace that never fit, and while some people would look at this place like it was the definition of insanity, to me it fit. Going
home
would be insane. I hadn’t really known whether I’d stay or not until I saw Momson, the sight of whom had brought me back to reality, had reminded me of the breeding stations and booze and of Bea, whom the system had sucked up the way a vacuum collects dust balls. That system wouldn’t get Phillip. And it would never touch me again. War was where I belonged, and for whatever reason I’d been born into it, so that trying to deny it was like trying to turn my hair blue from
wishing. You couldn’t be sure that we’d destroy the Chinese or even keep them from invading Thailand, but there was a feeling in the air, and I knew the
Gra Jaai
sensed it too, a sensation of promise.
Destiny.
“Yeah. I’d rather he wound up like them than wind up like me. Or worse—like
you.”
Lucy returned with two satos, who handed the Chinese corpse to Momson. He thanked them, and I turned to leave with Phillip’s hand grasped tightly in mine, so tightly that someone would have had to kill me to pry my hand loose.
Lucy whispered to me as we walked, “I knew you’d stay.”
“Yeah. I bet you did.”
“Hey,” Momson yelled after us. “At least tell me why. People are going to want to know, Bug, why you stayed when you could have come home and retired from all this crap. Forever.”
I stopped and looked back. “Because. I don’t ever want to go back to those days.”
And Phillip looked up at me and smiled.
T. C. M
C
C
ARTHY
earned a BA from the University of Virginia and a PhD from the University of Georgia before embarking on a career that gave him a unique perspective as a science fiction author. From his time as a patent examiner in complex biotechnology to his tenure with the Central Intelligence Agency, T.C. has studied and analyzed foreign militaries and weapons systems. T.C. was at the CIA during the September 11 terrorist attacks and was still there when US forces invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, allowing him to experience warfare from the perspective of an analyst. Find out more about the author at
www.tcmccarthy.com
.
If you enjoyed
CHIMERA,
look out for
by Kim Stanley Robinson
The year is 2312. Scientific and technological advances have opened gateways to an extraordinary future. Earth is no longer humanity’s only home; new habitats have been created throughout the solar system on moons, planets, and in between. But in this year, 2312, a sequence of events will force humanity to confront its past, its present, and its future.
The first event takes place on Mercury, on the city of Terminator, itself a miracle of engineering on an unprecedented scale. It is an unexpected death, but one that might have been foreseen. For Swan Er Hong, it is an event that will change her life. Swan was once a woman who designed worlds. Now she will be led into a plot to destroy them.
The sun is always just about to rise. Mercury rotates so slowly that you can walk fast enough over its rocky surface to stay ahead of the dawn; and so many people do. Many have made this a way of life. They walk roughly westward, staying always ahead of the stupendous day. Some of them hurry from location to location, pausing to look in cracks they earlier inoculated with bio-leaching metallophytes, quickly scraping free any accumulated residues of gold or tungsten or uranium. But most of them are out there to catch glimpses of the sun.
Mercury’s ancient face is so battered and irregular that the planet’s terminator, the zone of the breaking dawn, is a broad chiaroscuro of black and white—charcoal hollows pricked here and there by brilliant white high points, which grow and grow until all the land is as bright as molten glass, and the long day begun. This mixed zone of sun and shadow is often as much as thirty kilometers wide, even though on a level plain the horizon is only a few kilometers off. But so little of Mercury is level. All the old bangs are still there, and some long cliffs from when the planet first cooled and shrank. In a landscape so rumpled the light can suddenly jump the eastern horizon and leap west to strike some distant prominence. Everyone walking the land has to attend to this possibility, know when and where the longest sunreaches occur—and where they can run for shade if they happen to be caught out.
Or if they stay on purpose. Because many of them pause in their walkabouts on certain cliffs and crater rims, at places marked by stupas, cairns, petroglyphs, inuksuit, mirrors, walls, goldsworthies. The sunwalkers stand by these, facing east, waiting.
The horizon they watch is black space over black rock.
The superthin neon-argon atmosphere, created by sunlight smashing rock, holds only the faintest predawn glow. But the sunwalkers know the time, so they wait and watch—until—
a flick of orange fire dolphins over the horizon
and their blood leaps inside them. More brief banners follow, flicking up, arcing in loops, breaking off and floating free in the sky. Star oh star, about to break on them! Already their faceplates have darkened and polarized to protect their eyes.
The orange banners diverge left and right from the point of first appearance, as if a fire set just over the horizon is spreading north and south. Then a paring of the photosphere, the actual surface of the sun blinks and stays, spills slowly to the sides. Depending on the filters deployed in one’s faceplate, the star’s actual surface can appear as anything from a blue maelstrom to an orange pulsing mass to a simple white circle. The spill to left and right keeps spreading, farther than seems possible, until it is very obvious one stands on a pebble next to a star.
Time to turn and run! But by the time some of the sunwalkers manage to jerk themselves free, they are stunned—trip and fall—get up and dash west, in a panic like no other.
Before that—one last look at sunrise on Mercury. In the ultraviolet it’s a perpetual blue snarl of hot and hotter. With the disk of the photosphere blacked out, the fantastic dance of the corona becomes clearer, all the magnetized arcs and short circuits, the masses of burning hydrogen pitched out at the night. Alternatively you can block the corona, and look only at the sun’s photosphere, and even magnify your view of it, until the burning tops of the convection cells are revealed in their squiggling thousands, each a thunderhead of fire burning furiously, all together
torching five million tons of hydrogen a second—at which rate the star will burn another four billion years. All these long spicules of flame dance in circular patterns around the little black circles that are the sunspots—shifting whirlpools in the storms of burning. Masses of spicules flow together like kelp beds threshed by a tide. There are nonbiological explanations for all this convoluted motion—different gases moving at different speeds, magnetic fields fluxing constantly, shaping the endless whirlpools of fire—all mere physics, nothing more—but in fact it looks
alive
, more alive than many a living thing. Looking at it in the apocalypse of the Mercurial dawn, it’s impossible to believe it’s
not
alive. It roars in your ears, it
speaks
to you.
Most of the sunwalkers over time try all the various viewing filters, and then make choices to suit themselves. Particular filters or sequences of filters become forms of worship, rituals either personal or shared. It’s very easy to get lost in these rituals; as the sunwalkers stand on their points and watch, it’s not uncommon for devotees to become entranced by something in the sight, some pattern never seen before, something in the pulse and flow that snags the mind; suddenly the sizzle of the fiery cilia becomes audible, a turbulent roaring—that’s your own blood, rushing through your ears, but in those moments it sounds just like the sun burning. And so people stay too long. Some have their retinas burned; some are blinded; others are killed outright, betrayed by an overwhelmed spacesuit. Some are cooked in groups of a dozen or more.
Do you imagine they must have been fools? Do you think you would never make such a mistake? Don’t you be so sure. Really you have no idea. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. You may think you are inured, that
nothing outside the mind can really interest you anymore, as sophisticated and knowledgeable as you are. But you would be wrong. You are a creature of the sun. The beauty and terror of it seen from so close can empty any mind, thrust anyone into a trance. It’s like seeing the face of God, some people say, and it is true that the sun powers all living creatures in the solar system, and in that sense
is
our god. The sight of it can strike thought clean out of your head. People seek it out precisely for that.
So there is reason to worry about Swan Er Hong, a person more inclined than most to try things just to see. She often goes sunwalking, and when she does she skirts the edge of safety, and sometimes stays too long in the light. The immense Jacob’s ladders, the granulated pulsing, the spicules flowing… she has fallen in love with the sun. She worships it; she keeps a shrine to Sol Invictus in her room, performs the
pratahsamdhya
ceremony, the salute to the sun, every morning when she wakes in town. Much of her landscape and performance art is devoted to it, and these days she spends most of her time making goldsworthies and abramovics on the land and her body. So the sun is part of her art.
Now it is her solace too, for she is out there grieving. Now, if one were standing on the promenade topping the city Terminator’s great Dawn Wall, one would spot her there to the south, out near the horizon. She needs to hurry. The city is gliding on its tracks across the bottom of a giant dimple between Hesiod and Kurasawa, and a flood of sunlight will soon pour far to the west. Swan needs to get into town before that happens, yet she still
stands there. From the top of the Dawn Wall she looks like a silver toy. Her spacesuit has a big round clear helmet. Her boots look big and are black with dust. A little booted silver ant, standing there grieving when she should be hustling back to the boarding platform west of town. The other sunwalkers out there are already hustling back to town. Some pull little carts or wheeled travois, hauling their supplies or even their sleeping companions. They’ve timed their returns closely, as the city is very predictable. It cannot deviate from its schedule; the heat of coming day expands the tracks, and the city’s undercarriage is tightly sleeved over them; so sunlight drives the city west.
