Thanks to the wonder of the hide, no one starves or freezes or gets sick on the perfect worlds of the Solarian Alliance. Like a synthetic skin, the hide protects and heals, and can transform people into anything they want to be. Nothing threatens this utopian existence until an extraterrestrial message of unspeakable horror is received. An evil race terrorizes the galaxy, and it's coming toward Earth. . . .Into this world, the Solarian Alliance frees Krim, the last survivor of the Beat asteroid known as the Jack and a prisoner since he saw his world vanish into that strange other space known as Ur. Disgusted with this utopia, Krim enlists in a distant fight at the edge of the solar system, the battle no one on Earth may know about, lest it disrupt their perfect peace . . . the Hidden War.
Release date:
May 15, 2001
Publisher:
Grand Central Publishing
Print pages:
31
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Krim heard the soft click of the audio feedback, felt his finger slow, then push against the slight resistance of the firing mechanism. He waited for the flash, for the brief pain. As the sharp disconnect came, he told himself that his body lived back on Redoubt Ya, that it would be no worse than jerking out of a simulation. The trigger clicked.
The word INOPERATIVE floated before him. He opened his fist, looked at his hand, and saw his fingers shred away. The bogey moved toward him, the crater expanding, and he fell again, as he had fallen so long ago, into the maw of the beast, into captivity.
But not into death this time, he thought. No, not this time into death. Something worse, he feared. Something much, much worse.
TSR® BOOKS
CAPTAINS OUTRAGEOUS
Roy V. Young
CITY OF THE SORCERERS
Mary H. Herbert
GO QUEST, YOUNG MAN
K. B. Bogen
THE HIDDEN WAR
Michael Armstrong
MUS OF KERBRIDGE
Mel Odom
(Available Spring 1995)
F.R.E.E.LANCERS
Paul Kidd
(Available Summer 1995)
Dedicated
To Cap’n Bill Barnwell
Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know: Draw in your head, and sleep the long way home.
Hart Crane, “Voyages V”
Numerous people helped me in the creation of The Hidden War. The concept of the hide is loosely based on the idea of the milsuit in Janet Morris’s Dream Dancer series; I thank her for allowing me to build on that speculative vision. Janet Morris and Chris Morris have, as usual, been supportive of me in this endeavor. Dana Stabenow reviewed an earlier draft and gave me excellent criticism and feedback. Tom Sexton taught me enough about modern poetry and the Beats to allow me to stumble my way through the Jack. My sister, Helen Armstrong, and her husband, Charlie Barnwell, have also been supportive.
I would especially like to thank my editor, Brian Thomsen, for believing in me and this book. Through three novels and two publishers Brian has gently challenged me to write beyond my talent; I hope I have delivered. Thanks.
And, of course, I must thank my wife, Jenny Stroyeck, for her patience and understanding, and for her love.
Thank you all. Bless you.
Michael Armstrong
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”
Krim shuddered as he crossed over from Ur space. Twenty klicks out from the Jack, into real space popped his fighter, long and skinny, a hunk of spidery steel loaded with a blob of meat. Krim shivered the way he might after falling from the piercing intensity of love down into the web of bliss. Love, he thought, thinking of Corso, his lips still damp from her kiss.
An Ameruss battle cruiser had been spotted within attack distance of the home planetoid. The alarm had sounded, and he had rolled out from under from his mate’s embrace and—a hundred-meter dash to the launch tubes!—into the fighter, out of the carrier, out of the strange other space they called Ur. Into battle.
Running a hand through his hair, still tousled from sleep, he pushed the wild black dreadlocks off his forehead and behind his neck. A few stray strands clung to his lips and throat, the smell of Corso still in his mouth, his beard, his skin.
He rubbed his eyebrows, squinted at the hard world around him: the gray steel of his fighter’s cabin, the battered wood console, the manual joystick, and the flickering video flat-screen. Green and gold phosphenes burst into skyrockets on the monitor: a representation of the fighter’s artificial intelligence, Ship’s Animated Mode, thinking.
“Status, Sam,” Krim said. He tapped a few buttons on the console, activating the monitor. “Fighters—I don’t see my fighters, Sam. I’m supposed to have twenty Jack fighters at my back.” They had heard the alarm, surely they’d heard the alarm and launched? Corso had pulled on her coveralls and gone to the command tower of the fighter carrier, the Screaming Angel. And the others, he had seen them running, they had gone to the carrier’s launch tubes, too, hadn’t they? Hadn’t they?
“Sam, where the hell are my fighters?”
Sam hesitated. A red beacon popped on and flashed steadily in the center of the video monitor, a single sharp tone—doon, doon— chiming with each flash. “Put your eyes and arms on, Krim,” Sam said. “We’ve got company.”
“Christ, I hate that.” He sighed, though, and reached for the goggles attached to the top bulkhead. “The fighters, Sam?”
“Jack in, Krim.”
Krim grunted but swung his eyephones down, sealing the bug-eyed goggles tight around the orbits of his skull—sealing away all memory of Corso on the fighter carrier, of the Jack, of safety or sanctuary. He slipped his arms into the gloves of the ship’s body waldo, pulling the rubbery suit over his shoulders as if he were a seal wriggling into its skin. The body waldo hugged his flesh, and sensors on the inside of the suit transferred the motion of his legs and feet and hands to the ship. Slipping on the waldo and connecting directly to Sam felt a bit like making love—except Sam wasn’t human, wasn’t a lover, despite the intimacies shared between man and machine.
Inside the waldo, Sam monitored Krim’s heartbeat and respiration, took care of his excretions, could seal shut in the vacuum of space and give him air, water, and food if need be—could tend to Krim’s needs, as Corso tended him, as he tended her. Krim pulled a helmet onto his head, sealed it to the suit’s neck, and powered up the body waldo.
The console and the viewscreen and the joystick faded away, and yes, he became the ship—no, he and Sam became the ship, the pilot sharing the fighter with the AI the way two hemispheres of a brain might share the same skull and body. Krim fell into Sam’s virtual representation of the universe outside, the way the ship saw the world through its myriad sensors: a black night peppered with pink stars, an indigo night that became populated with salmon-colored rocks and the hint of another horizon glowing behind, pale pink and affirming—the membrane of Ur space.
He swung his head back and up, his field of view expanding and stretching behind him. He saw himself as a floating angel, saw the angel hovering before a crystal globe studded with ruby cathedrals, flying buttresses anchoring the globe to the night: the Jack, his home world, suspended in space. His hands appeared before him, representations in the simulated data world.
Inside the body waldo, Krim held his hand in a fist, saw the fist appear in his vision, and he pulled back on a representation of the fighter’s joystick. The waldo transferred his motions to the controls of the ship. His point of view inside the eyephones shifted from third-person limited to first-person subjective: his. The black night of the Gibsonian construct turned slightly, banked in, the silver- and salmon-colored rocks shifting position, the pink stars fading into dim stasis. And the beast emerged.
A silver cylinder appeared in the view before him, little numbers across its diameter and length giving him its size and scale and then vanishing: fifty meters wide, five hundred long. Pods along the end facing Krim flashed red. Krim knew that meant unused weapons pods. A fully armed battle cruiser—the battle cruiser that the carrier’s sensors had picked up from Ur, that they had seen coming near the Jack, that had triggered the alarms that sent the Jack pilots scrambling into the launch tubes, into the fighters.
Sam’s voice came out of the ether, dim and reassuring, the information spoken only to give him a tag to reality. “Krim, we’re on an intersect course with it,” he said. “Tentative identification: Ameruss battle cruiser Jeane Kirkpatrick.”
“Holy Moloch,” Krim whispered. “It’s come for the Jack itself.” He scanned the field of view, flicked back out to a third-person point of view, to an image of his fighter floating before him. “Where are the other fighters, Sam? Show me the fighters.” Damn, he thought, the first one out, he would be attack leader—or the only fighter, if they hadn’t launched.
“They’re jacking in,” Sam said.
Two asteroids in the middle of the screen separated, two disks rolling away, and the near one moved to show Krim the twenty fighters hiding behind the other asteroid, the rock between the squadron and the Kirkpatrick. Blips of light popped into the simulated reality, into the truth in all its spectrums—the sensor-generated, computer-manipulated virtual reality Krim stared into. First represented as spidery ships like his, the Jack fighters became crystalline angels hovering before him. Numbered labels briefly flickered beside each: NUMBER 6-HART; NUMBER 9-DIANE; NUMBER 4-SNYDER; and seventeen more tags.
Krim pointed at his own ship—a creepy feeling, knowing that a probe behind him gave him the view, knowing that he pointed at himself outside himself. He signed in his chop, his ship’s number, a flowing K drawn like an arrow slashing through a line. He maneuvered his fighter up behind the asteroid, joining the squadron, coordinating the attack. By tradition, as first fighter in position, he’d lead the attack.
“Give me a secure comm back to the carrier, Sam. Transmit situation.”
The pink horizon of Ur space shimmered with silver motes. A thin thread extended from his ship to the crystal globe of the Screaming Angel—Sam making the connection back into Ur. The silver motes hissed, the hiss of Ur itself. “Seance mode,” they called it, like talking to the dead.
“Screaming Angel has been apprised of our situation, Krim,” Sam said. “Stand by for attack plan.”
Ruby-rimmed geometric solids rippled across the pink boundary, the silver motes flickering madly from the fighter carrier to Krim’s fighter and then to the other ships.
“Attack options received,” Sam said. “Plan Alpha, forward assault, probability of—”
“No probabilities, Sam.” He waved a hand. “I don’t want to know. Go with the forward attack, hit it with everything we’ve got. We can’t hold any reserves, we don’t have any reserves.”
“Right,” Sam said. “Plan Alpha initiating, on your mark.”
“You’ve got the wing, Krim,” a voice said from the Screaming Angel. “Say the words.” Corso, Krim thought, at fighter control. More silver motes bounced off the pink fuzz of Ur to all the ships.
Down toward the battle cruiser the Jack fighters swept, a flock of avenging silver angels.
The Jack fighters came out of Ur space in a twisting nebula of two cones, one wing spiraling down toward the Kirkpatrick from Krim’s right, the other from his left. Two vortexes of fighters twisted in opposite directions, whirling and gyrating angels. At the outside of the nebula, Krim waited, commanding, coordinating, watching the attack.
Each fighter, each angel, swung around the edge of the vortex, banking in closer and closer, the fighters on the rims spitting out covering fire. One at a time a fighter would separate from the wing, dive down the center of the cone, and launch a bright light, a missile, at the gray cylinder in the center of Krim’s view.
To Krim the attack looked the way an atom might appear if blown to asteroid size: the Kirkpatrick the nucleus, the Jack fighters the shells of the electrons. He hovered in the outer shell of the attack, a stray ion, perhaps, driving the fighters before it.
And like a horrid nucleus, the Kirkpatrick sucked the fighters down to it, pulled their missiles into it, absorbing the blasts and shredding the wings of the angels, or pulling them to her. The gray cylinder grew larger, became a squid with thousands of clawed arms, grabbing the angels out of space and ripping their wings off. The Kirkpatrick took on a face, the face of her namesake, with Medusa-snake hair, snake body, wings of a harpy, and the mouth of a wolf. In the back of his mind, Krim knew that the ship was a ship and the fighters were fighters, but Sam made the beast the reality he saw—the images abstractions of what was happening—to better represent the data.
As each fighter, each angel, fell to the Ameruss monster, the enemy ship increased its strength. Sam listed the names of the lost pilots: Hart, Diprima, Burroughs, Normailer . . . gone, all gone, pulled into the beast. When the last of the fighters vanished into the Kirkpatrick, and she turned to face Krim, he swung his fist before him. The image whirled, became blank, then turned to a somber orange, showing the back side of an asteroid as Krim’s fighter retreated behind the safety of the hard planetoid. Krim caught his breath, reached behind him, toward the pink horizon with the silver motes, grasping for more angels, but finding himself alone, the last fighter.
“Prepare to launch second attack wave,” Sam said.
“Second attack wave!” Krim yelled, his own voice booming inside the helmet, amplified even louder through the simulated reality. “Son of a bitch, Sam. What wave? Aren’t there more fighters? We need more fighters! I can’t do it alone.”
“There are no more fighters, Krim.”
“Pull ’em in from the Screaming Angel, Sam.” He thought of the launch tubes on the carrier, vacant, empty, sucked of life.
“There are no more fighters.”
“Crap. Mines, Sam, rock batteries, do we have anything?” He waved his arms, grabbing the pockets and folds on the outside of his body waldo. All he felt was the empty fuzziness of Ur, of the other reality beyond.
“You’re it, babe,” Sam said.
“Damn it, Sam. Don’t tell me that!”
Sam said nothing.
Sighing, Krim eased back on his fist. He seemed to pull the orange rock before him—felt the fighter move through space toward an asteroid—then reached up with his hand to the right side of the image, clicked on his right eye, and moved the hand over the horizon of the asteroid he hid behind. His vision split into the orange background of his location and the dark space over the edge of the rock. The harpy, the battle cruiser, continued the attack.
The Ameruss ship had destroyed the Jack fighters, Krim knew, and the Kirkpatrick continued her assault. They’d been suckered into the attack, Krim realized, to reveal the general location of the Jack. And now the Kirkpatrick pinpointed the location in the crudest way. The harpy moved its tail toward Krim, and the tail branched out into a tentacle, a hydra’s head of tentacles. The tentacles grabbed orange rocks, pulling them to her maw and swallowing them. In a cluster of orange rocks, the crystal globe of the Jack glowed. Behind one orange rock, Krim hid. In Ur itself, the fighter cruiser Screaming Angel hid, useless, its fighters gone. The Kirkpatrick kept eating, kept blasting away at the nickel-iron or basalt asteroids, destroying and destroying until the battle cruiser could hit Krim, or hit the Jack—the home planetoid.
“What do I do, Sam? What can I do?”
“Attack, Krim.”
“Got to clear it with the Screaming Angel, Sam.”
“No time to upload the data, Krim. They can’t help you. You have to choose your own attack.”
“Shit.” He bit his lip. “Give me an attack plan—give me the odds this time.”
Sam hummed, and then displayed scenarios: An image of the harpy, writhing and whirling away, the words PROBABILITY 5 PERCENT flickering underneath the image. An image of the harpy with half its tentacles ripped away, rolling slowly over and over, disabled, PROBABILITY 15 PERCENT. And superimposed before each image was the angel of Krim’s fighter, one image flying away (PROBABILITY LESS THAN 5 PERCENT), another with the angel’s wings twisted (PROBABILITY 65 PERCENT).
Krim felt his heart beat slowly, felt his blood course through his veins, and his lungs slowly inhale and expel air. His body, a thing outside. Sam displayed before him images of other attack plans, quick-flowing ribbons and dots of his fighter and the Kirkpatrick. He reached out, grabbed one image, the ghost of his hand rising into the simulated reality, and he brought the program back inside.
“That one,” Krim said. “Let’s do it. Transmit final message to the Jack and the Angel, and then let’s hit it.”
“Message sent. Say the words, babe,” Sam said.
Krim smiled. “Holy holy holy!”
The fighter attacked.
Krim pushed away from the orange blob in front of him, reached with his data hand toward a rack of weapons floating at the bottom of the field, and threw a flaming javelin at the asteroid. The javelin, a plasma torpedo, sundered the asteroid into thousands of quivering orange blobs. The blobs fell down toward the Kirkpatrick, and the harpy turned to Krim, swiveled her tentacles, and grabbed and snatched at the orange rocks. Krim turned his hands, and the image of the rocks flowing down to the Kirkpatrick turned as the harpy followed the rocks down. She flicked her fingertips, and blots of silver light shot out through the rocks to the battle cruiser. The orange blobs tumbled down toward her, leaving Krim in their wake. He squeezed his hands, catching up with the swarm, then losing them again.
More speed, he thought, I need more speed.
“Prepare to blow nukes,” Krim said.
A flickering red switch appeared before him, a yellow box outlining it—a pull-down switch, like a breaker.
“Confirm control override,” Sam said.
“Affirmative. I’m going to blow the nukes, Sam.”
Sam burped, thought. “Use of nukes may disable return capability.” He displayed an image of the fighter trapped in gray ice, disabled. He burped again. “You might not be able to go back to Ur space, friend.” Sam displayed another image of the fighter, the angel, banging against a flickering pink wall.
“Crap,” Krim said. He thought of the Jack, of its warm warrens, its great chambers, of the paths through his home world worn into his feet. He thought of Corso, safe in Ur on the fighter carrier, back in the command tower, watching him, he hoped, monitoring. No way back to Ur, to escape? The Kirkpatrick advanced, only Krim and the fighter between her and his home.
“We’ll do it anyway.” He thrust his hand into the image, ready to pull down the flashing red switch. The pink edge of Ur shimmered again, and a slender thread extended from the carrier to him: communication, a secure comm-link to the fighter base.
“Holy Moloch, this is Green Eyes,” Corso said. “Do you copy?”
Krim moved his image hand to the silver thread, pulled it to him. Corso. “Green Eyes, this is Holy Moloch.” Corso’s voice soothed him, calmed him. Corso would bring him through this, would see the Kirkpatrick destroyed and bring him home. Krim saw the thread quiver, knew Sam had begun uploading his battle log to the Screaming Angel. At least they had bought some time.
“We got your final message. Sam-link indicates you are now going to blow the Big One. Confirm.”
“Affirmative,” Krim said.
“Uh, just a second, Holy Moloch.” The silver line flickered as Sam finished the upload, and a half minute later the voice came back on. “Okay, Holy Moloch. This raises an interesting possibility.” Corso’s voice cracked a bit, the way a voice cracked if it had a cold. “Uh, very interesting. If you blow the Big One, there is a strong possibility that it will open up a gap into Never Never Land big enough for Papa to enter. Do you copy?”
He saw before him an image of the crystal globe fading below the pink horizon and vanishing, joining the smaller globe of the fighter carrier. A gap large enough for the Jack to enter Ur space? Krim smiled. That would save it, if they could survive there. “Copy, Green Eyes.” Into Ur! If the whole planetoid, the whole world could escape . . . Sam projected another image, that of the globe fading, one lone angel whirling away and away into the arms of the harpy. Abandoned!
“Sam says blowing the Big One will close the gap from this end. Do you copy?”
“Copy, Holy Moloch.” Corso paused, and in that pause Krim saw where the crack in the voice had co. . .
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