Old Man's War Boxed Set 1 (42 page)

“No Special Forces soldiers have died because of their BrainPal,” Jane said.

“Oh, no, not
now,
” Cainen said. “But I wonder what you would find if you went back far enough.”

“What do you know?” Sagan asked.

“I know nothing,” Cainen said, mildly. “It’s merely idle speculation. But the point here is that you can’t compare Special Forces waking up with ‘consciousness’ with what you were trying to do with Private Dirac. It’s not the same thing. It’s not even close.”

Sagan changed the subject. “You said that it’s possible Boutin’s consciousness might not even be in Dirac’s brain anymore,” she said.

“It’s possible,” Cainen said. “The consciousness needs input; without it, it dissipates. That’s one reason why it’s near impossible to keep a consciousness pattern coherent outside the brain, and why Boutin’s a genius for doing it. My suspicion is that if Boutin’s consciousness was in there, it’s already leaked away, and you’ve got just another soldier on your hands. But there’s no way to tell whether it’s in there or not. Its pattern would be subsumed by Private Dirac’s consciousness.”

“If it
is
in there, what would wake it up?” Sagan asked.

“You’re asking me to speculate?” Cainen asked. Sagan nodded. “The reason you couldn’t access the Boutin consciousness in the first place is that the brain didn’t have memory and experience. Maybe as your Private Dirac accumulates experiences, one will be close enough in its substance to unlock some part of that consciousness.”

“And then he’d become Charles Boutin,” Sagan said.

“He might,” Cainen said. “Or he might not. Private Dirac has his own consciousness now. His own sense of self. If Boutin’s consciousness woke up, it wouldn’t be the only consciousness in there. It’s up to you to decide whether that’s good or bad, Lieutenant Sagan. I can’t tell you that, or what would truly happen if Boutin got woken up.”

“Those are the things I needed you to tell me,” Sagan said.

Cainen gave the Rraey equivalent of a chuckle. “Get me a lab,” he said. “Then I might be able to give you some answers.”

“I thought you said you would never help us,” Sagan said.

Cainen switched back to English. “Much time to think,” he said. “Too much time. Language lessons not enough.” And then back to Ckann. “And this doesn’t help you against my people. But it helps
you
.”

“Me?” Sagan said. “I know why you helped me this time; I bribed you with computer access. Why would you help me beyond this? I made you a prisoner.”

“And you struck me with a disease that will kill me if I don’t get a daily dose of antidote from my enemies,” Cainen said. He reached into the shallow desk moulded from the wall of the cell and pulled out a small injector. “My medicine,” he said. “They allow me to self-administer. Once I decided not to inject myself, to see if they would let me die. I’m still here, so that’s the answer to that. But they let me writhe on the floor for hours first. Just like
you
did, come to think of it.”

“None of this explains why you would want to help me,” Sagan said.

“Because you
remembered
me,” Cainen said. “To everyone else, I am just another one of your many enemies, barely worth providing a book to keep me from going insane with boredom. One day they could simply forget my antidote and let me die, and it would be all the same to them. You at least see me as having value. In the very small universe I live in now, that makes you my best and only friend, enemy though you are.”

Sagan stared at Cainen, remembering the
haughtiness
of him the first time they met. He was pitiful and craven now, and that momentarily struck Sagan as the saddest thing she’d ever seen.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and was surprised the words came out of her mouth.

Another Rraey chuckle from Cainen. “We were planning to destroy your people, Lieutenant,” Cainen said. “And we still might. You needn’t feel too apologetic.”

Sagan had nothing to say to that. She signaled to the brig officer that she was ready to leave; a guard came and stood with an Empee while the cell door opened.

As the door slid shut behind her, she turned back to Cainen. “Thank you for your help. I will ask about a lab,” she said.

“Thank you,” Cainen said. “I won’t get my hopes up.”

“That’s probably a good idea,” Sagan said.

“And Lieutenant,” Cainen said. “A thought. Your Private Dirac will be participating in your military actions.”

“Yes,” Sagan said.

“Watch him,” Cainen said. “In humans and Rraey both, the stress of battle leaves permanent marks on our brains. It’s a primal experience. If Boutin is still in there, it might be war that brings him out. Either by itself or through some combination of experiences.”

“How do you suggest I watch him in battle?” Sagan asked.

“That’s your department,” Cainen said. “Except for when you captured me, I’ve never been to war. I couldn’t begin to tell you. But if you’re worried about Dirac, that’s what I would do if I were you. You humans have an expression: ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’ It seems like your Private Dirac could be both. I’d keep him very close indeed.”

The
Kite
caught the Rraey cruiser napping.

The Skip Drive was a touchy piece of technology. It made interstellar travel possible not by propelling ships faster than the speed of light, which was impossible, but by punching through space-time and placing spaceships (or anything equipped with a Skip Drive) into any spot within that universe those using the Skip Drive pleased.

(Actually, this wasn’t exactly true; on a logarithmic scale Skip Drive travel became less reliable the more space there was between the initiation point and the destination point. The cause of what was called the Skip Drive Horizon Problem was not entirely understood, but its effects were lost ships and crews.

This kept humans and other races that used the Skip Drive in the same interstellar “neighborhood” as their home planets in the short run; if a race wanted to keep control of its colonies, as almost all did, its colonial expansion was ruled by the sphere defined by the Skip Drive horizon. In one sense this point was moot; thanks to the intense competition for real estate in the neighborhood humanity lived in, no intelligent race save one had a reach that came close to its own Skip Drive horizon. The exception was the Consu, whose technology was so advanced relative to the other races in the local space that it was an open question as to whether it used the Skip Drive at all.)

Among the many quirks of the Skip Drive, which had to be tolerated if one were to employ it, were its departure and arrival needs. When departing, the Skip Drive needed relatively “flat” space-time, which meant the Skip Drive could only be activated when the ship using it was well outside the gravity well of close-by planets; this required travel in space using engines. But a ship using the Skip Drive could arrive as close to a planet as it wanted—it could even, theoretically, arrive on a planet surface, if a navigator confident enough of his or her skill could be found to do it. While landing a spacecraft on a planet via Skip Drive navigation was officially and strongly discouraged by the Colonial Union, the Colonial Defense Forces recognized the strategic value of sudden and unexpected arrivals.

When the
Kite
arrived over the planet its human settlers called Gettysburg, it popped into existence within a quarter of a light-second from the Rraey cruiser, and with its dual rail guns warmed up and ready to fire. It took the
Kite
’s prepared weapons crew less than a minute to orient and target the hapless cruiser, which only at the end could be seen trying to respond, and the magnetized rail-gun projectiles needed less than two and a third seconds to travel the distance between the
Kite
and its quarry. The sheer speed of the rail-gun projectiles was more than sufficient to pierce the hide of the Rraey craft and tunnel through its innards like a bullet through soft butter, but the projectile designers hadn’t left it at that; the projectiles themselves were designed to expand explosively at the merest contact with matter.

An infinitesimal fraction of a second after the projectiles penetrated the Rraey craft, they fragmented and shards vectored crazily relative to their initial trajectory, turning the projectile into this universe’s fastest shotgun blast. The expenditure of energy required to change these trajectories was naturally immense and slowed down the shards considerably. However, the shards had energy to spare, and it simply meant each shard had more time to damage the Rraey vessel before it exited the wounded ship and began a long and frictionless journey through space.

Thanks to the relative positions of the
Kite
and the Rraey cruiser, the first rail-gun projectile struck the Rraey cruiser forward and starboard; the fragments from this projectile tunneled through diagonally and upward, not-so-cleanly chewing through several levels of the ship and turning a number of the Rraey crew into bloody mist. The entrance wound of this projectile was a clean circle seventeen centimeters wide; the exit wound was a ragged hole ten meters wide with a gout of metal, flesh and atmosphere blasting silently into the vacuum.

The second rail-gun projectile entered aft of the first, following a parallel directory, but failed to fragment; its exit wound was only marginally larger than its entrance wound. It made up for this failure by breaching one of the engines of the Rraey craft. The cruiser’s automatic damage controls slammed down bulkheads, isolating the damaged engine, and took the other two engines off-line to avoid a cascading failure. The Rraey ship was switched to emergency power, which offered it only a minimum of offensive and defensive options, none of which would be at all effective against the
Kite
.

The
Kite,
its own power partially drained (but recharging) through the use of the rail guns, sealed the deal by launching five conventional tactical nuclear missiles at the Rraey cruiser. It would take them more than a minute to reach the cruiser, but the
Kite
now had the luxury of time. The cruiser was the only Rraey ship in the area. A small flash issued forth from the Rraey ship: The doomed cruiser was launching a Skip drone, designed to quickly get to Skip distance and let the rest of the Rraey military know what happened to it. The
Kite
launched a sixth and final missile toward the drone, which would be overtaken and destroyed less than ten thousand klicks from Skip distance. By the time the Rraey found out about their cruiser, the
Kite
would be light-years away.

Presently the Rraey cruiser was an expanding debris field, and Lieutenant Sagan and her 2nd Platoon received their clearance for their part of the mission.

Jared tried to calm the first-mission nerves, and the mild fear brought by the choppiness of the troop transport’s descent into the Gettysburg atmosphere, by trying to close out distractions and focus his energies. Daniel Harvey, sitting next to him, was making that difficult.

::Goddamn wildcat colonists,:: Harvey said, as the troop transport plunged through the atmosphere. ::They go off and build illegal colonies and then come crying to us when some other fucking species is crawling up their holes.::

::Relax, Harvey,:: said Alex Roentgen. ::You’re going to give yourself a migraine.::

::What I want to know is how these fuckers even manage to
get
to these places,:: Harvey said. ::The Colonial Union doesn’t bring ’em out here. And you can’t go anywhere without CU say-so.::

::Sure you can,:: Roentgen said. ::The CU doesn’t control
all
interstellar travel, just the travel that humans do.::

::These colonists are human, Einstein,:: Harvey said.

::Hey,:: said Julie Einstein. ::Leave me out of this.::

::It’s just an expression, Julie,:: Harvey said.

::The colonists are human, but the people who are transporting them
aren’t,
you idiot,:: Roentgen said. ::Wildcat colonists buy transport from aliens the CU trades with, and the aliens take them where they want to go.::

::That’s stupid,:: Harvey said, and looked around the platoon for agreement. Most of the platoon were either resting with their eyes closed or studiously avoiding the discussion; Harvey had a reputation as an argumentative blowhard. ::The CU could stop that if they wanted to. Tell the aliens to stop picking up wildcat passengers. That would save us from having to risk getting
our
asses shot off.::

From the forward seat, Jane Sagan turned her head toward Harvey. ::The CU doesn’t want to stop wildcat colonists,:: she said, in a bored tone.

::Why the hell not?:: Harvey asked.

::They’re troublemakers,:: Sagan said. ::The sort of person who will defy the CU and start a wildcat colony is the sort of person who could cause trouble at home if he wasn’t allowed to go. The CU figures it’s not worth the trouble. So they let them go, and look the other way. Then they’re on their own.::

::Until they get in trouble,:: Harvey sneered.

::Usually even then,:: Sagan said. ::Wildcatters know what they’re getting into.::

::Then what
are
we doing here?:: Roentgen said. ::Not to take Harvey’s side, but these
are
wildcat colonists.::

::Orders,:: Sagan said, and closed her eyes, ending the discussion. Harvey snorted and was about to reply when the turbulence suddenly became especially bad.

::Looks like the Rraey on the ground just figured out we’re up here,:: Chad Assisi said from the pilot’s seat. ::We’ve got three more missiles on their way. Hang on, I’m going to try to burn them before they get too close.:: Several seconds later came a low, solid hum; the transport’s defensive maser fired up to deal with the missiles.

::Why don’t we just plaster these guys from orbit?:: Harvey said. ::We’ve done that before.::

::There are humans down there, aren’t there?:: Jared said, venturing a comment. ::I’d guess we’d want to avoid using tactics that would injure or kill them.::