NOVEL NEXT Sk-9. Beware the Stars
“Hunter! Hunter! Wake up, Hunter!”
Swaddled in blankets and sleep, Hunter squeezed his eyes shut tighter, hoping this would somehow drown out the hissing in his ear. Alas, no luck.
“Hunter! Psst!”
As if the noise wasn’t bad enough, someone started poking him. Little jabs between his ribs, not sharp enough to be painful, but annoying nonetheless.
Trapped in the twilight zone between sleep and awake, and very much resentful towards the begrudging consciousness that stirred his neurons, Hunter pried his eyes open warily. A face filled his vision… pale skin, black hair to the shoulders, and a big gap-toothed grin.
His best friend, Lyle.
“Mmmmrgrph,” Hunter said in greeting. His twelve-year-old body, malnourished and overworked, did not take kindly to sudden awakenings in the middle of the night. Even so, his friend persisted.
“Hunter! Look at what I found!” Lyle’s face withdrew, and Hunter took the chance to rub the sleep from his eyes before he sat up slowly and looked around the room.
It was a small annex, quite literally tacked onto the side of the great factory that was their home. Even now, in the middle of the night, Hunter could hear the distant din of the forge churning out Gravity Frames by the thousands. A half-dozen other sleeping workers were all huddled against the wall closest to the factory floor, basking in the small amount of waste heat that seeped through as a ward against the omnipresent freeze.
“Lyle… what time is it?” Hunter grumbled, making sure to mix in plenty of annoyance with the waning sleepiness in his voice.
“Dunno. Past midnight, maybe?” Lyle said dismissively, his grin never faltering. “Does it matter?”
Hunter groaned and rubbed his eyes. “Urgh. We have to be up for our shift again in a few hours, Lyle. We need to get some sleep.”
Lyle shook his head emphatically, sending his hair flying with each motion. “Who cares about that? I found something great! Look, look!” He held out a dusty book with a yellow cover that was half-rotted away.
Hunter sighed. “Did you go out into the ruins again? You know how dangerous that is.”
Lyle stuck out his tongue and made a noise not unlike an upset horse. “C’mon, Hunter. The reclamation squads just throw all this interesting stuff out! They only care about harvesting steel and rebar, not books!”
Hunter heard a murmur, and saw some of the other children in the room stirring. He sighed and wrapped a few threadbare blankets around himself, at last resigned to the fact that his sleep for the night was shot. “Fine, fine. Let’s go outside so we don’t wake up anyone else.”
He reluctantly padded towards the door, and Lyle followed.
******
The asteroid impact that destroyed Phoenix in 2044, five years earlier, had also devastated the nearby city of Tucson… albeit not completely. The mere fact that around half the population had survived the initial shockwave had convinced the Politburo to establish a Gravity Frame factory in the ruins, to serve as both shelter and work for the remaining residents. This factory was one of a half-dozen scattered across the whole Southwest Subdivision of the Pacific American Industrial Zone, mostly in the ruins of once-gleaming cities.
The roof of the factory, where Lyle and Hunter now stood, offered a stunning view of the surrounding city ruins. Even in the freezing dark of cloud-shrouded midnight, the myriad lights of Construction Frames digging through wrecked buildings for valuable alloys bathed the scene in a grim fluorescence. Hunter watched disinterestedly for a moment as one of the yellow-and-black striped Frames tore into a long-abandoned office tower, collapsing it into rubble with fists that bore the force of wrecking balls. The Frame got down on its hands and knees and began to paw through the wreckage, tossing steel beams and plates into a growing pile that would soon be dragged back to the factory and smelted down. The sight of humanity digging through the bones of its past to desperately defend the present never failed to fill Hunter with an overwhelming sense of…
What was he feeling, anyway? Apathy? Resignation? A grim sense of purpose? Strong emotions were Lyle’s forte, not his. Hunter simply wanted to survive.
“You can’t see anything…” came Lyle’s voice from his right. Hunter turned to see his friend’s neck craned and eyes fixed on the omnipresent cloud cover, a suffocating blanket of dust that still choked the skies years after the Sarcophage’s asteroid attacks had been stopped by the Almaz Array.
“Anything?” Hunter asked, shivering as a passing breeze cut through his layers of protective blankets.
“Any stars, I mean,” Lyle explained, his eyes still fixed on the occulted heavens. “Do you remember seeing any stars? Like… ever?”
Hunter shrugged. “Not really. Maybe I saw some as a toddler? I don’t really remember them, though.”
“Same,” Lyle replied, finally dragging his eyes downwards. “Isn’t that tragic?”
Hunter was about to shrug again, then thought that might be in bad taste. “I guess?”
Lyle split open the yellow book, flipping to a spot he’d marked with a dog ear, and presented it to Hunter. It was a two-page spread, a high-resolution photograph of the night sky taken by an old observatory somewhere deep in the Sonoran Desert. A field of numberless stars shone brilliantly against a black background, wreathed in the ghostly glow of the Milky Way.
“This is what they used to look like, on a clear night with no light pollution,” Lyle said in abject wonderment. “Aren’t they beautiful?”
Hunter had long ago suppressed his emotions for his own mental well-being, but for Lyle’s sake he managed to dredge up a mote of awe. “Yeah, they are.”
“I want to see them someday,” Lyle declared. “Not a photo or a newsreel or anything, but in person. I want to see real stars with my own eyes.”
Hunter placed his hand on Lyle’s shoulder in what he hoped was a reassuring gesture. “In three years we’ll be drafted and sent to the General Military Academy at Kirtland. Then after four years of boot camp and Frame training, we’ll go into space ourselves. You’ll get to see those stars someday.”
Lyle nodded, his jaw set in determination. “I want you to be there. I want us to see them together.”
A small twinge poked at Hunter’s frozen heart, and he cracked a slight smile. “Yeah. Me too.”
The two boys stared up at the sky for a minute longer before shuffling back inside the factory’s relative warmth.
+++++
Fourteen years later, against a field of a trillion gleaming stars, Hunter desperately fought for his life.
“Shields at 22%,” Sveta urgently announced. “Another swarm coming into sensor range at 242 mark 021. Composition, Spineball-Clawtooth 1:2.75.”
Hunter twisted Sveta’s controls, spiraling around an incoming barrage of spines before loosing a volley of positron fire from her shoulder cannons. “How long until our next warp jump?”
“22 seconds.” Sveta’s voice took on an air of pleading. “Please try to not get hit in the meantime; the more punishment the shields take, the longer the recharge cycle.”
Hunter grumbled under his breath; despite the wonderful protection afforded by the energy shields, they were not limitless. As such, he’d become very good at dodging incoming volleys, just like the pilots of yore who had defended the Absolute Line. Still, his hands ached from the strain. He would give anything for a moment’s rest, or even a brief nap.
Pushing that thought aside, he gunned Sveta’s gravity fins and accelerated towards the incoming swarm. He effortlessly wove between streams of spinefire before igniting both plasma blades and crashing right into the enemy formation. There was a frantic whirlwind of a melee, and a moment later the Gravity Frame emerged unscathed from an expanding cloud of scorched flesh.
“Nicely done,” Sveta said. “Jumping to warp in three… two… one…”
There was a flare of purple light, then the cockpit projection went black. Six seconds later the stars returned with another purple flare, and Hunter allowed himself to relax… if only for a moment.
“How long?” he asked, leaning back in his seat.
“Twenty-two minutes until they’re on us again,” Sveta answered, popping up her avatar in a video chat window. “It will take twenty minutes for the shields to recharge fully, and 43 minutes until we can warp again.”
Hunter raised an eyebrow. “43 minutes? That’s nine minutes longer than last time!”
Sveta nodded once, her mouth pressed into a grim line. “Making this many warp jumps back to back is taxing the drive’s more sensitive components. We’ve already blown through several planned maintenance cycles, and the nuclear fresnels are almost shot, slowing our discharge of the dark matter buildup in the reality furnace. For that matter, the shield grid is starting to decay as well. If we lose any more emitters, it will fail completely.”
Sveta brought up a master systems display with several flashing red segments, and Hunter frowned as he examined it. “I thought Gravity Frames were certified for at least ten days of continuous operation before needing service.”
“Normally, yes,” Sveta said, sounding a bit sheepish at her own multiplying malfunctions. “The warp drive and shield are brand-new technology, however. The milspec certification process was kinda rushed since our launch date moved up.”
“Great,” Hunter complained. “I really drew the short straw, huh? Dealing with the rare instance of unreliable Soviet weaponry while I’m fighting to save a whole species from extinction.”
That drew a wry chuckle from Sveta. “Well, sorry I’m not up to Kalashnikov standards. Look on the bright side, though! Once we get back to the Radiolaria Galactica, we’ll have accumulated tons of field data that will help the mechanics install more reliable components!”
Hunter shook his head, the corner of his mouth lifting slightly. “You’re boundlessly optimistic as usual, Sveta. I don’t know how you do it.”
Sveta smirked. “The digital equivalent of a coffee drip going straight into my bloodstream. Life’s easier when you’re always hopped up on cyber-caffeine.”
The two stared at each other for a long moment before bursting out in laughter. It felt good to laugh… it wasn’t something Hunter did a lot. He’d heard other pilots say being around Sveta tended to lift their moods; if nothing else, the girl had spunk to spare.
Still chuckling softly, he leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. The stims coursing through his body wouldn’t let him so much as doze off, but it felt good to rest for a moment. He sensed his muscles relax and his breathing slow. God, was he looking forward to a hot shower and a week’s bunk time after all this was over… and the warm companionship of a certain someone, of course.
“Eighteen minutes,” Sveta announced.
+++++
“Mission time expired. Ending simulation,” droned an emotionless, synthesized voice.
A teenaged Hunter exhaled and leaned back in his cockpit chair as the simulator screen surrounding him smash cut to deep black garnished with a blinking green cursor.
“Results, please,” he asked the disembodied voice.
The voice kept time to the blinking green text in front of Hunter as it displayed the simulation results. “Elapsed mission time: 16 hours and 32 minutes. Kill-death ratio: 4229:0. Damage incurred: 20% superficial, none critical. Allies lost: 2. Accuracy rate: 81%. Final score: 93. Would you like a detailed hard copy of these results?”
Hunter clenched his teeth; his score was a full point lower than his last simulator run; he vaguely wondered if he was losing his touch. Granted, his scores were among the highest in his class, but still… 92% wasn’t good enough to survive the horrors that lurked up in the stars. Not by a long shot.
And it certainly wasn’t good enough to protect Lyle.
“Would you like a detailed hard copy of these results?” the computerized voice repeated.
“No,” he mumbled. “Thank you.”
“You are welcome, Cadet Kretzer. Please vacate the simulator so another cadet may use it.”
Hunter obliged. As he exited the small door at the back of the cockpit, he found himself in the center of a huge, brightly-lit warehouse space where some dozen Gravity Frame simulators, each the size of a small car, churned and gyrated on huge pistons. Wordlessly, he climbed down the ladder to the ground.
The staff officer in charge of the simulators, who sat at a small desk in the middle of the huge machines, waved to Hunter as he exited. “Damn, kid, nice job!” she said enthusiastically. “Sixteen hours and you still kept your score over 90%? You’re a savant, that’s for sure!”
Hunter responded with his trademark retort and shrugged. “It’s no big deal. The pilots up on the Line fight for days at a time, especially during surges. I need to be at least as good as them.”
The officer frowned and eyed Hunter warily. “I see a lotta driven kids come in here on leave time, but you’re among the most intense. This war personal to you, kid?”
Hunter shook his head. “No. I just have something worth protecting, that’s all.”
The officer breathed a sigh of relief. “Glad to hear it. Some of the revenge kids, the ones with dead parents, are way too intense. I just saw one flip out when he heard the rumors.”
Hunter raised an eyebrow. “Rumors? What rumors?”
******
“What do you mean the war is OVER?!” Lyle exclaimed, his fists clenched so tightly his nails dug into his palms.
Hunter looked over to his friend, who was standing next to the bunk bed they shared and dressed in a flawlessly-pressed cadet’s uniform. Lyle’s long hair, which had grown past his shoulders, was now pulled up in a high ponytail.
“Everyone’s talking about it,” Hunter explained as he flopped down on the bottom bunk; the General Military Academy’s barracks could not be considered luxurious by any stretch of the imagination, but even a thin, threadbare mattress was leagues better than sleeping on the floor. “They haven’t announced anything officially yet, but buzz is the entire Sarcophage army just… suddenly retreated. Apparently scientists on Eros deployed some sort of new telepathic weapon that rendered the whole swarm docile.”
“That’s… uh, wow… that’s…” Lyle’s voice trailed off and he leaned over the bed, his face now directly above Hunter’s. The latter became lost in his eyes for a moment, deep seas of limpid purple framed by a smidge of eyeshadow and perfectly plucked eyebrows. Hunter never understood how Lyle had the energy to take such meticulous care of his appearance, even going so far as to mix his own cosmetics out of discarded ingredients from the supplies in their weekly ration packs. Then again, puberty had been kind to the black-haired boy, granting him an effortless lithe gracefulness as opposed to Hunter’s own blocky, clumsy awkwardness.
The thought of his dislike of his own body caused Hunter to feel a familiar pang of jealousy twist his stomach, and he quickly refocused on the conversation at hand to drown it out.
“That’s good news, right?” he said, finishing Lyle’s abortive thought from earlier. “Now we’re not all gonna die.”
“Yeah, that’s… good…” Lyle said, sounding unsure. He fiddled with the tip of his ponytail nervously, eyes distant in deep thought. “We… we still get to go to space, right? They’ll still need Gravity Frame pilots, right?”
Hunter, ever the stalwart, shrugged. “I’m sure. Even if the swarm around Earth is gone, we still gotta go retake Mars and the Belt, right? I’m sure they got infestations on Io and Pluto too.”
Lyle nodded. “I suppose…”
“And both of us graduate in three months anyway. They ain’t gonna kick us out after investing so much time and resources into our military education.”
Lyle sighed and spun around, effortlessly flopping down on the bunk a half-meter away from Hunter. “So we’ll still get to see them?”
Hunter rolled onto his side and studied his friend’s profile. Lyle’s eyes were distant, looking past the ceiling of the barracks to the greater things beyond, things that (for the moment) only existed in his imagination. Lyle was ever the dreamer, and Hunter had allowed himself to be swept up in that dream; he sure as hell wasn’t about to abandon it now. Not after all those simulator hours, all that training and effort.
“Of course we will, Lyle,” Hunter said, mustering up all the encouragement he could. “Even if they don’t need Gravity Frame pilots anymore, we can join the Engineering Brigades and repair space colonies, or work in asteroid mining. With Frame certification, we have options.”
Lyle’s eyes refocused and turned to Hunter, who felt his heart skip a beat. “You’re right,” Lyle said, a smile brightening his delicate features. “How about we go put in some more simulator time, and you tell me everything you know?”
Hunter didn’t really want to do another round in the Gravity Frame simulators after his last marathon session… but he did want to spend time with Lyle, so it all balanced out. “Sure thing. Let’s go.”
The two boys, lost in each other’s company, quickly shuffled out of the barracks, leaving no sound behind except the soft hissing of the air filtration.
++++++
A cacophonous chaos of wailing sirens assaulted Hunter’s ears at the same time one of the control consoles exploded, sending a shower of smoke and sparks pinballing around the cockpit. The little flickers bounced off Hunter’s Inertia Suit harmlessly, but he still reflexively flinched.
“SVETA!” he screamed while desperately steering her around a barrage of incoming spinefire. There was no response at first, although the sirens did begin to shut down one-by-one. Once merciful quiet was restored, Sveta’s flickering hologram appeared.
“The warp drive just shorted out,” she reported glumly, her voice underlined with static. “It took half the power transformers with it, so the shields are gone too. We still have weapons and sublight, and eighteen our Strike Fins, but that’s it.”
“Shit,” Hunter cursed, twisting up the acceleration and cleaving a Clawtooth in two with plasma blades. He felt the sluggishness in Sveta’s response time, an indication of just how bad the power grid failures were.
“Shit indeed,” echoed Sveta. “We still have at least twelve hours to go before the Radiolaria might arrive, at the earliest.”
Hunter frowned as he scanned the stars for the next enemy. “Will Crabworld be okay? It would be a shame if all of this was for nothing. I’ve grown a bit attached to those giant crustacean nerds.”
“Me too,” Sveta chuckled for a moment before resuming her grim expression. “To be honest, Hunter, I’m not sure. We’ve managed to lure the swarm several hundred million kilometers away, but the moment we’re gone they might resume attacking the crabs. Only Moby can truly divine what a Sarcophage swarm will do next.”
Hunter felt his stomach sink, in the same instance he spotted a distant Spineball and pulled the trigger. “So what now? Go out in a blaze of glory and pray for the best?”
Sveta was silent for a moment as her hyperprocessors whirled rapidly. “Perhaps…” Suddenly she snapped her fingers, slightly startling Hunter. “Aha! What if we enacted the Schwarzschild Protocol?”
Hunter was about to let his jaw hang slack, then saw another incoming swarm and instead danced around them delicately, picking them apart from afar with shoulder cannon blasts. When their smoking atoms scattered to the void, he turned back to Sveta and resumed his shocked expression. “The Schwarzschild Protocol? Isn’t that prohibited?”
“Well, yes, technically,” Sveta admitted, “although that’s never stopped me before. Intentionally overloading my reality furnace will result in an explosion that creates a black hole nearly a hundred kilometers in diameter. The black hole will evaporate after a few minutes, but…”
“But it will take out thousands of Sarcophage before it does,” Hunter said, his eyes lighting up with understanding. “Especially if we dive right into the heart of the swarm before setting it off. That will buy the crabs more time, maybe even enough to hold out until the Radiolaria gets here. How exactly does this plan not result in our deaths, though?”
Sveta responded by opening a window that displayed multi-spectrum comm frequencies. “I still have a signal to my Telepresence Doll back on Crabworld via gravitics, and the Doll has enough computer memory to store an uploaded consciousness in addition to my programs. If you authorize it, I can scan your brain with my laser, upload you and send your compressed AI file and my own memories back to the Doll. Then it can hide out in the caves with our crab friends, laying low until the Radiolaria shows up.”
Hunter felt his aching stomach twist into knots. The military had offered him upload before, but he’d always refused. There were numerous advantages, of course… immortality, super strength, freedom from aging and disease, and (perhaps most enticing for Hunter) the Dolls required neither food nor drink to survive. Many of Hunter’s comrades had jumped at the chance to upload, and even Lyle had shown curiosity about the prospect. Yet for Hunter, whose sole impetus was to survive, there was still one hurdle that gave him pause.
“I’d still die,” he said quietly, eyes cast downwards, hands twitching as he automatically dodged incoming barrages of spinefire. “The upload process involves killing me.”
“Yes, your physical body would die,” Sveta confirmed, brimming with concern. “Your soul and mind would transfer to the uploaded consciousness, but your physical body would be gone forever.”
Hunter’s stomach sank further. “I don’t know…” he mumbled. He knew it wasn’t true death, not really, but the prospect still terrified him deeply.
“Not to be harsh, but…” Sveta paused for a moment, thinking of how to phrase what came next. “The way I see it, you have three options. Firstly, you can upload yourself, which will kill your biological body but allow your mind and soul to live on digitally. Secondly, you can opt out, which means you’ll perish in the gravitic overload of the Reality Furnace alongside thousands of Sarcophage. Finally, we can forgo the Schwarzschild Protocol altogether and simply try to fight our way out of the swarm in a damaged Gravity Frame. Our odds of success would be extremely low, however… less than ten percent.”
Hunter didn’t take the last option seriously; he’d seen vids of what happened when the Sarcophage ate someone alive, and it was a horrible way to die. The middle option was tempting… going out in a big spacetime explosion that birthed a black hole was sure to be painless and quick, and would also accomplish their goal of protecting the crabs as best they could; maybe the crustacean nerds would even posthumously elevate him to saintly martyrdom for his trouble. He could think of worse ways to leave behind an indelible legacy.
And yet, there was one little niggle. One molehill that, when dwelled upon, swelled to the size of a mountain. If Hunter truly died his final death, here and now…
He’d never see Lyle again.
The thought of that wrenched his heart more than the prospect of uploading wrenched his stomach. In that rending calculus of emotion, he realized there was only one choice he could conceivably make.
He set his jaw in determination. “Alright. Upload me and then blow up the Frame.”
Sveta nodded, and the cockpit projection of surrounding space faded to static. “I’ll take over piloting. Hunter, just sit back and relax. This process is wholly painless; you won’t feel a thing.”
Hunter gulped and nodded, closing his eyes and trying in vain to release the tension in his shoulders. He felt a prickling at the back of his neck, saw the flash of a laser through his eyelids. Sveta’s voice rang out one final time, soft and kind.
“See you soon, Hunter. Have a good rest.”
Hunter felt his consciousness grow heavy, distant. He receded from it like he was sinking into an ocean; for an instant right before everything faded to black, he caught a glimpse of a blue-skinned feminine face, with pointed ears and brilliant red eyes framed by bone-white hair. Even though he only saw her for an instant, Hunter could have sworn she winked at him conspiratorially.
Then his life flashed before his eyes.
++++++
It had taken a while.
As it turned out, it was hard to see stars in low Earth orbit. With the planet mostly obscured by clouds it had a high albedo, and reflected sunlight tended to drown out the comparatively dim light of the stars. Add in tons of other reflective objects, like the thousands of spaceships going to and fro or the cylindrical metal hulls of space colonies, and Earth’s immediate neighborhood festered with light pollution almost as bad as any terrestrial city.
That’s why the eager young 2nd Lieutenant Lyle Melusina, fresh out of the Academy, had volunteered for a week-long deep space patrol mission. Hunter had naturally done the same without complaint. Now their element finally voyaged beyond the Moon’s orbit and the light of Earth faded behind them for the first time in their lives.
The holo-screens in their cockpits were good, of course. Top-of-the-line, the best humanity could produce, with voxels so tiny they were not discernable to the naked eye. Even so, for their first time, a screen simply wouldn’t do. That’s why, at the third waypoint, Hunter and Lyle brought their Gravity Frames close together, checked the seals on their Inertia Suit, decompressed their cockpits, and took a short spacewalk.
Words are perhaps inadequate to describe the experience of seeing a brilliant starry sky for the first time in one’s life. What can be described, however, are reactions. Lyle’s was a sharp intake of breath as his eyes roved the heavens, separated from the cosmos by only a centimeter-thick faceplate of transparent nanocarbon. Lyle sniffed and stared, entranced, and it would be nearly a full minute before he realized he was crying.
Hunter, on the other hand, had been entirely unmoved by the spectacle… but his heart also twisted up in a flurry of emotion for related reasons. As he beheld his best of friends weeping in wonderment and joy, he felt a complicated cyclone of conflicting feelings.
Love was prime among them. Hunter didn’t know exactly when he’d crossed that threshold, but Lyle was unspeakably dear to his heart. For all the misfortune the cold world had dealt him, for all the hardship he’d endured as humanity was besieged, Lyle had remained a beacon that guided him through that darkness. He’d shut off his own emotions to cope with loss and pain, but Hunter could never shut off his love for Lyle; it was as integral to him as eating or sleeping.
Yet juxtaposing was a far nastier emotion… jealousy. Whereas Hunter had come out of puberty as a tall, broad-shouldered and altogether square-shaped man, Lyle had retained the effeminate androgyny of youth. Combined with his long hair, worn in a variety of styles, and his flawlessly applied makeup, it made Lyle by far the prettier of the two. That fact made Hunter jealous, though he was not sure why. Indeed, he felt incredibly guilty that he was jealous of his dearest friend in the first place… and so both love and jealousy became more emotions he shoved down deep inside, where they could never be expressed and never hurt him.
Those emotions bubbled dangerously close to the surface as Hunter watched his starstruck friend gaze into infinity. It was all that internal turmoil that occupied his thoughts, so much so that when Lyle called out his name he was brought back to reality with a start.
“Hmm?” Hunter said, refocusing his gaze and regaining his composure.
“We made it, Hunter. We finally made it,” Lyle said, cry-choking on every word.
Hunter jetted closer to his friend and placed a hand, heavy with comfort, on his shoulder. Lyle couldn’t feel it through the Inertia Suit, but the gesture was appreciated nonetheless.
“Yes we did,” Hunter replied softly.
“My… my gods…” Lyle’s eyes swept across Hunter’s face, then back to the panoply of stellar wonder spread before them. “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”
Hunter nodded. “Yes, they are.”
Then, quieter, in words whispered so softly his helmet microphone could not pick them up…
“…And so are you.”
