Hardfought Read online

  Since little or no knowledge was lost in breeding cycles, cultural growth was rapid at times; since the dead weight of knowledge was often heavy, cultural growth often slowed to a crawl.

  Using water as a building material, developing techniques that humans still understood imperfectly, they prepared for travel away from their birthworlds.

  Prufrax wondered, as she listened to the older hawks, how humans had come to know all this. Had Senexi been captured and questioned? Was it all theory? Did anyone really know—anyone she could ask?

  —She’s weak.

  —Why weak?

  —Some knowledge is best for glovers to ignore. Some questions are best left to the supreme overs.

  Have you thought that in here, you can answer her questions, our questions?

  No. No. Learn about me us first.

  In the hour before engagement, Prufrax tried to find a place alone. On the raider this wasn’t difficult. The ship’s size was overwhelming for the number of hawks and crew aboard. There were many areas where she could put on an environs and walk or drift in silence, surrounded by the dark shapes of equipment wrapped in plexerv. There was so much about ship operations she didn’t understand, hadn’t been taught. Why carry so much excess equipment, weapons—far more than they’d need even for replacements? She could think of possibilities—superiors on Mercior wanting their cruisers to have flexible mission capabilities, for one—but her ignorance troubled her less than why she was ignorant. Why was it necessary to keep fighters in the dark on so many subjects?

  She pulled herself through the cold g less tunnels, feeling slightly awked by the loneness, the quiet. One tunnel angled outboard, toward the hull of the cruiser. She hesitated, peering into its length with her environs beacon, when a beep warned her she was near another crew member. She was startled to think someone else might be as curious as she. The other hawks and crew, for the most part, had long outgrown their need to wander and regarded it as birdish. Prufrax was used to being different—she had always perceived herself, with some pride, as a bit of a freak. She scooted expertly up the tunnel, spreading her arms and tucking her legs as she would in a fightsuit.

  The tunnel was filled with a faint milky green mist, absorbing her environs beam. It couldn’t be much more than a couple of hundred meters long, however, and it was quite straight. The signal beeped louder.

  Ahead she could make out a dismantled weapons blister. That explained the fog: a plexerv aerosol diffused in the low pressure. Sitting in the blister was a man, his environs glowing a pale violet. He had deopaqued a section of the blister and was staring out at the stars. He swiveled as she approached and looked her over dispassionately. He seemed to be a hawk—he had fightform, tall, thin with brown hair above hull white skin, large eyes with pupils so dark she might have been looking through his head into space beyond.

  “Under,” she said as their environs met and merged.

  “Over. What are you doing here?”

  “I was about to ask you the same.”

  “You should be getting ready for the fight,” he admonished.

  “I am. I need to be alone for a while.”

  “Yes.” He turned back to the stars. “I used to do that, too.”

  “You don’t fight now?”

  He shook his head. “Retired. I’m a researcher.”

  She tried not to look impressed. Crossing rates was almost impossible. A bitalent was unusual in the service.

  “What kind of research?” she asked.

  “I’m here to correlate enemy finds.”

  “Won’t find much of anything, after we’re done with the zero phase.”

  It would have been polite for him to say, “Power to that,” or offer some other encouragement. He said nothing.

  “Why would you want to research them?”

  “To fight an enemy properly, you have to know what they are. Ignorance is defeat.”

  “You research tactics?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What, then?”

  “You’ll be in a tough hardfought this wake. Make you a proposition. You fight well, observe, come to me and tell me what you see. Then I’ll answer your questions.”

  “Brief you before my immediate overs?”

  “I have the authority,” he said. No one had ever lied to her; she didn’t even suspect he would. “You’re eager?” “Very.”

  “You’ll be doing what?”

  “Engaging Senexi fighters, then hunting down branch inds and brood minds.”

  “How many fighters going in?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Big target, eh?”

  She nodded.

  “While you’re there, ask yourself what are they fighting for? Understand?”

  “I—”

  “Ask, what are they fighting for. Just that. Then come back to me.” “What’s your name?”

  “Not important,” he said. “Now go.”

  She returned to the prep center as the sponge space warning tones began. Overhawks went among the fighters in the lineup, checking gear and giveaway body points for mental orientation. Prufrax submitted to the molded sensor mask being slipped over her face. “Ready!” the overhawk said. “Hardfought!” He clapped her on the shoulder. “Good luck.”

  “Thank you, sir.” She bent down and slid into her fightsuit. Along the launch line, eleven other hawks did the same. The overs and other crew left the chamber, and twelve red beams delineated the launch tube. The fightsuits automatically lifted and aligned on their individual beams. Fields swirled around them like silvery tissue in moving water, then settled and hardened into cold scintillating walls, pulsing as the launch energy built up.

  The tactic came to her. The ship’s sensors became part of her information net. She saw the Senexi thornship twelve kilometers in diameter, cuckoos lacing its outer hull like maggots on red fruit, snakes waiting to take them on.

  She was terrified and exultant, so worked up that her body temperature was climbing. The fightsuit adjusted her balance.

  At the count of ten and nine, she switched from biologic to cyber. The implant after absorbing much of her thought processes for weeks became Prufrax.

  For a time there seemed to be two of her. Biologic continued, and in that region she could even relax a bit, as if watching a fib.

  With almost dreamlike slowness, in the electronic time of cyber, her fightsuit followed the beam. She saw the stars and oriented herself to the cruiser’s beacon, using both for reference, plunging in the sword flower formation to assault the thornship. The cuckoos retreated in the vast red hull like worms withdrawing into an apple. Then hundreds of tiny black pinpoints appeared in the closest quadrant to the sword flower.

  Snakes shot out, each piloted by a Senexi branch ind. “Hardfought!” she told herself in biologic before that portion gave over completely to cyber.

  Why were we flung out of dark

  through ice and fire, a shower

  of sparks? a puzzle;

  Perhaps to build hell.

  We strike here, there;

  Set brief glows, fall through

  and cross round again.

  By our dimming, we see what

  Beatitude we have.

  In the circle, kindling

  together, we form an exhausted Empyrean.

  We feel the rush of

  igniting winds but still

  grow dull and wan.

  New rage flames, new light,

  dropping like sun through muddy

  ice and night and fall

  Close, spinning blue and bright.

  In time they, too,

  Tire. Redden.

  We join, compare pasts

  cool in huddled paths, turn gray.

  And again.

  We are a companion flow

  of ash, in the slurry,

  out and down.

  We sleep.

  Rivers form above and below.

  Above, iron snakes twist,

  clang and slice, ch
ime,

  helium eyes watching, seeing

  Snowflake hawks,

  signaling adamant muscles and

  energy teeth. What hunger

  compels our venom spit?

  It flies, strikes the crystal

  flight, making mist gray green

  with ammonia rain.

  Sleeping, we glide,

  and to each side

  unseen shores wait

  with the moans of

  an unseen tide.

  She wrote that. We. One of her our poems.”

  Poem?

  A kind of fib, I think.

  —I don’t see what it says.

  —Sure you do! She’s talking hardfought.

  The Zap? Is that all?

  —No, I don’t think so.

  Do you understand it?

  Not all…

  She lay back in the bunk, legs crossed, eyes closed, feeling the receding dominance of the implant the overness of cyber and the almost pleasant ache in her back. She had survived her first. The thornship had retired, severely damaged, its surface seared and scored so heavily it would never release cuckoos again.

  It would become a hulk, a decoy. Out of action. Satisfaction / out of action / Satisfaction…

  Still, with eight of the twelve fighters lost, she didn’t quite feel the exuberance of the rhyme. The snakes had fought very well. Bravely, she might say. They lured, sacrificed, cooperated, demonstrating teamwork as fine as that in her own group. Strategy was what made the cruiser’s raid successful. A superior approach, an excellent tactic. And perhaps even surprise, though the final analysis hadn’t been posted yet.

  Without those advantages, they might have all died.

  She opened her eyes and stared at the pattern of blinking lights in the ceiling panel, lights with their secret codes that repeated every second, so that whenever she looked at them, the implant deep inside was debriefed, reinstructed. Only when she fought would she know what she was now seeing.

  She returned to the tunnel as quickly as she was able. She floated up toward the blister and found him there, surrounded by packs of information from the last hardfought. She waited until he turned his attention to her.

  “Well?” he said.

  “I asked myself what they are fighting for. And I’m very angry.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t know. I can’t know. They’re Senexi.”

  “Did they fight well?”

  “We lost eight. Eight.” She cleared her throat.

  “Did they fight well?” he repeated, an edge in his voice.

  “Better than I was ever told they could.”

  “Did they die?”

  “Enough of them.”

  “How many did you kill?”

  “I don’t know.” But she did. Eight.

  “You killed eight,” he said, pointing to the packs. “I’m analyzing the battle now.”

  “You’re behind what we read, what gets posted?” she asked.

  “Partly,” he said. “You’re a good hawk.”

  “I knew I would be,” she said, her tone quiet, simple.

  “Since they fought bravely—”

  “How can Senexi be brave?” she asked sharply.

  “Since,” he repeated, “they fought bravely, why?”

  “They want to live, to do their…work. Just like me.”

  “No,” he said. She was confused, moving between extremes in her mind, first resisting, then giving in too much. “They’re Senexi. They’re not like us.”

  “What’s your name?” she asked, dodging the issue.

  “Clevo.”

  Her glory hadn’t even begun yet, and already she was well into her fall.

  Aryz made his connection and felt the brood mind’s emergency cache of knowledge in the mandate grow up around him like ice crystals on glass. He stood in a static scene. The transition from living memory to human machine memory had resulted in either a coding of data or a reduction of detail; either way, the memory was cold not dynamic. It would have to be compared, recorrelated, if that would ever be possible.

  How much human data had had to be dumped to make space for this?

  He cautiously advanced into the human memory, calling up topics almost at random. In the short time he had been away, so much of what he had learned seemed to have faded or become scrambled. Branch inds were supposed to have permanent memory, human data, for one reason or another, didn’t take. It required so much effort just to begin to understand the different modes of thought.

  He backed away from sociological data, trying to remain within physics and mathematics. There he could make conversions to fit his understanding without too much strain.

  Then something unexpected happened. He felt the brush of another mind, a gentle inquiry from a source made even stranger by the hint of familiarity. It made what passed for a Senexi greeting, but not in the proper form, using what one branch ind of a team would radiate to a fellow; a gross breach, since it was obviously not from his team or even from his family. Aryz tried to withdraw. How was it possible for minds to meet in the mandate? As he retreated, he pushed into a broad region of incomprehensible data. It had none of the characteristics of the other human regions he had examined.

  This is for machines, the other said. Not all cultural data is limited to biologic. You are in the area where programs and cyber designs are stored. They are really accessible only to a machine hooked into the mandate.

  —What is your family? Aryz asked, the first step question in the sequence Senexi used for urgent identity requests.

  —I have no family. I am not a branch ind. No access to active brood minds. I have learned from the mandate.

  Then what are you?

  —I don’t know, exactly. Not unlike you.

  Aryz understood what he was dealing with. It was the mind of the mutated shape, the one that had remained in the chamber, beseeching when he approached the transparent barrier.

  I must go now, the shape said. Aryz was alone again in the incomprehensible jumble. He moved slowly, carefully, into the Senexi sector, calling up subjects familiar to him. If he could encounter one shape, doubtless he could encounter the others perhaps even the captive.

  The idea was dreadful—and fascinating. So far as he knew, such intimacy between Senexi and human had never happened before. Yet there was something very Senexi like in the method, as if branch inds attached to the brood mind were to brush mentalities while searching in the ageless memories.

  The dread subsided. There was little worse that could happen to him, with his fellows dead, his brood mind in flux bind, his purpose uncertain.

  What Aryz was feeling, for the first time, was a small measure of freedom.

  The story of the original Prufrax continued.

  In the early stages she visited Clevo with a barely concealed anger. His method was aggravating, his goals never precisely spelled out. What did he want with her, if anything?

  And she with him? Their meetings were clandestine, though not precisely forbidden. She was a hawk one now with considerable personal liberty between exercises and engagements. There were no monitors in the closed off reaches of the cruiser, and they could do whatever they wished. The two met in areas close to the ship’s hull, usually in weapons blisters that could be opened to reveal the stars there they talked.

  Prufrax was not accustomed to prolonged conversation. Hawks were not raised to be voluble, nor were they selected for their curiosity. Yet the exhawk Clevo talked a great deal and was the most curious person she had met, herself included, and she regarded herself as uncharacteristically curious.

  Often he was infuriating, especially when he played the “leading game,” as she called it. Leading her from one question to the next, like an instructor, but without the trappings or any clarity of purpose. “What do you think of your mother?”

  “Does that matter?”

  “Not to me.”

  “Then why ask?”

  “Because you matter.
”

  Prufrax shrugged. “She was a fine mother. She bore me with a well chosen heritage. She raised me as a hawk candidate. She told me her stories.”

  “Any hawk I know would envy you for listening at Jayax’s knee.”

  “I was hardly at her knee.”

  “A speech tactic.”

  “Yes, well, she was important to me.”

  “She was a preferred single?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you have no father.”

  “She selected without reference to individuals.”

  “Then you are really not that much different from a Senexi.”

  She bristled and started to push away. “There! You insult me again.”

  “Not at all. I’ve been asking one question all this time, and you haven’t even heard. How well do you know the enemy?”

  “Well enough to destroy them.” She couldn’t believe that was the only question he’d been asking. His speech tactics were very odd.

  “Yes, to win battles, perhaps. But who will win the war?”

  “It’ll be a long war,” she said softly, floating a few meters from him. He rotated in the blister, blocking out a blurred string of stars. The cruiser was preparing to shift out of status geometry again. “They fight well.”

  “They fight with conviction. Do you believe them to be evil?”

  “They destroy us.”

  “We destroy them.”

  “So the question,” she said, smiling at her cleverness, “is who began to destroy?”

  “Not at all,” Clevo said. “I suspect there’s no longer a clear answer to that. Our leaders have obviously decided the question isn’t important. No. We are the new, they are the old. The old must be superseded. It’s a conflict born in the essential difference between Senexi and humans.”