Tyger Burning Read online

  “What the hell are Sommen materials doing all the way out here?” he asked. “And how come nobody ever detected this before?”

  The captain sounded amused. “I think, Mr. Maung, that those are exactly the kinds of questions Carson expects us to answer.”

  “I need a cigarette,” Maung whispered and the captain chuckled.

  “Me too.”

  A part of Maung’s brain swore to him that he was about to fall off the ground and sail into space. He had never seen a sky so black, so huge, or so occupied by another planet, with Jupiter filling almost all of it and close enough that he reached up. His feet slipped. Maung fell gently onto his back and he stayed there for a moment, taking it all in and breathing so hard that his suit computer chimed a warning: “Heart and breathing rates above nominal levels; increasing CO2.” He thanked his ancestors. Tears formed and he began to laugh until Nang yanked him to his feet, which was easy for her since the gravity on Ganymede was so much less than Earth’s.

  “This is amazing,” said Maung.

  The captain’s voice clicked in. “This isn’t a vacation, Maung. Everyone stay ready. The ship is scanning this area and keeping a close eye on things but that doesn’t mean the Chinese won’t show.”

  But Maung didn’t hear. To him it didn’t matter if the Chinese arrived because he was lost in the endless panorama, the horizon a brilliant white line in the distance that faded into mottled gray and then hit a band of brilliant blue again before merging with light blue ice near his feet. There were mountains. Huge chunks of ice dwarfed the group, even as they skirted the cliffs to stay clear of any avalanches. Only their footing concerned Maung. Most of the surface was rough and so there was no problem with grip, but occasionally they hit a patch so smooth that it seemed like glass, and Maung wanted to lie on his stomach and slide across.

  “Starting the melt now, Captain.” It was Jennifer. She had stayed behind at the lifeboat to rig the water collection equipment and load the craft. First the ice had to melt. Before they set out, Maung had helped her unroll a massive metallic mat, a grid of thick wires that now carried heat from the boat’s small fusion reactor to melt the ice in a perfect rectangular pattern. Over it was a tent. The rig was designed so that a pump transferred sublimated steam to the ship, where it then condensed into liquid water.

  “Will it be heavy on takeoff?” Nang asked, as if reading Maung’s thoughts.

  “She’ll be all right,” said Jennifer. “The boat’s designed to hold all the water we’ll be collecting—plus sixteen souls. That’s more than enough margin for her engines.”

  Nang clicked in again, and Maung judged from her breathing that she must have been getting winded. “How much farther, Captain?”

  “It should be . . .” The man stopped and tapped at the console on his forearm and Maung blinked when a map appeared on his faceplate. “We’re the blue dot. These green rectangles are the objects.”

  “Then we should be there,” Maung said. “It looks like we’ve passed over the lower edge of the field and are standing right on them.”

  Nang backed up. “I don’t see a damn thing.” Maung thought she must be nervous because she raised her weapon, a coil gun that could fire fléchettes at an insane rate, piercing anyone’s suit; if the fléchettes didn’t kill you the exposure to vacuum would. “This is a crap show.”

  “Calm down.” Maung dropped to his knees and scraped at a thin layer of ice crystals about a centimeter thick. “Someone help me with this.”

  Soon he and Nang had cleared a section of ice about two meters across and the captain stood over them, watching, before he whistled and motioned for the two to move away. “You’re right, Maung. Whatever the things are, they put them in the ice. I have to record this.” The captain typed on his forearm console again, then slapped a hand against his helmet, clearing the video aperture of ice.

  “Almost looks like they tried to hide them,” said Maung, standing up. “They melted a huge rectangular section, lay these in, and then filled it.”

  Nang stayed on her knees and backed up again. “This makes no sense. Captain, I’d like to go help with water collection if that’s OK.”

  “Fine. Go ahead.”

  Maung watched as Nang left, and noticed that she ran as fast as she could, a bounding jog in light gravity that sent her sprawling more than once. He wanted to run after her. But before he could call out on the radio, the captain slapped his shoulder.

  “Something’s happening,” he said.

  Maung knelt again and leaned over so that his helmet almost touched the ice—to get a better view. Beneath them, in the patch they had cleared, he saw a green sphere and Maung’s skin tingled. He recalled the story he’d heard about how the contractors broke through a slab at the Charleston spaceport and then one of the Sommen showed up, but this wasn’t the size of a Sommen; it was only a meter in diameter. Now, though, the ball pulsated, alternating from a luminescent light green to a dark color, and Maung nearly jumped, startled when someone from the ship clicked in.

  “Captain we’re getting thermal readings right on top of your coordinates, and they’re inconsistent with water collection operations. Is everything OK?”

  “It’s fine,” he said. “Keep monitoring.”

  Maung shook his head. “It’s not fine. The ice is melting all around us. We should move back.”

  He and the captain retreated and found a raised area, a small hill that gave them a better view of the melt. When Maung looked back at the field, he gasped; much of it had already gone, and as he watched, the ice sublimated into steam, which rose a few meters before it drifted away as ice again, a kind of artificial snowstorm that looked as spooky as it was beautiful. Soon it was over, and in front of them a massive pit had opened, inside of which rested thousands of dark spheres. Then the green faded into a crystal clear kind of glass, perfectly transparent; Maung recognized what was inside and clutched the captain’s arm.

  “Those are bodies. Human corpses.”

  The captain stepped forward and Maung advanced with him—despite the fact that he wanted to run. “I know.”

  “Captain . . .” Maung felt sick now. He’d seen far worse, but it dredged up memories that he never wanted to recall and as they walked the spheres disappeared, letting their curled-up contents collapse slowly onto ice. “None of them have heads. They’ve all been decapitated. Murdered. Why did the Sommen do that? These are people.”

  The captain said nothing. Maung and he walked silently through the field and Maung prayed while the captain documented as much as he could, beaming the video information directly to the ship so it could be cataloged, and then he stooped every few meters to collect a tissue sample. Maung spoke for the dead. He asked his people to let their ancestors know where they were and when Jennifer called them back, announcing that the water tank had filled, he said a prayer of thanks. He and the captain bounded over the slick surface as fast as they could, neither one wanting to stay on Ganymede.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Although Maung had discarded his suit and wore only a set of corporate coveralls, being aboard ship gave him a warm feeling of security; the captain ordered them out of Ganymede’s orbit so with every passing second they moved farther away from the dead, farther from the Chinese on Europa. The captain and the doctor were with him in sick bay. A holo of the ice field rotated in front of them while the computer analyzed their data and Maung began to respect the men; maybe it was his Burmese upbringing, or maybe it was because both men had the slow thoughtfulness of age, but they reminded him of his father and several times he had to remind himself to speak in English.

  “Have you seen anything like this?” the doctor asked.

  Maung nodded. “I’ve seen the green material; it looked similar to what the Sommen used to construct their facility in Charleston. And probably all their other facilities on Earth. But I’ve never seen them use it to encase bodies like that, and I’ve never seen them collect headless human bodies.”

  “How long will p
rocessing take—for both video and tissue samples, Doc?” asked the captain.

  “Another hour. After that we’ll beam it to Singapore but given our position relative to the sun and Earth, it will take almost an hour for them to start receiving, maybe another hour to process, and then, if they respond immediately, we’d get it an hour after that. Three hours, minimum.”

  The captain nodded. “Computer—navigation.” When Jennifer’s face appeared on a screen he asked, “How long until we get a burn window to Karin?”

  “Another day,” she said.

  “Notch it up, Jennifer; push maneuvering fuel consumption as close to the line as you can because I want to get away from this place. And keep scanning for vessels; if Carson’s people tracked this from Earth, the Chinese picked it up too.”

  The captain turned back to the holo then and Maung doubted the man really understood what he’d face if the Chinese decided the Singapore Sun was a target worth having. The ice field looked strange in hologram, he thought. It rotated quietly and instead of corpses there were tiny green dots in neat rows, a total of 12,756 that someone on Earth would have to somehow identify so relatives could be notified. Maung tried to keep from shivering at the number. Since the Sommen had them, it was possible the bodies had been taken over a period of years, killed, and then put in storage until now, a time when the Sommen thought returning them was appropriate. Why? he asked himself for the hundredth time. Why did they go to all this trouble? Why did the Sommen depart in the first place and leave behind one of their warriors to attack at the spaceport—setting off a chain reaction that robbed Maung of his family and threw him into deep space?

  Jennifer’s voice clicked in again, her voice sounding stressed. “Captain, we just received a message from one of the freighters closer to Europa. A pair of Chinese warships are headed this way.”

  The captain stared at Maung, as if reading his thoughts. “We can’t be taken.”

  “I know,” Maung said.

  “If I help you do what you do—to kill—what do you need?”

  “Captain?” Jennifer broke in again.

  “Message received,” the captain responded. He then turned to Maung. “Now, son.”

  Maung shrugged. “For one, I need you to disarm the ship’s automated defenses so your microbots and internal weaponry don’t come after me once I’m active.”

  “Captain,” the doctor said, his face drained of color. “That’s suicide. If we—”

  The captain silenced him with a raised hand. “What else?”

  “I’ll need someone to strap me into an acceleration couch where I won’t be bothered, after which you’ll have to give me control over the ship’s computer and coms arrays. I need to leverage her beaming and broadcast range.”

  The doctor looked even more incredulous and was about to say something when the captain cut him off. “Doc, get Maung ready. Here in sick bay. Strap him in while I take care of everything else and on second thought, get him in a full environment suit so he’d be safe in case of decompression; full linkup with ships’ systems, and a backup hose link to ship’s oxygen.”

  The captain floated through the holo to shove his face close to Maung’s. “I want your word, son. If they show up, and it looks like we can’t get away, I want you to swear that even if some of us elect to stay with the ship that you’ll blow it to hell.”

  “You have my word. But I’ll only do this if you promise me one thing.”

  “What?” the Captain asked.

  “Think of a good lie,” said Maung, “to explain what’s going on. If we survive, and I make it to Karin, I can’t have Nang or anyone else knowing what I am. Or what I can do.”

  The captain nodded. “Deal.”

  Maung wanted out of the suit. It included layer upon layer of specialized cloth and capillary nets that provided cooling, insulation, and some radiation protection, and although it included equipment so that the wearer could go to the bathroom without moving, it threatened to drive Maung crazy with the fact that he could barely move.

  Jennifer clicked in. “Maung, you’re doing it again.”

  “What?”

  “Praying,” she said. “I’ve been ordered not to disable your coms system so you’ve got to stay quiet, we need the system clear.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t even know I was.”

  Maung struggled to understand how she and the rest of the crew did it—kept track of all the information needed to run the ship and now that he plugged into it, he heard the traffic. They were in contact with Singapore. But the messages were delayed by over an hour so the communications officer was keeping track of a conversation over an hour old, and folding into it brand-new data, while at the same time monitoring local traffic and internal coms. A note of urgency underpinned their voices; Maung figured that everyone was nervous and thinking about the same thing he was, that the Chinese would show up soon.

  “Jennifer?” Maung asked.

  “What?”

  He was embarrassed now that he interrupted her but the thought just occurred to him and made him uneasy. “I’m listening to all the local traffic and it seems like there are freighters and private vessels that could have helped.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “So?”

  Maung heard her impatience but continued anyway. “So how come nobody answered our distress call a while ago?”

  “We were too close to Europa. Before the treaty, the Chinese Fleet there would fake distress calls to lure ships into traps. Nobody’s forgotten about that and it’s too risky to take the chance when you’re this far out.”

  “Oh,” Maung said, and something else occurred to him. “One last thing: Is there any way to get electronic cigarettes on the ship?”

  “No, Maung. None of us smoke except Cap. Now can I get back to trying to drive this beast?”

  He detected it before the ship’s systems did. It was a gentle touch, one that woke his semi-aware with a pressure no more than that given by a parent stroking their child’s head or patting them on the back, and it was something that Maung had forgotten about. A friend or foe beacon. But it was more than that, he realized: It was a method of recognition for a people whose communications included both human and digital forms, so that it also asked one’s political leanings, processing capabilities, and weapons systems in addition to querying about whose side one was on. Maung’s semi-aware responded automatically. But he said a silent prayer of thanks that his transmission range was too short to be received; the Chinese didn’t realize he was there.

  Hello, his semi-aware said, interrupting Maung’s thoughts. All systems ready for merging.

  Maung hit a key on his forearm, one the captain taught him to punch for privacy.

  “Go ahead, Maung.”

  He took a deep breath, almost giddy with the feeling of being active again; it was like standing on the edge of a cliff, looking down into a vast ocean of data and knowledge, which beckoned for Maung to dive—to link up and fuse with systems that he hadn’t used in years. “They’re here, Captain. Just out of your scanning range.”

  “Thank you. I’ve turned off our internal defenses so you should be safe to activate.”

  “I know,” said Maung. “We already woke up.”

  He dove off the cliff, letting his semi-aware wrap him in its grasp so that Maung grinned at the realization: He was smart again.

  Welcome home, Maung. The semi-aware “felt” as happy as he was. There was no time to communicate during our last awakening, but you seem to be in good health.

  Maung whispered to the ship’s systems. He imagined himself like a creeping vine, shooting tendrils and roots out to take hold in shallow ways, not yet fully infiltrating so that people like Jennifer had no clue he was there. Every new contact energized him. The ship vibrated in a different way than before because the main engine was more than just the idling of a bull with no place to charge, it was his own heartbeat that added to the totality of his thoughts and experiences and now he was part human, part supertanker. There were tw
o places that Maung hadn’t yet accessed. One was the ship’s command and control system, which he planned to take last since doing so would give him control of all the ships scanning sensors and beaming equipment; for now, he wanted to avoid giving himself away to the Chinese by changing the ship’s electronic signatures.

  The second place was a mystery. It shouldn’t have been there. To Maung it “looked” like a series of tiny black holes, and one was present in each system he’d infiltrated, a snippet of code that made copies of all traffic and dumped them into a one-way subroutine, from which nothing emanated. He created his own subroutine and wrapped it in innocuous life-support data—like candy coating on a pill. Maung sent it in and waited. Two minutes later, there was still no response and Maung had an uneasy feeling because his routine should have given him total control, no matter what was inside.

  But he couldn’t spend more time on it; the Chinese hailed the Singapore Sun, and simultaneously blasted it with full-powered scans that flooded Maung’s semi-aware in a wave—thousands of access attempts per millisecond, a digital sledgehammer that nearly split his brain. Maung’s nostrils became warm with his blood, which now trickled out.

  All of the crew spoke at once and Maung focused on the communications officer who was first to notice that the Chinese had hacked their way in but Maung already knew this; he was in combat. Maung ignored the blood and decided there was no point in hiding. He harnessed the processing capacity of every ship’s component and converted them into weapons; all of them focused on wrapping the invaders’ thrusts with useless code to keep them busy while he leapfrogged packets that took him outside the ship, through space, and into the Chinese command system. There he shut down the Chinese ship’s communications in a way that looked like it was a malfunction; the move cut the infiltrators off from their parents and Maung jumped back to the Singapore Sun.