In Heaven and Earth Read online

  Since she was the one who asked, he considered it. Vairya’s reaction had thrown him off balance. No one had ever called him a hero to his face. Oh, some of the prosecutors had shown him grim respect, and he had received a letter of commendation from the Senate, but there had been no one to look at him with such warmth and pride. His parents were long dead and he had heard nothing from his wider family, who had all voted for Ahrima, after all. It would be nice, he thought, a little wistfully, to have someone hear his story just because they wanted to know him better, rather than because they were searching for some historical truth.

  “I don’t know where to begin,” he said, looking down at the table. It was standard government issue, ten years past the date it should have been retired, scuffed and chipped. It was a long way from the gleaming military messes of Ahrima’s Fleet.

  “How did you end up working for Ahrima?” Meili asked.

  “What do you know about Rigel’s wars?”

  “Not much,” Meili admitted. “Only that they seem to have been going on forever.”

  “I know more,” Chanthavy said, unsurprisingly.

  “I only know there were some,” Eskil said. “I was fourteen when Ahrima was arrested. This is all history to me.”

  “Baby,” Meili said and did pat his head.

  “Hey.”

  “Rigel System has three gas planets with thirty inhabited moons and a space platform. The moon colonies are all small and compete for mining rights on the planets. They exist in a constant state of rivalry.” Reuben paused, trying to find a simple way to explain the tense state he had grown up in. “The platform is more advanced, technologically, and has the largest population of any outpost. We—they—play peacekeeper whenever things heat up into full conflict rather than the usual skirmishes. Causes some resentment in the moons, of course, so there’s always at least six anti-federation movements at work trying to bring down the platform or overthrow the government. You get used to it. Someone’s always trying to assassinate someone, or hijack their ships, or blow up their bases. It’s only the intensity that changes. And the sides, of course. Alliances change all the time.”

  “Sounds terrible,” Eskil said sympathetically.

  Reuben’s heart suddenly ached. How to explain it, what it was like to grow up under that sun, where trails of fire crossed the sky on more days than not, fighters and troopships filling the air over the docks, the loudness of laughter wherever off-duty soldiers gathered, the discipline that came with learning from the first when to fight, when to run, how to be aware of danger. Rigel was steel and the distant thunder of guns; it was the purple gleam of sunlight off the jagged edges of shot-out fortresses, the lonely call of sirens in the night. It was being that little more alive than he had ever been since, the wild glee of facing challenge after challenge and triumphing over them all, of choosing your life’s path not out of whimsy but because you were needed to serve your people.

  “It was home,” he said and went back to his story. “When I was eighteen, it turned into outright war again. The moons of Rigel III declared independence and started attacking passing shipping. I was newly qualified, and I signed up at once, before conscription started. Got assigned to the sickbay on one of the big battlecruisers.”

  “Ahrima’s ship?”

  “No, not then. I was on Anansi, assigned to convoy duty. Ahrima wasn’t even a general then. She was in command of the Outer Orbital Fleet, well beyond the area where we were operating. It’s why she escaped the worst of the Hyperion Proxy attack.”

  “The what?” Eskil asked.

  Reuben looked at Chanthavy in surprise. She lowered her head and said, “It wasn’t widely reported on out here, not in comparison to Ahrima’s later career.”

  “It was the worst thing I have seen,” Reuben said and reached for the bottle again. Chanthavy poured him a generous glassful but he could only sip at it. The memories were pushing too hard at the inside of his skull, making his head throb. “Rigel— we’ve always perceived implants as a flaw, a weakness. You would have to be pretty perverse to choose to alter your body if it wasn’t necessary. That never meant people didn’t have them, though. Cybernetic enhancements were actually very common in the Rigelian Fleet. In the Federation, most people either end up in the mines or the military, or both. Injuries are common and both jobs carry the risk of needing prosthetics. I never met anyone who took pride in their implants until I left Rigel, but it didn’t mean we didn’t have them.”

  “Thought you were all complete body purists,” Meili said. “Better death than implantation and similar crap.”

  “I’m about to tell you how we got to that point,” Reuben said and took another sip. “The rebels had a genius, you see, one of those people who sees how to do a thing and doesn’t stop to think about whether you ought to do it. Most of the cyberware in the Fleet was originally mining issue, or old military stock, not the sophisticated stuff you get coming out of Sirius or Alpha Centauri. This madman of theirs found a way to bypass their security profiles and access their command chips from a distance.”

  “He hacked their bodies?” Eskil said in horror. “Turned them off?”

  “No,” Reuben said flatly. “He turned them up. The patch he got through, it had an AI component, enough that it could randomise the actions of any cybernetic implant he hacked. Artificial lungs expanding a thousand times a second, limbs turning to beat their owners, hair like yours throttling people, eyes heating up until they began to melt, skin carapaces locking so that men suffocated in their own defences.”

  Eskil looked like he was about to be sick. “That’s horrific.”

  “It was war,” Reuben said, but relented enough to nod agreement. “It was evil. It was— they all came to my sickbay, and most of the medical staff were down too, and then the attack began. We could barely defend ourselves.”

  “What did you do?” Meili asked.

  “Those with no or minimal enhancements fought. I did surgery,” Reuben said. “Lots of surgery.” He had been the youngest doctor in the bay, and one of only three who hadn’t had any cyber implants. Patient after patient had come under his laser scalpel and he had cut away cables and cogs and steel until he no longer saw faces, only bodies. “I cut out every implant that could be removed. Those I didn’t cripple went back to the guns.”

  “How did you survive?”

  “Ahrima. She heard what was happening before they got close enough to her command. Every cyber-enhanced soldier in her command went under the knife before they swept back in system to relieve us. She cut her own eye out, she told me later, right there on her command deck. ‘And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out,’ she said.”

  “And so she became a hero,” Chanthavy said. “You had no enhancements, I assume?”

  “No. It was arrogance, nothing more. I thought I could do as much with my own hands as less talented men could with enhancements. Not many Fleet doctors could claim as much, not after years at the front line, but me, I was proud to be pure.” He grimaced. “Being a smug little bigot saved my life. Of course, it also brought me to Ahrima’s attention.”

  He had still been standing when Ahrima strode into his sickbay, shaking so hard he could no longer hold his tools, blood stained and speechless. She had looked at him, and it had been like another blow, the ferocity and astonishment in her unbandaged eye. Then she had smiled at him, sharp and impressed, and said, “Stand down, Doctor. You can rest now. The cavalry’s here.”

  He had just blinked at her, not understanding.

  She had walked over to him, taken his elbow, and guided him to a seat. “What’s your name, Doctor?”

  “Reuben.” Then, out of some dim instinct for military discipline, he had dragged out, “Lieutenant Cooper, sir, ROMC.”

  “Consider yourself promoted, captain. Where’s your CO?”

  Reuben lifted his arm towards the morgue. “Visual implant melted. Brain aneurysm.”

  “Is there a senior doctor here?”

  Reuben had look
ed around, watching dimly as new personnel started filing in, taking over the care of his patients. The only members of his original team still here were Kitty Okafor, who had been a year behind him at med school, standing in the middle of the ward with tears running down her face as she turned to the next patient, three corpsmen, and the robonurses. There was no one else. “I think,” he said, “Doctor Chukwu is in the next ward.”

  “Is he still standing?”

  “Only amputated his arm.” The world went a little hazy at that thought, and when he came back round, he was on one of his own beds, with a strange doctor standing over him. He tried to get up, only to be pushed down firmly.

  “You’re off duty, Dr Cooper,” the stranger said and smiled at him. “Stand down, kid. You did good.”

  “Casualties?”

  “Too many,” the doctor said grimly, “but you saved a lot of lives. The commander wants to talk to you when you’ve rested. She’s impressed.”

  “She ended the war,” he said now. “Ended it. Not just a temporary truce or a lessening of hostilities. She ended it.”

  “Brutally,” Meili said.

  “By then, no one cared. Too many people had died. Most people were just so damn grateful to have a chance of peace. When she ran for president… well, it was an easy victory.”

  “Even though she ran on a pure human platform?”

  “It wasn’t what defined her, not then. Law and order, security, peace. She promised free implant removal as one of her health policies, but it was a popular pledge. After the war…”

  He stopped himself, sickened. It was still too easy to defend her, to remember the general he would have followed into hell, the president he had idolised. “I trusted her,” he said instead. “She helped me. Because of her patronage, I was at the top of my field, with opportunities no one else my age had. All she asked was that I support her publicly, tell people that they could survive without implants.”

  “I saw the news clips,” Chanthavy said. “You were eloquent.”

  “I believed it,” he said. “I never had her religious convictions, but I had seen what could go wrong. I do still think we are over-reliant on mechanical enhancement. I would hate to see another Hyperion Proxy.”

  “Is that why you performed those operations?” Meili demanded. “Because you believed they would be better off without their eyes or their limbs or—”

  “I was given consent forms,” he snapped. “For every operation I performed, I was shown written consent.” He took a deep breath. “I should have insisted that I speak to every patient first, but there were so many of them, and the president said they wanted discretion, and the whole system was clamouring for a return to… I was wrong. I was stupid. I should have asked.”

  “How did you find out?” Eskil asked.

  “Ahrima took me on a visit to a convalescent hospital. It was a media event, all scripted, but my cousin was ill, so I slipped away from my minders to contact her. While I was there, I stumbled into a side ward, saw a man I recognised from my table, and went to ask after his recovery.”

  “And he told you the truth?” Meili breathed.

  “He had no idea who I was. He was blind. I had taken his eyes. I didn’t know who he was, what it meant until he started to curse the bastard who had crippled him.”

  “Who was he?”

  “His name was Jonah Imasuen. He was one of the leaders of the opposition party. The media had been told he had left Rigel.”

  They knew the rest, the horrible truth that had come out over the next few months, Ahrima’s prisons and asylums, the way her opponents had been treated, the forced operations and silenced critics. “I investigated. Found out what was happening. Went to Alpha Centauri and begged them to listen. Testified. And here I am. Can we change the fucking subject now?” He didn’t want to talk about betrayal any more, not Ahrima’s of him or his of her.

  “Sure,” Meili said. “Shitty time, shitty situation, shitty leader. Damned if I know what I would have done in your place.”

  “Of course you do,” Reuben said bitterly. “Everyone knows better than I did.”

  “Easy to say if you’re not living it,” Eskil said, and Meili nodded shortly.

  “So, what now?” she asked, staring at him. “You’re the tough one. Are we just going to sit and wait to die? Can’t we fight?”

  “Fight what?” Eskil said. “We have no weapons, not to use against them. We’re not soldiers, Meili, not even Cooper here.”

  “I’d rather fight,” Reuben said and rubbed his forehead. “Is there any way we can isolate the nanites within the city?”

  “It should be possible to put up barriers between districts,” Meili said. “That’s what you’d do in a contagion, to minimise the spread.”

  “If this was a viral outbreak, how would you approach it?” She was the expert on contagious disease.

  “Stop any movement out of infected areas,” she said grimly, “which is what they’re doing with us, and then get inoculated medical teams in there to treat the sick. Develop a vaccine.”

  “Don’t think there is one for this.”

  “We’re the medical team on the ground,” Chanthavy said. “We have no patients, though.”

  “Safe disposal of bodies is a priority in a bad epidemic,” Meili said. “We could look at that. Perhaps it would work better to think of it as a forest fire. We need to create fire breaks, deprive it of fuel.”

  “We need to break the city apart,” Eskil said, “and destroy the infected parts.”

  “That’s exactly what Vairya has set in motion,” Reuben pointed out, “and exactly what the Fleet will do when they arrive.”

  They all went quiet. Then Meili looked up, her face fierce. “I don’t care. I don’t care if it won’t make much difference. I want to go down fighting. This thing, these nanites, they’re worse than a disease. I want to destroy as many of them as I can before they get me.”

  “Yes,” Reuben said and reached out to offer her his hand. “No waiting to die.”

  She grasped his hand, squeezing tightly, and Eskil reached out tentatively to press his fingers over theirs. “Me too. I’ll fight.”

  Chanthavy was more hesitant, but she reached out at last. “I’m not sure what we can do, but we must try something.”

  Reuben nodded. “We need detailed information about the city if we’re going to start building fire breaks.”

  From the doorway, Vairya said quietly, “I think I can help with that.”

  Chapter Seven

  THEY all turned to stare at him, and he offered them a hesitant smile. “The sedatives wore off. If I can’t be in my garden, let me keep you company.”

  “Come in,” Reuben said and moved up to make space for him.

  Vairya came and sat down beside him, a little tentatively. He was wearing his filmy chiton again, and was barefoot, and looked utterly out of place in their grotty mess. As soon as he settled into the neighbouring chair, Reuben was aware of him, warm and solid and real beside him, suddenly present in the real world in a way that was both bizarre and made the hairs stand up on Reuben’s arms.

  “Captain,” Reuben said, remembering some basic courtesies, “this is Vairya of Caelestia. Vairya, Captain Chanthavy Som, Lieutenant Meili Peake and Lieutenant Eskil Levin, crew of the Juniper.”

  “I am honoured,” Chanthavy said.

  “The honour is mine,” Vairya said gravely and glanced up at Reuben. “Any chance of a drink?”

  “No,” everyone around the table said at once.

  “You have a head injury,” Meili reminded him. “No alcohol.”

  “My brain is made up of entirely different elements from yours,” he pointed out, pouting a little.

  “Does alcohol make you giddy, absent-minded, uncoordinated, or overemotional?” Reuben asked.

  “On a good day,” Vairya muttered.

  “Then you don’t get to drink with a head injury, whatever your brain is made of.”

  Vairya sighed. “Food?”
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br />   “That we can do,” Eskil said and bounced to his feet. “Is there anything you don’t eat? I can make something fresh if you like.”

  “Don’t go to any trouble, please.”

  “Eskil’s never met a TC4 before,” Reuben said. “He’s expecting you to have wings and a halo.”

  “Coop!”

  “No,” Vairya said, and he grinned a little. “Nothing like that. I’m just a gardener. You want my brother Jibrail if that’s what you’re after. He makes everyone feel unworthy.”

  “For now,” Chanthavy said, “I would like to give my crew time to record messages for their families. We welcome your help and mean no rudeness, but perhaps we could leave you to your meal?”

  “I’ll keep him company,” Reuben said. “No one will expect a message from me.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” Vairya said before any of the others could comment. “Perhaps you could lend me a change of clothes. This isn’t particularly warm.”

  “Sure,” Reuben said and watched him eat. Vairya looked so out of place here, in such an ordinary place, and he couldn’t make sense of it enough to look away. Some people belonged in imaginary kingdoms, not mundane kitchens.

  It still felt strange when he walked with Vairya to his cabin. Inside Vairya’s garden, it had been easy to talk, to play games with words and wit. Here, it was all a little too real.

  “Have you turned shy on me, good Sir Reuben?” Vairya said. He had fallen into step with Reuben easily, but there was something less graceful about him out here. Glancing across, Reuben could see the red patches where his skin hadn’t quite healed from the cold. His hair was a little tangled, his cheek a little rougher, and it made him more strange rather than less.

  “That’s not who I am,” he said. “I’m not a knight, or anything like it. I’m just a man.”

  “Yes,” Vairya said. “I rather liked the fierce knight who invaded my garden, but I think I prefer your real face. You look kinder than your imagined self.”