Old Man's War Read online

  “It bothers me a little,” Alan said. “It’s not a stand-up fight at all; we’re just blowing these people to hell. On the other hand, the worst casualty I have in my squad is a burst eardrum. That’s a miracle for you right there. So overall I feel pretty good about it. And the Covandu aren’t entirely helpless. The overall scoreboard between us and them is pretty much tied.”

  This was surprisingly true. The Covandu’s size worked to their advantage in space battles; their ships are hard for ours to track and their tiny fighter craft do little damage individually but an immense amount in aggregate. It was only when it came to ground fights that we had the overwhelming advantage. Cova Banda had a relatively small space fleet protecting it; it was one of the reasons the CDF decided to try to take it back.

  “I’m not talking about who’s ahead in the overall tally, Alan,” I said. “I’m talking about the fact that our opponents are one fucking inch tall. Before this, we were fighting spiders. Before that, we were fighting goddamned pterodactyls. It’s all messing with my sense of scale. It’s messing with my sense of me. I don’t feel human anymore, Alan.”

  “Technically speaking, you’re not human anymore,” Alan said. It was an attempt to lighten my mood.

  It didn’t work. “Well, then, I don’t feel connected with what it was to be human anymore,” I said. “Our job is to go meet strange new people and cultures, and kill the sons of bitches as quickly as we possibly can. We know only what we need to know about these people in order to fight with them. They don’t exist to be anything other than an enemy, as far as we know. Except for the fact that they’re smart about fighting back, we might as well be fighting animals.”

  “That makes it easier for most of us,” Alan said. “If you don’t identify with a spider, you don’t feel as bad about killing one, even a big, smart one. Maybe especially a big, smart one.”

  “Maybe that’s what’s bothering me,” I said. “There’s no sense of consequence. I just took a living, thinking thing and hurled it into the side of a building. Doing it didn’t bother me at all. The fact that it didn’t does bother me, Alan. There ought to be consequences to our actions. We have to acknowledge at least some of the horror of what we do, whether we’re doing it for good reasons or not. I have no horror about what I’m doing. I’m scared of that. I’m scared of what it means. I’m stomping around this city like a goddamned monster. And I’m beginning to think that’s exactly what I am. What I’ve become. I’m a monster. You’re a monster. We’re all fucking inhuman monsters, and we don’t see a damned thing wrong with it.”

  Alan didn’t have anything to say to that. So instead we watched our soldiers, stomping Covandu to death, until finally there weren’t really any left to stomp.

  “So what the hell is wrong with him?” Lieutenant Keyes asked Alan, about me, at the end of our post-battle briefing with the other squad leaders.

  “He thinks we’re all inhuman monsters,” Alan said.

  “Oh, that,” Lieutenant Keyes said, and turned to me. “How long have you been in, Perry?”

  “Almost a year,” I said.

  Lieutenant Keyes nodded. “You’re right on schedule, then, Perry. It takes about a year for most people to figure out they’ve turned into some soulless killing machine with no conscience or morals. Some sooner, some later. Jensen here”—he indicated one of the other squadron leaders—“got to about the fifteen-month point before he cracked. Tell him what you did, Jensen.”

  “I took a shot at Keyes,” Ron Jensen said. “Seeing as he was the personification of the evil system that turned me into a killing machine.”

  “Nearly took off my head, too,” Keyes said.

  “It was a lucky shot,” Jensen allowed.

  “Yeah, lucky that you missed. Otherwise I’d be dead and you’d be a brain floating in a tank, going insane from the lack of outside stimuli. Look, Perry, it happens to everyone. You’ll shake it off when you realize you’re not actually an inhuman monster, you’re just trying to wrap your brain around a totally fucked-up situation. For seventy-five years you lead the sort of life where the most exciting thing that happens is you get laid from time to time, and the next thing you know you’re trying to blast space octopi with an Empee before they kill you first. Christ. It’s the ones that don’t eventually lose it that I don’t trust.”

  “Alan hasn’t lost it,” I said. “And he’s been in as long as I have.”

  “That’s true,” Keyes said. “What’s your answer to that, Rosenthal?”

  “I’m a seething cauldron of disconnected rage on the inside, Lieutenant.”

  “Ah, repression,” Keyes said. “Excellent. Try to avoid taking a potshot at me when you finally blow, please.”

  “I can’t promise anything, sir,” Alan said.

  “You know what worked for me,” said Aimee Weber, another squad leader. “I made a list of the things that I missed about Earth. It was sort of depressing, but on the other hand, it reminded me that I wasn’t totally out of it. If you miss things, you’re still connected.”

  “So what did you miss?” I asked.

  “Shakespeare in the Park, for one,” she said. “My last night on Earth, I saw a production of Macbeth that was just perfection. God, that was great. And it’s not like we’re getting any good live theater around these here parts.”

  “I miss my daughter’s chocolate chip cookies,” said Jensen.

  “You can get chocolate chip cookies on the Modesto,” Keyes said. “Damn fine ones.”

  “They’re not as good as my daughter’s. The secret is molasses.”

  “That sounds disgusting,” Keyes said. “I hate molasses.”

  “Good thing I didn’t know that when I shot at you,” Jensen said. “I wouldn’t have missed.”

  “I miss swimming,” said Greg Ridley. “I used to swim in the river next to my property in Tennessee. Cold as hell most of the time, but I liked it that way.”

  “Roller coasters,” said Keyes. “Big ones that made you feel like your intestines would drop out through your shoes.”

  “Books,” said Alan. “A big fat hardcover on a Sunday morning.”

  “Well, Perry?” Weber said. “Anything you’re missing right about now?”

  I shrugged. “Only one thing,” I said.

  “It can’t be any stupider than missing roller coasters,” Keyes said. “Out with it. That’s an order.”

  “The only thing I really miss is being married,” I said. “I miss sitting around with my wife, just talking or reading together or whatever.”

  This got utter silence. “That’s a new one on me,” Ridley said.

  “Shit, I don’t miss that,” Jensen said. “The last twenty years of my marriage were nothing to write home about.”

  I looked around. “Don’t any of you have spouses who joined up? Don’t you keep in touch with them?”

  “My husband signed up before I did,” Weber said. “He was already dead by the time I got my first posting.”

  “My wife is stationed on the Boise,” Keyes said. “She drops me a note occasionally. I don’t really get the feeling she’s missing me terribly. I guess thirty-eight years of me was enough.”

  “People get out here and they don’t really want to be in their old lives anymore,” Jensen said. “Sure, we miss the little things—like Aimee says, that’s one of the ways you keep yourself from going nuts. But it’s like being taken back in time, to just before you made all the choices that gave you the life you had. If you could go back, why would you make the same choices? You already lived that life. My last comment aside, I don’t regret the choices I made. But I’m not in a rush to make those same choices again. My wife’s out here, sure. But she’s happy to live her new life without me. And, I must say, I’m not in a hurry to sign up on that tour of duty again, either.”

  “This isn’t cheering me up, people,” I said.

  “What is it about being married you miss?” Alan asked.

  “Well, I miss my wife, you know,” I said. “B
ut I also miss the feeling of, I don’t know, comfort. The sense you’re where you’re supposed to be, with someone you’re supposed to be with. I sure as hell don’t feel that out here. We go places that we have to fight for, with people who might be dead the next day or the day after that. No offense.”

  “None taken,” Keyes said.

  “There’s no stable ground out here,” I said. “There’s nothing out here I feel really safe about. My marriage had its ups and downs like anyone’s, but when it came down to it, I knew it was solid. I miss that sort of security, and that sort of connection with someone. Part of what makes us human is what we mean to other people, and what people mean to us. I miss meaning something to someone, having that part of being human. That’s what I miss about marriage.”

  More silence. “Well, hell, Perry,” Ridley finally said. “When you put it that way, I miss being married, too.”

  Jensen snorted. “I don’t. You keep missing being married, Perry. I’ll keep missing my daughter’s cookies.”

  “Molasses,” Keyes said. “Disgusting.”

  “Don’t start that again, sir,” Jensen said. “I may have to go get my Empee.”

  Susan’s death was very nearly the flip side of Thomas’. A drillers’ strike on Elysium had severely reduced the amount of petroleum being refined. The Tucson was assigned to transport scab drillers and protect them while they got several of the shut-down drilling platforms back online. Susan was on one of the platforms when the striking drillers attacked with improvised artillery; the explosion knocked Susan and two other soldiers off the platform and down several dozen meters to the sea. The other two soldiers were already dead when they hit the water but Susan, severely burned and barely conscious, was still alive.

  Susan was fished out of the sea by the striking drillers who had launched the attack; they decided to make an example of her. The Elysium seas feature a large scavenger called a gaper, whose hinged jaw is easily capable of taking up a person in a single swallow. Gapers frequent the drilling platforms because they feed off the trash the platforms shed into the sea. The drillers propped Susan up, slapped her into consciousness, and then reeled off a hurried manifesto in her general direction, relying on her BrainPal connection to carry their words to the CDF. They then found Susan guilty of collaborating with the enemy, sentenced her to death, and pushed her back into the sea directly below the platform’s trash chute.

  A gaper was not long in coming; one swallow and Susan was in. At this point Susan was still alive and struggling to exit the gaper from the same orifice from which she entered. Before she could manage this, however, one of the striking drillers shot the gaper directly below the dorsal fin, where the animal’s brain was located. The gaper was killed instantly and sank, taking Susan with it. Susan was killed, not from being eaten and not even from drowning, but from the pressure of the water as she and the fish that had swallowed her sank into the abyss.

  Any celebration by the striking drillers over this blow to the oppressor was short-lived. Fresh forces from the Tucson swept through the drillers’ camps, rounded up several dozen ringleaders, shot them and fed them all to the gapers. Except for the ones who killed Susan, who were fed to gapers without the intermediary step of being shot first. The strike ended shortly thereafter.

  Susan’s death was clarifying to me, a reminder that humans can be as inhuman as any alien species. If I had been on the Tucson, I could see myself feeding one of the bastards who killed Susan to the gapers, and not feeling in the least bit bad about it. I don’t know if this made me better or worse than what I had feared I was becoming when we battled the Covandu. But I no longer worried about it making me any less human than I was before.

  TWELVE

  Those of us who were at the Battle for Coral remember where we were when we first heard the planet had been taken. I was listening to Alan explain how the universe I thought I knew was long gone.

  “We left it the first time we skipped,” he said. “Just went up and out into the universe next door. That’s how skipping works.”

  This got a nice, long mute reaction from me and Ed McGuire, who were sitting with Alan in the battalion’s “At Ease” lounge. Finally Ed, who had taken over Aimee Weber’s squad, piped up. “I’m not following you, Alan. I thought that the skip drive just took us up past the speed of light or something like that. That’s how it works.”

  “Nope,” Alan said. “Einstein’s still right—the speed of light is as fast as you can go. Besides which, you wouldn’t want to start flying around the universe at any real fraction of the speed of light, anyway. You hit even a little chunk of dirt while you’re going a couple hundred thousand klicks a second and you’re going to put a pretty good hole in your spaceship. It’s just a speedy way to get killed.”

  Ed blinked and then swept his hand over his head. “Whoosh,” he said. “You lost me.”

  “All right, look,” Alan said. “You asked me how the skip drive works. And like I said, it’s simple: It takes an object from one universe, like the Modesto, and pops it into another universe. The problem is that we refer to it as a ‘drive.’ It’s not really a drive at all, because acceleration is not a factor; the only factor is location within the multiverse.”

  “Alan,” I said. “You’re doing another flyby.”

  “Sorry,” Alan said, and looked thoughtful for a second. “How much math do you guys have?” he asked.

  “I vaguely recall calculus,” I said. Ed McGuire nodded in agreement.

  “Oy,” Alan said. “Fine. I’m going to use small words here. Please don’t be offended.”

  “We’ll try not to,” Ed said.

  “Okay. First off, the universe you’re in—the universe we’re in right at this moment—is only one of an infinite number of possible universes whose existence is allowed for within quantum physics. Every time we spot an electron in a particular position, for example, our universe is functionally defined by that electron’s position, while in the alternate universe, that electron’s position is entirely different. You following me?”

  “Not at all,” said Ed.

  “You nonscientists. Well, just trust me on it, then. The point is: multiple universes. The multiverse. What the skip drive does is open a door to another one of those universes.”

  “How does it do that?” I asked.

  “You don’t have the math for me to explain it to you,” Alan said.

  “So it’s magic,” I said.

  “From your point of view, yes,” Alan said. “But it’s well allowed in physics.”

  “I don’t get it,” Ed said. “We’ve been through multiple universes then, yet every universe we’ve been in has been exactly like ours. Every ‘alternate universe’ I ever read about in science fiction has major differences. That’s how you know you’re in an alternate universe.”

  “There’s actually an interesting answer to that question,” Alan said. “Let us take as a given that moving an object from one universe to another is a fundamentally unlikely event.”

  “I can accept that,” I said.

  “In terms of physics, this is allowable, since at its most basic level, this is a quantum physics universe and pretty much anything can happen, even if as a practical matter it doesn’t. However, all other things being equal, each universe prefers to keep unlikely events to a bare minimum, especially above the subatomic level.”

  “How does a universe ‘prefer’ anything?” Ed asked.

  “You don’t have the math,” Alan said.

  “Of course not,” Ed said, rolling his eyes.

  “But the universe does prefer some things over others. It prefers to move toward a state of entropy, for example. It prefers to have the speed of light as a constant. You can modify or mess with these things to some extent, but they take work. Same thing here. In this case, moving an object from one universe to another is so unlikely that typically the universe to which you move the object is otherwise exactly like the one you left—a conservation of unlikeliness, you might say.”<
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  “But how do you explain us moving from one place to another?” I asked. “How do we get from one point in space in one universe, to an entirely different point in space in another?”

  “Well, think about it,” Alan said. “Moving an entire ship into another universe is the incredibly unlikely part. From the universe’s point of view, where in that new universe it appears is really very trivial. That’s why I said that the word ‘drive’ is a misnomer. We don’t really go anywhere. We simply arrive.”

  “And what happens in the universe that you just left?” asked Ed.

  “Another version of the Modesto from another universe pops right in, with alternate versions of us in it,” Alan said. “Probably. There’s an infinitesimally small chance against it, but as a general rule, that’s what happens.”

  “So do we ever get to go back?” I asked.

  “Back where?” Alan said.

  “Back to the universes where we started from,” I said.

  “No,” Alan said. “Well, again, it’s theoretically possible you could, but it’s extremely unlikely. Universes are continually being created from branching possibilities, and the universes we go to are generally created almost instantly before we skip into them—it’s one of the reasons why we can skip to them, because they are so very close to our own in composition. The longer in time you’re separated from a particular universe, the more time it has to become divergent, and the less likely you are to go back to it. Even going back to a universe you left a second before is phenomenally unlikely. Going back to the one we left over a year ago, when we first skipped to Phoenix from Earth, is really out of the question.”

  “I’m depressed,” Ed said. “I liked my universe.”

  “Well, get this, Ed,” Alan said. “You don’t even come from the same original universe as John and I, since you didn’t make that first skip when we did. What’s more, even the people who did make that same first skip with us aren’t in the same universe as us now, since they’ve since skipped into different universes because they’re on different ships—any versions of our old friends that we meet up with will be alternate versions. Of course, they will look and act the same, because except for the occasional electron placement here and there, they are the same. But our originating universes are completely different.”