Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 111 Read online

  Capella.

  Admiral Steele’s been chasing Laporte the whole way. Trying to repair his only error. And here they are now, in Capella, at the end of the hunt—Laporte plunging towards the black hole in her little Uriel and Steele’s titanic Atreus plunging after her.

  The Uriel’s electronic warfare systems make a deep frightened sound. Laporte’s helmet taps her chin and says:

  VAMPIRE! ASPECT! STINGRAY! SSM-[EOS]-[notch 000x000]-[20+!]

  It’ll be missiles, then. A fuck-ton of missiles.

  If he turned around now, with all Atreus’ fuel still coiled up in her engines, Steele could probably stop his fall. Claw his way into a hover above the black hole, and then make the grueling climb up to the wormhole and safety.

  But he’s accelerating. Chasing Laporte. Risking himself and his entire crew to kill her.

  Laporte opens a COM channel. Aims it downward. Into the dark. She has allies here, if they can be made to understand the danger.

  “Ken,” she sends. “It’s me. Don’t keep me waiting, old man.”

  That’s why she’s come here, to the singularity, to the tomb of Capella. Because the Nemesis made it.

  Just as they made her.

  nagari 2/10

  Ken is a dream of Laporte’s. Laporte’s dreams are not entirely her own.

  Ken happened long before the Alliance rebuilt the wormhole, long before the war—

  She was six years old, playing in the yard. Her parents had a house in Tandale, part of Dar es Salaam, where they worked on heavy trains, moving cargo from the Indian Ocean all across Tanzania. Her father was a reserve pilot and her mother was in arbitrage. Little Noemi, left to self-directed education, as was the Ubuntu preference for the young, spent her days building a model train system in the dirt between her water garden and her ant battle arena. But the ants would not stay in the ant battle arena, not even a little—they kept foraying into the train system, no matter how many of them Noemi punitively de-limbed.

  Ken suggested she consider the broader logic driving the ants. Ken often gave Noemi advice. Her parents were very proud that little Noemi had actualized such a useful inner friend.

  After an exhaustive survey of her territories, Noemi discovered the problem. There was a rival ant colony north of the water garden. The two groups had fallen to war. She studied up on ant diplomacy, complaining into her phone, and concluded there was no pluralist solution. The colonies would compete for hegemony over all available resources. Unless one side achieved a swift victory, lives and labor would be lost on the war. An attritional stalemate could ruin them both.

  She uncurled the garden hose and drowned the northern colony. The choice was simple, in that it was easy. It only depended on one thing. She knew and loved the ants in the south of the yard. She cared nothing for the ants in the north. There was no other distinction between them.

  When you are a monster, as Laporte certainly is, you have to cling to the things that you love. The ligatures that connect you to the rest of humanity.

  If you lose them, you may whirl away.

  simms 3/9

  Laporte didn’t understand the Ken dream until she joined NAGARI. That’s the beginning.

  What the Alliance asked the Federation is what the woman named al-Alimah asked Laporte. She was a tall woman with gunmetal implants in place of her eyes. She gave Laporte a choice: stay with Simms as she fights the radiation poisoning, or come with me and try to win the war.

  “The medics are coming,” she said. “You can stay with your Captain until she dies, or until she doesn’t. You’ll make no difference. None of your talents or capabilities will contribute to her battle.”

  (Laporte is a wingman and she never leaves her wing leader—)

  “Or you can come with me. I’m with a black ops unit. Special moral environment. NAGARI. You know we’re losing this war. You know we need you.”

  (—except when necessary to complete the mission.)

  And Laporte thought, if she lives, if she wakes up, I want to be able to say—

  Hey, boss. We’ve won. I took care of everything for you. Did you have a good vacation?

  So Laporte took al-Alimah by her tactical gloves and went with her, out of the sweltering briefing room, out of the dying ship where everyone’s sweat was hot enough to leave red radiation burns, where their marrow rotted inside their neutron-salted bones.

  And that was how she joined NAGARI.

  nagari 3/10

  NAGARI. A committee of monsters: a federation of sharks. Shaved-skull operators cooking lamb on the naked coils of their frigate’s heatsinks. All veterans. Not one in uniform.

  There are real psychological differences between Federation and Alliance citizens. Fifty years of sealed prosperity in Sol gave birth to a generation of humans who are very good at living but very bad at killing.

  That’s why the Federation, for all its socioeconomic might, is losing the war. (That’s why Laporte thinks the Alliance chose war over peace. They could never win the peace. And they were built for victory.)

  But Laporte isn’t a good Federation citizen, no oh, that’s what Simms told her in their radiation-cooked parley: you’re a killer, you need no reason and no hate. It’s just you. And that’s why you’ll be fine without me.

  And Simms was right. Laporte has an instinct for violence. And there are others like her, gathered under the mantle of Federation black ops, where the terrain of their violence extends far beyond the battlefield.

  “This is your first mission.” Al-Alimah briefs her in the back of the mess kitchen as they inventory the remainders. Cumin and cinnamon and allspice blown down over them, but the stink of ozone is stronger. Al-Alimah’s eyes are sensors and projectors: they sketch visions for Laporte by scratching her eyes with particle beams. “You will infiltrate an Alliance personnel convoy carrying non-combatant contractors. Dental and culinary services for rear-area bases.”

  When Laporte blinks, the images left by al-Alimah’s eyes don’t fade.

  “You will deploy a neutron weapon against the dormitory ships. Leave no survivors.”

  Laporte imagines Simms asking: what is the military rationale for this strike, sir? She vows to ask, after the mission. She vows to get good data on the mission effects. She used to keep a kill tally, one strike for each fighter she shot down, one chance to preen and brag for Boss.

  She sleeps with a cable in her skull, and she dreams about the strike over and over. When she flies it, it feels like a dream too. The neutron weapon makes no light or sound except the shrieking RAD warnings in her cockpit. She comes home to backslaps and fistbumps and moonshine from the still.

  “The objective is atrocity,” al-Alimah tells her, when she asks. The NAGARI analyst wears a baggy gray jumpsuit, indifferent to rank and physical presence. “The Alliance uses statistical modeling to predict our tactics. They’ve learned that we obey a set of moral guidelines. The only way to confound their predictions is to introduce noise.”

  Noise. Killing all those dentists with radiation was noise.

  When Simms was irradiated she was very quiet.

  Laporte stops spicing her food. She dresses in stark self-washing jumpsuits and she showers cold. The other operators are happy monsters, full of gossip and tall tales, not shy about talking shop or sex. Laporte touches no one. She doesn’t talk about her missions. In the gym and the simulator she is laconic and dependable but she never asks for anything. She practices self-denial.

  One of the other operators, Europa-born and silver-haired, comes after Laporte for reasons either carnal or tactical. The closest she gets to intimacy, of one sort or another, is when she says: “You act like you’re a monk! Monks give up stuff they like, man. Monks deny their pleasures.”

  That’s right. Monsters shouldn’t be warm. They shouldn’t have fun. Being a monster should feel like it costs.

  But the silver woman grins at Laporte, an I-know-you grin, and says, “So when you pretend you hate the work—I know what that means. I know what’s
up.”

  Laporte flies noise jobs for months. False flags. Political assassinations. Bycatch enhancement. Straight-up terrorism. She has to round her kill tally to the nearest thousand. She has one of her teeth replaced by an armored transponder, so that someone will know she dies even if her body’s vaporized.

  Simms would not be proud. Simms fought a war against an invading army, and she hated the fuck out of them. But she had rules. NAGARI is anti-rule. Strategically amoral.

  Is this her whole purpose now? Trying to buy the Federation a few extra months through the exercise of atrocity? Missions that violate every tenet of Ubuntu and civilized conflict?

  It’s war, Simms once said. In war, monsters win. Laporte gathers up that thought and buckles it around herself, for want of Simms, for want of victory.

  Is she fighting because victory might mean seeing Simms again? Imagine that. Imagine saying: Hey, boss, you’re alive. I neutron bombed a few thousand dentists, and we won the war. Can I buy you a drink?

  simms 4/9

  Back in the middle. In the story that moves Laporte from NAGARI to the black hole. Her last chance to stay human.

  “It’s not true,” Laporte tells Simms.

  They’ve finished re-arming all the fighters, breaking the ceasefire lock. This is the lean time between the surrender and the mutiny, when the Federation’s surviving fleet lurks in the cold on the edge of the solar system, a faithful dog cast out and gone feral. Waiting for Laporte and NAGARI to rouse them to revenge.

  “What’s not true?” Simms asks. She pokes the fire with her cooking mitt.

  They have a trash fire going on the Eris’ hangar deck. Warships are very good at coping with internal fires, and very bad at serving as long-term habitats. They grew some chicken in the medical tissue loom and now they’re burning trash under a plate of thermal conductor, in the hope of making a chicken curry.

  “That monsters win,” Laporte says. The chicken pops and spatters grease. Simms laughs and Laporte, thinking of dead cells sloughing apart under radiation, shudders. Her transponder tooth, left over from NAGARI work, is cold under her tongue. “In the end, actually, monsters tend to lose. And that’s much worse.”

  “What do you mean?” Simms eyes her up. Simms is still exploring Laporte’s new crazy side, separate (in her practical mind) from Laporte’s old crazy side, before their long radiation-cooked severance. “Is this something from your NAGARI drug trips? Cosmic insight, plucked from the void?”

  “Yeah,” Laporte says, remembering the surgical theater, the feeling of cold entheogen slurry pumping into her skull. Where they discovered the truth about Ken. “I wish you’d been there.”

  “But I was there,” Simms says, stirring the fire. The thermal conductor is a cheerful cherry-hot color, and Simms hums as she works, like she’s trying to be casual about how much she cares for this idea: the possibility that she was out there, helping Laporte win, even while she was bolted to a triage rig with her bones melting out through needled tubes. “I was in your thoughts. Wasn’t I? Isn’t that what kept you alive?”

  Why would she be so happy about this, about helping Laporte be a good monster, and then, just a day later, refuse to fly with Laporte in the mutiny?

  Why?

  nagari 4/10

  This is what Laporte was up to while Simms’ bones were melting:

  Laporte flies her terror missions. She goes out alone and she returns alone, and between those stanchions she kills her targets. Her effect on the universe, the vector sum of her actions, is purely subtractive.

  She isn’t fine without Simms. Simms was her captain and her friend, the last tie keeping Laporte in the human orbit. But that’s the point, right? Laporte’s a monster now. Her past is useful to her only in the way that gunpowder is useful to a bullet. The more pain in it, the better.

  The war’s falling apart, slouching towards surrender. NAGARI scores victory after horrible victory. But the Federation Navy can’t follow their lead. The clockmaker-Admiral Steele outfoxes the Navy again and again, closing in on Earth.

  Laporte becomes a kind of leader among the operators, on strength of her efficiency, in admiration of her self-sufficiency. She learns the name of every NAGARI operator, their habits and crimes, their gym schedules (hey man, spot me) and cooking tricks (come on, not this curry shit again). She also learns the callsigns of every active pilot: physiological parameters, operational histories.

  But she can’t connect the two, the names and the callsigns. When a callsign dies on a mission, she isn’t sure who it was until she misses their grunt in the gym, their recipes on the heatsink grill.

  The Federation is still losing the war. Her intention is to keep flying until she dies.

  But the memory of Simms (and the memory of what she said: you’ll be fine, you don’t need a reason) drives her mad with competition. She had a competition with Simms! She always wants to be better than her Captain expects.

  So when she wakes up from a training dream she goes to al-Alimah and asks: “Why are we doing this? What’s the point of noise jobs and neutron bombs, if it’s just a way to put off the inevitable surrender?”

  She expects the answer she’s given herself: Monsters are weapons. It’s not up to the weapon to choose targets.

  But al-Alimah startles her. As if she is a ghost alive in the memory of childhood Tandale summers, al-Alimah says: “Tell me about Ken.”

  “What is this?” Laporte stares her down, eye to gleaming post-surgery tactical eye. “Why do you care about that?”

  “You told your Captain Simms that you had an invisible friend as a child. He urged you to develop your faculty for violence.”

  Laporte laughs. It doesn’t surprise her that NAGARI knows this shit, but it’s hilarious that they care. “Ants, man. He wanted violence against ants. Ken was an imaginary friend.”

  Al-Alimah doesn’t waver. “During your adolescence, you were treated for schizotypal symptoms. You reported violent ideation, dissociative thoughts, and a fear of outside intrusion. Your first boyfriend left you because he was afraid of you.”

  Laporte opens her arms in a gesture of animal challenge. “Are you worried,” she says, grinning, “that I might be unwell?”

  Al-Alimah laughs. She can pretend to be very warm, when she wants, although it’s terrifyingly focused. Like all her charm radiates from a naked wire charged red-hot.

  “What would Ubuntu have had you do to the ants?” she asks. “What would our Federation’s philosophy say to two ant colonies at war?”

  Find a pluralistic solution. Locate the structural causes of inter-colony violence. Rework the terrain, so that peaceful competition between colonies can produce a common good.

  “Ubuntu is for people,” Laporte says. “It doesn’t work on ants.”

  Al-Alimah touches Laporte’s wrist with one long, cold finger. “Think about the universe,” she says, “and what portions of it belong to people. If Ubuntu applies to the human territory, what is NAGARI for?”

  “Oh my God,” Laporte says.

  She understands instantly. She grasps the higher purpose of NAGARI.

  She has a terrible, wonderful, world-burning premonition. A way to win the war.

  nagari 5/10

  Ask the Alliance, Steele’s people, the aggressors and the victors in this terrible war: what is the grievance? The fatal casus belli?

  Imagine a republic charged and corroded by perpetual emergency. Scattered across lonely stars. Simmering on the edge of rebellion. They may be tyrants. May also be the bravest and the most tenacious people ever born.

  This is what Laporte knows, what NAGARI knows, about their history—

  Humanity met something out there. Implacably hostile. Unspeakably alien. Nemesis.

  Love is about knowing the rules of your connection. You know how you could hurt her, if you wanted, and she trusts you with this knowledge. And war is about that too. You learn the enemy’s victory conditions, her capabilities and taboos. You build a model of her and figure out w
here it breaks. You force the enemy into unsurvivable terrain, pinned between an unwinnable war and unacceptable compromise.

  But what do you do when the rules you use to understand how one thing relates to another stop working? When the other thing has no rules at all?

  simms 5/9

  Rules about Simms, from the time before radiation and ambush:

  The Federation military forbids fraternization in the ranks. While Ubuntu treasures community, emotional attachment can compromise the chain of command.

  So at first the fire between them, the charge in the air, bled off in confined ways—

  Laporte tried not to look at Simms too much, or too little, so nobody would notice her unusual attention. This is like war logic. When you look for the enemy with your active sensors, you also tell the enemy where you are and what you intend.

  When they checked each others’ suits they were extremely professional. Soon they realized this was an error, since soldiers are profoundly obscene. But it was too late to start making catheter jokes.

  Sometimes they sparred in the gym. Simms was icy and Laporte grinned too much. The whole squadron turned out to cheer. (They’re all dead now.)

  A new rule, after NAGARI and the Federation’s surrender, after al-Alimah puts them back together. A rule they teach other—

  You must never hint at your secret fear. The terrible thought that it might have been better if you’d never found each other again.

  nagari 6/10

  Al-Alimah shares the history of humanity and the Nemesis, the history that Laporte knows from school—and the secret parts NAGARI has collated.

  There were two Nemesis incursions.

  The first war, the war that divided mankind into Federation and Alliance, began like a nightmare and ended like an amputation. The Nemesis surfaced from the wormhole web and moved across human space erratic and arbitrarily violent. Humanity scored tactical victories (tactical victory is the tequila of combat highs: hot in the moment, hateful in the aftermath) but in the end the Nemesis world-killer called Sinadhuja made it all the way to Serpentis.