In Heaven and Earth (8 page)

“
He’s happy,”
Reuben said. “He’s in his garden, with his people. Let him
sleep.”

“
Was it really
a garden?” Eskil asked, and that conversation took them all the way
up to the mess.

They shared the cooking
after that. Meili and Eskil talked, light chatter about everything
except the monster in the room, and Reuben made an effort to join
in when Eskil threw a comment his way. Meili’s obvious nerves made
him dislike her less. Suddenly, she seemed like a junior officer
faced with battle for the first time, and he switched back to old
behaviour patterns without thinking about it. He had been Chief
Medic on Ahrima’s flagship for five years, before everything else,
and he knew how to play that role.

Chances were he and his
colleagues, along with Vairya and the city of Caelestia, were just
the first casualties in a galactic war. If so, he’d damn well go
down fighting.

When Chanthavy came to
join them, she simply walked in and sat down, dropping her head
into her hands without speaking.

“
What are our
orders?” Reuben asked, as the other two stepped closer to each
other, Eskil’s hand clenching around the spoon he was stirring
with.

“
Withdraw from
action within the city, but remain docked and await instructions.
They ordered me to send them command codes for our engines and
hyperdrive.”

“
Did you?”
Reuben asked.

“
Of course,”
she said, and she sounded old for the first time. “It was a direct
order.”

“
Vairya said we
should run,” Reuben said and began to set the table. It was rather
pointless, but he needed to do something with his hands.

“
I don’t
understand,” Eskil said. “What does that mean?”

“
It means we’re
collateral damage,” Reuben said. “They’re going to send us into the
sun with the city. Permission to break out the good booze,
captain?”

“
Granted,” she
said without looking up.

Chapter Six

LATER, after they had all
drunk enough to get a little hazy, Meili planted her elbow hard on
the table and glared at Reuben. “So, you think we’re all judging
you?”

“
Am I wrong?”
he asked mildly.

She snorted, but then
said, “No. Didn’t know it bothered you.”

“
I’m used to
it.”

“
So you said.
To Vairya.” She lifted her hand to point at him. “So how is it that
you talk more to the crazy cyborg than to any of us,
huh?”

“
Maybe I like
him better than you,” Reuben said and took another
drink.

But this time, to his
surprise, she laughed. “That was a joke, wasn’t it? Fucking nasty
sense of humour you have, Cooper.”

“
Better than
none at all.”

“
Wait,” Eskil
said, lifting his head from where he was slumped on the table.
“Don’t you like us, Coop?”

“
If he cries,”
Meili said, grinning evilly, “you’re paying for my
therapy.”

“
I like you,”
Reuben told Eskil and managed not to pat him on the head. “Now go
back to sleep so Meili and I can stop playing nicely
again.”

But Eskil was sitting up.
It took him a couple of attempts, but he stared at Reuben
reproachfully. “She’s right. You did talk to him more freely than
you ever have to us.” A slow smile bloomed across his face and he
waved his finger at Reuben. “You liked him.”

“
Shoot me now,”
Reuben said to Meili. “You don’t want to have to sit through this
any more than I do.”

She leaned back in her
chair, laughing. “No, I think this should be hilarious. Go ahead,
Eskil. Matchmake at the end of time. Why not?”

“
You’re mean,”
Eskil told her and slumped back down on the table.

“
You didn’t
really fancy him, did you?” she asked. “Dr Bigot and the cyborg?
Ironic.”

Chanthavy, who had been
gazing into space, stirred at that one. “Don’t call Reuben a bigot,
Meili. And, Reuben, I do hope you haven’t been forming any
inappropriate attachments to—”

“
I should have
just hung myself in my cell,” Reuben muttered, tongue loosened by
Sirian brandy. “If I’d realised I was in for a lifetime of ethics
lectures, I might not have looked forwards to the end of the damn
trial so much. In case any of you missed it, I was a witness for
the
prosecution
.”

“
But you worked
for General Ahrima,” Meili said. “You were her chief surgeon. You
knew what she was doing. You must have.”

They were all staring at
him now.

Reuben knocked back the
rest of his drink. “The trial transcripts are all online. Form your
own opinions.”

“
I want to hear
it from you,” Meili said belligerently. “I want to know what deal
you did to keep your licence and how the hell you can sleep with
what you did.”

“
I think,”
Eskil said muzzily, “that this is probably why Reuben doesn’t like
us. Vairya was nice to him. You should try that, Mei.”

“
Seriously,
just shoot me before we get to that point,” Reuben
muttered.

But she was looking at
him, her whole head quirked to the side. “Didn’t realise until
today that you were funny. What else did I miss,
Cooper?”

“
I’m not
obliged to justify myself to any of you.”

One of Eskil’s dreads
stretched across the table to tap Reuben on the wrist. “Coop, be
nice to Meili too.”

“
Oh, yeah,”
Meili muttered. “I’ll shoot you if you shoot me.”

“
I myself would
like to hear the story,” Chanthavy said, as Eskil pouted and Meili
glared. “You are certainly not obliged to tell us your side of
events, but we have nothing else to do but sit here and await our
doom. I would hate to enter oblivion misjudging a
colleague.”

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.”