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The Quiet War

Cash Baker was just twenty-six, with eight years' service in the Greater Brazilian Air Defence Force, when he was selected for the J-2 singleship test programme. From inauspiciously ordinary origins in a hardscrabble city in the badlands of East Texas he'd risen through the ranks with astonishing speed. Luckily, he'd received as good an education as anyone in his neck of the woods could reasonably expect, and one of his teachers had spotted his preternatural mathematical ability and given him extra tutoring and steered him towards the Air Defence Force. He scraped into the top percentile in the induction tests, was streamed straight into basic pilot-training at the academy in Monterrey, and a year later, on a hot, thundery day in August, marched at the head of the graduation parade for the class of 2210. He started out flying fat-bellied Tapir-L4s on supply missions to remote camps of the Wreckers Corps east of the Great Lakes, was quickly promoted to the combat wing of the 114th Squadron, flying fast, deadly little Raptors, and distinguished himself in a string of air-support missions during the campaign fought by General Arvam Peixoto's Third Division, clearing bandit settlements in and around the ruins of Chicago. The bandits were organised and highly disciplined, but for the most part poorly armed, although one time someone fired a reconditioned smart missile at Cash's bird and he had a hairy couple of minutes flying all over the sky before his battle AI broke the encryption of the missile's fierce little mind and it incontinently exploded.

Then he was transferred to the big base outside Santiago and flew long-range intercept patrols out across the Pacific during the Cold War between Greater Brazil and the Pacific Community, when for a little while it looked as if war might break out over possession of Hawaii. After the Cold War cooled down, he was selected for test-pilot school, and worked on a new generation ground-to-orbit fighter, the Jaguar Ghost. A dream to handle in orbit, but a pig during re-entry. After three of the eight prototypes crashed and burned when their engines flamed on erratically or not at all while planing back into the atmosphere, and two more burnt up because of flaws in their lightweight diamond-paint heat shields, the programme was cancelled. But Cash had a lot of fun in the six months he spent testing the craft, loved the way the horizon flexed beneath him and the sky darkened until the stars came out as he arrowed out of the atmosphere, loved the serene oceanic feeling of seeming to float above the Earth while travelling at several thousand klicks a second. Up there, the terrible wounds left by the industrial age and anthropogenic climate change and the Overturn were mostly invisible. The dead zones in the oceans, the flooding along the shorelines of every continent, the deforested deserts of the Amazonian basin and Africa, the vast and tumbled deserts of North America, the ruined cities . . . All was lost in the shining vastness of the beautiful blue planet. Cash wasn't especially religious, but in orbit he understood for the first time what the green saints meant when they said that the Earth was a living organism whole and entire.

After the Jaguar fiasco Cash was returned to combat status, but by now he had a bad jones for test flying, and for space. He was chasing down rumours of a new kind of space plane when General Arvam Peixoto's office reached out to him. The general remembered Cash from the Chicago campaign, and Cash volunteered for the test programme as soon as he was asked if he wanted to come aboard.

So he went to the Moon, and the Earth seemed lovelier than ever, a lonely blue-white pearl floating in the black sky above the lunar wastelands. A hundred and fifty years ago some of Earth's richest, brightest, and most powerful people had underwritten the construction costs of a tented city, Athena, east of Archimedes Crater on the edge of the Imbrium Basin, moving there to escape the devastation and disorder caused by climate change and dozens of brush-fire wars fought over dwindling resources. Strip mines had processed lunar regolith for helium-3, and there was a sprawling site where sunshade mirrors had been manufactured and slung into orbit at the L1 point between the Earth and Moon. The helium-3 had been used in fusion reactors; the swarm of mirrors had cut down insolation and helped to stabilise the Earth's climate during the wild years of the Overturn, when runaway global warming driven by vast surges of methane released from Antarctic clathrates had threatened to cause mass extinction on a global scale. The mirrors were in orbit still, maintained by international crews. It would be at least another century before the effects of the Overturn and global warming were entirely ameliorated.

When it had become clear that the new supranational states that had emerged after the Overturn were determined to take control of the strip mines and shut down everything else on the Moon, the construction workers and the science crews, along with their families and many of the private citizens and their families and employees, had lit out for Mars and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Greater Brazil had claimed the city they had abandoned in place, and it had been refurbished by members of the Peixoto family, its most enthusiastic proselytisers for an expansion of the space programme. They had built a small fleet of long-range ships, had recently established links and trade routes with cities and settlements in the Jupiter and Saturn systems, and their skunk works had developed all kind of technological miracles, including a new kind of combat space plane.

Directly after disembarking from the shuttle from Earth, Cash and the other volunteers for the test programme were taken to a briefing room where General Arvam Peixoto walked them through the specs of the prototype of the new plane, the J-2 singleship. It was a hot bird, all right. A self-guided missile equipped with a new kind of fusion motor that used antiprotons to drive a fission/fusion chain reaction in microdroplets of deuterium and tritium, and was far more powerful than any currently in operation. There was a pressure-suit-sized life system at the J-2's sharp end, it had cut-back wings for atmospheric sorties, and it was armed with a pumped-pulse X-ray laser, a drum of single-shot gamma-ray lasers, a rail mini-gun that fired depleted-uranium flechettes, a variety of conventional missiles, and manoeuvrable proxies that after being fired from a fat cannon could do all kinds of imaginative damage when they caught up with their targets. Its flight guidance system, using long-range and sideways radars, and GPS and contour maps accurate to within ten centimetres, could fly it completely around the Moon at an average altitude of a hundred metres, and then do it all over again, with exactly the same flight profile. And it was so agile and so fast, General Peixoto explained, that in combat situations it demanded superhuman qualities from its pilots.

The general was a powerfully built man with shoulder-length white hair brushed back from his craggy face. He talked with an easy informal style, as if to members of his own family, making eye contact with everyone in the room. When his glance fell on Cash for a moment, the young pilot felt his heart swell with pride and passion.

'You are already the most able pilots in Air Defence,' General Peixoto said. 'There are none better than you anywhere on Earth or the Moon. But it is possible to make you even better. I'm not familiar with all the techniques involved, and I think it only fair that you should understand completely what we are asking of you. So I'm going to hand you over for a few minutes to Professor Doctor Sri Hong-Owen, who will walk you through what the procedure entails.'

Later, one of the pilots, Luiz Schwarcz, whose family had a background in medical science, told the others that Sri Hong-Owen was a stone-cold genius who had risen to the top of her field under the sponsorship of the Peixoto family's green saint, that she'd designed a radical new photosynthetic system, created all kinds of vacuum organisms, developed many of the techniques that family members used to extend their lives, and much else. But at the time, during the briefing, Cash Baker didn't think much of her. Severe and awkward, dressed in the same blue coveralls everyone wore around the base, she was a plain woman of indeterminate age with a shaved, gleaming scalp and the palest skin he'd ever seen. She talked too fast, addressed the checklists, diagrams, and videos she conjured in the memo space rather than her audience, and answered questions with a brisk, take-no-prisoners manner, as if she thought the pilots were goddamned fools who'd failed to grasp the simplest of facts about the procedure.

Which was, when all the jargon and doubletalk was boiled away, some kind of rewiring or augmentation of their nervous systems that would allow them not only to plug directly into the plane's control systems, but also to briefly boost their neural-processing speeds. When Sri Hong-Owen was done, General Peixoto addressed the pilots again, telling them that it was an extremely radical procedure, that there was no guarantee that it would work in every case, or that everyone would survive it. If any of them wished to walk away and return to normal duties, there would be no dishonour in doing so, no shame, and no mention of it on their service record, he said, and asked those who wished to volunteer to raise their hands.

Cash stuck his arm straight up. So did everyone else. Someone down at the front was waving both his hands above his head. Because, hell, who didn't want to be a better pilot?

The first operation was performed under general anaesthetic and laid an artificial neural network around Cash's spine. The process of bedding in, as the network interfaced with his peripheral nervous system, was tedious and sometimes agonising, and during the seemingly endless rounds of tests that followed he found it weirdly unsettling to watch his right or left arm move by itself and his hands dance through a memo space with robotic swiftness and precision, solving spatial and kinetic problems without any conscious intervention on his part.

There was worse to come. He had to stay awake throughout the second operation, when the interfaces of the network were laced into his motor and sensory cortices, because the surgical team had to check that not only were his new talents in place and functioning, but also that nothing else, from his spinal reflexes to his memory, was damaged during the procedure that inserted them. So although he was given a nerve block and felt no pain, Cash had to endure the vibration and smell of burnt blood and bone as the bone saw cut open his skull, felt the sucking lift as the cap of his skull was lifted away, heard the mosquito whine of the bush robot that worked on his brain with manipulators that divided and divided a thousand times into clouds of cutting and recording tips nanometres in length, not much bigger than the neurons on which they operated. And although the brain has no pain receptors, he felt waves of phantom pain burn through his limbs as the bush robot tested each and every connection, was overwhelmed by discordant symphonies of emotion and taste and sound and hallucinatory shapes of every colour. Afterwards, he was knocked out for two days while final tests were made, and then he and the rest of the pilots on the wing began their long convalescence.

They had to learn to use their bodies all over again, but they were young and fit and determined. They made rapid progress and turned everything into a contest. Laying bets on who would be the first to walk from bed to jakes unaided, who threw up the most (at first they all suffered from balance and inner-ear problems), who could deliver the greatest volume of piss when the doctors asked for a sample. Later on, when they were allowed to use the gym, they competed to see who could do the most press-ups or sit-ups, who could cycle or run the furthest on the machines, who could bench-press the heaviest weights.

Aldo Ruiz started to get into arguments with an invisible presence, hectoring the air in front of his face with passionate anger. He was taken away after he started to punch and slap himself, and the rest of the wing never saw him again.

The next week the tests started in earnest.

Complete physicals to begin with, more intensive than any they'd endured during induction. Then psychological testing, answering all kinds of questions about hypothetical situations and having to complete puzzles while wearing caps that monitored their brain activity. They also wore the caps while carrying out basic exercises on simulations of the J-2. Two of them were weeded out at this stage, for reasons never explained. The rest went forward into the testing and training programme.

No one bothered to tell Cash what would happen the first time his new abilities were activated. He was lying on a couch, surrounded by the usual gaggle of doctors and medical technicians, and then everything around him slowed. His hearing faded, leaving only a faint rumble; it felt as if he was sinking deep in tar; his field of vision dopplered down to red and narrowed to a patch about the size of his thumbnail held at arm's length. He couldn't turn or raise his head but could slowly track his eyes, moving that tiny patch of acuity like a spotlight to study a tech's ponderous blink (one eye squashing shut just before the other), watch another make a laborious mark on a slate. And then, just as suddenly, the world came back to normal. He was hot and horribly breathless, as if he'd just run twenty kilometres in full gear. His chest heaved as he tried to suck down air and his heart was slamming against his ribs and then the taste of metal flooded his mouth and he briefly fainted.

The doctors and techs wouldn't tell Cash if he'd passed or failed, wouldn't explain exactly what had happened to him, wouldn't tell him that it had been okay to faint. So he didn't know if he'd scratched out until he was returned to the ward, and found that everyone else had fainted when they'd been accelerated into what the techs called hyper-reflexive mode for the first time. In the night, Eudóxia Vitória and Bris Lispector both threw full-blown epileptic fits and the doctors took them away and the rest of the wing never saw them again. After the second day of testing Chiquinho Brown didn't come back, and Luiz Schwarcz claimed that he'd overheard one tech telling another that Chiquinho had died of a heart attack.

Those were the last casualties. Five weeks later, the survivors were passed as fit and fully integrated. They had each logged over a hundred hours on simulations, both with normal HUD controls and with their neural systems wired directly into control and guidance systems. Because they might be zipped into their birds for weeks at a time in a war situation, they'd all had their teeth extracted and replaced by contoured plastic ridges. Their appendices had been removed, too. Now they were let loose on the J-2 prototypes, flying with only HUD controls at first, basic point-to-point flights and simple combat simulations. After two weeks of these bedding-in trials, Cash Baker was selected to be the first pilot to fly in fully-wired mode.

It was a live-round discriminatory target exercise. He flew west -- the bird was basically flying itself, but Cash was extended into every corner of its airframe -- out across the dark plain where more than three and a half billion years ago lava had flooded the raw impact crater of the Imbrium Basin. When the target area in the slumped rim mountains at the far edge of the basin came around the horizon, the transition from being merely wired in to flying by wire was fantastically smooth: the J-2's trim altered by less than point zero one arc of a minute. It wasn't like flying the plane. It was like being the plane. Like having sex with it, Luiz said later, although as far as Cash was concerned, that first time, he couldn't remember when he'd ever had sex that good.

He'd been taught to visualise the trigger for his hyper-reflexes as a big red button in the centre of his head. He pressed that button now, and everything went dream-slow. He felt each individual jolt as the rail mini-gun loosed a hail of depleted-uranium flechettes that shredded a simulated pressure dome, located the two rolligons with friendly markings moving across the plain amongst six others tagged as enemy, and targeted those six and crisped their control systems with precise gamma-ray laser shots within a second, and used missiles to take out a series of pop-up targets. Then the target area was behind him, and he gave up command and control to the J-2's battle AI and pushed the imaginary red button again. He'd learned how to stay conscious during the switch-over by now, and was able to acknowledge the range officer's confirmation of his kills.

That evening there was an official celebration of the programme's success. The pilots hung in a tight group and sipped water and fruit juice while senior officers and scientists and techs tossed down shots of pulque and rum and tequila and grew loud and animated. General Peixoto made a short speech, was videoed shaking the hands of the pilots, and disappeared. Officers and the science crew toasted the pilots and each other with grand and florid eloquence, shattered empty glasses on the floor. The pilots left when one of the suit techs was persuaded to take off her shirt and the party started to get serious -- they had medical tests the next morning just like every other morning, 0530 - 0630, and then an hour in the gym before the daily briefing over breakfast before they started work.

Everyone in the Air Defence Force believed that there was going to be another war with the Outers. The so-called peace and reconciliation initiatives would never amount to anything other than a colossal waste of time; the Outers had to be brought under control before they threw another comet at Earth, or developed some weird posthuman tweak that made them invincible. There was going to be war, and Cash Baker, raised on stories of the heroic deeds of his forefathers, couldn't wait. Meanwhile, he and the other pilots continued to work on the J-2. They flew solo missions and flew in formation. They flew over every type of lunar landscape, practised intercept missions in orbit around the Moon and Earth, tested their birds at every level of Earth's atmosphere. When they weren't flying in real time, they honed specific skills in simulations, attended seminars on redesign and improvements of their craft, and updates in combat theory, endured endless suit fittings, medical tests, psychological evaluations . . .

One day, about six months after Cash's maiden flight, the intelligence officer delivering the usual briefing session after breakfast gave way to the colonel in charge of the J-2 programme, who said without preamble that Maximilian Peixoto, the husband of the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Greater Brazilian Air Defence Force, had died late last night. He told the pilots that there would be no test or training flights until after the funeral, which would take place in ten days' time, and said that he had been instructed to choose four pilots who would fly their J-2s over the cathedral in Brasília at the end of the funeral service to honour the man who had been their commander. He named Cash Baker and Luiz Schwarcz and two others, and announced that there would be a special Mass in one hour.

Afterwards, Luiz told Cash that this changed everything.

'Maximilian Peixoto wasn't just our Commander-in-Chief. He was also chair of the Committee for Reconciliation, one of the champions of making peace with the Outers. He set up the first embassies out there thirty years ago. He'd been working steadily ever since to establish trade links. And he naturally had the ear of the President. Now he's dead, his friends will have much less influence.'

'This means what?'

'You really are an ignorant son of a bitch,' Luiz said.

'Maybe I am,' Cash said. 'Or maybe I don't much care for politics.'

'Well, you should. There are many people in the government who think it is pointless and dangerous to try to make friendly overtures to the Outers. They are not yet in the majority, but now they will be able to argue openly against peace and reconciliation. And General Arvam Peixoto is one who has always opposed reconciliation very strongly. You watch out. Pretty soon I believe that he will get the green light to put the J-2 into production.'

'So we're finally going head to head against the Outers.'

'Not quite yet, but we're a step closer.'

'Well it's about time,' Cash said.

(Next)

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