Warchild Read online

  Warchild

  Karin Lowachee

  WARNER BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright © 2002 Karin Lowachee

  Cover design by Shasti O’Leary/Don Puckey

  Cover illustration by Matt Stawicki

  Book design by Charles Sutherland

  First Printing: April 2002

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  PART I

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  PART II

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  PART III

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  XXXII

  XXXIII

  XXXIV

  XXXV

  XXXVI

  XXXVII

  XXXVIII

  XXXIX

  XL

  XLI

  XLII

  XLIII

  XLIV

  XLV

  XLVI

  PART IV

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  About The Author

  Dedication

  To Winifred Wong & Yukiko Kawakami

  For sushi, sanity, and safe harbor

  Acknowledgments

  Many people contributed to the various stages of this novel’s life, directly or indirectly. I wish to thank (in alphabetical order):

  — The critiquers from the old DROWW, who saw part of the baby draft

  — Carole Dzerigian, for character psychoanalysis

  — My family and friends who put up with my panics, for advice, support, and logistics (Yo, Ghetto Lamp Photography, “It’s all good.”)

  — The F.O.G.ians: James Allison, Cecilia Dart-Thornton, and Charles Coleman Finlay (also a Sock Monkey, who suggested I submit to the contest and sent me the info)

  — Sue Glantz, for unwavering belief

  — Jaime Levine and Betsy Mitchell, for editorial insight and making this first foray such a positive experience

  — Tim Powers, for seeing potential

  — The Sock Monkeys (one of the best crit groups and bunch of writers): Keri Arthur, Jan Corso, Caroline Heske, Steve Nagy, Sensei Steve K.S. Perry—whose willingness to share his experiences of things both martial and military deserves special mention, but all the SNAFUs outside of dramatic extrapolation are mine; Marsha Sisolak and Jason Venter

  — The Sporks (the other best crit group and bunch of writers): Angela Boord and her Boyz, Jennifer de Guzman, Mike Dumas, Roger “Jack” Eichorn, Elizabeth Glover, Meredith L. Patterson, Nancy Proctor, Keby Thompson, and Helen Vorster

  — Meinwen Tsui, for all those discussions on Arctic weekends that fueled my muse

  — The wonderful people I taught, worked with, and learned from in Kangiqliniq. Qujannamiik nanurmit.

  And, finally, on behalf of Mustard, thanks to Ketchup.

  PART I

  * * *

  I.

  You didn’t see their faces from where you hid behind the maintenance grate. Smoke worked its fingers through the tiny holes and stroked under your nose and over your eyes, forcing you to stifle breaths, to blink, and to cry. Footsteps followed everywhere that smoke went on the deck— heavy, violent footsteps—and everywhere they went, shouts went with them. Screams. Pulse fire.

  You hardly knew what to listen for, where that one voice you wanted to hear so badly could be among all the other voices that rose and fell on the other side of your screen. Your shelter. Your cowardice.

  But your parents had told you to hide if something like this happened. There’d been drills, even in the middle of your sleepshift, so you knew when the klaxon wailed and Daddy and Mama went for their guns and ushered you into the secret compartment in the floor that you were doing what was right, what you were told to do. Pirates or aliens or the Warboy could attack Mukudori and you had to stay hidden, just in case, just like you practiced. Daddy and Mama would come back and get you when the klaxon stopped and they’d say you did good, Jos. Daddy would call you his brave soldier boy, and you would believe it. When they lifted you out of that hiding place and smiled at you so proud, you didn’t feel like an eight-year-old at all.

  But they hadn’t come back to the secret compartment. The little yellow light in there winked as if something was wrong with it, on-off, on-off, until you shut your eyes and just listened. But you were under the skin of the ship, like Daddy said, and it was quiet. You didn’t hear outside, and outside couldn’t hear you. It kept you safe. It was too dark so you opened your eyes and looked up, touched the light, touched the rough walls, but time went away with every yellow blink and nobody came. It got too warm, as if somebody had shut the air vents.

  You waited until your legs were numb from sitting in that small space and Mama and Daddy didn’t come back. Everywhere was silence and you were too scared to move your fingers and unhook the latch that would open a way into the bedroom. But eventually you had to. Eventually you had to find out why Daddy and Mama hadn’t come back like they always did at the end of drills. They never forgot. Daddy would brush off your bottom and ruffle your hair while Mama locked the guns back in the cabinet. They thought you didn’t know how to open it. But you did. You thought of that cabinet as you finally crept out of the compartment and made a run for the other side of your bed. You peeked above the rumpled covers but there wasn’t anybody in the room and you couldn’t hear anybody in the outer room either. So you climbed over your bed and then over your parents’ and ran to the outer room so you could take the comp chair and use it to get to the cabinet. Quick before somebody came in.

  You stood on the chair and poked the right numbers that you’d seen Daddy and Mama use, then the green button, and waited. The cabinet comp beeped, then the lights behind the buttons glowed green and you grabbed the handle and tugged. A rack of guns. You couldn’t remember exactly how to use them but you probably could figure it out. You’d seen Daddy and Mama use them on the firing range. Daddy and Mama were good with guns,
even though they were engineers. Everybody old enough had to be good with guns, Daddy said, because of the war. Nobody could predict aliens or the symps like the Warboy, and merchants like Mukudori could get caught between some Hub battleship and a strit one, you just never knew. And pirates were worse. Pirates liked to take hostages.

  Never can be too safe, Mama said, when she locked away the guns after a drill.

  You took the smallest one in the cabinet and looked at it all over, where the activation was, where the safety was, where the kill release was. Your friend Evan was older and he’d explained all the parts before, even though he never let you touch one. But now you could protect Mukudori like Daddy and Mama did, if you had a gun. You hopped down and ran to the hatch to put your ear against it like when you played hide-and-seek with Evan and Derek.

  Now you heard the noise, muffled, and smelled smoke very faintly. You didn’t want to go out, it was better to hide in the room and wait. But what if something was wrong with the ship and you had to evac? What if something was wrong with the intercom so you couldn’t hear the captain telling you to go? What if Daddy and Mama got hung up somewhere and couldn’t come back for you? Strits or pirates attacked merchants, Mama said, because the Hub warred with the strits and the pirates were greedy. What if they were out there now? You knew you were breaking regs by opening that hatch but you couldn’t sit and wait when it had been so long without anybody coming to tell you anything. You had a gun. You could help.

  So you opened the hatch. It took a lot of tugging, and the noise got worse. You crept down the corridor, twitching at every sound. Voices around the corner screamed words Daddy had told you never to repeat. The sound of pulse shots bounced toward you. Someone fell into view. Derek. Just this past goldshift you’d played with Derek in the gym and there he was on the deck, looking at you, but he wasn’t looking at you. He was bleeding from his head. He didn’t move. The screaming kept on but it wasn’t the klaxon, it was Derek’s mother. Even distorted you recognized her Martian accent.

  Then she went quiet and a suited form walked around the corner. You didn’t see the face. It wore a helmet with no markings on it, not like Mukudori helmets, and thin armor. You stared.

  You stared. It came toward you like a creature from the vids, black and sleek, scarred on its reflective face, carrying a big gun. Rifle. It took its time. It said, “Kid,” in a hollow voice that didn’t seem to come from anywhere near where the mouth should have been. It walked toward you like you were no threat, walked over Derek where he lay still and staring. It tracked blood across the deck and that would’ve made Cap very, very mad.

  You went deaf.

  You raised your gun and shot the creature directly in the chest. Somehow your fingers had found the release and the trigger and the small gun went pop pop in your hand, spitting out two bright red pulses that burned the creature through its armor and cast it to the deck.

  Two more came around the corner, faster.

  Your hand spasmed again, raining red on the creatures so they scattered. Then you turned and ran because suddenly space became noisy again. Now you weren’t deaf. Footsteps chased you. The creatures chased you. You knew all the towersteps and you took them, holding the rails, hooking your ankles and sliding down the way you’d done a hundred times, playing.

  But somewhere along the line you’d dropped the gun. Going down the stairs.

  Stupid, stupid Jos. They shouted above you on crew deck, below you from engineering deck. Now you were on the command deck where Cap should have been. You pounded away from corridor mains and into corners you knew from years of exploring. You remembered the best hiding place in the galaxy. You squeezed into that maintenance shaft and shrank back in the shadows, hoping the ship would not lose gravity, violently, and send the loosened grate across the deckplates. You smelled smoke and tried not to breathe.

  Mukudori was dying. The steady low thrum of her atmospheric controls whined to a halt. You knew the word “die.” You’d seen it now. Somewhere Simone shouted “No!” You heard Hasao screaming for Johann, you heard all the silences after, silence creeping toward you from all over the ship, deck by deck, until nothing remained but your own breathing.

  Dead in space.

  You lost the gun. You lost the gun and now you had no defense. Were you going to sit and wait for the creatures to leave the ship and shoot it from wherever they’d come from? Mama said that was what pirates did. What aliens did too, because they didn’t like to take prisoners. Were you going to go out and look for Cap, for friends, for family? Daddy and Mama didn’t know where you were. You shouldn’t have left the secret compartment. You shouldn’t have gone so far because now if they were looking for you they would never find you. You were in the best hiding place in the galaxy.

  You couldn’t breathe. The shaft was filling with smoke. You shut your eyes and covered your mouth with the bottom of your sweater but it didn’t help. You coughed, big wracking coughs as if your lungs were going to fall out your mouth and onto your lap.

  The grate opened and a thick, gloved hand reached in and dragged you into the blinking red lights that meant the ship needed help. You couldn’t stop coughing, even when the hands pinched and felt you all over in places nobody was ever supposed to touch—Daddy had said so when you’d gone on stations and into playdens with other kids. But these hands poked and Daddy wasn’t anywhere to hear your voice. You kicked and swung fists but the hands hit you then. The creatures kicked you and yelled at you to stop it or they’d shoot you. The violence of it shocked you motionless.

  “He ain’t armed,” one of the creatures said.

  “He was. This is the one killed Martine.”

  They hit you again. You stared at their boots. The deck was cold against your cheek. Above your head, far up against the lights the creatures carried on their distant, hollow conversation. You blinked and your eyes ran. Something red made a film over your sight.

  “He’ll be good. He’s strong.”

  “Pretty.”

  “He’ll grow. What does he look like, six?”

  “Hey, kid, how old’re you?” Something prodded your back. You couldn’t answer.

  “Look at his tag.”

  The gloved hand came back, smacked you when you tried to roll away. Your head spun and you couldn’t see clearly. The hand reached in your sweater and yanked out the chained disk from around your neck. The reflective helmet that gave no features came close, looking at your face on the tag and all the basic information it held in case you were lost on station and something had happened to your parents or the ship. Something had happened. But these were the wrong people. They wouldn’t help you.

  In the helmet you saw your own eyes. They were black holes.

  “Eight. Small for eight.”

  “Can use a P-90 well enough.”

  “Yeah, Falcone will wanna see him.” The hand let your tag drop, lifted up your head by the hair and turned your face this way and that, then pried open your mouth and looked in. You bit. The creature slapped you again. Hard.

  “Gonna have to beat the attitude out,” was the last thing you heard.

  * * *

  II.

  Deep nausea from a deep leap through space pushed you awake. But you were blind.

  Then lights hit you in the face. Stinging. Somebody screamed. Shadows formed out of the light and there Adalia reached for you as a man dragged her out a hatch before you could even sit up. The hatch slammed in with the speed of a chopping knife and darkness swallowed you whole. Whimpers bled from the corners of the room, all around you.

  Little Adalia. Four-year-old Adalia.

  “What’s happening?”

  Your voice was not your voice. It sounded small and it echoed in the black room. You were cold and the air smelled metallic and rank. The darkness sat thick and solid around you. But maybe a senior was in here with you. Maybe someone who knew things.

  “Pirates,” someone said.

  “Evan?” You sat up wiping your eyes, feeling stickiness,
sniffing. “Evan, where are you?” .

  “I’m here. C’mere, Jos.”

  Evan and his brother Shane stayed with you when your parents and their parents got together off-duty. Evan used to bully you sometimes, dump food on your clothes and make you jump to get toys he’d hold over his head. But now Evan kept talking to you in a soft voice until you found his leg and then his arm and hugged him there to not let go. Evan was twelve. Not grown-up yet. But he was strong and he could protect you if that man came back.

  “Where did they take Adalia?”

  “I don’t know.” Evan paused. “We’re on their ship.”

  “It’s pirates? Not aliens?” Your voice sounded shrill. Evan kept patting your hair and back.

  “Yeah.”

  Others came to Evan. They were all younger than twelve. You recognized the voices. Tammy, Whelan, Sano, Paul, Indira, Kaspar, Masayo… all crowded around Evan and you, touching for comfort, shivering as you shivered, sniffling and crying. Scared.

  Now that you weren’t alone you were more afraid. Everyone else’s fear added to your own and your heart trembled, all your insides shook, and you dared not ask where Daddy and Mama were. Evan usually had a big mouth and tousled you rough in gym sometimes, but now he was silent in a way he’d never been silent in all of your life. What had he seen? What had happened to Mukudori? But you couldn’t ask. Evan patted you and didn’t speak unless you asked a question.

  But no more questions. You huddled with everybody else, all who might have been left, and tried for hours to sleep.

  * * *

  III.

  In the dream you were home. Mama was tucking you into bed and whispering “my starling,” like she’d call Daddy her darling, but playing on the name of the ship. Mukudori meant starling, she said. My starling. You fell asleep like you always did to the hum of Mukudori’s drives, and it was a song that brought with it the sounds of your parents talking softly to each other when they thought you weren’t awake. Sometimes Mama sat with you, rubbing your back with her hands, which felt dry and rough even though her touch was light and made you drowsy real fast. Sometimes Daddy sang to you. Daddy’s voice wasn’t so great and sometimes you fell asleep to their laughter and Mama saying, “You’ll make the boy deaf.”