Forever Magazine Issue 68 by Eugene Fischer & Django Wexler & Julie Novakova

Author:Eugene Fischer & Django Wexler & Julie Novakova [Fischer, Eugene & Wexler, Django & Novakova, Julie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: magazine, novella, science fiction, Science Fiction - Short Stories, science fiction magazine
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2020-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, April/May 2015.

The End of the War

Django Wexler

Officially, the little short-range clearwaves are forbidden, for obvious security reasons. I don’t think any operator leaves for her second tour without one, though. Sometimes it’s just to hear another voice out in the black, no matter who it belongs to. It can make the difference between finishing the tour and coming back a ghost.

Mine is a junky little affair duct-taped to the side of my main console. I hesitate a bit before hitting the switch, but my spin-up mobs are reporting the hull composition on this piece-of-shit drifter is even worse than I predicted. I’ve adjusted the build profile for a low-rez encounter, but even so I’ve got some time. I click the clearwave on, hoping for a familiar voice. It would be nice to talk to Ledra again, or Molly. Anyone but that bitch Andrin.

“Hello, hello,” I say, my voice coming back tinny where the clearwave is patched into my suit audio. “Anybody out there?”

There’s a long stretch of nothing. I can hear the whirr of the suit fans, the deep rumble of my own mobs chewing into the skin of this ancient hulk. The latter sound isn’t real, of course—no air within a million kilometers to carry it—but the mobcom’s external sensors pick up vibrations in the hull, and the suit translate it into audio so I can make full use of my precious human sensory integration. That is, after all, why I’m here, why it’s worth hauling canned spam like me across the solar system to rendezvous with flying junk. There are some things we still do better than machines.

I know there’s another mobcom on the wreck. I wonder if it is Andrin after all, and she’s refusing to speak to me on principle. Or someone else, a newbie who hasn’t learned the tricks yet, maybe doesn’t even have a clearwave. I could be transmitting into nothing. The first scouts tumble out of the spin-ups, tiny mobs the size of grapes with nothing more energetic aboard than a little compressed gas. I key in a pattern from my library, and they jet off into the dark, changing direction with tiny puffs and caroming off the walls of the dead ship’s corridors. The map on my console, based on old specs, begins to light up and update itself with real-time data.

“Hello,” comes a voice from the clearwave. A man’s voice.

I raise an eyebrow, pointless as that is in my black-helmeted suit, itself wrapped in the spider-like metal skin of the mobcom. There aren’t many male operators. Not the fault of the men, of course, they’re as patriotic as the rest of us, but they’re just made differently. The male psyche doesn’t deal well with the waiting, the confinement, the high-G transits. I’ve spoken to only a couple of men in the black from our side, and never to a Minoan.

Maybe this encounter won’t be as dull as I thought.

“How’s it going?” I keep my voice deliberately casual.

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