Collateral

Collateral

By Peter Watts

Eight hours in IT when they landed: every aug tested to melting, every prosthetic stripped to the bolts while the attached meat sat silent and still and kept all the screams inside. They gave her four hours’ rack time even though her clockwork could scrub the fatigue right out of her blood, regulate adenosine and melatonin so precisely she wouldn’t even yawn right up until the point she dropped dead of heart failure. Might as well, they said : other schedules to clear anyway, other people to bring back across other oceans.

They told her not to worry. They told her it wasn’t her fault. They gave her propranolol to help her believe them.

Four hours, flat on her back, staring at the ceiling.

Now here she was : soul half a world away, body stuck in this windowless room, paneled in oak on three sides, crawling with luminous maps and tacticals on the fourth. Learning just what the enemby had been doing, besides sneaking up on a military cyborg in the middle of the fucking night.

« They were fishing, » the PAO told her.

“No, » Becker said; som subconscious subroutine added an automatic « sir ».

The JAG lawyer – Eisbach, that was it – shook her head. « They had longlines in their outriggers, Corporal. They had hooks, a bait pail. No weapons.

The general in the background – from HDHQ in Ottawa, Becker gathered, although there’d been no formal introduction – studied the tacpad in his hand and said nothing at all.

She shook her head. « There aren’t any fish. Every reef in the WTP’s has been acidified for twenty years. »

« It’s definitely a point we’ll be making, » Eisbach said. « You can’t fault the system for not recognizing profiles that aren’t even supposed to exist in the zone. »

« But how could they be – »

« Tradition, maybe. » The PAO shrugged. « Some kind of cultural thing. We’re checking with the local NGOs but so far none of them are accepting responsibility. Whatever they were doing, the UN never white-listed it. »

Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, edited by Rich Horton, Prime Books, 2015. 

Collateral. Photo by Elena.