“It’s beautiful,” she says, and her eyes are mostly closed, and I can’t tell if she’s talking to me or just talking. The IV is working; sometimes they say things.
She says, “I don’t know how anyone could take up a weapon again, after seeing the message.”
Without thinking, I put my hand over her hand.
She sighs. Then, so quietly that no one else hears, Octa says, “I hope that ship never comes.”
Her face gets tight and determined—she looks like Alpha, exactly like, and I almost call out for them to stop—it’s so uncanny, something must be wrong.
But nothing is wrong. She closes her eyes, and the bio-feed flatlines; the tech across the room turns off the alarm on the main bank, and it’s over.
We flip on the antigrav, and one of the techs takes her down to the incinerator. He comes back, says the other delegates have lined up in the little audience hall outside the incinerator, waiting to clap and drink champagne.
It’s always a long night after an expiration, but it’s what we’re here to do, and it’s good solid work, moving and monitoring and setting up the influx for Yemenni’s first night. Nobody wants a delay between delegates. You never know when the Carthage is going to show up. We think another four hundred years, but it could be tomorrow. Stranger things have happened.
Wren Ennea-Yemenni needs to be awake, just in case; she’ll have things to do, when Carthage comes.
LIFE-SUSPENSION
by L. E. Modesitt, Jr.
L. E. Modesitt is the bestselling author of the Saga of Recluse, the Spellsong Cycle, the Corean Chronicles, and several other series, as well as a number of standalone novels, such as The Eternity Artifact, The Elysium Commission, and a new book, Haze, that’s due out in June. His short fiction has appeared in a number of anthologies, and was recently collected in Viewpoints Critical.
“Life-Suspension” is set in a future where interstellar travel is possible, but where there is warfare over who controls the lines of interstellar communication. “It’s a story that shows how thin the lines between all human passions are, especially in war,” Modesitt said. “I was a military pilot, and I’ve tried to capture the feel of those situations, and the contrast between the times of action and the quiet civility of officers in between action.”
I
The S.R.S. Amaterasu had left Kunitsu Orbit Station 2 less than three hours earlier, and Flight Captain Ghenji Yamato was more than ready to eat when the junior officers’ wardroom opened at 1600 KMT. He wasn’t the first entering—that would have been most impolite—but he was far from the last when he took his seat halfway down the second table.
He’d barely seated himself when his eyes registered a flash of white, and he glanced up.
The officer who had just entered the mess caught his eyes immediately, not because she was full-figured, which she was not, boyish as her frame was, but because her short-cut hair was pure white, and her pale white face was almost unearthly in its beauty. He almost laughed at the thought. Unearthly? None of them would ever see Earth—and probably not even Kunitsu—again for years. Objective years, not subjective, he reminded himself. He found himself still looking at her. For all the white hair, she was probably younger than he was. He couldn’t help but stare before he looked down abruptly.
She was ship’s crew—that was certain—and not one of the attack pilots for the mission ahead, because he knew most of them, except for the transfers and replacements, although her hair was cut every bit as short as that of the women pilots in his squadron. Yet… for all that he knew he had never seen her before; there was something about her. He just didn’t know what it was. He ate almost mechanically, although he did enjoy the black tea, probably a variant from the Nintoku Islands.
As he left the mess after the meal, he glanced back, but he didn’t see the white-haired captain. As he looked to the corridor ahead, leading to the attack operations spaces—there she was, waiting and looking at him. Her eyebrows were also white, as were her eyelashes, but she had deep black eyes and red lips.
“Hello,” he offered. “I’m Ghenji Yamato, Flight Captain.”
“I know. Your name, that is, and your reputation as ‘the monk.’”
“The monk?” Ghenji knew the allusion, but wasn’t about to admit it.
“The flight captain utterly devoted to his duties once he’s shipside.” She smiled. “I’m Rokujo. Rokujo Yukionna.” She smiled. “I’m in life-support.”
He thought he ought to recognize her name, but he hadn’t checked the roster of ship’s officers. He’d also never paid that much attention to names or where they came from. His educational background had been engineering, but he’d been fortunate, if one could call it that, to have been accepted by the service for training as an attack needle pilot. The current tour was his fourth, and, afterwards, he’d be eligible for promotion to major—and squadron commander, or the equivalent. With the time-dilation effect, even with military pay discounting, he’d even be able to retire, not that he’d ever considered that.
Ghenji glanced at her green skinsuit—medical—and the senior captain’s insignia on the collars of her shipvest. “Doctor or technical?”
“Does it matter?” She laughed ruefully. “At least you asked. Most of the pilots just assume tech because I look so young.”
“You’re in charge of…?” He thought he’d recovered as gracefully as possible.
“Very good. I’m a recovery specialist, but I’m chief of the suspension and support.”
“A most necessary specialty, especially for attack pilots,” he said with a smile. He couldn’t have met her before, but the sense of familiarity remained. “You didn’t study at Edo Institute, did you?”
“No. Fumitomo, then Heian for my residency.”
“Why did you decide on the service?”
“I like the specialty. It fits me, and where else would I get this kind of experience? All planetside suspension facilities are either geriatric wards for the wealthy or holding pens for clone-replacement therapy, and there aren’t many of the latter.”
Ghenji nodded. “In a way, it’s like attack flying. If you want to pilot anything outside the service, all you are is a tram driver…”
All in all, they talked for close to two stans before he had to leave to stand an ops-watch, not that doing so meant more than watching the system indicators.
Ghenji didn’t see Rokujo the next day, but when he woke the following morning and rolled out of his cubicle, he decided that he would make an effort to encounter her, while he had time to get to know her… even though that was unlike him. But she did fascinate him, perhaps because of the calm, almost unblinking, way she viewed him, as if she were focused on him and him alone.
Still, the Amaterasu would enter deep jump in three days, and in two Ghenji Yamato would climb into a cocoon and be hibernated until the ship re-entered normspace, not that he knew that destination, only that it was in the area disputed by the Mogulate and the Republic. After that, his real tasks would begin.
For all his engineering background, he still found it hard to understand a universe where instantaneous—or near-instantaneous—interstellar communications were possible, but where interstellar travel was far slower. It did make for an interesting galaxy—and one that required the space service… and one Ghenji Yamato—or other pilots like him.