God-Eye Fleet - Stranger in His Own Skin

The ceiling was white and curved, ridged with panels that hummed. Fluorescent, but not the fluorescent of any hospital he had known — the light had a violet edge to it, and the hum was too low, too steady, like something breathing at the edge of hearing. He turned his head, and the motion cost him. The room swam. There was a drip in his arm, a tube taped to the inside of his elbow, and the skin of his arm — he stared at it — the skin was wrong. Too smooth. Too young. Brown, where his own arm had been a pale, freckled thing that burned in any sun worth the name.

The brown skin was attached to a hand that was attached to a wrist that was not his wrist.

He lay very still for a long time, and he let the two rivers run.

One river was Colin Alden. Forty-three years old. A mid-level designer of wargame scenarios for a company whose name he had stopped believing in around year nine. A reserve naval officer who had never seen combat and had spent a decade training other men for wars he privately thought the species was too stupid to avoid. A man on a metro platform in the rain, holding a sandwich he had been meaning to eat, watching the train arrive, thinking about nothing at all, and then the light, and the impact, and the dark. The dark had not lasted. The dark had been a doorway.

The other river was Quinlan Voss. Twenty-three years old. The last son of the Voss shipbuilding dynasty, which meant the last son of a hundred billion credits and a name that opened doors he had never bothered to walk through. Court-martialed out of the Academy for selling classified simulator doctrine to a private wargame studio — a crime so stupid, so careless, so entirely him , that the whole frontier had laughed. Disowned by the family in a statement that had made the news feeds for exactly one cycle. Given a dead-end field commission as a joke. And then, two nights ago, alone in a rented room on a station named Elvira, with a needle in his arm and a stimulant overdose that had stopped his heart for three minutes and forty-one seconds.Colin Alden had died on a metro platform. Quinlan Voss had died on a rented bed. And one of them had woken up.

I am not me, Colin thought, with the part of his mind that still insisted on calling itself Colin, and I have no idea what I am.Something moved in his vision.

It was not the room. The room stayed where it was. It was a line, a hair-thin line of blue, drawn across the ceiling at an angle that did not match any architectural seam. He blinked, and the line stayed. It began to multiply. A second line joined it, then a grid of them, faint and luminous, the color of deep water at the bottom of a well, and as he watched they began to reorganize themselves — the lines flowing along the walls, pooling at the door, tracing the drip stand, the monitors, the IV line into his arm. He understood, without understanding how, that the lines were showing him the room’s power: the electricity in the walls, the oxygen in the air, the pulse of the machine that was keeping his borrowed heart honest.

The blue grid hurt. It hurt the way a headache hurts when you first notice it and understand it is not going away. It hurt behind the same eyes that held the resident coal, and it was worse than the coal, because the coal was a pain he could name.

He squeezed his eyes shut. The grid was still there, drawn on the inside of his lids, dimmer but present.

Okay, he thought. Okay. That’s new.The door hissed open.

A woman came in, a doctor by the insignia on her collar — the crossed-helix of fleet medical — with a datapad in one hand and the tired, practiced expression of someone who has seen a hundred overdoses and expects them to behave identically. She did not look at his face. She looked at the monitors.

“Good,” she said. “You’re conscious. How’s the head?”

He considered the question. The grid was painting her in blue — tracing the blood moving under her skin, the electrical chatter of her heart, a small bright node where she held the datapad. He could not read the details; the details were noise. But the shape of her was suddenly legible to him in a way that no person had ever been legible before. She was tired. She was bored. She had already decided what he was.“Throbbing,” he said, and his voice surprised him — it was a young man’s voice, lighter than his own, with an accent he had never owned. He swallowed. “What happened to me?”

“You tried very hard to die,” the doctor said, without looking up. “Stimulant toxicity. Your heart stopped for almost four minutes. The cortex was — interesting. We brought you back, which the record will show was my decision, and which I may regret if the headaches turn out to be permanent.”

“Headaches.”

“Visual disturbances, aura, migraine-type symptoms. Standard sequelae.” She finally looked at him, and her eyes were flat and professional. “Also standard: memory gaps, personality changes, difficulty with language. The brain does a lot of re-routing after four minutes without oxygen. You may find you’re not quite the same man who checked into that room.”

He almost laughed. The laugh died in his throat when he looked at his own hands again. The hands were not the hands of a man who had been checked into any room by his own choice. The hands were the hands of a boy who had been handed everything and thrown it all away, one careless piece at a time.

“Your records,” the doctor went on, “have been forwarded to fleet command. You’re still scheduled for your commission — there was some question of whether the overdose would cancel it. Apparently not. The Admiralty wants you at the annex tomorrow morning, oh-eight-hundred, to collect your orders.” She paused, and for the first time something that was almost human flickered across her face. “I’d tell you to take it easy, but it seems a waste of breath. You’re a Voss. Vosses don’t take it easy.”

She left before he could answer, and the door hissed shut, and the room went quiet except for the hum and the drip and the blue grid, which had begun, very slowly, to draw a shape in the air above his bed.

He watched the shape for a long time.

It was a map. He knew it was a map the way he knew the doctor was tired and bored — a certainty that arrived without evidence, like a taste in the mouth. It was a map of something vast and empty, drawn in blue lines that were not quite straight, with points that pulsed and faded like heartbeats. Stars. He thought they were stars. The grid was showing him a map of stars, and one of the stars was brighter than the others, and the brightness was moving, and the movement was toward him.

That’s the station, he thought, and he was not sure if the thought was his or the grid’s. That’s where I am. And that— the bright moving star — that’s a ship coming in.He had no way to know that. He was lying in a hospital bed on a station named Elvira, which he had never heard of before this morning, in a body that was not his, and yet he knew, with the same unearned certainty as everything else the grid gave him, that a ship was inbound to the station, that it was military, that it was coming faster than the traffic pattern allowed, and that it had something to do with him.

The migraine crested behind his eyes, and the grid flared, and for a moment the map and the room and the doctor and the drip all doubled and slid sideways, and he gripped the edge of the bed and waited for it to pass.

When it passed, the map was gone, and the room was just a room, and he was just a man with a borrowed body and a headache and a commission he had not asked for and apparently could not refuse.

All right, Colin Alden thought, from somewhere behind the coal and the blue and the stranger’s smooth brown hands. All right, Quinlan. Let’s see what you’ve gotten us into.He pushed the button that raised the head of the bed, and he sat up, and he looked at the future the grid had shown him — the empty map, the inbound ship, the war it could not quite show him yet — and he waited for morning.

Colin had not believed in gods, or afterlives, or the tidy arithmetic of a universe that paid its debts. He had believed in a flat in the low district with a window that faced a wall, in a woman named Isa who had left him four years before he died because he had spent more evenings bent over a wargame board than over her, and in a project he had never finished — a simulation of a siege, a city built of numbers, that he had been tuning for eleven years and had never once run to completion, because every run ended with the defenders holding a line that should have broken, and he had never understood why. He had died with a sandwich in one hand and the blueprint of that unfinished siege in his head, and the last thing he had thought, before the metro doors shut on him for the last time, was not about the war or the stars or the machine that was about to reach into his skull. It was about Isa’s face, and the rain on the platform, and the fact that he had never told her the siege was the only love letter he had ever known how to write.

He had not believed in gods. But lying in a hospital bed on a station named Elvira, with a blue grid behind his eyes and a dead man’s name in his mouth, he had begun to believe in something stranger: that a hand, once dealt, could be played again, and that the unfinished siege in his head was still waiting, somewhere, to be run.

The night did not last long. The night had never lasted long for people who were about to be sent to the war nobody wanted to win.