Lisa grinned tightly. General Fromm meant well. He was a brooder and a deep-thinker. He never took risks if he could help it, but carefully thought out the best way to do everything. She hated lying on the couch and she was unbelievably bored. Timing her landing on the couch and strapping-in to the exact second of the re-igniting thrusters had become one of her sole games. Having a brooder to scold her only made the game more enjoyable.
“Ms. Aster,” the general said, “your risk of debilitating injury far outweighs any juvenile pleasure you might gain in waiting so long. You must strap yourself in now.”
At least the general had learned not to try to order her. She
was
the Blanche-Aster now, even if she was the only one to acknowledge it. Despite the handicap of being a clone, she would climb the ranks of Social Unity into the rarified heights of leadership.
“Thirty seconds to deceleration,” General Fromm said testily.
Lisa grinned at him, and she shuddered at the idea of another six hours of labored breathing and straining just to scratch her nose. Her face itched abominably during deceleration. What made it even worse was that she would have liked to study the files on the cyborgs and study the Supreme Commander’s attack plan. She had tried quizzing the general, but extended conversations soon become too tiring under the high Gs pressing against their bodies.
“Ten seconds,” General Fromm said.
Lisa yawned as if bored.
“Ms. Aster, this is absurd. I demand you strap-in now.”
“I didn’t hear you say please.”
“Seven seconds,” he said. “Please, hurry.”
“Very well,” she said. Now her pulse pounded. Now it was almost too late. If she pushed off wrong and missed her acceleration couch, she could break bones. If a rib punctured a lung, she would quickly bleed to death.
Lisa smoothly shoved off the ceiling, sailed to her couch and hit so she grunted. She spun around fast and made the fabric squeak. She barely managed to settle into position. Then the mighty thrusters switched on. A horrible, grinding weight slammed against her, shoving her down into the padding of the acceleration couch. It was a straining effort to bring the straps across her body. Buckling them left her wheezing at the exertion.
“Was—that—worth—it?” General Fromm wheezed.
Lisa tried to make herself more comfortable. Someday, she was going to kill cyborgs. Originally, her motives were vengeful, as the cyborgs had engineered her mother’s death. Now it was for this brutal journey. Lisa closed her eyes, already longing for the next half-hour of weightlessness.
***
As Lisa Aster and the convoy fleet decelerated into far-Mars orbit, the many months journey aboard the
Mayflower
were ending for Marten Kluge and Omi.
They decelerated, but at a fraction of the convoy fleet’s rate. They had been traveling at a much slower speed.
Omi had given Marten a haircut. Marten’s hair was short and his manner was alert. He felt as he had during his best times as a shock trooper. Marten’s muscles were hard again and his stamina had built back up from endless exercises on the machines.
Omi had gained weight and he was no longer so dreadfully thin. He hadn’t regained his original muscle-mass, but this last week had seen him hit the machines much more vigorously than before. Unfortunately, it had become stale throughout the shuttle. To conserve water, they had long ago stopped taking showers. Before leaving the shuttle, they would each shower thoroughly. Until such time, each endured the other.
The
Mayflower
was a shuttle, hardly big enough for extended flights between the inner planets. To the distant outer planets, it would have almost been impossible.
The shuttle lacked a warship’s detection equipment and the accompanying squads of trained personnel using such equipment around the clock. Still, the
Mayflower
possessed limited radar gear and limited teleoptics. Using the teleoptics, Marten easily discovered the hard-decelerating convoy fleet. The constant burn and plethora of fusion engines created a discernable image against the cold backdrop of space. The number and size of the war-vessels impressed Marten.
It was more difficult for Marten to spot the growing Social Unity Battlefleet. Those warships possessed greater ECM, Electronic Counter Measures, than his relatively tiny spaceship. A few were stealth ships with low signature hulls. Most, however, had large particle shields, the largest of those were 600-meter thick slabs of asteroid-rock. The reason Marten failed to detect them was simple. They were hidden behind Mars. The majority of the Battlefleet had already assembled in far-Mars orbit. Marten therefore spotted the few remaining warships that decelerated to help Mars’ gravitational field catch them.
With the convoy fleet a mere two weeks out of Mars orbit, and with the sightings of major Social Unity war-vessels, Marten knew they were in serious trouble. He had worried about it for some time. The worst part was he lacked fuel to do anything else other than continue the deceleration.
“Social Unity is going to retake Mars,” Omi said after Marten told him about the situation.
“They’re certainly going to try,” Marten said. “Yet we’ve both served under the Highborn. They gave Mars to the Rebels.”
“The Martian Planetary Union?” asked Omi.
“That’s what the Rebels call themselves,” Marten said, nodding. “I doubt the Highborn gave the Rebels Mars if the Highborn thought the Rebels were going to lose it right away. It’s not reasonable to think the Highborn ran from Mars out of fear. So that leads me to the conclusion that the Highborn gave the Rebels enough war supplies to fight off any Social Unity attacks.”
“If we see those warships,” Omi said, “those warships must see us.”
Marten tapped a red light on the lower part of the vidscreen. “Correct. This means radar is bouncing off us.”
“From where?” Omi asked.
Marten fiddled with the controls. “From that approaching fleet there,” he said, pointing out the blaze that signified the convoy fleet. “And from that warship there.”
“Why doesn’t the warship call us?” Omi asked.
Marten shrugged.
“Why don’t they launch a missile and blow us up?” Omi asked.
“They might already have launched a missile.”
“The radar doesn’t show that,” Omi said.
“Sometimes warships release a drone, leaving it behind like a mine. If we see a sudden bloom of engine-burn, we’ll know we’re in trouble. But the more likely explanation is that we’re a shuttle, so we’re nothing to them. Besides, maybe they believe that our radio is out. If they’re worried enough, they’ll try to capture us later once we’re in near orbit.”
“Let’s head out to Jupiter,” Omi suggested.
Marten stared at the vidscreen, at the controls. He wished his ship were sized for men, not for Highborn. If he could move the pilot’s chair closer and raise it a little higher, that would be great.
Jupiter System
, Marten nodded. Going there had been one of his thoughts, too. They had enough fuel to change headings but hardly enough to increase their velocity to anything like the needed speed. That meant a trip to Jupiter would take several more years than it would have if he’d started for there originally. Marten had little desire to spend six years in this cramped shuttle alone with Omi.
“We need to refuel first,” Marten said.
“What do we use for currency?”
“Passage out of the war.”
Omi nodded. “How many people do you think you can pack into our shuttle?”
“A few rich ones would be best,” Marten said, “although I wish we could take more.”
“How do we keep Social Unity from firing on our shuttle? A single missile kills us. So all they have to do is tell us to stop or we’re dead.”
“Ideally, we need to modify the shuttle, attaching anti-missile pods.”
“We lack currency,” Omi said.
“I call that: Problem number one.”
“Would the Rebels be willing to part with war supplies?”
“That’s problem number two,” Marten said.
Omi stared out of the polarized window. “Does the shuttle have reflectors to bounce laser-fire?”
“Reflectors would make us easier to spot, and reflectors won’t bounce a military laser. But the short answer is no, our shuttle lacks reflectors. That would be our next purchase, a warfare pod filled with prismatic crystals.”
“What else do we need?” Omi asked.
“Luck,” Marten said.
The radio crackled, which startled Omi. Marten adjusted the controls, but there was too much static for the speakers. So he put on headphones and listened carefully.
“Mars defense is calling,” he soon told Omi. “They’re asking us to identify ourselves. I’d tell them, but then the SU ship might fire a missile as you’ve been suggesting.”
Marten tapped at the console as he studied the vidscreen and studied the satellites and habitats in near-Mars orbit. “It would be a shame to have escaped the Highborn only to have the Martian Rebels kill us.”
“Can you send them a tight-beam message?”
Instead of answering, Marten slapped a switch. The engines cut out, bringing weightlessness to the
Mayflower
.
“We’re going to drift in faster and decelerate harder nearer the planet,” Marten explained. “We’ll have to take to the couches for that. Hopefully, that will make whoever is scanning and calling us think we’re damaged. That seems like the best way to buy us an arrival without any missiles.”
“Will Social Unity warships be in range by that time?” Omi asked.
Marten studied the headings. “Frankly, I’m surprised the SU warships and Rebel moons aren’t trading missiles or laser fire.”
“Do you know why not?”
“It must have something to do with this being a three-way situation. It’s not just the Rebels verses Social Unity. The Highborn change everything. Why fight if you don’t have to?”
“You said before that the Highborn helped the Rebels.”
“They did,” Marten said, “but that doesn’t make them friends.”
“It should make them allies.”
“Temporary allies,” Marten said. “The Rebels aren’t fools, and they probably have long memories. The Highborn crushed the Martian Rebels and the Jupiter Confederation Fleet back in 2339.”
“Maybe if we’re lucky, we can slip in and slip out before the shooting starts.”
Marten grinned. “Now you’re talking.” He pushed out of the pilot’s chair.
“Where are you headed?”
“All this thinking is making me edgy. I’m going to do some rowing. See you in an hour.”
Omi nodded and then continued to stare out of the heavily polarized window.
The cyborg battle pods traveled silently through the stellar void. Each pod had begun its journey almost a year ago at the Neptune System. Neptune was 30 times the distance from the Sun as Earth or about 4,486,100,000 kilometers away. It took sunlight traveling 300,000 kilometers per second four hours and fifteen minutes to reach Neptune.
The pods had long ago accelerated and now decelerated much harder than anything a human could have survived. Each was an ultra-stealth pod, with a ceramic hull that gave the lowest sensor signature of any vessel in human space. Each pod was also crammed with the latest Onoshi ECM equipment and decoys.
All the pods were as black as night and spherical. Within all the pods but one lay a cyborg platoon in cryogenic stillness. The cyborg known as OD12 was in pod B3.
The designation OD12 referred to her lost humanity and machine code number. OD had once been Osadar Di, the female pilot with the perennial bad luck of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As the battle pods decelerated, an electrical impulse surged through OD12’s frozen body. At the same time, cryogenic heaters began the painful defrosting of the cyborg cargo.
OD12 awakened, but her mental facilities were kept offline. Instead, she was hooked into the Web-Mind. There, Osadar Di practiced a hundred combat evolutions. It was similar to a human playing intense hologames while wearing a virtual imaging suit. The difference was that her reflexes gained one hundred percent conditioning as if she physically participated in each action. These Web-Mind combat drops, bunker assaults, storm attacks and sniper targeting took place at an accelerated rate. She thus gained ‘years’ of practice.
There was a glitch, however, in six out of every one hundred simulations. The Web-Mind noted this malfunction in OD12. Accepted anomalies were one tenth of a percent, not six percent. Because of the extreme distance to the Master Web-Mind in the Neptune System, the Web-Mind in Toll Seven’s command pod initiated a phase two diagnostic.
In the simulator, OD12 bounded across a moon in the Saturn System. She wore a vacuum suit churning at full heat. She knelt in frozen ammonia, lifted her laser carbine and hesitated instead of firing the two-kilometer distance to pick off the retreating battleoids. OD12 glanced around her and then scooped a handful of the orange ammonia in her gloved hand.
The diagnostic program froze the image. Then it confronted OD12’s personality.
Why did you hesitate
?
“The expanse of orange snow struck me as beautiful. I had to feel it.”