The A.I. War, Book One: The Big Boost (Tales of the Continuing Time) (16 page)

17

TRENT RAN EVERY other morning, in a big circle inside Gym 16.

Gym 16 was about 200 meters aft of the bridge. It was one of four gyms, positioned in roughly equal distances along the length of the ship, which spun up to provide gravity for running. The other gyms were all under gravity as well, but they were smaller and were used mostly for exercise or training that required smaller areas: resistance training, yoga, various martial disciplines. The resistance training and yoga were designed to insure that bones, tendons and muscles did not atrophy during extended stays in free fall.

Most of the gyms aboard ship were self-segregated: PKF practiced in their own gyms, Space Force in theirs, and civilians in theirs. The eight or nine Elite aboard ship had their own gym not far off the bridge, which turned under higher gravity than the other gyms.

There was no rule as such to prevent a civilian from exercising with the PKF, or with Space Force, but not many did after their first chilly reception in the wrong gym. Space Force and PKF personnel, Trent knew, were advised upon arrival at the
Unity
which gyms to use, and almost never made the mistake civilians sometimes did.

But there were only four running gyms along the length of the ship. Of necessity, they were shared. Not happily, most of the time, in Trent’s experience: he’d seen Space Force and PKF square off after brushing into one another on the circular track, and though he had not seen it come to blows yet, he remained hopeful.

Trent’s first two weeks after arrival, he exercised at the hotel before taking the shuttle to
Unity
. Then Keith Daniels, the Space Force lieutenant, told him about the running tracks, and after that Trent alternated workouts, one day at the hotel, the next day running.

His first session on the track, shortly after arriving at the
Unity
, left him sore and winded. But his wind came back quickly enough: after the first two weeks he was running five kilometers every morning, with only a little discomfort in his right knee.

Occasionally Keith Daniels ran with him. Trent didn’t mind: Daniels was one of the few people on staff whom Yovia hadn’t worked with, four years previously – Daniels at least wasn’t going to attempt to resume a conversation from the past.

Trent arrived at the gym just before 05:00 on Wednesday morning, March 27; the Space Force Lieutenant was already in the gym when Trent arrived, standing to the side of the track, one foot hooked underneath a hold while he waited for the gym to spin up to speed.

Trent joined him. “Keith.”

“Chief.”

Trent stretched while waiting. The gym rotated around the ship’s Z axis; when not rotating the gym locked in place and four doors, hatches, appeared in the floors. One door pointed up, one down; one to starboard, one to port. While they waited, half a dozen people appeared at the various doors, pulled themselves through and onto the track. One minute before five, a warning bell sounded; sixty seconds later, the four doors sealed shut and became a part of the gym’s track.

The gym was large and it took a while to rotate up to speed; the first half rotation was so slow that Trent barely noticed the tug of the hold he’d hooked his foot through. By the second complete rotation Trent began to feel weight, pushing him gently against the floor. After several minutes there was enough weight to run; about five minutes in, they were running under Earth-normal gravity.

There were five lanes: they ran together in the #2 and #3 lanes. The #1 lane was for sprinters, and every now and again a PKF Elite would show up and use it, running at two or three times the speed of an unaugmented human.

Trent didn’t
think
it was intended to intimidate, but it certainly had that effect. Running in the number two or three lanes, you could feel the wind of the Elite passing by.

After they’d been running for a while and had fallen into a rhythm, Keith said, “We’re pretty near a wrap on IC and RI.” Intership Communications and Remote Instrumentation. “I hear you and Kenny got pulled off to go look at the Relay Station.”

“Not pulled, exactly. There aren’t that many coders floating around with clearances to permit them to look into a problem over there, so Kenny did a favor for a friend. We went out on Saturday.”

“If it happens again, I’d like to come. I’m doing similar work with Monitor – I’d like to see some of that old gear.”

Trent glanced sideways at him. “OK. We couldn’t figure out what was going on – interrupted logs. Maybe new eyes would be useful.”

“OK.” They ran together in silence. “You going to go take a look at the torches?”

“I haven’t been asked,” Trent said.

“You won’t be. Chief Thorvald is a sad little balloon of a human being. Whatever’s screwed up over there, he’s not going to ask for help.”

“Is it his fault?”

“How would I know?”

“Is it?” Trent asked again.

Daniels grinned at him. “If I had to bet. That bomb did him a hell of a favor – the rocket jocks were running so far behind they’d have been hung out to dry if Monitor hadn’t gone down. They looked bad. They
still
look bad – I don’t think there’s been a test fire of a single rocket yet at full load. But they’ve got a few weeks to fix it. They don’t like you at all – they had months to get things together before you came in and moved all the 3C timelines up.”

“They don’t know me,” Trent assured Daniels. “They’d like me if they knew me.”

“You going to give them a chance to?”

Trent needed the rockets working. Absolutely had to have them.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “I guess I am.”

18

ACCORDING TO HER father Ernest du Bois, Melissa had been born a soldier. He admitted that he did not understand why God had blessed him – that was always his phrase, even when presented with intransigence that would have undone a lesser man – with a child so stern and unyielding. But Ernest was himself gifted with patience, if not understanding.

When she was four Melissa’s older brother Vincent died. Vincent was two years older than Melissa, and later in life her memories of him were just flashes, images and impressions; but her memories of her parents’ grief were clearer, sharper, altogether more lasting. Her Mama, Rebecca, withdrew from the world so severely that, looking back years later, Melissa suspected she had been suicidal, though Rebecca did not kill herself.

When Melissa began school that fall, it was not Mama who took her to St. Margaret’s: her father walked with her, every morning, holding her hand all the way there. It was her first strong memory: her hand, in Papa’s, on the way to school, morning after morning. When he picked her up in the afternoon, he wouldn’t hold her hand unless she asked him to, and she rarely did. They walked home together discussing what had happened that day, in school or work. But in the mornings she would take his hand, stepping out their front door, and not release it until she had stepped through the front gate of the school.

It was all right, Papa assured her, to want to hold his hand in the morning, because she was just a little soldier.

MELISSA WAS BORN on August 4, 2046, in Narbonne, a small town near the Gulf of Lyon, in the Mediterranean. The town had only some forty thousand residents, the year Melissa was born. It was not quite a beachside town, though Melissa and her parents lived inland only ten kilometers.

After her brother’s death, for most of two years, her mother did not work much. It made no real difference in their lives; there was enough Credit, new clothes, food, medical care. The essentials of Melissa’s life were secure, and would have remained so barring a disaster depriving her of both parents. Fortunately no such disaster occurred: her mother, with the passage of time, resumed an interest in the day to day details of their lives together, though by then the cast of Melissa’s relationship with her mother was set; Melissa would rarely seek Papa’s approval before deciding upon a course of action, and never Mama’s.

SHE GREW TO adulthood in Narbonne. Her father, a Peaceforcer himself, traveled occasionally on business; they never traveled for pleasure. Melissa had never left Narbonne until, at thirteen, her school had arranged a field trip to the Louvre. It was 630 kilometers to Paris, not an unreasonable distance on one of the bullet trains that networked France; except that Narbonne was too small to have a stop. The nearest stop was in Beziers, a nearby town about twice the size of Narbonne.

That morning they caught a bus to Beziers, then boarded the 6:15 A.M. Express to Paris. The Bullet rode through an evacuated tunnel just barely wide enough for it. It scared some of her classmates: at its top speed the Bullet traveled through the vacuum at nearly 600 kilometers per hour. It wasn’t so bad in the underground portions of the tunnel, when you couldn’t see anything, but during the portions where the Bullet rose above ground, the sense of speed was frightening, and some of Melissa’s friends had to close their eyes.

Melissa wasn’t worried about the speed as such; the rapidly passing landscape did not frighten her. She was thinking, though, about an incident six years ago, when she’d been seven: a Bullet in New York had been destroyed in a terrorist attack. Terrorists had left a bowling ball in the tunnel. The Bullet had vaporized the bowling ball, but it had also made contact with the side of the tunnel. In the resulting crash everyone aboard the Bullet, over eight hundred people, had died.

No one claimed credit. Melissa, at seven, had been baffled by that. She was clear that the ideologs who had committed the attack were wicked – “wicked all the way through,” she had informed her parents – but she had been baffled by the intent. If the terrorists did not claim credit, who would take them seriously when they made demands? Clearly they wanted to scare people – not that she was afraid, she assured her parents, because France was safe, not like Occupied America … but it made no sense to her.

But even while telling her parents that she wasn’t afraid, she wondered if she was really. She’d never been on the Bullet – maybe if she were riding it, knowing what might happen, she might feel differently?

Six years later she found that no, she wasn’t frightened, not even a little. But, riding the train, she had flashes of what she would recognize later as anger, thinking about the sort of people who would destroy something like the Bullet, take all those innocent lives, and not at least accept responsibility for their actions. It was, she concluded, that
they
were afraid – afraid to stand and fight, because they knew they would lose. So they used the tools of cowards, and struck at the weak rather than the strong.

It was the first consciously political thought she’d ever had.

THE LOUVRE MADE no real impression on her. She saw Voleur’s masterpiece,
Je Suis Le Fleuve
, while she was there, and found it not to her liking: a red monochrome, a river flowing through a darker, redder jungle. “I Follow The River,” or “I Am The River,” the painting’s name meant: Melissa was sure she was not a river and equally certain she didn’t want to follow what looked a river of blood.

The Mona Lisa left her cold. The Venus de Milo was broken and in Melissa’s opinion wanted fixing. She despised
The Oath of the Horatii;
weeping women to one side, men playing with swords to the other.

Their tour guide took note of her lack of interest at one point, and told the joke that many visitors to the Louvre hear at some point: “A woman visiting the Louvre,” the tour guide said patiently, “said, ‘I don’t think much of it.’ And a guide, overhearing, said: ‘Madame, one does not judge the Louvre; one is judged by it.’”

“The
Palais du Louvre
,” Melissa responded, “is a collection of buildings, and surely incapable of judgment.”

The tour guide, who seemed a pleasant young man, was taken aback. He stuttered slightly. “Since 1793, f-for
generations
, very wise men and women have chosen –”

Melissa interrupted him. Had her Mama been there she would have scolded Melissa for it; even Papa might have, for manners were important in their house. But she interrupted anyway. “I think my judgment better than theirs,” she said firmly, “in choosing what I like.
De gustibus non est disputandum
,” she added, displaying one of the benefits of a rigorous Catholic education: she could not really speak Latin, but she read it adequately and at thirteen she could quote in Latin as well as anyone.

Their tour guide ignored her after that, which suited her.

They had an early dinner in Paris before heading back, and that dinner stayed with Melissa in later years. The restaurant they ate in was not very good – the school’s budget was limited – but it was as good as her mother’s cooking and a little better than her father’s, and quite a bit better than what she ate in school. She did not realize they’d been taken to one of the cheaper restaurants available, and had she known, would not have cared.

They ended up sitting outside, watching the sun set while the City of Light came alive around them. The pedestrian traffic picked up as people came out for the evening. Melissa drank an after-dinner hot chocolate, watching the sophisticated crowds swirl about her, the young couples in the first bloom of love, old men and women cautiously navigating the traffic, still holding hands, some of them, as if they were still middle school sweethearts, and in the first and clearest of her life’s goals, knew she wanted to live in Paris forever.

IN 2064 HER half-brother Andre died. He was her father’s child by a previous marriage, and he was also a Peaceforcer. He was stationed on Luna when the Fizzle War broke out. Space Force shot down a SpaceFarer ship over Free Luna – several hundred SpaceFarers died, but only a few Space Force troops, and only one PKF officer – her brother.

It did not affect Melissa much; she had only rarely seen Andre, growing up. But her father, never an outgoing man, grew even more distant.

SHE GRADUATED FROM high school first in her class, at the age of fifteen, more than two years earlier than most of her childhood friends. She was accepted, as everyone had known she would be, into the PKF Academy at Marseille. They wouldn’t accept students under sixteen, but Melissa would turn sixteen in August, just in time to attend the start of classes in September.

Marseille was 180 kilometers away from home in a straight line – 250 kilometers following the curve of the French coast around the Mediterranean, if one traveled by land. As no Bullet train connected the two cities, and her parents could not afford a car capable of flying directly across the sea, she had to travel by older rail, at a travel time of four and a half hours – which meant that she would have to live in the dorms in Marseille, and not see her parents except on weekends.

It bothered her parents more than it bothered Melissa. They were proud of her, of course – they were French and they were patriots and a career in the Peace Keeping Force, for a girl of her talents and inclinations, was an obvious path. But they were not ready to let go yet, particularly Rebecca. No one brought up her brother Vincent, but no one had to – the shadow of the dead child hung over all of them, more lightly in recent years, but never forgotten.

Melissa would not miss her classmates; the girls were older than she was and disliked her; the boys older and intimidated by her. She had already said good-bye to her few remaining childhood friends from before she had jumped grades.

She had a last summer together with Mama and Papa before classes started. They spent a lot of it at the beach. Ernest was lighter-skinned than either Melissa or Rebecca, and had never handled the heat well. Melissa had inherited Rebecca’s skin: she quickly turned brown in the sun and could stay out in the sunlight through the heat of the day without burning or becoming overheated.

Rebecca and Melissa played volleyball in the sand as often as they could find competition, while Ernest sat under an umbrella and read on his handheld. They usually beat other women, and sometimes played and beat men – though men and boys who had lost to them once had a habit of making themselves scarce. There was such a thing as male ego.

“I wish Papa liked volleyball,” Melissa said at one point, as they sat in the beach chairs by the volleyball nets, drinking water from their sports bottles, waiting for more competition to arrive. A few windsurfers were busy out in the bay, though there was just barely enough wind to keep their brightly colored sails full. “
He
wouldn’t quit just because he’d lost a few games.”

Rebecca smiled at her. “No, Papa is an unusual man. Better than most of them. He just can’t handle the heat.”

Melissa nodded. She knew that well enough. They went running together in the morning sometimes, when it was cool, all three of them, and Papa’s endurance was at least as good as theirs, perhaps better. “I just wish we could do more things together.”

Rebecca said simply, “I wish you wouldn’t go.”

Melissa shook her head without answering.

“Not this year at least,” Rebecca continued. “I wish we hadn’t let you skip two grades.”

Melissa shrugged. That, she knew, had mostly been her father’s doing anyway. It hadn’t been important to him – he knew Melissa was bright, knew she was driven, and while none of this appeared to impress him particularly, seemed perfectly content that Melissa should have her way in most matters. If she wanted to study harder material, he was content that she have the chance to. If it meant she would leave home for university (or, as it turned out, the Academy), earlier than she would have otherwise, well, all children left home eventually.

Of course, from Mama’s perspective, it meant that she was losing Melissa two years too soon. “Mama, I’m going. I’ll perform well. When, in eight or ten years, they offer to make me an Elite” – Melissa had no doubt they would – “I will accept.”

“You’ll never have children,” Rebecca said very quietly.

“No,” Melissa agreed, “I won’t.”

HER SIXTEENTH BIRTHDAY came and went, the summer waned, and the day before she went to Academy they went rowing in the morning on the Canal de la Robine, had lunch at the beach, and then had dinner together at home. Her mother cooked Melissa’s favorite dinner, fresh bread with mushroom chicken and artichoke hearts over wild rice, and her father baked a blueberry pie – their respective strengths. Neither was a great cook, but the resulting dinner could not have been improved on in the best restaurant in Paris, for Melissa’s purposes.

The dinner proceeded pleasantly, and afterward they watched the 100
^th
Anniversary reissue of an old flat classic,
Lawrence of Arabia
. It was Ernest’s favorite movie, and Melissa had never seen it before. For the reissue the studio had retrofitted the old movie with depth, traceset cues for smell, taste, and touch, plus the usual viewpoint options. Ernest hadn’t bothered asking if anyone else wanted those things; he turned them all off, positioned the flat screen at the front of their holofield, and they watched the movie as it had been produced, a century before. He didn’t even enable the French audio track; all of them spoke English well enough. He did, in a very limited compromise, turn on the French subtitles.

The movie immediately became one of Melissa’s favorites. It was a product of its time – a movie made in 1962, portraying the last days of World War I. In its three and a half hours only one woman’s face was seen, a nurse in the final scenes. It was not supposed to be a homosexual romance, either – in those days, even in 1962, such things were considered perverse and no one would have made such a movie. It was clear that the story’s – hero was not too strong a word – hero, T.E. Lawrence, was gay, though Melissa was not sure if Lawrence himself was supposed to be aware of it; in those days people often hid such things even from themselves, the social stigma against it was so strong. But it was a love story, regardless; between Lawrence and the young prince, Sherif Ali, who fought together, successfully, to free the Arab tribes from the rule of the Turks.