The A.I. War, Book One: The Big Boost (Tales of the Continuing Time) (17 page)

When the movie was over, Ernest said, “We must go to bed now, and you should too.” Her parents were coming with her on the train to Marseille, though they would not be permitted to enter the Academy with her; the Academy discouraged parents even remaining in town after dropping their children off, and Ernest and Rebecca would return to Narbonne the same day. “Perhaps you should not mention this movie when you talk with your new friends at Academy,” he went on.

It seemed an odd piece of advice. “Why?”

“In some circles it’s thought subversive,” he said. “They’re wrong, they lack imagination to think so. The Unification of our time is not the Turkish Empire of World War I … but some people have argued the connection, and some people take the argument seriously. Twice foolish,” he added. “David Lean” – the film’s director – “and the writers died decades before the Unification War. The movie is based on T.E. Lawrence’s writing from after World War I. They are reading intent where there could not possibly have been any.” He paused. “But be careful anyway. You have been raised in a patriotic household, but where you are going, you will meet patriots who will make us seem suspect and insufficiently proud.”

Melissa could not imagine such a thing (though it turned out that, as was so often the case, Papa was right.)

She kissed them both and went to bed. Later that night, something awoke her, some low noise – she lay in bed motionless, wondering what it was – a bird? – before she realized it was, from her parent’s bedroom at the other end of the hallway, with two closed doors between Melissa and her parents, the sound of her mother crying.

MELISSA DU BOIS’ four years at the Peace Keeping Force Academy in Marseille were without doubt the four best years of Melissa’s life up to that point. At least some of the men were not afraid of her – with the exception of her own father they were the first men she had ever met whom she had not completely intimidated, with her looks, her body, her athleticism, her intellect, her poise and reserve, or by all of those things in short succession.

Finding men who were not afraid of her was surprisingly pleasant. She was not tempted to sleep with any of them – they were usually upperclassmen and too old for her, and she knew her parents would have disapproved. “Men do not value what comes too easily,” was all Ernest had said on the subject, but Melissa thought it likely he was correct; he had been correct about most of the things he’d bothered to state explicitly, in her life. Melissa was still a virgin at sixteen, and in no hurry to change that.

But there was no denying the attention was enjoyable.

MELISSA LEARNED TO speak idiomatic English and passable Chinese. She learned a pragmatic grasp of hand to hand combat, most of which consisted of harming your opponent quickly and savagely and then separating long enough to acquire a weapon. She learned to use every common weapon and how to improvise a startling variety of weapons from common objects. She learned to recognize a bomb, and how to build one.

She learned elementary psyops – how to interrogate a prisoner, how to survive interrogation if captured. How to gain trust, how to manage distrust.

She studied Unification Law and PKF regulations. She studied military history and economic history and politics; one fairly technical paper she wrote on the evolution of intergovernmentalism into supranationalism, and how those things flowed directly from the lessons of World War II and became the basis of the European Union and later the Unification, aroused enough comment within the Academy that it was submitted for publication to a well regarded history journal, not long after her eighteenth birthday.

A common subject, regardless of class, was the problem of Occupied America. Over four decades after the end of the Unification War, the Johnny Rebs were still functioning – not effectively, in the opinion of most of Melissa’s instructors, but still functioning and worse,
popular
. Stories about the Rebs, movies about the Rebs, portrayed them as heroes, as patriots – not in a proper sense, not patriotic to the idea of the stable and just society that only the Unification had ever provided to humanity in the entire history of the word; but to abstractions of justice and liberty that were impossible to measure.

“Make no mistake,” one instructor pointed out at the end of a period of discussion, “by any metric you care to name, Occupied America is a better place to live today – we leave aside the question of New York for the moment – than at any time in the history of the American people. They live longer, they live healthier. Infant mortality has decreased to nearly zero. Hunger is rare and starvation nonexistent. Drug and alcohol addiction is a fraction of the problem it once was. Crime of all sorts – violent crime, murder, rape; nonviolent crime, burglary, embezzlement, theft – are at levels previously unknown in American history.

“One would think they would be happy … but they are not. And were not, even before the Troubles began in New York. For Wednesday, a paper giving your theory as to why.”

AT LEAST IN part due to her excellent English, at the age of twenty-one she found herself walking a beat, showing the flag, airing the uniform … in the city of Santa Monica, California, Occupied America.

California was a state Melissa could only just have found on a map before her arrival in it; she knew not much about it otherwise, for all her studies at Academy concerning Occupied America. Los Angeles she knew something about – the part of it called Hollywood had been the most productive source of filmed entertainment during the twentieth century, and Humphrey Bogart had lived there.

Santa Monica, it turned out, was a beach town completely surrounded by the city of Los Angeles. It reminded her a little of Narbonne, though it was wealthier and more crowded. The beaches reminded her quite a bit of the beaches at home; she found herself going down to Santa Monica and Venice beaches when off duty and playing volleyball with complete strangers. Her accent was still obviously French, but for the most part the people on the beach didn’t seem to care about that, at least not as much as they cared about her killer spike.

She spent a year in Santa Monica, teleconferencing with her parents to stay in touch. Her mother got nervous if Melissa didn’t call at least twice a week, despite Melissa’s assurance that she had landed in one of the softest, safest patrol jobs any Peaceforcer on Earth could have dreamed up – but with twice weekly calls, Mama was calm enough, if not noticeably happy. (“Happy is her job,” Papa said once, when Melissa was still small. “You can’t make another person happy. Our job is to love her whether she is happy or sad.”)

Melissa thought her mother’s worries excessive, but it cost her nothing to check in regularly, to send messages back and forth during the course of the day; though she did get in the habit of blocking personal calls on her earphone while on shift. It was only a little white lie to tell her mother that her C.O. disapproved of personal calls – he did, but he wouldn’t have known unless he’d had cause to review her call records, and it would have taken a disciplinary review before he’d have been permitted to look.

As it happened, in December of 2068, he had cause to look.

LATER MELISSA BUILT up an idea of what had happened that day, only three days before Christmas. The last thing she really remembered was sitting in a PKF Armored AeroSmith at the intersection of Wilshire and 15
^th
Street, explaining wearily to her Captain who was on the phone and twenty kilometers away that she’d had no choice but to override the autocomp and fly directly to the UCLA Medical Center of Santa Monica, because the ambulance wouldn’t have gotten Pierre to a doctor in time. He had chunks blown out of his torso so large that his uniform was the principle thing keeping his spinal column from the air.

Melissa didn’t really remember much of that day, either before or after that moment. At one point a bullet had clipped the back of her skull, digging a furrow in the bone and causing bleeding just the other side of the bone. She’d been, in fact, closer to dying than her partner, and it had required brain surgery by one of Los Angeles’s best human surgeons to save her.

Her performance review decided that Melissa had killed four of the Rebs; her partner had only accounted one. The remaining six had been killed by PKF Elite within minutes of their arrival onsite. The citation added to Melissa’s record concluded that she had directly saved the lives of at least twenty of the Reb hostages – all members of a group of Chinese Christian tourists visiting the U.S. for Christmas.

And they
did
, Melissa made a point of telling her mother, check her personal phone records before issuing the citation.

IT TOOK A while for her promotion to come through; it was the summer of 2069 before she made Detective. She was twenty-two years old, and along with her promotion came the invitation PKF both feared and desired: she was invited to apply for the Peace Keeping Force Elite. Others might have hesitated, but Melissa knew of no one as young as she who had ever received an invitation: if she turned it down, she knew the odds of receiving another, ever, were poor.

ON AUGUST THE fourteenth, 2069, Melissa du Bois and forty-six other members of the United Nations Peace Keeping Force took their seats aboard the
Captain Sir Dominic Flandry
, a SpaceFarer vehicle that had been retained to take them to the Elite surgery facility at SpaceBase One at L5.

The cabin in which they were to travel had forty-eight seats. After Melissa and her fellow PKF were seated, there remained one empty seat – the aisle seat next to Melissa. No one seemed to know who it was for, but it was soon apparent that the ship would not be taking off until whoever it was arrived.

Melissa waited patiently for a few minutes, then took her handheld out to read. She was halfway through a classic her father had recommended, “The Elegance of the Hedgehog,” and had managed to get lost within it again when a tall young man wearing a well-tailored business suit, carrying a briefcase, was led into the cabin and made his way to the empty seat beside her. He was her age, Melissa guessed, maybe even younger – twenty? Melissa wondered who he was, what gave him the pull to keep their ship grounded until he arrived. She didn’t look directly at him, just studied him from the corner of her eye while continuing to page through her novel.

He sat down and strapped himself in, put his briefcase in the safety web beneath the seat: he was handsome, blond, and with quite strikingly beautiful blue eyes.

He turned to her and smiled, and Melissa allowed herself to look up from her handheld. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Trent the thief. Is there anything I can steal for you?”

19

“TELL ME ABOUT your day,” Trent suggested, “and I’ll tell you about mine.”

“I killed a man,” Melissa said.

Me too,
Trent started to say, when he saw that she was serious.

AS CHIEF OF Security for the
Unity
, Melissa du Bois was, in theory, not responsible for anything except the security and safety of the ship and the personnel assigned to it.

“ ‘In theory,’ ” one of Melissa’s instructors had quoted at her once at Academy, “ ‘there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.’ ”

In practice, every Peaceforcer knew that there was no such thing as “off duty.” You were a Peaceforcer when you got up in the morning, a Peaceforcer throughout the day, a Peaceforcer when you went to bed and while you dreamed. Your duty was without limits, either of time or place.

Early Friday evening, March 29, 2080, Melissa’s earphone went off while she was having dinner at home, in what had once been the house of the previous Chief of Security for Halfway. Half a dozen holos floated in her office, and she was eating while browsing the readouts. Chief Yovia had volunteered to help Chief Thorvald with the problems with the torch thrust, and Chief Thorvald had received the offer with the complete lack of graciousness Melissa had come to expect of the man. Yovia’s department was proceeding at a good speed; her reports from Yovia showed Monitor going green over the weekend of April 13-14, and, if anything, her private reports from her PKF programmers showed that as a possibly conservative date.

Staffing up was expected to begin toward the end of April, and to take most of two months. The first shipments of the
Unity
’s operational staff were due no more than two weeks following the final greenlights for Monitor and the torches.

The euphemism – “operational staff” – annoyed Melissa. It referred to Space Force and PKF combat troops. When fully staffed, seventy percent of the personnel aboard the
Unity
would be Space Force combat troops. Twenty percent would be PKF troops trained for free fall combat in pressurized environments – troops destined to conquer and then patrol the Belt CityStates. And there would be several dozen Elite – almost half of the Elite were already aboard ship, and had been all along, providing security.

Despite her best efforts, Melissa could not convince herself that the planned Unification of Free Luna and the outer Solar System was wise. Vance knew her feelings – with modern psychometrics it was impossible to hide such things – and she wondered daily why, despite knowing her reservations, he had promoted her into this position. Her loyalty – to the Unification, to Vance personally – could not be doubted. But she thought the coming war a mistake, and nothing she had seen or been told had changed that opinion.

“I would rather,” Vance had told her, “place my faith in your loyalty and competency, rather than merely in loyalty. Competency arises from the ability to evaluate multiple propositions, to consider options, to think outside the parameters that second rate thinkers would impose upon you. You may think this policy wrong: but that you will execute it to the best of your considerable ability I have no doubt.”

Sitting at her desk, flipping through the holos that showed the
Unity
’s daily improving readiness, Melissa knew that Vance was not wrong. She had doubts: they would not outweigh Vance’s certainty.

When her phone went off the caller ID showed that it was a Peaceforcer on the Halfway security detail – not the
Unity
, and not properly in her chain of command. “Yes?”

“Chief,” he said without preamble, “we have a hostage situation.”

THEY’D CALLED HER because Ops had shown she was the Elite closest to the problem. Any Elite would have done – but she was at least twenty minutes closer, responding from the Chief’s house, than any of the Elite aboard the
Unity
, or aboard the hotels that serviced the
Unity
. And she spoke Chinese.

In theory, she was not required to respond. In practice –

“WHAT IS YOUR name?” she called out in Mandarin to the man on the other side of the dance floor.

“Go away!” he yelled back.

They were in a night club not too far from the Earthside Edge, in the middle of a little cluster of restaurants and clubs. It was a tumbling bolo, with a restaurant at one end of the cable and a dance club at the other. A small car ran the length of the cable, shuttling people between the two destinations. The man holding the hostages had camped out in the dance club; he’d released most of his hostages already, letting them exit via the cable car, half a dozen at a time. They were down to only the hostage taker and his three hostages – two women and another man – by the time Melissa arrived.

She got floating cameras up in the air – the size of dust motes, invisible in the dance club’s low lighting – as soon as she arrived. The hostage taker – Melissa dubbed him “Chrome” for his long, mirrored hairstyle – was probably in his early twenties, possibly even his late teens. His hostages were also Asians, no older than he was, and in the video feed looked too terrified to be of use.

Chrome was armed with a weapon Melissa found depressingly familiar – an Elite killer, a pumped laser, with the flared bell-shaped opening that meant it had been detuned to be fired upon PKF Elite. The weapon alone complicated the situation – weapons were difficult to come by at Halfway; the average Halfway structure was a thin shell that held up to pressurization well enough, but handled any sort of weapons fire badly. Nobody wanted to breathe death pressure, and almost no Halfers carried weapons capable of producing a breach.

Even the few who did, didn’t carry Elite killers. The PKF had Views on such weapons; possession was an automatic death penalty and the PKF wasn’t slow about applying it. The heat exchange in post-Rebellion model Elite made them less useful than they’d been – but you could still kill an Elite with one, though usually not with just one shot.

Melissa hadn’t been retrofitted with the heat exchanges yet. One shot would probably be enough, at this distance. She’d been shot with an Elite killer once before, during her second tour of duty in Los Angeles, during the rebellion – but it had been from a sufficient distance that she’d survived it with bad but not fatal internal burns, where the superconducting network beneath her skin had distributed the heat.

Her floating cameras got a good front view of Chrome’s face; Melissa’s tactical engagement program immediately began searching facial recognition databases for a match.

The dance floor was about 40 meters in diameter; the cable car came down in the center of it. Melissa came down in the car and stepped out on the side facing away from Chrome and his hostages. They were holed up to one side of the dance floor, on a small rise designed for live music – to Melissa’s surprise there was what looked like an actual piano on the riser, a wooden upright that looked very like the piano in her parent’s living room. Who had paid to ship
that
to Halfway?

Chrome had his hostages on their knees in front of him, and was crouched down behind them with his pumped laser pointed at the back of a sobbing girl’s head.

“I appreciate you sending everyone else out,” Melissa called out from the other side of the cable car. “Perhaps we can send out the three who are left? I will be happy to stay behind with you.”

“I can’t send out anyone else!” – she thought Chrome yelled back at her. His accent was worse than hers and she had a hard time understanding him. Chinese, yes, but no more a native Mandarin speaker than Melissa. She fed the rest of what he had to say through her battle computer – she thought he was complaining that the women had fooled him, that the man he’d taken hostage was trying to make a fool of him, they were liars and he would show them what was done with liars –

It sounded like romance gone very, very bad.

But there was the Elite killer.

Melissa knew she might not get a chance to ask him the question afterward. She knew that asking it now was probably a mistake – but she wanted to know. “Where did you get the rifle?”

“Ha!” Chrome yelled. “You like it! You like my rifle, you like my big gun?”

“It is a very big gun,” Melissa agreed. “Where did you get it?”

“
Hu Jinping,”
a voice whispered across her earphone.
“Twenty-two. Shipping clerk. No revolutionary background on record, not a likely candidate for recruitment. One of the hostages is Pamela Qinghong, his ex-girlfriend.”

“
Where did he get the gun?”
she subvocalized.

“
We don’t know.”

Jinping yelled at her. “Not telling! Do you want to see me use it, huh?”

“No, don’t,” Melissa said, lowering her voice enough that he would have to quiet down to hear her. “This doesn’t need to end badly for anyone.” Any moment backup would arrive onsite with enough knockout gas to flood the room –
should have had it to hand to begin with,
flickered across Melissa’s mind, it was interesting how many things could go wrong in one not-very-unusual hostage situation. “If we –”

Jinping yelled something Melissa didn’t understand about freedom and pride and shot the girl he’d been pointing the laser at. The corona of the discharge bloomed around her head in a fireball and she was dead before she had time to know what was happening. Melissa came around the cable car with the lasers in both fingers lit, and got them centered on Hu Jinping’s face as he swung the laser around, not on her, but to shoot another of his hostages.

The pumped laser took time to charge, and Melissa’s lasers sliced down and took Jinping in the throat before he could pull the trigger again.

Jinping died before a stasis bubble reached him.

It turned out that the girl he’d actually killed wasn’t even his ex-girlfriend, just someone who’d managed to be in the wrong place at very much the wrong time.

TRENT SPENT MOST of Friday working his way through Chief Thorvald’s progress reports. He had an idea what was going on, and Monitor thought it might be correct – but Trent didn’t trust Thorvald to address it. Reading the remarkable series of excuses Thorvald had produced across the last year to explain slowness in mounting and test firing the torches, Trent decided that he didn’t even trust Thorvald to honestly evaluate and fix the problem, even if he had the solution handed to him.

At 3:00 P.M. he took Ken and Keith Daniels and Jean-Paul Troileac with him and went down to see the torches in the “B” stack.

IVAN THORVALD KEPT them waiting for most of half an hour before showing his face. Thorvald was a short, olive skinned, black-haired man in his mid-fifties – not obese, exactly, but round and red-faced. Like many people these days, he didn’t particularly resemble his name. Even in free fall he had difficulty catching his breath, when he spoke too much or too passionately – Trent got to see both before the afternoon was over.

Thorvald, when he finally arrived at the rocket scaffolding for the “B” stack, brought nearly half his senior staff with him. That suited Trent – the more witnesses the better, for his purposes.

“Chief,” Thorvald said shortly to Trent. “Come to fix our problems, have you?”

“Well, we’ve fixed ours,” Trent said mildly. “We thought we might be of service.”

“We knew you’d
appreciate
it,” Ken volunteered.

The
Unity
had sixteen torches, each one of sufficient size to power any other vehicle humans had ever built. They were aligned in four rows of four torches each, four stacks, with each stack heavily shielded from the others. In the event one stack met with damage, the shielding would, ideally, prevent the damage from spilling over into the other three stacks. Within each stack, there was shielding between each individual torch, though it was substantially lighter than the shielding between stacks.

With all sixteen torches lit, the
Unity
would accelerate at two gravities – an amazing accomplishment, for a structure the size of two spacescrapers laid end to end.

At least that was the theory.

“I’ve been walking the diagrams,” Trent said. “It looks like what’s happening is that when the torches pass fifty percent utilization on the flow of hydrogen, you start getting sputtering. Fifty percent flow gives you less than thirty percent of the thrust you’re supposed to develop, because the fusion reaction doesn’t operate at peak efficiency until they’re at full flow. Good so far?”

“Yes,” Thorvald said grudgingly.

ly

“Great,” Trent said. “And you think that the problem is the focal length of the fusion reaction, that it’s been misdesigned and is too short, or too long, or both –”

Thorvald flared up immediately. “I don’t need any fucking sarcasm from
you
, we’re doing our best here with gear that’s out of spec and –”

“It may be,” Trent agreed, “but let’s go look at B1.”

THE B1 TORCH was an oval structure approximately twice as wide as it was tall – 80 meters by 40, and nearly 40 deep. The fusion chamber tapered at the left and right edges so that, when fusion was occurring, it looked eerily like a human eye – a darker circle in the center where the hydrogen entered the torch, a brighter ring surrounding it where the fusion reaction took place.

Trent brought them back to the point in the scaffolding where the hydrogen fuel was injected into the fusion chamber, and then walked them backward along the main fuel line. “Do you know why the Space Shuttle
Challenger
exploded?” Trent asked. “
Not you,
Kenny. Not you, Daniels. And particularly not you, Lieutenant Troileac of the United Nations Peace Keeping Force DataWatch.”

“I’ll just float here with my mouth shut,” said Lieutenant Troileac.

Trent waited patiently. Finally one of Thorvald’s sub-Chiefs said, “Blow-by with the O-rings.”

“Righto. Bad design work, that. But the thing is, everyone knew about the problem. I mean, bloody well everyone, right? People at NASA knew about it. People at Morton Thiokol knew about it. The solid rocket boosters built by Morton Thiokol had a problem with the O-rings getting cold and not flexing sufficiently to seal off the hot gases. One very cold morning they launch, and blammo, the O-rings are frozen stiff and they don’t seal, and it goes badly from there.