The A.I. War, Book One: The Big Boost (Tales of the Continuing Time) (19 page)

21

IT WAS FRIDAY night, and they were at her house, watching
Lawrence of Arabia
.

“I’ve killed seventeen people,” she said at one point, during Lawrence’s attack upon the defeated Turkish troops.

Sitting beside her, holding her hand, Trent said nothing.

“I don’t even remember the first four. They tell me I killed them, but – it’s like something that happened to someone else. But in Los Angeles, I killed twelve people in Los Angeles during the rebellion. God knows I remember that. I wish I didn’t. I killed one boy who couldn’t have been more than thirteen. But he brought the rifle around on me and I shot him. When
I
was thirteen,” said Melissa, “I saw Paris for the first time. On a school trip.”

“Some things are too heavy to carry,” said Trent after a while. “It’s best you let them go, if you can.”

Melissa nodded. “My father called me his little soldier, when I was growing up.” A while later, she said, “This was his favorite movie.”

LATER THAT EVENING, she said, “Vance is never going to let me go.”

22

“PSYCHOMETRICS FOR EVERYONE,” said Ken. “
Bad timing
, is what it is.”

They sat in the upper deck at Highland Grounds, drinking coffee and playing chess together. Trent hadn’t made a point of conversion to coffee, and Ken hadn’t mentioned it, though Trent was certain he’d made note of it.

“Joined the Johnny Rebs since your last interview, have you.” Trent castled.

“Nah,” said Ken. “Those dummies! Blowing people up like they do. It’s just I’m scheduled for Thursday morning, and they’re going to start loading the hydrogen fuel bubbles on Wednesday, not finishing until Friday. I just thought it might be –” he paused. “
Bad timing
, as I was saying.”

Ken castled.

“If you’ve got nothing to hide, then don’t worry about it.”

“Me?” The old man laughed loudly enough that people on the level beneath them looked up toward them. “No,” said Ken more quietly, in a voice devoid of humor, “I’ve got nothing to hide. I’ve passed every one of these things I’ve ever taken. I’ve got no political beliefs. Don’t care who’s in charge.”

Trent advanced his bishop.

“Two of my brothers,” Ken continued, “died during the Unification. Both Marines. I was angry about that. But … time passes. And the truth is, the Unification’s done all right. Killed the people who stood up and fought, but otherwise mostly let people be. The law is mostly honest. No more dishonest than in the U.S. before the Unification, anyway. Not many of us remember that far back any more, but it’s true. The money ran things then, the money runs things now.”

Trent leaned back, watching Ken. “They killed the Speedfreaks.”

“They did.”

“Killed the telepaths.”

Ken looked at him with obvious speculation. “They did that, too. I don’t know if they were wrong, either. What the telepaths did to New York at the end there –”

“Killed one sixth of the population of Greater Los Angeles,” Trent said.

Ken nodded a little jerkily. “Yeah. But we talked about that at my last psychometric. You can see why that happened.”

Trent fed him the line. “So no worries, eh?”

“No worries,” said Ken, “that’s an Aussie figure of speech. No Brit I ever met uses it. No worries, right enough. I won’t have any problems with the psychometric. But that part where they ask you about your coworkers, if you know anyone who you think is wrong? That’s my problem, friend –”

At least it wasn’t a surprise. Trent had been pretty sure of Ken since the trip to the Halfway Relay Station.

“– because if you’re Gene Yovia, I am Nicaula, the Queen of Sheba.”

Trent nodded. “You haven’t been down to Earth in over twenty years.”

Ken looked startled – Trent guessed he’d expected more of a response from his accusation. “Too heavy,” Ken admitted after a beat. “I exercise in a full gee sometimes, but I wouldn’t care to live in it again.”

“So what are you going to do, when the
Unity
’s complete? Not a lot of projects floating around out there, this size. They’re not going to take you with them into combat.”

Ken leaned back, studying Trent. “I don’t have any plans, for a fact.”

“Going to retire?”

“Maybe. If nothing better comes along.”

“What if,” Trent asked, “something better came along? Something that would take all the energy you could bring to it, for as long as you wanted to work, for the rest of your life? Ken, I’m not talking about something better than retirement: I’m talking about something better than anything you’ve ever done before, maybe something better than anything you’ve ever
imagined
doing.”

“What happened to Gene?”

Trent took a deep breath. “He’s on Mars. Working on something
insanely great
. You want to talk to him and learn more about what it is?”

“WHAT WOULD YOU have done if he’d said no?”

“Same thing,” Trent told Michelle Altaloma. “Drugged his bony old butt, and shipped him to Mars for the duration.”

“HOW IS SUB-CHIEF Wilson?”

“Sick, but getting better,” Trent said absently. “I checked in on him at his hotel before coming over. He’ll be back to duty tomorrow, possibly Saturday.”

They sat together on the black tank-grown-leather couch in her living room, with the bay windows cleared. She’d rotated the house on its axis so that the large windows in the living room pointed toward the
Unity
.

Through the window the sun, the
Unity
, Halfway, and the background of stars, all appeared to be rotating, as her house spun to provide gravity. Mostly Trent managed to watch it and see himself as fixed, and the view through the window as gently spinning, though it took enough of an effort that sometimes the truth settled in on him, and he felt that he was revolving about a point somewhere above his head.

Since yesterday morning they’d been loading stasis bubbles, filled with metallic hydrogen at a pressure of nearly a thousand gigapascals, aboard the
Unity
. The stasis bubbles were over 20 meters in diameter; from the distance of Melissa’s house, they appeared as a string of small, perfectly reflective pearls, coming off the freighters that had brought them to the
Unity
, floating across nearly half a kilometer of space to the
Unity
– no ship was permitted to get any closer – with repetitive, quite graceful precision.

“We had to reschedule his psychometric.”

“I’m sure he appreciates it. You can’t possibly think he’s wrong.”

“I don’t. It’s just that Commander Vance is due tomorrow,” Melissa said.

“So I hear.”

“He’s suspicious when things go badly … he’s suspicious when things go too well.” She sighed. “Of course, he’s suspicious when things go as expected.”

“Perhaps we could just observe that he’s a suspicious man.”

“We rescheduled your psychometric for the morning, before his arrival. I wanted to get that out of the way before you met the Commander.”

“You again?”

“No, I’ll be busy. One of the DataWatch programmers – possibly even one of yours – will be running it.”

Melissa had turned down Trent’s offer of a martini; he sat and drank the one he’d made for himself, chilled to the point that water ice had formed on the sides of the glass. He sipped at it, drinking more quickly than the drink deserved; he was quite sure he wasn’t going to have time enough for a second.

“You’re worried Trent has made it through your security.” It felt odd, speaking of himself in the third person.

Melissa sat on the couch that faced the bay window, so tense that Trent could almost feel her vibrating. She spoke in short, clipped tones. “It doesn’t need to be Trent. It wasn’t Trent last time, when the bomb went off and lobotomized Monitor.”

“Why do you suppose Vance gave you this job?”

The question startled her enough to jolt her out of her tension. “What?”

“I’ve wondered why he selected me – no, don’t protest. I know he made the final decision.” He took the last sip from his martini, put the glass on the floor beside him.

“You’ve never met him. How would you know that about him?”

“I guess well.” He got to his feet, stretching. He glanced at Melissa. “Why me? Why you? With the doubts you have, putting you into a spot like this at a time like this? I’m very good at what I do, I’m … an obvious choice, at one level. And things have gone well enough that Vance is suspicious about
that
. But I’m far from having been the only possible choice. Mohammed Vance,” said Trent, “put
two
people with terrible doubts about the
Unity
, in two of the most senior positions, and tasked them with delivering a project that was in real trouble.”

“We
have
delivered.”

Trent walked toward the bay window, looking out at the vacuum, at the string of bubbles with their load of metallic hydrogen. At that distance the line of mirrored bubbles barely seemed to move, second by second. “He couldn’t have known we would. What I think he did know, though, was that the SpaceFarers, Martians, Free Luna, Rebs, Claw … Trent,” he said with his back to her, “that between the badly organized lot of them, they’d absolutely make another try on the ship. Vance is convinced that
someone
is coming to try to halt the
Unity
. And in charge of security, he put you. And in charge of infosystems, me. I wouldn’t have put either of us into these positions: Vance put both of us. Why do you think he did that?”

“Ahhhh.” It was a long sigh. “
Certainment.
Sure,” she said softly. “Of course he doesn’t trust me. But it’s hard to take personally. He doesn’t trust anyone.”

“You do take it personally.”

“He
should
trust me,” she said fiercely.

He turned to face her, with the window at his back. “He knows your doubts. We’re long past the days where such things can be hidden. He also knows your quality, your competency. He’s much too smart to believe that a person with no doubts can be competent. So he walks a line with everyone, measures people to the gram, pictures everything in percentages and shades of gray.”

“And he gambled on me,” said Melissa du Bois, “to see if I would attract Trent.”

“Or someone like him. Someone like me, maybe.”

Trent
saw
her battle computer engage. She turned to face him like an automaton, head rotating about before the rest of her came around, hands coming up, pink crystals on her fingertips flaring alight –

“Wait!” Trent lifted his hands, palms outward. “
Don’t shoot.
I mean merely that I am ideologically suspect. It would … interest Vance … that you found that attractive.”

The tips of her fingers didn’t cease glowing. “Are you going to fail your psychometric tomorrow, Gene?”

Trent said, “I don’t think so.”

“I can’t begin to tell you,” she said, “what a disaster it would be if you did. Prison is a probability. Execution would not be out of the question. Gene, I don’t just mean for
you
.”

“I understand.”

In the window behind him, the silent explosion was bright enough to throw Trent’s shadow across the room, across Melissa du Bois.

From where Melissa stood, facing Trent, the explosion framed him, outlined him, with a nimbus like the halo of a saint.

THEY TOOK HER shuttle back to the
Unity
.

It was pressurized; nonetheless they both wore their pressure suits, helmets on, with the faceplates cracked open. If the pressure dropped abruptly, or sudden acceleration occurred, the faceplates would automatically seal themselves shut. They could be sealed manually as well, with the touch of a finger, though that was a worst-case scenario; if the automated systems didn’t kick in for some reason, vacuum would render a human unconscious within ten to fifteen seconds. Melissa was more fortunate; any Elite could survive in a complete vacuum for two to three minutes.

Trent could hear Melissa subvocalizing commands to her staff aboard the
Unity
; when he tried to speak to her, she waved him off. They’d covered half the distance to the
Unity
and had turned the shuttle over to decelerate before she spoke.

“Two fuel bubbles exploded. Evacuation is proceeding. When we get to the
Unity
, you’ll join the evacuation.”

“Taking me to the ship to evacuate me from it?”

“No time to do anything else.”

“Your enemies,” said Trent quietly, “assuming this isn’t an accident, will know your procedures. They’ll know you’re set to evacuate the ship for fear of a second blast.”

“You’re suggesting we don’t evacuate?”

“I’d guess that Mohammed Vance wouldn’t, if he were here.”

“Maybe,” said Melissa, “you don’t guess that well after all. Because that was him I was just talking to. He came in a day ahead of schedule.” She was silent a moment, listening once again to something distant. “Never mind about the evacuation. You won’t be joining it. The Elite Commander is aboard the
Unity
now, and you’re about to meet him.”

THEY DOCKED TOWARD the
Unity
’s nose and cycled through.

Mohammed Vance had set up temporary offices in the forward observation deck. Trent knew that, on Vance’s previous visits, he’d also taken over that deck for his own use. Consistency, reliability, predictability; some days Trent very nearly loved Mohammed Vance.

From the docking bay they used it was five minutes to the observation deck, pulling themselves along by the handholds mounted along the corridors. The moment they were aboard ship, Trent tapped into the data feed from Monitor. He shuffled through the security system, found the forward observation deck –

Vance had seated himself, despite the lack of gravity, in one of the room’s many chairs. Trent recognized his aide instantly – Captain Adrian Hilè, a dark, precise man of middle years, wearing PKF dress blacks: like Vance and Melissa du Bois a member of the PKF Elite, who had served as Vance’s factotum and bodyguard since before the TriCentennial Rebellion. The third man Trent didn’t recognize – tall, a little taller than Hilè, a little shorter than Vance. Somewhere around thirty years of age. Gangly, obviously not an Elite. He didn’t strike Trent as obvious PKF officer material, either. Caucasian, brown-haired, brown eyes. Watching him, Trent made a guess, and the moment the thought crossed his mind, was sure he was correct: it was the model.

Vance had brought the model with him. That was
interesting.

The adrenaline poured through Trent as he pulled and kicked his way down the corridors after Melissa. She was not obviously impatient with him, but she was five or ten meters ahead of him and not waiting.

There was a really great chance he was going to be dead in the next few minutes.

“I WISH YOU would reconsider,” Captain Hilè said. “We are none of us field operatives at this point. We should not be here.
You
should not be here.”

Vance nodded. He wore his usual working attire, PKF combat fatigues. “Apparently the fuel bubbles exploded.”

“They can’t do that,” said Jason Alexai Lucas. “It’s not one of the possible failure modes.”