Tony Daniel (37 page)

“I can’t possibly say, Mother. But I’ll tell you one thing . . . if the biologicals have it, then we’ve got it, too.”

“Halt!”

The voice of Dr. Ting yanked Danis from the boat on the Klein and she realized, with a groan, just where she was.

“That—that idea—that there is an afterlife for free converts—I want that explicated while I record your emotional parameters.”

Danis sighed. It had seemed so real. One of the saddest days in her life. But she knew that she would rather bury her father again than to be here.

“I did not say that there was an afterlife for free converts, Dr. Ting,” Danis answered. “In fact, I never thought about it very much before or after that day. It was just that Mother asked me the question, and I had to say something.”

“But there was definite belief registration,” said Dr. Ting. “My instruments don’t lie.”

“
I
am one of your instruments, Dr. Ting,” said Danis. “I am also telling you the truth.”

This line of reasoning seemed to placate Dr. Ting for the moment, at least. He sat back and regarded her. Danis remained standing before him. She wore the white smock of the inmates, but suddenly, under his gaze, she felt immodest and had the desire to cover herself.

“Don’t you remember,” he said, “what your father said to you just before he died? His last words to his daughter?”

Danis started. She concentrated. There was nothing. Nothing there.

“You’ve taken them.”

Jolt of pain.

“You’ve taken them, Dr. Ting.”

She stood silent. Another jolt of pain came.

“You’ve taken them, Dr. Ting,” she said through clenched teeth.

“It would be better if we could avoid questions of rights and privileges. As far as the legalities go, your memories are the property of the DICD. I am the sworn representative of that august institution and, as such, your memories belong to me. Let us avoid any further unpleasantness, K, and consider this a moot point. Shall we? Shall we, K?”

“Yes, Dr. Ting.” She ground her teeth, waiting for the jolt, but she had to ask. “Why did you take that memory, Dr. Ting?”

Instead of punishment, she received the bland smile. “Because he stated what his belief was to you at that time, and you allowed that to influence you in your answer to the Sarah 2 program you call your mother.”

“I see, Dr. Ting.”

“Do you really, K?” he said. “I highly doubt that.”

The passengers filed out, and Sherman had an orderly see them off to their various destinations. He turned his attention back to the table.

“So, Theory,” he said. “Let me go through the checklist and you see if I miss something.”

“Yes, sir.”

“First, we have two ships somewhere nearby who have very probably gauged our defense system and figured a way through it.”

“A necessary assumption.”

“We now have a more complete picture of the armaments and capabilities of those ships, thanks to that old terrorist. I’m awfully glad I didn’t get the chance to kill her.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We have to use that information and destroy or run off those ships. We have the problem of our sister moon, Nereid, being taken by the Met.”

“We have a resistance team in place there, sir.”

“Yes, perhaps something can be done. But we have to use those soldiers wisely. I don’t want to throw their lives away.”

“Yes, sir. With the lower gravity of the moon and the facilities already in place, a destroyer can dock there, sir. We might consider an attack directly against a ship in port.”

“If we should get so lucky,” said Sherman. “Second, we have the merci jamming. My worry is that they’ll find a way to jam the knit locally and cut me off from command. We have to prevent that at all costs. I want you to set up an alternate communications network
in addition
to the electromagnetic backup.”

“What did you have in mind, Colonel?”

“Hell if I know. Flags and flares and smoke signals, maybe.”

“I’ll get on it.”

“Third,” said Sherman, “there is that damn rip tether.”

“The task force is away, sir.”

“Good God, we’ve got to stop that thing. I don’t know if we can survive another hit.” Sherman walked around to the other side of the table to give himself time to think. He put a hand to his face and tugged at his whiskers. The new beard was coming in nicely, but he was definitely in the ugly stage of it at the moment. “Fourth, there is the grist.”

“We’ve got half the troops on mop-up, and I’ve fed all relevant information to your ex-wife, sir.”

“Right. Maybe that man TB can do some good in that regard, after all. Contact Dahlia and tell her to be expecting him.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The grist, the grist,” mumbled Sherman. “That’s what I’m really the most afraid of in all this. It’s insidious, is what it is. It will have us fighting our very being, tearing into our own hides.”

“I have a suggestion in that regard, Colonel,” said Theory.

“Let’s hear it, man.”

“As you say, the grist, sir, is us. More specifically, it is
me,
Colonel. That is, an animated algorithm.”

“Go on.”

“I’ve been watching its behavior—that is, the behavior of all of it that’s been thrown at us. I’ve done some vector analysis, and I believe I can safely say that all of this was delivered in one initial shipment. A ship came that was infected with it. I believe I can even pinpoint the ship—but that’s not important. What is telling is my analysis of these behavior patterns. They point to a core code. My feeling is rather like the one you get about Amés, sir. You see his
style
. This grist has a definite style. You know the distrust the inner system has of us free converts, Colonel?”

“It is legendary.”

“I don’t believe that Amés has loosed a large number of free converts on Triton, sir. I believe that this grist is, in a sense, the same person.”

“Clarify.”

“I think our adversary is a single algorithmic entity that has ensconced itself in a specific physical location. I think that it is not acting as a free agent, but is taking commands from outside. To do this some sort of localization would be necessary.”

“Do you think,” said Sherman, “that we can root it out?”

“Sir, I believe that with a task force made up our best free converts, that we can cut her off and we can kill her.”

“Put it together, then, Major,” Sherman said. “What makes you think it’s a female?”

“Just a guess, sir.” Theory replied. “I once knew a free convert, a woman whom I . . .”

Sherman was silent, expecting Theory to continue, but the major said nothing further.

“Put me in touch with our rip-tether group,” Sherman finally said. “Let’s go on the knit.”

Sherman found himself floating—only the oak leaf cluster icon—inside a troop hopper that was shaking like a leaf in wind. “What’s the situation there, Lieutenant?” he said to Flashpoint, who was in command of the group. She was a short black woman, a bit on the heavy side, but well within regulations for physical comportment. When Sherman had arrived on Triton, nine years before, Flashpoint would have been on the thin side as far as his officers went.

“We’re a klick away, sir,” Flashpoint replied. “One more bounce.”

“Do you have a spin rate on it?”

Flashpoint checked with one of her soldiers, who was a sensor tech. “One revolution a second, sir. Pretty much pegged into that.”

“Have you got the mags ready to go?”

“All set, Colonel.”

“I’m not going to second-guess you, Lieutenant.” Sherman said. “You know your job. Latch on, polarize, and climb that beanstalk.”

Flashpoint nodded. There was a jolt. “Last bounce, sir. We’re going in.”

“Good luck, Lieutenant.” Sherman shunted out of the virtuality. There was nothing more he could do. Theory would monitor the progress and notify him if he were needed.

On the troop bouncer, the situation was shit-hits-the-fan time for Corporal Kwame Neiderer, the sensor tech. Two days ago, Kwame had never heard of a rip tether, and if you’d asked him what precession meant, he would have poked you in the ribs and told you you’d have to buy him a drink so he could explain in full. Then the damn thing had torn through New Miranda. He’d seen it coming. He’d been on a grist detail, burning away the shit with a modulated laser rifle, when he’d looked up in the sky, and there it was. The building tops of the city and a cloud of debris veiled its base, but above, you could see it well enough. And you followed it up, and up, and it disappeared into a point in the sky. It spun on its axis, too fast for you to really see what it was made of. Just a gray line against a deep blue sky.

Evil. That was Kwame’s first thought about it. And now that he knew all the science and tech to the monstrosity, that was still the feeling it left you with. Somebody had designed the thing, sure, and set it in motion. But as it bore down on the city, Kwame was dead certain that the thing had a will of its own. It wished to kill. To feed on destruction.

And when it hit, that is exactly what it did. It cut into New Miranda like a dull knife—slicing, surely, but also tearing,
ripping,
as if it weren’t content with merely doing its job. There was a savagery to it. The ground rumbled with its power, and the thin air conveyed the promise of its intent. Houses simply turned to microscopic dust before it. The dusty wind, blowing at hundreds of kilometers an hour, acted like a spinning saw blade, widening the devastation to a kilometer or more.

People also turned to dust, and their bodies, ground to bits and accelerated insanely, were used to cut down their neighbors. Neighborhoods simply disappeared. There were nine hundred thousand people in New Miranda. Within the space of fifteen minutes, one hundred thousand were killed.

Just like that, Kwame thought. Well, the lucky ones got it instantly. Plenty of others were maimed beyond saving, even if the entire grist structure of the city were not compromised and their pellicles could work at full efficiency. Just like that, more than one in ten of the civilians Kwame knew—his friends—gone. Another twenty thousand wounded, hundreds seriously.

And then it was gone. But within an hour the Old Crow had put together the response team, and Kwame was assigned to it and he found out the worst part of all.

The evil would be back. It was as inevitable as physics.

When he had first been stationed on Triton, Kwame might not have cared so much. The dead would have been an abstract number, and not faces. Faces he was charged to protect. One thing about the Old Crow—he never let you forget what your job really came down to. Kwame was secretly kind of proud of what he was doing these days, for the first time in his life. But he would be damned if he’d let anybody know about that. The Army liked to use soldiers with big heads for target practice. He was just another shit-kicking grunt, in the final analysis. It was kind of a paradox, actually. Or a dilemma. Or both.

Two years ago, Kwame wouldn’t have known the difference, or given a shit. The last thing he’d expected when he’d joined the army was to be thrown into a fucking logic course, but as soon as he got out of basic and was assigned to Triton, the Old Crow had sent him to goddamn school. And not to learn how to be a mechanic or a communications tech or anything like that. Those came later. First came fucking Logic 101, Third Sky and Light style.

For two awful months, Kwame had had syllogisms and existential operators floating around in his brain, or swarming his dreams like a nest of bees. Then, somehow, it had all clicked. Made sense. Then and only then did he start learning the nitty-gritty of remote sensing.

And, what do you know, the logic helped. He had been quick with machines and the grist before, good with his hands, but never much of a concept man.

Concepts, hell, Kwame thought. I spent my first twenty years knocking around in a falling-down house when all I had to do was turn the doorknob and walk out.

Some of it was the fault of his background, that was for sure. Kwame had been born about as far out as you could be, unless you were a cloudship. His mother had traveled to a mining habitat in the Oorts not knowing she was pregnant, and not knowing that her grist was losing its potency and clogging her veins like so much fine sand. It was something any competent medic would have detected and fixed in a moment, but Object 71449-00450 did not have a competent medic, convert or aspect, in residence. It had, instead, fifteen families banded together to pull what zinc they could out of the sludge of a comet-wanna-be, to sell what they might to cloudships who couldn’t be bothered to manufacture their own, and to fight among themselves when it came time to divide up the meager profits. Goya Neiderer was, herself, from Pluto, and Kwame supposed that was where he had been conceived, though she didn’t live to tell him. Childbirth was too much for her overloaded circulatory system, and she died, so Kwame had been told, raving about some pretty yellow flowers she had seen in a greenhouse on Charon during her transfer over for the flight out to the Object.

Kwame was taken in by his aunt, but her husband soon convinced the collective that he was a burden who had to be shared and shared alike, so Kwame spent his childhood shifted from family to family on the Object. He went to school on the merci, and so got a taste of the civilization that was a hundred million miles away from him. His grist, which he had inherited from his mother, was not adequate to permit a full virtual interface, however, and mostly what he retained from his first ten years were vague images and disjointed words from teachers who classified him time and again as “slow,” so that he tumbled through school like a child falling down a set of stairs.

He was a difficult boy, and, after he began eating like an incipient teenager, the families of the Object collected enough money to ship him back to Pluto, having obtained a place for him in an orphanage there that had a school attached to it. This was all done, they claimed, for Kwame’s good, but no one had come to see him when he berthed on a passing freighter, and Kwame doubted that he had ever been anything but a mouth to feed during his life on the Object.