Tony Daniel (40 page)

“Access code,” the convert said to him.

Kwame grunted in exasperation. “What’s your name?” he asked. Another detail he’d failed to learn about the mission. If he got out of this alive, he’d be damned if he went into another situation without all the information that was possibly available to him.

“Private Dragon, sir.”

“Don’t ‘sir’ me; I’m a goddamn corporal. Have a look at the situation, Dragon.”

“I’m aware of it, Corporal.”

“Then do your job.”

“I need the lieutenant’s access codes.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll have to call in for them.”

“Won’t work, Corporal.”

“Why the hell not!”

“Just one copy. To prevent knit subterfuge and subversion.”

“What fucking genius dreamed up that protocol?”

“I don’t know that, Corporal.”

Kwame stumbled over to the lieutenant. Flashpoint wouldn’t be waking up. Flashpoint was dead. He went back to the virtuality.

“The codes are not available. She’s dead.”

“I can’t act without the key,” said Dragon. She sounded
strained
, the convert version of scared.

“Well, what the hell am I supposed to do about that, Dragon?”

“I don’t know, Corporal.”

Shit, shit, shit. The fucking Army is really letting me down, Kwame thought.

“All right then. Dragon.” He thought furiously. “Can you tell
me
how to do it?”

“Do what, Corporal?”

“Set the damn breeder thing of course, you shithead!”

The convert was silent for a millisecond. In the virtuality, it seemed a long time to Kwame.

“Without the key, you would have to use manual override, Corporal,” she finally said.

“Manual override? Manual override! Why didn’t you fucking
tell
me there was a manual override?”

“See the green light beside the lieutenant’s station, Corporal?”

Kwame looked around wildly, and almost missed it. But there it was, right in front of his fucking face.

“Got it,” he said.

“There’s a switch under it. A toggle switch.”

“There sure as shit is.” A chrome switch.

“When the light turns red, you would need to flip that switch, Corporal.”

“That’s it?”

“That is all, Corporal.”

“Are you joking? What are you leaving out, Dragon? It can’t be that easy.”

“That is all, Corporal.”

Think, he told himself,
think
. Converts. Good at data. No intuition.

“Uh, Dragon, when does it turn red?”

“Five minutes before deployment window.”

Ah-ha.

“So, I couldn’t get out.”

“Pardon, Corporal? Did you ask me a question?”

“No, Dragon. No, I did not.” He shunted back to actuality. “Rastin!”

“Corporal?”

“Get the fuck out of here!”

“What?”

“You heard me. Get in the escape pod and take it down. I’m staying behind to flip the fucking switch.”

“But Corporal—”

“That’s an order, Private.”

“Who the fuck are you to give me an order, you—”

“Rastin, shut up! There’s nothing you can do to help me. It’s the only way. Now get in the fucking pod!”

Rastin gave Kwame a long, mournful look. He had never noticed before how much Rastin’s face resembled a hound dog’s.

“All right, Neiderer,” he said. “I’ll go.”

“Then go!” Kwame growled.

“Jesus Christ, all right.” Rastin grabbed a handhold and swung himself toward the door to the pod bay. “Good luck, Kwame,” he called out, and then he was gone.

Back to the virtuality.

“Dragon!”

“Yes, Corporal.”

“Go home.”

“Are we evacuating?”

“You are.”

“I don’t understand, Corporal.”

“I’m staying.”

Another millisecond of being startled. “Oh. I understand. Corporal.”

“Download and away with you, Dragon.”

“Yes, Corporal.” Dragon’s presence withdrew. But she left an image inscribed in the “air” in front of Kwame. He had to look twice before he could believe his eyes. It was two lips bowed into a kiss.

“Well, fuck me,” he said, then called back up the pilot’s sensorium.

A bright flash indicated that the escape pod was away. He watched it trail off on its parabola of salvation. I don’t get one of those, Kwame thought. He looked back at the tether. The midpoint was drawing near. Just you and me. Me and evil.

Fuck evil.

He waited. The light stayed green above the toggle. He waited longer. Something like an idea. No, not even that. A crazy notion.

The light shone red.

Kwame flipped the toggle and ran for the escape pods, He was through the door in an instant. The hopper was shaking violently, and he used his pellicle grist to cling to the bulkheads. By the time he got to the ejection sling, he was crawling on his hands and knees just to keep moving.

Jesus God, he hoped he could get it to reset itself.

He interacted with its simple algorithm. The sling reset. Kwame squirmed into it. His body was not at all shaped like an escape pod, but the seat of the sling was curved, just like the bowl of a catapult might be. He got into it, feeling like a pea in a great big spoon.

“Good-bye, cruel world,” he said. “Or something like that.”

He ordered the sling to release. The bay door opened. The sling actuated.

If he had been in an escape pod, he would have been lying flat against a cushioned wall that would, with its grist, exactly match the contours of his body and adjust for all acceleration strains. It would be a rough jostling, but nothing more than uncomfortable.

This was more like getting slapped in the back of the head with an iron bar.

Kwame was flung into space at nearly a twenty-gee acceleration. It was almost enough to kill even the space-adapted. Almost, but not quite.

His mind browned over for a moment. Kwame blinked. Consciousness returned.

And there he was, flying through empty space. The only direction that mattered at the moment was away. Away from the damned—the truly damned—hopper. Away. He didn’t look back. He couldn’t. All he could do was hope.

Minutes passed. Triton was above him. Above, he thought, how can that be? Then he realized he was lying on his back with respect to it. What the hell. He mentally adjusted his point of view.

The shock wave from the nuclear explosion hit him while he was doing this, and, after that, all was confusion. Then the white confusion turned to brown confusion, the brown to black. The black to nothingness.

When he woke up, he was farther away from Triton. Much, much farther. He could see the whole fucking thing. It had been a long time since he had been in a vacuum, and he’d never been in free fall and a vacuum simultaneously. That was why it took him a moment to remember that he had small attitude sprays built into his elbows and knees. He called up the operations manual and reacquainted himself with how to use them. With a little adjustment, he had himself facing the moon.

Fuck me, Kwame thought. I’m in fucking orbit.

He was. Falling around Triton like a human satellite. For a long time, he just looked. Looked on the green-yellow moon. The cantaloupe-rind equatorial area. The volcanic craters of the south pole. The zone where they interfaced. He tried to see the twinkling lights of New Miranda, but then remembered that he was on the opposite side of the world from it.

“I sure am,” Kwame said, and
heard
himself speak. That was how he remembered that he had a built-in radio. Of course he did. How the fuck else was he gonna talk in space?

I have the grist, he thought. I can get on the knit. He tried it. Dead. The lines were dead. Oh yeah, they were jamming the incoming merci. He must be inside the range of their jamming device. Or whatever. It didn’t work.

But I have a radio.

He’d need to be over the civilized side of the moon. How fast was his orbit? He had no gauge, except the change in the moon’s position below him.

“How the hell long can I live out here?” he said. He called up the specs. Five e-days.

So. Maybe. There was a chance in hell.

And there were satellites. Hell, there was a geosynchronous minefield above New Miranda. Could he bounce a message off of them? He had no idea where they were. But he sure as hell could guess their general vicinity.

What the fuck. It was worth a try.

He turned his radio-enhanced voice up to full amplitude.

“Hey!” he yelled. “Hey, I’m up here. It’s Neiderer. I’m up here in the sky!”

He kept it up, kept calling. Calling till he was sick of it and full of the knowledge that it would do no good, that he would die out here. He’d almost resigned himself to that cold fact when he heard the answer, faint but clear.

His algorithms triangulated on it; he cocked his ear.

“Hey, I’m up here!”

The answering call was louder now and, oh shit, Kwame recognized the voice.

The Old Crow himself.

“Neiderer!”

“Yes, Colonel?”

“What the goddamn hell are you doing up in space?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“You’re slacking off, aren’t you, Corporal?”

“I can’t say, sir,” he replied. “But it sure is good to hear you.”

“We can’t have it, Corporal. Can’t have you hanging around out there when there’s fighting to be done.”

“Get me down from here,” Kwame said, “and I’ll kick their asses, sir.”

There was a moment of quiet. But Kwame checked. The carrier wave was still coming in strong and true.

“We’re coming to get you, son, just as soon as it can be arranged.”

“That’s good to hear, sir.”

“Hang tight.”

“Don’t have much choice, Colonel.”

“And, Corporal?”

“Yes, sir?”

“You did it. The rip tether’s cut and fallen. Rastin and Dragon are back safe.”

For a moment, he couldn’t remember what it was the Old Crow was talking about. And then he did. The evil was gone. Fallen to ruin. Gone. For now.

“Corporal, you there?”

“Can I ask a favor, sir?”

Sherman guffawed. He hadn’t known the old bird could laugh. Or maybe that was just static. “I believe a favor might be in order, son.”

Kwame looked at the cantaloupe moon. He looked at his hand held against it. His palm just covered the northern hemisphere.

“When I get down from here, Colonel, could you ask somebody to explain to me what the hell I just did?”

The Borrasca

A Memoir

by Lebedev, Wing Commander, Left Front

Unlike a Met ship, a cloudship is a person. The vessel is not an extension of the captain’s will, but is, instead, his or her will embodied. Along with intelligence comes adaptability. A single cloudship can become any number of other “types” of ship, and can do so quickly, especially when the ship has practice and training. A cloudship is big—sometimes hundreds of times larger than a Met vessel, and can split into pieces that are the equivalents of the specialized Met craft. Its structure is generalized. The captain’s intelligence is spread throughout the ship so that there are no critical places for a weapon to strike that might take out the entire structure. The largest of us are the size of small moons, and far more dispersed, so that to kill us, an enormous amount of destruction is required. Disabling us is a slightly easier task, but we possess recuperative powers equal to those of a Met bolsa and—provided enough material is handy—can be back in operation sometimes within minutes, depending upon the extent of the damage.

This said, there are drawbacks. We possess no equivalent to the DIED ship’s isotropic coating, and are sitting ducks for certain classes of weaponry. We are all grist and generalized matter, and most of our weaponry is manufactured and operates on a nanometer level. Thus, while you cannot “take out” a cloudship’s cannon, we are vulnerable to grist-based attacks and are susceptible to “killing zones” of military grist, as was shown so effectively in the early stages of the war.

The “quantum jamming” also used early in the conflict proved quite able to destroy us from within on occasion. If a jamming device could be gotten close enough, ships could be induced to tear themselves to pieces in the equivalent of an epileptic seizure. Defenses against these attacks were developed, but not before much loss of life resulted.

Our greatest ability, apart from intelligence, and our most powerful weapon, is our ability to produce antimatter at any point on our surface and concentrate it for firepower or propulsion. The positronic cannon of the DIED ships were sometimes called Auger guns because of their use of a variation on the Auger effect by which suitably excited atoms emit, instead of electromagnetic radiation or an electron, an antielectron, or positron. This is then concentrated in the same manner as a laser concentrates photons. This is necessarily done on a macro level, by large-scale equipment. Cloudships use an entirely different process.

The process is begun by using what is called the Casimir effect. This effect is a result of the fundamental quantum nature of reality, and it works as follows: If two mirrors are placed a short distance apart, and facing one another, they will move, to a small degree,
toward
one another. This distance is imperceptible to the naked eye, of course, but it does, indeed occur.

The most familiar concept usually used for demonstrating the principle of uncertainty is that of momentum and position. If you know one, the other becomes unknowable to an extent equal (precisely) to the amount that you know its partner. Another product of uncertainty is the energy and time pairing. Taking this into account mathematically results in the prediction that space—empty space—is actually teeming with a sea of virtual particles, all produced in pair-antipair combinations that are continually being generated and annihilating one another.

This is known as quantum fluctuation.

The time involved is usually extremely short, but there are arguments that the entire universe is the result of a specific kind of quantum fluctuation that has lasted a good deal longer. No matter, that, at the moment. My point here is that quantum fluctuation does occur, and our mirrors can be affected by it. This was demonstrated as early as the 1990s on Earth.