Transcendence (14 page)

At that moment, Clarisse saw Ivan, she saw Nikolai, she saw a horde of grinning men in retro suits in Bangkok laughing at her, everyone was laughing at her, testing her as Ivan had tested her, punishing her as Ivan and the other brothers and sisters had punished her. Well, had she not, eventually, taught her testers and punishers that she had mastered their lessons? Had they not suffered? So, too, will you suffer, NKK fools. So, too, will you suffer, rotten Nikolai with the beautiful face and lusting eyes.

She went in to the sportster’s server and disarmed the safety override that had set the lasers to a “safe” level, which could still scorch bare skin. She bumped up their power so that now they could burn through a titanium hull with a sustained blast. This was not cheating, for in war, there are no rules. Nikolai should know that, if he was truly sent to test me.

Then she aerobraked and pitched the sportster at as many
g
s as it could handle, until she was facing up along the axis of Nikolai’s last shot. The air was too dense here to get a good reading of his location, too turbulent, but the long-range scan showed his fighter as a tiny blip at 80 kilometers. Clarisse released two of her own projectors, not caring that they would be lost forever down here. The projectors would tell Nikolai that she had done the logical thing—veered away from him. Only a fool would race headlong toward a superior-armed enemy. But I am no fool, I am wiser than the wise, I am more powerful than a fleet, “I am Clarisse Poinsettia Chang!”

The ruse worked: Nikolai’s fighter targeted the northernmost projector and fired a virtual missile. The projector transmitted that the missile had failed to hit its target. Since he was still out of damage range of his other weapons, Nikolai fired the other missile. This time, Clarisse instructed the projector to tell him he blew up a projector. She would give him that much warning, to assure that her edge did not dull.

Now she broke through the clouds and her sensors showed the fighter as clear as she could ever hope. In assaulting Clarisse’s projector, Nikolai had maneuvered too far to correct. Clarisse ground her teeth tight and fired both banks of lasers for a one-second burst, enough to scare the bowels out of the cocky boy. With the generators screaming as loud as the craft’s ram-rocket, Clarisse felt herself part of the deadly beams, her muscles clenched and hard beneath the skin-tight spacesuit. The almost-orgasmic thrill of victory pumped through her.

And then she watched Nikolai’s rocket sputter and explode. Large sections of the fighter’s aft ripped loose in the explosion. The laserbeams had inadvertently struck something in the fuel system. A protective plate must have come loose, or else the shielding was insufficient. Had she selected too long a blast? No, of course not. Even so, fear shot into Clarisse’s bloodstream like ice and electricity.

At that moment she realized this had not been an accident. She had lost control, and now she had only seconds to regain that priceless thing within.

“
Nikolai, are you okay?” she commed.

“
Damn,” he answered, “that was something. I knew you were the best.” His voice sounded ragged; had he been hurt in the explosion?

“
You have to eject before you enter the deep clouds.”

“
I studied your tactics at suit camp,” Nikolai continued, ignoring her.

“
Get out, Nikolai. That’s an order.”

“
You’re the reason I came to Neptune. I had to meet you. I used certain political connections to bypass normal deployment and be sent to Neptunekaisha instead. Oh, when I first saw 3VRDs of you. . . . So sexy, so powerful, I—”

The tanks in the fighter’s amidships roared open in a blossom of orange and red. Nikolai said no more.

Hastily but thoroughly, Clarisse erased all trace of her tampering with the server’s safety override. Then she erased the traces of the traces. Then she indulged herself in another glut of hatred and blind fury. This time, she directed the fire at herself. So he had not come to test her—at least, not in the way she had suspected. A simple infatuation. The first worthy man who had ever been infatuated with her. She killed him.

Seconds later, Clarisse’s sportster plunged through the cloud that had been Nikolai’s fighter. Bits of debris tinged against the hull. She rocketed back to the station in a numbed state.

An enraged Shen-lin had demanded her resignation, but the standing Sotoi Guntai officers aboard the stations conducted their own investigation that, ultimately, proved Clarisse innocent of any wrongdoing. No one discovered what she had done. No significant pieces of evidence from the fighter were ever recovered.

In the days that followed her acquittal, Clarisse’s good hate had returned. This time, it was doubly strong. And she had learned a lesson. And that lesson had paid for her loss.

Clarisse exhaled and returned her concentration to the battle at hand. Nikolai’s death had taught her the virtue of staying balanced, of not allowing the enemy to drive her beyond rational behavior. She took a deep breath and studied the situation.

The white ring of
Bounty
’s exhaust grew wider, wider, approaching. Clarisse absently chewed her lip as the next hunter hissed atop a column of ions, closing on its prey.

Then a sudden glint of light, a flash of alphanumerics at the edge of the hunter’s readout. The invader had fired another missile. She kicked a leg in sympathetic motion as her ephemeral fingers seized control of the tiny robot craft.

Too late.

Another thump in the head, another frazzle of white noise. She receded from the hunter’s dead channel as fast as she could.

A tiny light flashed on her BW selector, indicating Shen-lin’s channel. He wanted to talk to her now? What kind of fool. . . ? She grimaced and sent him a replay of the hunter’s blast of static. The light winked out. He needed to learn lessons, as well.

Time for a new plan. She considered options. Moments later, she reached out to the remaining four hunters and gathered them under her control. Another blacked out of existence, its explosion a tiny hammer against the inside of her skull.

She used her fists as guides, spreading her fingers to redirect the hunters like claws. This was a custom 3VRD program she had designed herself. The hunters danced against the stars, three streaking eyeballs through which she watched the ship approach from three directions, in three different sizes.

Another intercept missile flared from the EarthCo ship. She growled and dove the hunters toward it, interweaving them in three dimensions, pumping their high-energy ion rockets to varying thrusts. Meshing her orders with the automatic systems aboard the hunters, Clarisse fell into a war-trance.

She became part instinct, part machine, part lightning reflex, part number cruncher. Space was a grid scribed with countless shifting coordinates, etched in three dimensions that weaved and surged with the motions of her claws, crystal spheres within spheres. Kinesthesia swept through her as if she were riding all that hardware through space—as if they were her body. She was free from thinking about velocity, range, acceleration, trajectory. The hunters’ cards, her server aboard the station flying through Neptune’s clouds, her headcard and its enhanced neural connections—none of these got in the way of one another. Feed and feedback became one. Receiver and transmitter were only two aspects of one part of her, yin and yang.

This part of her nature had dictated to her superiors among the Sotoi Guntai that she deserved a high position, although they hadn’t told her at first just how rare her talents were. To use her optimally, they had advanced her faster than anyone had risen during peacetime before. She had become Neptunekaisha’s Coordinator of Protection at the age of 27 Earth-years. Around that time, she had finally recognized her uniqueness. Then had come personal empowerment, and then drive to add to that power, to expand her sphere of influence closer to EarthCo space. To exact her revenge.

The hunters laced and interlaced, confusing the torpedo, which rocketed past her hunter povs. She flicked on an inset splice to watch the enemy missile. Its chemical engine fizzled out tens of thousands of kilometers from anything it could damage. When she switched off the inset and grinned, the expression was inadvertently translated into a brightening of the hunters’ ultraviolet radiation. For a moment that worried her—she had betrayed herself, she had let her anger get in her way. But that passed: No longer was she concerned about being visible to the attacker; they had proven that they could see her hunters, anyway.

So
Bounty
’s computer or crew was smarter than her little robots. She could accept that. But she wouldn’t accept that they were smarter than Clarisse Poinsettia Chang, and certainly not more agile. She closed for the kill, her first direct strike against the EarthCo military’s steel facade.

She broke free of her past. She overpowered her weakness. No longer was she the wild dog. Now she was the tiger, racing fast and sharp through the forest of stars, bursting into a clearing that held the prey she had hunted all her life.

Miru’s palm began to grow cold where it slid along the temple wall. Even the best pressure suit has only so much insulation. He pulled it back and rubbed it against his other glove, a feeble heat produced by the friction of skin against the suit’s foam liner. Although he had walked what seemed to be hundreds of meters, he knew any outside observer would have watched a man in a spacesuit wandering round and round a dome, black smooth perfection embedded in bright ragged ice.

But this was no time to concern himself about appearances. Whether or not his colleagues considered him insane was unimportant at the moment. Most important was the job at hand, declaring to the entire solar system that a non-human object had been discovered on a little world at the frontier of human habitation. Most important was learning more about this impenetrable ball. If Liu Miru perished . . . well, that was the way of things. He was small in the universe, and had learned that young. At least others would know, and they could continue the investigation. He had finally done something worthwhile, and no one would take that away. He would gladly die to save the Project.

He looked up, imagining the fast-approaching warcraft. Were bombs already falling? Was a furious Neptunekaisha already scrambling its own forces to silence TritonCo’s surrender? But he could see nothing. Not only would the attacker have been invisible at this range, but some property of the object made the rest of the universe only a haze at the horizons surrounding the temple. To the observer, it seemed as if everything had melted and the liquefied remains drizzled to the horizons of a great plain. Overhead, the sky was changing: It had brightened from pure black to yellow, purified of everything but light.

He nodded, certain no one had replaced the camouflage screen: Camouflaged, the sky was only a disk of sparks. Miru took a deep breath, cleared his throat, and continued transmitting.

“
There must be an entrance,” he subvocalized as the temple’s fourth wall finally rotated into view. Excitement hastened his steps.

Though the circular outer barrier never seemed to change, at least the temple itself rotated in logical progression. Whatever logic meant in this situation, at least the image of the temple followed some observable order. Unless he spliced back into headfeed, as he had earlier, and then he had had to begin the circumlocution over from the beginning.

“
If the observer’s pov remains free of splice or enhancement, he will see something far greater than a homogeneous ball.” He hesitated before continuing. “It appears to be a reproduction of the Great Buddhist Temple of Mahabodhi, though I may be mistaken.”

A memory drifted into his mind. Again, he remembered the 3VRD pilgrimage to Mahabodhi he and his parents had taken when he was a pre-teen. The temple seemed to scrape the sky, as high as a mountain. It possessed a certain magic; he believed in magic then. Now he recognized magic for what it was: Sense of wonder. Knowing its true name, he had been able to recall it every time his work revealed some hidden fold in nature.

He walked faster now, sensing either defeat or discovery. His heart
thud-thudd
ed in the suit’s earphones. He calculated that, within the next hundred or so strides, he would complete one full circuit of the temple. There had to be an entrance. Finding it had become an obsession. If he must die, at least he would die having found the key to understanding this object. Whoever followed in his tracks would be able to start from there. To Miru, only tomorrow had value, because in tomorrow lay change and hope. Today had always meant nothing, because it contained no hope for him. Then came the object. It was almost as if he had traveled through time, and tomorrow had become his today.

“
Again, this is Project Hikosen Director Liu Miru of Triton, Sovereignty of TritonCo. On behalf of Project Hikosen, Jiru City, TritonCo, and the entire Neptunian satellite of Triton, I surrender.” He recited the binary Ganymedean Treaty’s Code of Inviolate Surrender.