Authors: Christopher McKitterick
The Sotoi Guntai’s face finally cracked into a smile. That gradually transformed into a slow laugh, and by the time the whirlyjet had reached the outer towers of the city, the man was exploding with laughter.
“
Hardman Nadir,” he said, “you are a good man. I made the right decision to stand beside you on this crazy mission.” He snapped open his x-belt and rose on legs steadied from long years of practice standing in a moving aircraft. The blue-uniformed man stepped over a clutter of boots to Nadir, and reached down a fist.
Paolo moved for his knife, but Nadir shook his head just enough for the boy to see. Paolo relaxed, but didn’t move his hand from his belt.
“
Hardman Nadir,” the Sotoi Guntai said, “we fight together, we die together.” His fist hovered before Nadir’s face.
Nadir realized what he was to do. He unbelted himself, stood as best he could, and made a fist. The two men smacked their knuckles together and held them pressed there.
All the other elite NKK soldiers rose from their plastimesh seats, and Nadir noticed their mouths were open. He flipped on his allband EarthCo-to-NKK channels, and a vast roar filled his head. Paolo and the Ukrainian boy struggled to their feet with their blue-uniformed counterparts, faces confused and wild and expectant. Nadir cast them his best whole-face grin, and then 3-verded all the EarthCo warriors.
No words. Just a picture and wordless sound, a symbol: Sotoi Guntai Commander fist to fist with EarthCo Boss, in a crowded whirlyjet cabin, surrounded by the roaring approval of soldiers.
He then flipped down to a car-mounted pov.
The picture from the ground: moonlit uniforms as far as he could see, armored cars and beetle-shaped tanks, whirlyjets and every sort of modern aircraft ripping the sky overhead. And a battle-cry, the roar of 10,000 men and women finally about to avenge the betrayal of their ideals by the very people they thought had opened the door onto them.
“
To victory!” Nadir shouted across the BWs.
The Sotoi Guntai shouted something in a language Nadir didn’t know; he assumed it was Chinese. But no one needed to understand the words, as the intent was clear.
The massive, hybrid army lurched and roared forward toward the unknown.
The first shots of the revolution were fired by a few unlucky cops who didn’t like the look of crazy-eyed enemy soldiers marching into town.
Nadir shouldered his rifle and prepared to leap out as the aircraft dove toward a brightly lit landing pad atop a windowless building housing the city’s central information network.
The cabin door banged open and all nine jumped out. A Sotoi Guntai soldier kicked in a rusted steel door and ran inside just as the command whirlyjet took off to allow another to set down.
Nadir took position along the rooftop railing and smiled as he watched aircraft land and take off and land like a conveyor belt producing warriors. Gunfire—the antique gunpowder kind—echoed from below.
Life
, Nadir thought,
life. I’m drowning in it
.
“
Live, boys, for tonight we may die!” he commed, and followed an EarthCo cavalry unit into the building.
A world away, above the Moon, a war rages unbeknownst to Nadir’s army:
An EConautics HY-fighter dives at an NKK Langayan frigate, long and silver and ringed with laser barrels. She manages to lock on with her massaccel guns just in time to see three dozen flashes of light. The frigate looks like a Christmas tree, the pilot thinks as her craft sizzles all around her. Her guns stop firing. The server goes dead. The lifesupport motors whirr to silence. Another Christmas-storm, and the pilot finds herself gasping. Her suit has been compromised, and the cabin’s atmosphere hisses through fifty glowing holes into space; she watches crystals spray in geysers as the animal instinct within blacks out her consciousness and her body begins to convulse.
An NKK-Tsuki technician stops walking along the observatory’s outer corridor and looks up through an ultraglas porthole. He does this at the same time every day, uses his intheflesh eyes to observe what the radio telescopes can do so much better. The notepad he is carrying falls from his hand and clatters on the metal flooring as he watches the lunar colony’s domes silently erupt one by one while a battleship fires electromagnetic beams invisible until free atmosphere ionizes and reveals the source of his home’s destruction. Only for three seconds can his scream be heard. The corridor pops around him like a capillary exposed to hard vacuum; the hall lumnisheets crack and grow dim green; the air explodes and turns to vapor almost at once; the vapor turns to complex crystals. The astronomer’s assistant has only a moment to be heartbroken, but his snowflake tears are not for himself: This facility has taken two generations to build, and he watches it be destroyed in a moment.
An NKK battleship—one of only three so near Earth—rises from the crater Aristotle. The Commander of EConautics’ billion-credit destroyer
Dreadnought
, Captain Dirk Downward, smiles his rictus grin and orders his vessel’s pilots to attack full speed. Twenty EarthCo fighters and fighter/bombers accompany him as they close on the fleeing enemy. Downward runs a hand through his long grey hair. The battleship’s atomic engines blaze, throwing up four distinct clouds of lunar dust, but it cannot gain enough velocity to escape gravity before the aged
Dreadnought
and her escorts are within range. Captain Downward only blinks once, but when his eyes again open, he stares across the heads of five subordinates in the spacious bridge, out through the panoramic viewport, and watches a swarm of torpedoes rocket toward him. A moment later, countless wounds across his face, chest, and arms burn and agony! But, oh, his eyes stay open long enough to watch the battleship sprout fire blossoms of its own. A few seconds later, victory means nothing to him as he lays squirming on the bridge deck, screaming in air so thin he can’t hear anything but a bubbly hiss.
And so on. A thousand vessels, large and small, perish within the first minutes of humanity’s first declared interplanetary war. A trillion credits burn and smolder in hollow space or on the parched surface of the Moon. Within the first quarter-hour, no contained atmosphere exists on the Moon, except in one spacesuit and a few unused oxygen tanks. Within two hours, NKK no longer has a space fleet within a million kilometers of Earth; some two dozen vessels limp or rocket toward Mars, their crews grim with the knowledge of what they will find there. By midnight Eastern American Time, EConautics begins its assault on Earthside NKK installations.
On Mare Tranquillitatis, the last human alive on the Moon tilts his head back and stares up from the glare of the sun on the silent grey world around him at the Earth. It looms larger than it did last time he looked up from his bulldozer’s control panel. Blue basins separate brown and green masses obscured by white streaks and a huge swirl near the coast of a place he had once called home but was more than happy to leave. He raises his arm, clenches his hand into a fist, and cries out as loud as he can, “You bastards! You bastards! I just got here. You promised me!”
Of course, no operable server is near enough to transmit his words. He can’t even form a real fist; the material of the suit’s glove bunches up between his fingers and in his palm.
Jonathan Sombrio backs away from the curving hull of the Stratofighter, not yet ready to put it out of his life, even though it contains the lingering threat of Director Herrschaft. The first pink rays of dawn reflect off the faces of Old Downtown Minneapolis’ skyscrapers and set the spaceship’s white skin gleaming.
“
Jonathan,” Nooa says from beside him, “we had best get away from this craft. I had chosen not to tell you before now, but EarthCo and NKK are at war, and either side might attack a Stratofighter reported as stolen.”
He turns to stare at the Brain’s construct. He feels nothing but exhausted and a little sick from the adventure; the world whirls a little around him, as if he hadn’t noticed its rotation before. “War?”
“
It began last night during the primetime run of
Lone Ship Bounty
,” Nooa says.
“
I thought we’ve been at war since
. . .
I don’t know, since the beginning.”
“
Technically,” Nooa says, “what you have witnessed on the battle subscriptions were scripted shows, except for a few proxy wars and border skirmishes. They were fiction, but this war is real. It will reach across the entire solar system, and it will
. . .
cause much loss of infrastructure and human life.”
“
Is that all? Fuck, that’s nothing new.”
Nooa looks pained, but Jonathan doesn’t want to hear any more. He wonders briefly if the War Command will draft his father into service, and feels a moment of glee. The old man always plays the soldier on his 3VRD; let him play one intheflesh. Ah, but the bastard wouldn’t end up a grunt—he’s a specialist.
“
I’m more bugged about Director Herrschaft,” Jonathan says. “What’s he going to do to us? Crash, man, I thought that guy was gonna kill us, er, me.”
“
Don’t worry about Herrschaft,” Nooa says. Her lack of explanation is an ominous silence to Jonathan.
“
Charity,” Jonathan blurts. He realizes today is yesterday’s tomorrow.
“
Charity,” Nooa repeats. After only a split-second, she says, “The woman you met yesterday in the Mobile Hostile Zone. You have an appointment.”
That human existence is so transparent to the Brain terrifies Jonathan for a moment.
But she’s on my side
, he tells himself. He takes a deep breath and goes on:
“
Listen, Nooa. You’ve been a real clean friend and all. Thanks especially for the ride with Captain Jackson. That was full-out peak.” Jonathan feels a strange warm sensation in his cheeks and a tightness in his throat, but it passes.
“
Anyway, thanks for all that, but just give me a day or so alone—unless the Captain comes back. I’ll want to know that. I owe you one, and I won’t forget it, but I have to find Charity.”
Odd
, he thinks;
I feel
. . .
happy. Shit
.
“
Have a nice day, Jonathan,” Nooa says. “I will also warn you if I sense you are in danger.”
Jonathan shakes his head, unable to keep from smiling at the girl—
Construct
, he reminds himself. “I don’t know how to make all this up to you.”
“
You have been very helpful to me, as well, Jonathan. I’m certain we will continue helping one another.”
He’s not sure how to say goodbye to an AI, so he simply nods and turns away. After walking for a few minutes along deserted sidewalks, skirting heaps of trash that could hide assaulters, he overlays the intricate webwork of CityNet and starts searching for Charity.
He feels a moment of panic when her trace is not at the same place she’d been last; he’d presumed that was her house. Had she decided against meeting him? Worse—had something awful befallen her?
But he’s an expert trace-tracker, and now he sports an amp. With only her digitized ID to go on, he steps back from CityNet and simply looks for a blinking light.
There she is. Should have done that in the first place. He leaps back into the glowing passages, rocketing through hundreds of virtual kilometers in less than a second—even this is faster than before—and finds her.
This is awfully early
, he thinks. But she had said “first thing tomorrow.” Since his need is greater than his fear, he takes the risk.
“
Charity, are you awake?” He barely whispers into her card. He doesn’t do her the indignity of appearing 3VRD and gawking at her from whatever pov camera is operating in her room.
“
Who’s there?” is the startled reply.
“
I . . . I’m sorry,” he says, and is about to vanish when she adds—
“
Is that you, Jonathan? My loverboy, of course it is! Come on, show yourself.”
He transmits his 3VRD—again not needing to find a server to run the projection-assist. He’s really beginning to like this amp. Maybe even worth the trouble, he thinks. There are lots of benefits to suffering—amp, Nooa, Captain Jackson, rides into space. . . .
Charity lies on a whisper-white bed draped in lace sheets. Gauzy coverings hang from a four-post frame. The woodwork is intricate, flourishing with dragons and unicorns and knights on horseback, castles, Viking ships tossed on the ocean’s waves. The detail moves ever so minutely as he watches; animated decor is all the curr among the heute.