by Brian Smith
The admiral laughed. “The TOA, CFR, and PEA are generating the next message. We’ll let this one go the whole twenty-four hours, as advertised. Once a few curious Marsmen upgrade their snoopers and the first Omnisynth gets shot, the lid is going to come off what’s left of the MIM. Um, go secure, okay?”
“Roger that,” Ayers replied, flipping a virtual switch in the communications link.
The signal delay jumped from one second to two, and before each transmission there was now a second of electronic garble as the signal was encrypted on one end and decrypted on the other. Ayers had quality-checked the results of the team that had worked through the previous night in order to ensure that encrypted communications were secure again. As far as she could tell, they were.
Again, OURANIA had been the entity cracking their supposedly uncrackable quantum-level encryptions. Without OURANIA’s capacity and ability, the MIM remnant on Mars comprised rank amateurs—their sole effort in the theater of cyber warfare seemed to be to wrest back control of the Martian newsfeeds. It was with no small sense of smug irony that Ayers had set up a disinformation maze for them in which they could chase their own tails from here to kingdom come.
“Secure on this end, sir,” she reported.
“Reuben James is en route to Earth, ETA 2230 Zulu. They’re bringing back four salvaged cores from OURANIA, and a couple other pieces of technical wizardry they salvaged from the wreckage they made of Janus Station. Captain Ford thinks the debris they recovered might be related to the energy shield OURANIA was able to put over herself. That’s something we’re obviously interested in, especially if we can put energy shields around warships.”
“Are they going to hand it over to Federov-Kusaka?” Ayers asked.
The admiral looked momentarily annoyed. “Hell, no. Those guys have enough of a head start on all this already. We bagged this bit ourselves, fair and square. It’s going to NRL for analysis and, with any luck, some reverse engineering.”
Ayers smiled wryly. “Yes, sir.”
“I know that look. . . . What?”
“Well, sir, you give it to NRL and they’ll figure it out—in about a decade. You give it to Kusaka and he’ll be manufacturing them for you next week.”
“Hmm. We’ll see,” the admiral said dubiously. “The computer cores are coming to Terra. We’re taking one, we’re giving one to the army’s cyber-warfare and computer specialists, and one is going to the Japanese and the British Commonwealth each—all of us paid the bill in blood. The army says they’ve got the schematics on those cores just about figured out and that there’s a way to send a ping through the quantum entanglement, or the Q-gel, or some damn thing like that—” He paused, staring at her likeness in virtual. “I know that look, too.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m hearing Greek, admiral. What’s the payoff?”
“They think they can get a location on every other entangled computer core that might have survived, anywhere it’s located in the solar system. They also think they can get an accurate count, and a snapshot of the position of any remaining Omnisynth as well.”
“That’ll be information worth having, sir, if they can pull it off.”
“I think they can. Our efforts to localize and neutralize the remaining Omnisynths here at home are accelerating. Apparently, they aren’t doing so well now that they aren’t being actively controlled by OURANIA. Their actions are much more random and hunting them has practically become a public sport. Kids are running in packs with modified snoopers. . . . It’s a little surreal, actually.”
“I wouldn’t want to be one of those things down Earth-side, right now,” Ayers agreed. “Especially not in North America. There’s going to be some ugly vigilantism, given the way these things can pass for human. A few rednecks are apt to light themselves on fire if they aren’t careful.”
“It’s funny you should mention that. We’ve been getting some strange reports.”
“Strange in what way, sir?”
“A few Omnisynths have turned themselves in to the authorities worldwide. They’re claiming that it was literally as she was being destroyed that OURANIA made them self-aware and conscious. Sort of a final, atoning act or something. We’re not sure if it’s some sort of self-preservation programming or they’re telling the truth. Do you think it’s possible they might be conscious?”
Ayers grinned. “With respect, I’m not walking into that quicksand, admiral. I’ve never read a truly scientific explanation of what it means to be conscious.”
“Okay, then, play devil’s advocate for me. Say we decide they’re ‘alive,’ for lack of a better word. How should they be treated?”
“On the face of it, I’d say like war criminals. Anything beyond that answer is above my pay grade, sir.”
“You’re no fun, Ayers.”
“Sorry, sir. Is there anything else I can do for you, admiral?”
“I’ll call if there is. Just so you know: I’m putting you in for the Navy Cross. As far as I’m concerned, your contribution deserves the Medal of Honor, but the brass won’t bite on that even though you arguably won the war for us—like Rochefort at Midway but cubed. Unlike old Joe, you even got shot at a couple times.”
“Thank you, admiral,” Ayers replied.
She appreciated the honor, but she didn’t care much about medals. The DSM she’d been awarded for 5111 Omega was a bigger decoration than she’d ever imagined getting. A Navy Cross for cyber warfare . . . ? Well, times had changed.
“Is Reuben James going to rendezvous here at Armstrong or dock at Ross Station?” she asked.
The director grinned. “Armstrong. The Ross dry docks are full up right now,” he added with a wink. “You can meet the ship yourself.”
That bit of information was more valuable to her than any medal. “Thank, you, sir!”
“They came through that last campaign without a scratch. Amazing, isn’t it, given all they went through before? All right, I’ll let you turn to, Cheryl. Great work up there! Keep it up.” The director winked out virtual. Ayers’s view returned to simple augmented reality, and she sighed.
There was one personal item on her agenda which she wasn’t going to let be buried under a stack of work. While her assumption was that Diane Hutton was dead, there was no way to be certain of this. Hutton had lost her snoopers the night of December first, when they were fried by an EMP marble in the attack on the Scobee Center. She’d found a cheapo pair of government ones in the rolligon, but Ayers imagined Hutton would have ditched those as soon it was understood that the MIM could track Hutton’s movements through them if the snoopers were networked.
OURANIA had expunged the government’s Mars database and records: Hutton’s old official contact information was therefore missing, and Ayers had never exchanged any personal contact information with her. Jim Ford, who was arriving later that evening, might have that. Ayers knew the subject would be a sore one with him, to say the least. Given Ford’s mindset when he’d left, Ayers really didn’t want to bring up the subject of Hutton at all unless she had some sort of miraculous good news to report.
She sat back, drumming her fingers on her desk, until Yeoman Gonzalez interrupted her musings with a fresh batch of deliciously strong black coffee. A few slugs of rich navy brew stimulated her brain, and she began thinking about all she needed to get done if she wanted to meet Reuben James later.
She put her thoughts of Diane Hutton aside and got back to work.
***
Ayers’s joyful reunion with Reuben James and her crew later that evening suffered only one low moment: when she decided to risk the expected emotional blowback and asked Jim Ford if he had any personal contact information for Marshal Hutton. His face, which had been showing some signs of life again, reverted to a stoic mask. He told Ayers he’d never stopped trying to get a message through, the entire eight months since anyone had last seen Hutton. He’d just never gotten a reply, was all. It was clear he was convinced Hutton was dead, so Ayers quickly dropped the subject.
The crew of the James, old-timers and replacements alike, were flushed with victory. Ayers had seen the imagery from the Dogstar, of what they’d done—there was no doubt the ship and its crew were going to go down in history as the heroes of this war, and they deserved every accolade. She learned that the primary reason for their return to Terra was to drop off the recovered computer cores and other technological windfalls; the crew would receive a brief two-day liberty, and then they were going right back out—there was still a tremendous amount left to do, and Reuben James was one of only two fleet ships that could traverse the solar system in hours rather than days or weeks.
For the time being, the question of Hutton’s fate would go unanswered.
July 23, 2094 (Terran Calendar)
Lucky’s, Lone Star Pressure
Amazonis Mensa Region, Mars
Colin Harper wordlessly took the snoopers that Donelle Crawford passed him from behind the bar and casually slipped them on. He put them into the dual-overlay mode recommended by the message from Terra and pretended to go about his business. His monocular vision didn’t seem any worse than usual with the firmware upgrade, a fact for which he was grateful.
Obtaining the firmware files had been difficult; the MIM kept trying to corrupt the ones that had been forced through to the Marsnet and made available for download. Which files were needed depended on the brand, make, and model of the snoopers in question. Some people were able to obtain their upgrade with little effort, while others had difficulty finding uncorrupted files. The MIM had turned the process into a gamble as well: the corrupted files were designed to wreck a snooper set if a firmware update were attempted with them. And obtaining new snoopers could be problematic at the moment if the MIM authorities decided that purchasing new ones in the wake of the Terran message signaled disloyalty. Of course, as an entity the MIM authorities themselves seemed to have been unraveling rather quickly over the past twenty-four hours, which had led Harper to commit this small act of resistance.
Harper wasn’t looking so good these days; eight months of being hunted would do that to a person. He and a small knot of tenacious survivors had taken to the Martian wilderness like ghosts, living a constantly nomadic existence between pressure tents hidden in various caves; getting the occasional day or two of rest and succor with the Kusaka clan at Kasei Echigo; or hiding out like animals in the small subpressure that formed the Crawfords’ chicken farm. There were no live chickens at present—given the MIM occupation and the Terran blockade, their upkeep wasn’t feasible. The Crawfords had cooked up and served their remaining stock, and the Genuinely Fowl menu was on indefinite hiatus.
Harper had lost weight and muscle mass, a condition brought on by months on the run from MIM agents; inadequate nutrition; poor air; and too much surface radiation. Once he’d determined that the MIM weren’t interested in murdering the lower-level rank-and-file members of Aberdeen Astronautics, he’d taken those members of his security team who weren’t willing to surrender to MIM authority and done his best to vanish with them. At that point, there hadn’t been any actual company left to salvage.
Harper’s group, along with others, had formed the core of an active resistance movement along the habitats of the maglev line. These groups hadn’t made much of a difference; the enemy seemed to be able to track them almost effortlessly at every turn. Most of the movement’s activity involved simply trying to stay alive, and one step ahead of the MIM’s capable drone swarms, AI hunter-killers, and human foot soldiers.
The breakthrough message from Terra had been a godsend: most of Harper’s people had been picked off over time, and there weren’t many left. Only a half dozen remained—exhausted, worn down, and on their last legs. They’d all been living in a media blackout because they knew that what they saw in the newsfeeds was MIM propaganda and misinformation.
After the receipt of the message from Terra the night before, the mood in Lone Star Pressure had been restive. The small population of this habitat had always closely identified with their Tex-Mex American roots and had chafed under MIM authority more than others would. Unfortunately, the MIM’s control of cloud-based networks and data feeds had been absolute, and a relatively small number of MIM occupiers had managed to keep the habitat under control through the liberal use of AI-controlled weaponry—drone weapons programmed to simply eliminate those who didn’t toe the line.
It had taken some exemplary deaths to tamp down the resistance, but in the end the MIM succeeded in exerting control. They had swept through the pressure and confiscated all the weapons they could find, but several citizens successfully hid theirs from the occupiers. The Crawfords had managed to do the resistance one better than most: their chicken-farm subpressure had its own small airlock, barely large enough for a single exosuit-clad person to get through. It was the only unmonitored entrance to Lone Star Pressure that anyone knew of, and it gave those on the lam a safe point of transit between the habitat and the wilderness outside. The only other option was either of the north- and south-garage airlocks, which were continuously monitored.
Harper waited for what seemed an opportune moment, then casually turned and swept his gaze over the Lucky’s patrons. He almost gasped in surprise when no fewer than three figures stood out in the vision overlay of his snoopers, seeming to glow with an iridescent indigo aura. He switched off the overlay so that he could look at the Omnisynths with normal vision. They appeared as human as everyone around them, blending in quite easily, even eating and drinking—albeit sparingly.
Harper noticed that although they weren’t sitting together at the same table, they occasionally looked at one another furtively, and generally appeared anxious. They looked like they were waiting for something, but he couldn’t imagine what. He turned back to the bar and quietly pointed out to Donelle Crawford the three patrons that were Omnisynths.
“You’re kidding! Those three can’t possibly be!”
“Believe it, love,” Harper grimaced; he’d dealt with enough of them to know.
“They’re so realistic! Right, then, those two I don’t know, but that red-haired bugger is the one who murdered the sheriff—walked him right out the bloody airlock with no exosuit!” she hissed. “Jack’s in back, and he’s brought in the guns. How do you want to handle it?”
“I’m tempted to pop ’em and see what happens, but there are still a lot of combat drones around.”
“That red-haired one, the MIM-appointed replacement sheriff, controls them,” she said. “Bag him, and the drones might not be an issue. He’s got two deputies who aren’t here, though. It might be risky.”
“Or not,” Harper reflected. “Look around—you can cut the tension with a knife in here. People are about to go bloody Guy Fawkes on the MIM, and the bastards know it. Maybe everyone’s just waiting for something to happen. Let’s give ’em something,” he said with finality. He paused for a long, thoughtful moment. “Is your fire-suppression system working?” he asked.
“Sure. Why? . . . Oh,” she said, and nodded sagely. “Well, here’s hoping we don’t burn the bloody place down.” Like everyone else on Mars, she’d read the message from Terra.
Harper nodded and stepped behind the bar, where one of the MIM-built particle beam-weapons was waiting for him. Jack Crawford was just behind the kitchen door, wearing his old-fashioned cyclotron pack and carrying his long-barreled beam rifle. Donelle Crawford had her scattergun ready, but not for the synths. If any MIM-sympathizing collaborators happened to side with the enemy, she’d put them down hard.
Harper signaled across the room at the mocha-skinned woman sitting at a small table by herself, her chair casually propped against the back wall. She was nursing a thin, watery beer from behind a set of large snoopers that hid most of her features. Like Harper, she was gaunt and sickly. Her head was shaved and she wore a faded, dirty rust-red miner’s jumpsuit that hung loosely on her malnourished frame. She caught Harper’s signal, passed him a barely noticeable hand signal in return, and reached under her table t
o ease a pistol out of her bag.
Jack Crawford made his stand. He stepped out from the kitchen, leveled his rifle at the MIM-appointed sheriff, and shouted, “Take this, ya duster sons of bitches!”
He triggered the particle beam at full power, giving the Omnisynth no time to react. The red-orange beam lased out and sliced the synth clean in two; there was a brief burst of fluorescent peridot-colored mist, which immediately ignited like a small vapor cloud, along with the synth itself. People screamed and dived for the floor as the Omnisynth burst into brilliant flame. Harper simultaneously raised his weapon and shot the second synth, with similar results.
The third reacted more quickly than any of them anticipated. She was a bit smaller: a lithe “Xia” type with vaguely oriental features. She ducked and bolted, appearing to those around her to be another bystander diving for cover. The woman against the wall raised her pistol but cursed and checked fire when she realized she didn’t have a clean shot.
“Get her!” Harper bellowed.
“Trying!” the woman replied, moving fast through the crowd.
The synth ducked again as Jack Crawford fired a second time, blowing the front door of his own establishment wide open and leaving an avenue for escape. The Omnisynth took it, a terrified expression on her face as she ran for her life. She didn’t appear to be armed, improbable as that seemed.
“Get after her, Diane! Don’t let her get away!” Jack Crawford urged.
“Go! I’m right behind you!” Harper added.
Hutton cursed as she tripped over a patron, stumbling and barely catching herself as she practically fell outside the door and into the public thoroughfare. A few people outside had stopped and were staring at her, dumbfounded.
Hutton then did something she hadn’t done in months because it would have immediately marked her for death. Maybe it still would, she reflected, but after reading the message from home and knowing what she already knew, she was done hiding. She fumbled with her badge, pulled it out of a thigh pocket, and held it over her head like a talisman. When she spoke, it was in her old “cop voice,” ramped up so that she sounded like a drill instructor.
