No Surrender

by Kevin J. Anderson

  “Kieran is ready to play. Are we actually to play?” That was Kieran, speaking of himself, as ever, in the third person. The first genuine freak of the new generation of liberated ’gangers, he was young even by our standards, made and activated fewer than two years previously. He’d been keen to receive the benefits of the Stork’s ’ganger modification options, and now he was a centaur, human from the waist up, four-legged horse from the waist down. He was a real novelty—there weren’t many horses on Chiron.

  He towered over us when he walked. He could also run faster than any other ’ganger I knew. His brown horse hair and tail matched the long hair, trim mustache and beard he wore. He kept his skin tone at a well-tanned Caucasian brown and he had a lot of lovers. Fortunately for my carpet, he didn’t drop waste like a true horse. Beyond all that, I didn’t know much about him except that he was a superior scout and sentry, and had become a Jack, killing a human with a spear, in the months since the Escape. Obviously, he couldn’t use a chair, so he sat down like a resting horse beside the table, his long body stretching back toward the door.

  BeeBee, sitting opposite Kieran, shook her head. “No. I’ve prepped a game progression simulation which you can download on the way out.” Tonight she was dressed again in a leaf-pattern jumpsuit and black boots, but she also wore a heavy utility belt. It was a deliberate reminder of the gear she’d worn during the Escape, of her role during that event.

  I was dressed the same way for the same reason. I even had, hanging from my utility belt, the wrist cuffs, including climbing claws, with which I had killed a human soldier.

  Kieran made a sour face in response to BeeBee’s words.

  Next to him, Tink piped up. “Um, who wins in the simulation?” She was as dainty as Kieran was overbuilt. Like me, she had Asian features, but she was red-haired and waif-like where I was brown-haired and tediously average-looking. She wore a dress decorated in symbols and pictures from the face cards of a poker deck—appropriate, since this gathering was officially a card game. In the hours leading up to the Battle of Breen Hollow, while ostensibly serving with a human satellite maintenance crew, she’d disabled planetary surveillance satellites, giving the transporters of the Stork a chance to get the precious fabricator to its new home. Like me, she had space, air, and ground vehicle experience.

  BeeBee let her voice turn scornful: “Who do you think?” She jerked her head toward Malibu, sitting to BeeBee’s left.

  Malibu clapped once and rubbed his hands together in victory. “As usual, I win just by showing up.” Where Kieran’s physical appeal was savage and wild, Malibu’s was smooth and sophisticated, like his voice. Blond and tanned, clean-shaven, with bright eyes as blue as little Thonny’s and teeth so white they seemed to gleam, he had been modeled after singer Courtnel “Malibu” James, and he had a singing voice and musical skill to match those of the man he duplicated. He wore a spotless peach-colored jumpsuit, white belt and boots, an ensemble that would have looked good on Courtnel James. Back when we were in human hands, he’d been a popular attraction for ’ganger-bangers, humans who drove Dollganger-sized, Dollganger-shaped remotes, cybernetically linked to the drivers’ senses, to have sex with ’gangers. He’d weathered those years with more aplomb than some, but he never talked about those times. Immediately prior to the Escape, he’d supervised the building of the Nest; during the Battle of Breen Hollow, he’d been kilometers away, waiting with an ambush crew standing by to attack any human forces that detected and pursued the Stork as it was being transported.

  “The fix is in.” That was Parfait, her voice sounding overly formal but amused rather than accusing.

  An exotic, her skin and hair as white as new linen, she was not a replica of any specific human, or of a naturally-occurring albino—her eye pupils were black. From the day she’d emerged from Chiron’s original Dollganger fabricator until the Escape, she, too, had been popular with the ’ganger-bangers, and her only job had been as a sex toy for them. It was no secret that she was a mess because of those years. In the Battle of Breen Hollow, she’d operated a tracked forklift rather than a mega, and had, according to witnesses, taken a particular joy in driving it across human troops, crushing them to death. Tonight, as she had since we’d escaped the humans, she wore a long, voluminous dress and a head-to-hips shawl in gray, only her face and hands visible.

  I elaborated on BeeBee’s explanation. “When we leave, check the time elapsed, compare it to corresponding points on the game simulation.” I sat beside BeeBee, presenting a united front with her. “Erase everything from that point up to the marker ‘Final Hand’. If you ever need to tell anyone about tonight’s game, embellish it in your own self-serving fashion.”

  “Can we just get on with it?” That raspy voice, belonging to the final member of our gathering of seven, seemed to cause my internal fluids to lose heat, sending a chill through me.

  Pothole Charlie.

  I was one of the oldest surviving ’gangers on Chiron. Pothole Charlie was older—meaning not that he looked like an old human or that his physical abilities were diminished, but that he had more experience than I did. I was one of the three or four most capable vehicle wranglers among the ’gangers; Pothole Charlie was the most capable, with years of deep-space work, exploration, and wormhole navigation I couldn’t match. I’d been the first ’ganger ever to take a human life on Chiron without use of vehicle systems, ranged weapons, or explosives; in the months since the Escape, on missions into Zhou City, Pothole Charlie had killed two human infantrymen face-to-face. He was bigger than I was by some 10mm, heavier by maybe 150 grams of bone and muscle mass, and back in the day he’d been part of the informal conspiracy that attempted to assassinate me during the Battle of Breen Hollow. Oh, we’d shaken hands later, and he’d promised to abide by the Directors’ mandate to forgive and forget my long friendly association with the humans.

  But I doubted he’d forgiven or forgotten anything.

  Now, wearing the brown leathery garments he’d had on all day while welding a new rail track extension, his big, craggy features emotionless like he was indeed playing poker, his shaggy black hair and thick eyebrows giving him his perpetually forbidding look, he seemed like someone who’d be more at ease if he could put on a black executioner’s hood and come after me with an axe.

  And, of course, with his question, he’d seized control of the meeting.

  I grabbed it back. “Sure. You know the general parameters of why we’re here. You’ll be participating—”

  “Um, we’ve only agreed to listen.” Despite the challenge in her words, Tink’s voice was as soft as ever. “But we haven’t agreed to do it, and, um, I don’t think we can. Not if we really have to keep all stages secret from the Directors. I think it’s impossible.”

  “You are a defeatist, Tink. And you obviously learn about as fast as a toaster.” That, to my surprise, was Parfait, her voice mellow and silky in contrast to her words. “We could not possibly steal a whole fabrication unit from Harringen—but we did. We still have the secret weapon we did then. We have Jack One.” She gave me a little nod of her head.

  I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that. I still wasn’t used to receiving admiring comments at public events.

  Tink gave Parfait a stiff, cold look, then she glanced back at me. “Um, I’m willing to listen. I just don’t think it can be done.”

  I nodded her way. “Human security on vital resources has improved a lot since we stole the Stork. Any effort to bypass it will be noticed to some extent. Flags will drop in their computer security systems, incidents will be investigated, holes in their security will be patched. Enough flags and their analysts could even figure out what we’re doing. So what I propose to do is invite the humans to help us realize our goals.”

  That got a bark of laughter from Pothole Charlie and a quizzical frown from Parfait. I pressed on. “We’re not even going to try to be invisible here. This operation is called Coffee and Cream because it’s a two-pronged offensive. Coffee objectiv
es are our true goals. Cream objectives, accomplished at the same time, are to convince the humans that we’re up to something entirely different. Something that matches their expectations of what we’re doing.”

  Pothole Charlie didn’t laugh this time. He frowned, making him look even more ominous, but his question was civil enough. “So what would we be doing, exactly, and what would the humans think we were doing?”

  BeeBee took over. “The humans have to realize that one of the ’ganger plans might involve stealing and escaping in a Coracle-class deep space exploration vehicle—the only spacecraft scaled for ’gangers, the only ones ’gangers can operate without human assistance. All the Coracles on Chiron are currently grounded, experiencing ‘routine maintenance’, while the government tries to figure out which Dollgangers still in their employ are loyal to them. The Coracles are under tighter security than any corporate president’s bank account. Rumor has it that they’ve had remotely-triggerable explosives installed in case we manage to steal one anyway. And security restricting access to ships at the spaceport is much higher to prevent ’gangers from sneaking aboard an outbound transport. They’re serious about not letting our ‘infection’ get off-world.”

  Pothole Charlie gave her a dubious look. “And you’ve found a magical hole through their security.”

  She shook her head. “Certainly not.”

  He looked confused. “Why are we here again?”

  I grinned at him, showing a confidence I never actually felt in his presence. “We’re not going to go after the Coracles. I feel sad saying those words to the master of that ship class, but it’s true. Nor are we going to smuggle ourselves or messages on an outbound ship. No, we’re going to steal a human-scaled, privately owned space yacht called the Granny Knot.”

  Tink frowned. “That belongs to, um, Selva Shavery. Vice president in charge of the Shavery Corporation’s Chiron branch.”

  I nodded.

  “Um, it doesn’t have a control deck scaled for ’gangers. We can’t fly it.”

  “Wait, wait, wait.” A light was dawning in Pothole Charlie’s eyes. “So you’re not talking about an invade-and-blast-off operation.”

  I smiled. “Score one for the big man.”

  Pothole Charlie settled back in his chair, looking both suspicious and intrigued. “Keep talking, plush.”

  I turned my smile on each of them. I knew some would find it unsettling. I don’t smile much. I didn’t think I’d smiled at all since I left my human owner, Doc Chiang, particularly since Lina had made it clear that she wanted to raise children with Wolfe.

  So BeeBee and I explained the plan I had conceived and BeeBee had improved. The plan did call for a lot of aid from unsuspecting humans.

  In Stage One, we would sneak into the Kresh Assemblies factory responsible for the fabrication of most of the drones used by Chiron’s military in its attempts to find us. Those drones, ranging from high-flying stealth-copter models three meters long down to things the size and shape of dragonflies and praying mantises, were the biggest threat to Nest security, and everybody on both sides of our quiet little war knew it. So we were going to blow up Kresh Assemblies. Drone fabrication would be set back a few weeks or months.

  Except ... one of the people sitting at this table had to die in order for the plan to work. Except ... the plan actually had nothing to do with depriving the humans of new drones. And when I explained what Stage One was really all about, the others nodded and agreed. Parfait volunteered to die.

  Then, Stage Two. The Chiron branch of the Harringen Corporation was the builder of the Stork and fabricators like it, but many of its components were built by other companies. Several crucial computer sub-systems were put together by the same Shavery Corporation whose vice president owned the yacht we wanted. We would break into the Shavery plant and steal computer components sufficient to build a complete control system for a new Stork.

  Except the mission wasn’t really about stealing components for the purpose of building a brain for a new Stork. When BeeBee explained what Stage Two was really for, the others nodded and agreed.

  Stage Three involved performing a commando raid on Akima Spaceport next to Zhou City. The target would be the hangar-bunker where the Coracle-class spacecraft were mothballed. Our purpose was evident—seize one of the craft and leave Chiron in it.

  And when I explained what Stage Three was really all about, and how I intended for it to fail, the ’gangers around my table nodded and agreed.

  4: Scrap-Walk

  The four-wheeled human military transport, boxy and green with a short truck bed in back, pulled to a halt at an intersection of darkened Zhou City streets. BeeBee, Malibu, and I, hanging from climb-cords out of sight in the little gap between the rear seats and the truck bed, rappelled down to the hard graytop road surface below. The cords were not affixed above us, simply pulled over support struts keeping the truck and passenger compartments separate, so as we stood on the street, each of us tugged on one of the cords in our hands. As the transport drove off, its rear wheels passing to either side of us, the cords dropped to the roadway and we retrieved them.

  The place where we dropped off, a residential neighborhood, was the closest point on the transport’s route between our origin, a roadway many kilometers from the Nest, and our destination, the Kresh Assemblies plant. But “closest” didn’t mean “close”. It was a kilometer away, which for us was like eight and a half kilometers to humans.

  We headed out, three doll-sized people in close-fitting black nightsuits and masks, backpacks stuffed with gear, lightly armed and completely unarmored, in an enemy city—yes, we moved with stealth and caution born of the fact that one mistake would kill us all. In Zhou City and other important human sites, we could find military drones, playful dogs, curious cats, even the occasional brightly-colored pet tarantula ... and they could find us. It paid to be paranoid.

  But we made it undetected, putting us outside Kresh Assemblies at about midnight.

  I’d been here several times starting eight weeks before, shortly after the first meeting of the Coffee and Cream conspirators. This was a sealed factory complex, an unbroken chain of huge, gray, boxy buildings, windowless other than on the building featuring the majority of human offices. Fixed floodlights poured illumination across the streets, parking areas, shipping areas, and walls, making it impossible to cross those spaces without being caught in bright puddles of light on camera. The factory, its exterior surface the exact color and texture of unpainted cinder block, looked impossibly well-defended against Dollgangers.

  Except it wasn’t.

  Across the street in front of the plant, in the less well-illuminated greenbelt park where the plant owners held their corporate picnics and public announcements, the three of us approached the opening of a drain pipe. Approached it from the side, of course. To approach it straight-on would put us within view of the little cameras that had been installed within it some time after the Escape.

  When we stood just beside the pipe opening, I glanced at BeeBee.

  She nodded. “I’ve got the sequence queued up and ready to send. On your marks ...” She assumed a runner’s ready-to-race stance. Malibu and I followed suit.

  “Get set ...” She closed her eyes and I knew she was now sending, by radio, the first command in a series of eight. Her eyes opened. “Go.”

  We charged the drain pipe opening, Malibu in front, BeeBee second, me last, and a moment later entered the low, dark, circular pipe—moving at a crouch because none of us could stand completely upright in the low passage. Fortunately, it hadn’t been raining recently; there was no water in the pipe, just a little nearly-dry mud. We kept our feet to either side of the mud so as not to leave identifiable footprints for the cameras to see.

  We scurried a few meters along the pipe. BeeBee kept talking, her voice flat and emotionless because of her state of distraction. “Codes Two and Three sent. Sensor Two responding correctly ...”

  It had taken me a few nights to breach the
security in this drain pipe. There were eight little sensor stations along its slightly meandering forty-meter length—the humans were that serious about the Dollganger menace. I’d started by pushing a narrow plastic tube under the mud from a spot out of sight of the first camera to a point directly beneath that camera. Then I’d pushed a wire through the tube until it reached the camera’s position and beyond. That wire was, itself, a delicate sensor, capable, when hooked up to the correct monitoring device, of detecting electronic flows. For hours after it was in place, I’d watched its monitor box, figuring out the electron-flow patterns that corresponded to times when the factory’s security people ran power-down/power-up self-tests on the cameras.

  When I was sure the camera was experiencing a self-test, I charged into the pipe. I spliced a data stream capture box into the camera. It would intercept all data being passed from the camera to the humans’ security room. Upon receipt of a radio command, it would play the last fifteen seconds of recorded data instead of sending current data. But I wasn’t activating that function at that time; I was just getting the capture box into place.

  Capture boxes. Once I was past a camera, I could shove the wire farther along the pipe, past bends and elevation changes, and repeat the process with the next camera in line.

  It took me three nights to do that a total of eight times, but now the pipe was completely compromised.

  This time, this last time, getting through the sequence was comparatively easy. BeeBee sent the signal to each capture box and got automated confirmation that it was being acted on. Those cross-signals, on radio frequencies, were too weak to be detected outside the pipe; only the first one, broadcast from outside the pipe, might have been detected.