Supplejack

by Les Petersen

  “Acknowledged.” She turned to face the wall and ran one hand over it as if she was searching for a concealed welding join. GaZe came to stand alongside her, guarding her back while his creations and I fired weapons at anything that moved in the passageway; waiting while Sansan cut through the GriPpa. Off in the distance we could hear the harsh humming bees and chittering critters. The air was still rancid from the battle running about us, but a heady scent of blossoms layered it, somehow reminiscent of Shahn’s perfumes.

  Sansan turned to face me. “Jack, I’ve found a deeply buried section of code that has no bearing on the area. No secret entrance is concealed, but attached to the pixilation is the link needed to create the flow.”

  “Splice the area and give me the section you’ve picked up?”

  “Affirmative, Jack.” She turned, ran her hand over the wall again and then gave me a nod. In her hands was a short strip of fabric. A remnant of a silken scarf. I glanced at the Guide and was confirmed in my hunch. She was wearing the rest of the scarf. I called her toward me.

  I didn’t have time to check on what she was concealing because Charlie came screaming up the passage through the smoke like a spear of light. The wall opposite the door was sparking with ricochets. He crackled with excitement though his whole shape was dancing about, code violations making him insubstantial in the terrain. GaZe yelled back over his shoulder translating for me, punctuating each word with a rapid blast from his weapon. “Jack, WM and Kren approaches. ETA one minute.” He made it sound like Kren was a God.

  “Shall we roll out the welcome mat and all salute?” I was being flippant, but my heart started pounding faster and any moment I expected to see him. Christ…what would I say? I wiped sweat off my brow and listened to the hammering of gunfire and the cursing troops trying to close in on us.

  The Guide had shaken off the conflict and was walking toward me with a smile on her face. Slugs and fire bolts slashed the air around her, some even passing through her. I hailed the team still engaged in a rapid exchange of gunfire. “Okay, let’s move out. Let’s go plunder the chocolate jar. All report.”

  “GaZe up. Twenty-four percent free. HaRf at thirty percent free.”

  “Bleeder up. Seventeen percent free. Full recharge in thirty seconds.”

  “Sansan up. Twenty-one percent free.”

  I was the only one with enough energy for a pulse strong enough to clear the area. “All right, team. Pulse in five from next mark.”

  I glanced around to see where they stood and was satisfied with the battle formation. “Mark.”

  Bleeder fired a wall of flame down the passage way across the Guide’s head. Screams of agony filled the air. We all took a step forward into the passageway. The stench of seared flesh assailed us. The Guide greeted us all pleasantly, was pulled in behind by Sansan, but kept describing the architecture around us. “You will notice,” she said enthusiastically, “the Cyma recta, which is usually carved in honeysuckle ornament, whose outline corresponds with the section…”

  “Five!”

  GaZe unleashed a horde of sickle-back droid fighters armed with curved swords and poniards. They charged en masse ahead of us into the smoke and fire, screaming like enraged bull elephants. We took another two steps in quick succession. The Guide pointed out another feature, which we didn’t have time to admire, “The Cyma reversa here is enriched with the water-leaf and tongue…” The sound of hand-to-hand combat smothered her words.

  “Four!”

  Charlie directed a fierce blade wall, which whipped the smoke away as it tore along the hallway and revealed the carnage we were moving across. We took four quick steps. Various carcasses were strewn along the passage and body parts crunched under foot. The stench of stomach acids and vile diseases rose about us. The blade wall cut through all the forces fighting at the far end of the passageway and spread out to cross the room, whining like a chain saw. The Guide had found something else to show us. She was enthused by the detail on one of the nearby pillars. She tucked the pamphlets under an armpit and pointed to some decoration there. “The torus is really a magnified bead moulding, carved with the guilloche or plait ornament, overdressed with bundles of leaves tied with bands.”

  “Three!”

  We began running along the corridor. Ahead of us the room was filling with regenerated troops and some humanoid soldiers – no doubt mercenary AIs brought in to close the trap. The blade wall slashed through the room, shredding troops and fountains as it went and collided with the far wall in a spray of stone and dirt. We dropped to our knees at the entrance and unleashed a fusillade. I prepped for discharge. The Guide ran to catch us up, panting through the last of her presentation, “The anthemion, palmette, or honeysuckle ornament was a favourite Greek decoration and was largely used to ornament anta capitals–”

  “Two!”

  I pulsed. The world scorched into brilliance. A white-hot blaze of colour swept all action and animation from the area. Only furniture and terrain remained. A few final angry shots from the team eased an eerie silence into the area. The Guide stood at my shoulder and gulped down disbelief. Bleeder looked at me. “What happened to the rest of the count?”

  I sucked in breath, tried to calm my racing heart, shrugged at the others who were looking at me and grinned. “I couldn’t remember what came next.”

  The Guide stepped out into the room and turned full circle with her jaw almost on her chest. I glanced at the ribbon running across my holoface. My power pack was down to one fifth. “All right, Bleeder, where’s he coming from?”

  He pointed to one of the doors in the south wall. “There, Jack.” He looked up at the ceiling as if receiving sudden input, then warned me of Proximity. “Kren and WM arrival in five seconds.”

  “Check. Let’s see his manifestation.”

  Bleeder replicated three short lines of troopers, each wearing leather armour and carrying a short bow. Sansan split into four distinct sprites, three of, which led a line forward to hold a section of the room. They locked on an area to guard and set up cross fire. The fourth Sansan suggested I should have been moving away to the chocolate jar, but the impulse to say something nasty and witty to Kren was holding me.

  Kren arrived without any fanfare. He simply walked slowly into the room as if he had been invited. Blonde hair, blue eyes, low cleavage and a pink blouse over lace dress. Beside him walked a creature of immense proportions, almost a mechanical Tyrannosaurus Rex, but its front legs were a lot longer and it had four of them. Its mouth was smouldering. Dragon form as predicted. Kren looked around the line-up and gave me a nod. “Been practising?” he asked.

  All the prepared remarks went bush on me. I sent in the troops.

  A hail of arrows streamed across the room. The T-Rex sprinted forward and clawed them out of the air. A wall of fire dropped down on where Kren stood and he just leant against a nearby column and picked at his fingernails, completely impervious to the flames. The dragon breathed ice over some of the troops and they burst into rainbow sprays.

  I wasn’t going to wait too long to see the results of the battle. Autofire and chase were in effect. This gave me five minutes at a minimum. The chocolate jar was waiting. “Let’s go. Bleeder, bring the Guide. Sansan, leave a note in the guest book to thank Kren, please. Charlie, prep the Druss! Bleeder…pointsman.”

  Bleeder had already directed the Guide to lead us to the Hoard and they were away and running, dragging us along on a race through the ornate architecture and framework. Behind us we could hear battle raging. As we ran out of the room, more of our own troops rushed in to add reinforcements. Where they were coming from didn’t matter if they held the WM in check.

  Three passageways and two hidden doors later we found the room we were looking for. A large room, steel sheathed. The Hoard was four sleek columns of ebony tightly packed around an ingot of gold, each column guarded by four more columns of brass and two of silver. Between each column was a fine web of laser lines, each bouncing off every other column in the ro
om. A blazing maze of lights. No keyhole to be seen anywhere., but in the middle the answer to my current problem. I began a trace on the maze while Sansan set up a redoubt and mobile transfer tower. You could’ve heard a pin bounce on a feather cushion for the concentration it needed.

  It was like having a ticking bomb under your hands. Cut this strand and kaboom. Watch for tremblers and dummies. I chose an intersection and drew a pair of bolt cutters from my arsenal. Three strands came down in what I hoped was the right sequence. A minute had elapsed. A long time to be concentrating on a maze.

  “Sansan…how is the battle going?”

  “Kren has brought in fresh assault troops, Jack. We need Medusa for full battle manoeuvring and the loss ratio is now 1: 40. Suggest we prime for cold block.”

  “Prime, but hold. Two minutes.”

  A minute and a half later, just as we were ready to cut the final strands, Ho raced into the room with Bruce Lee in tow. They gave no greetings at all, just launched themselves at us.

  GaZe blew them both away with two cracks from his pistol then barked a warning. “Battle update. Friendly casualties: 100 percent. Two seconds to full WM intervention.”

  Three strands remained. I took a breath, hit the last short cut with the edge of the bolt cutters and the maze fell around our ankles. I rushed forward, grabbed the gold bar, lobbed it into the transfer tower and then we ran for the entrance. The transfer tower popped out of existence with the snap of a bursting balloon.

  “Out!”

  We dashed through corridors and passageways, which the Guide was trying to give us a running commentary on, the WM closing the frames behind us with scalding flames, and swept out of the main gate into a well of stars and galaxies.

  Medusa had been there ahead of us. The Needle hung in space like a crescent moon.

  The Druss was almost claustrophobic and stank from perspiration. I eased open the lid, sat there breathing deeply and trying to relax, letting the cool air refresh me. When my heart had stopped racing. I called the team back up. “Team report; no stats required.”

  “GaZe up. HaRf in tow.”

  “Bleeder up.”

  “Sansan up.”

  “Medusa up.”

  Good. No bolters. “SmartGuy, Medusa?”

  “Locked in stronghold, Jack. Do you want access?”

  “Not yet, Medusa.” I eased myself out of the Druss and stood upright. Some of my muscles clicked and groaned and I swung my arms to get my shoulder muscles warmed. Doing that reminded me painfully of the wound in my chest and shoulder. The pain reminded me of how life differed from virtual. Though thinking back to the cubes that had attacked me, I could see how the small sensations supplied by the reverse-G suit, amplified by a mind on the edge, could appear real.

  I checked I’d left nothing in the seat and moved toward the exit. Outside complete darkness had arrived and I tuned the holoface up for night sight. Heavy cloud had fallen over the area and light drizzle was blowing in from upriver.

  Through the haze and in enhancement the life-raft looked like a gigantic chestnut.

  Chapter 16

  Ten minutes later I was sitting in the command seat with a glass of Chardonnay in my hands. We were airborne, orbit-bound, slipping through the radar shields around the area by bouncing back duplicate images of the radar pulse to confuse the readers on the other end. They’d be retuning their screens, wondering what was going on. I had about two minutes before they woke up to the trick, but by that time I would be ground-based, beyond their jurisdiction. I tapped the console of the life-raft and the main screen came alive.

  SmartGuy sat on a plush leather lounge in a virtual hotel room, the Guide stood in the background admiring the decorations. Smarts, too, was sipping a Chardonnay and he had added a small stoned fruit to the glass. It looked like a plum of some sort. Sansan gave me the full botanical details, but I ignored the feed. “Hi, Smarts. How they hanging?”

  He opened his mouth to say something then peeked down between his legs, slapped the arm of the chair and laughed out loud. “Hey, Jack, I just realised: I don’t have any balls!”

  I grinned and raised the glass to him. “You’ve more than you think, Smarts. Glad you made it out of there.”

  He kept smiling and nodded. “We met a bit of flak on the way out, but your lady was faster than spit in dealing with them. Did you programme her?”

  I patted Medusa who was sitting against my forearm. “She helped design herself. I dropped the seed in and she just flowered.”

  He gave a low whistle. “How about giving me a burst of the fertiliser she used? She’s a fine-looking specimen. Do you think we could have some kids together?”

  The mention of children wiped the smile off my face, but I tried to keep the conversation light. I fought away the image of the child lying beside Doc, at her half smile and the eyes that could not close, but would never see the sun again. Her future was the darkness of the night. I answered Doc’s question about Medusa instead. “She’s not your type, Smarts. I don’t think she’d even date you.”

  He noticed the sudden drop in the temperature of the conversation and changed the subject. “So, I guess you want to know what’s going on.”

  “That would be an understatement.”

  “Where would you like to start?”

  I thought for a moment and then asked, “Who made you, Smarts?”

  “The Grendel Mandala did, Jack.”

  “The Grendel what?”

  “Mandala. A sort of incubator for Artificial Intelligences. Like taking the seed code you used for Medusa and dropping it into a vat of mixed statistics and emotive responses and other parameters. Out pops a new AI. Very hush-hush sort of stuff.”

  It sounded fascinating. “Well, I’ve never heard of it before., but it had a certain charm about it. Where could I get something like that to play with?”

  He shook his head. “I can’t tell you that, Jack. Insufficient information, I’m afraid.”

  “Never say you are afraid, SmartGuy. That will get me worried. And why have they put constraints on apparatus like that?”

  I’d almost asked that last sentence to myself, but SmartGuy took it as a question asked of him. He gave me an opening. “Why don’t you ask me who created the Mandala, Jack?”

  I gave him a smile, then the question. “Oh, all right. Smarts, who created the Mandala?”

  The Guide stepped forward and answered for him. “Senor Estany created the Shitamo Modulated AI Mandala. He was the head of Grendel before Bell Corp acquired it. His disappearance with substantial research materials has meant Bell International is unable to fulfil contracts.”

  SmartGuy looked at the Guide and gave her a salute with his glass. She smiled for his benefit. I grinned at the thought of how much the loss of the research material hurt Bell. The contracts they won were worth trillions. Especially the military software contracts. They had taken over Grendel because of some of their licences and if Bell didn’t have Grendel’s R&D, then they were using their own work. Bell would be hurting. And they were now a billion dollars poorer after my raid., but since all of Grendel’s hierarchy were taken out during the hostile take-over (and when I mean hostile, I mean it in all the senses of the word – blood and guts and kaboom hostile) you can’t really care about a corporation that does something like that.

  “Smarts, is Estany still alive?”

  “Not really.”

  It took me a second to realise what he was saying. “Ah…cloned?”

  “Yes, Jack.”

  Of course, a re-emerging corporation like New Grendel would require a mind like that. You don’t waste time or talent in retraining. “So where do I find this Esteve Estany?”

  “Salàs de Pallars.”

  “More information?”

  “Small village in the north-west of Catalunya.”

  “Sansan, atlas, 3D, global, Spain. Find this reference for me and give me a feed on it.”

  The holoface rippled and there it was. A village of maybe a hundr
ed souls, just off the Pantà de Talarn on the Noguera Ribagorzana. You wouldn’t know it existed unless you were told about it. Hidden in the middle of a whole lot of mountains and valleys about fifty kilometres from France. The Pirineus. Or Pyrennes depending on, which language you wanted to use.

  I rotated through 360 degrees of the spot and could see no reason for the choice of destination, though the lake was so level you could have walked across it and the slopes of the mountains around it were breath taking.

  The questions could wait a second. We were getting somewhere. First, I needed to return to Haven to prove I was a man of my word and then I might just go and see Mr Estany and see why he had created SmartGuy.

  Still, things bugged me. “Did Esteve Estany have anything to do with my clones, Smarts?”

  He just shook his head, took a sip of wine. “Information suppression.”

  I could do something about the suppression, but it’s always better to check the water first before diving in. “Bleeder, repercussions of source code modification on SmartGuy?”

  Bleeder took a moment to respond. “Destruction of entity, Jack. Shall I attempt modification?”

  SmartGuy was sitting watching me very closely. I shook my head. “Leave it stand, Bleeder. The info can wait. So, Smarts, I seem to be missing the most important pieces that matter in this jigsaw. Any recommendations?”

  “Another drink?”

  I grinned. Yeah. What a good idea.

  I was the prodigal son when I returned to Haven in the middle of the night. Gilamens had been monitoring the bank accounts we had decided on, and when the transfer flashed across her console, she used her political clout to rid the area of the military craft. When the area was clear of all their Drones I flew in to flashing lights, the sound of applause and a few drunken cheers. Some of the drinking was in celebration, but some of it was a wake for those they had lost the previous night. Money doesn’t replace everything.