by Tom Clancy
She described it in a hurry. Charlie’s eyes got wide when he started to realize what kind of thing the microps could do.
“Holy cow,” Del said. “But what can we do?”
“Fight them. Slow them down. Virtually.”
Del looked flabbergasted. Charlie, though, stood very still for a moment, then nodded. “To chase these things effectively, to interact with them at all, you would have to ‘map’ Laurent’s body details — human body details, anyway — onto whatever paradigm you were planning to use for the fighting.”
“Cluster Rangers,” Maj said.
Del looked at her, opened his mouth, shut it again. “Maj,” he said, “we’re simmers, but are we this good? Good enough to let someone’s life depend on it?”
“If we’re not now,” Maj said, “we’d better get to be, because we have to buy this boy some time. Del, have a little faith in yourself! We’ve been working with these programming modules for two months now. We’re all good at the language.”
“Some of us better than most,” Robin said, walking out of the air, that blue crest of hair nodding jauntily. “What’s the issue?”
“Miss Robin,” Charlie said, with a smile. “Didn’t know you were part of this crowd. Changes the tone of the whole affair.”
Robin high-fived him in a cheerful manner as she came over. Maj made a note to pump Robin about where she knew Charlie from, and what was making him grin in that particular way. “Interesting to see you here, too,” she said. “Maj, what’s the scoop?”
Maj hurriedly told Robin what she needed to know, and what they needed. “It’s an overmap,” Robin said, nodding. “Not straightforward, but when are they ever? Del, the Rangers custom module handler can deal with the details of the overmapping.” She grinned at Laurent. “For the time being, his body becomes the battleground. But we need a body map to conjoin with the Cluster Rangers’ programming protocols—”
“Just so happens,” Charlie said, “I have the New Gray’s Virtual Anatomy in my work space all the time. That be good enough?”
“What’s the resolution?” Robin said.
“Five microns. Ten max.”
“Close enough for jazz,” Del said. “Rangers runs at six-micron virtual grain—Gray’s is a little better than we need.”
“Can you get started on this right away?” Maj said. “We need to get out of here.”
“We can do better than that,” Robin said. “We can do it on the fly. I always keep the module manager in my cockpit for fine-tuning the Arbalest simulation in the microsecond pauses.”
Maj’s jaw dropped. “Do you mean to tell me you’ve been altering your sim’s characteristics while you’re using it?”
Del, too, was looking amazed. “I bow to the master,” he said, and put his helmet on. “If you can do that—”
“Hangar’s out that way,” Maj said, pointing at the appropriate door and causing her own suit to appear. “Laurent, you come along with me again. Charlie, you’d better sort yourself out one of these.”
He blinked, and did so.
“Charlie, you come with me,” Robin said. “They’re all two-seaters. I’ll guest you in, and you can sit behind me and give me advice until we’ve got this solution all properly geeked out.”
They all headed out into the hangars and started the jets warming up. It took a while getting Laurent up into the cockpit — he was slow, and Maj started worrying about exactly how long the effect of being virtual was going to continue to do him any good. But she kept that to herself. “Maj,” Del said on “intersuit radio” as they sealed up the cockpits, “where exactly were you planning to go hunting these bugs?”
“In Rangers space.”
“But, Maj, the bad guys know Laurent was there. If we go in there, they’ll try to get at him again.”
“Maybe,” Maj said. “But I’m betting they’ve already done their worst as far as Laurent is concerned. It doesn’t make sense that they’d hold back — he’s too important to them. We can’t possibly run the modules on my home system, Del! There’s not nearly enough processing power! The Rangers system has more than enough to spare. And as long as the routines we use to hunt these things through Laurent’s body are successfully recast as Rangers plug-in modules, it’s all allowable. It should work — we’ve done enough programming in that system to have a good feel for it.”
Robin looked up from her work in the third cockpit down. “There’s one other problem, though. If the agents from the other side come in after us—”
“We know this space a whole lot better than they do,” Maj said. “We have the home field advantage. They’re bound to be scared. I don’t imagine that it will go down too well with their bosses if they fail. If I were them, I’d be concentrating on keeping my butt in one piece….”
“Ready?” Robin said after a moment. “I’m still working, but there’s no need for us to sit while this is going on. Let’s make tracks upward and see where the buggies are hiding.”
“There are your coordinates,” Charlic said from behind Robin. “The microps have all gone cortical. The program’s mapping the sulci now….”
“Nebula space,” Robin said. “The crossmapping is making it equate to the Beehive Nebula, guys….”
“Oh, no,” Maj said. That part of space was crawling with the Archon’s forces, as well as being thick with a particularly opaque and beautiful, but annoying, nebula. It was a perfect hiding place…and a very dangerous place to have a fight, since you could all too easily wind up shooting your buddies.
“The good fight is never easy,” Del said. The hangar finished evacuating — the stars blazed and sang overhead. “Seven for seven, guys!”
They rose into the unending night. A few minutes later, the synch lasers lanced out, knitting the three ships into a unit. Then the stars’ light crashed down on them, pressed them down to nothing and out the other side—
— into glowing cloud, a mass of ion-excited purple, green, and blue, eighteen light-years away. The three of them hung there in silence for a while, looking…
…and then saw them.
They were bugs.
The Cluster Rangers’ game equivalence mapping had taken the projected characteristics of the microps and matched them to the closest creatures in its own “vernacular.” Now Maj saw what she had quite frankly never cared to see up close — the legendary Substantives, the mindless, nonorganic scavengers left over from “another space, another time,” remnants of the dark and ancient race with whom the Cluster Rangers’ patron species had fought so many long and terrible wars. They were hunger — they ate, and that was all. Many-limbed, many-eyed, nearly immortal, the Substantives lived on energy in whatever form they could find…but they best loved the rubble of shattered planets, plenty of which had been left behind, over time, in their dark masters’ wake. Lacking that, they would eat anything — ships, space stations, light, power…even dust. That was what they were eating now — using invisible, custom-generated ramscoops to scoop up and devour the glowing dust of the nebula. They shone with it, and left trails of excreted parasitic light behind them, the only remnant of their feast.
“Euuuuuw,” Robin said softly.
“You got that in one,” Charlie said from behind her. “That’s the myelin sheathing that holds the brain cells together, people, and they’re glomming it up like there’s no tomorrow. This keeps up for very long, there won’t be a tomorrow for one of us.”
Maj was acutely aware of Laurent, behind her, looking out at this with astonishment and horror. “Let’s go get ’em, then,” she said.
The three fighters dived in. Maj, though, was already calculating odds, and beginning to despair. There were at least fifty of these things scattered around that she could see. Substantives had no weapons that she knew of other than brute strength and consuming anything that got in their way — but how representative were these of the true number of microps presently inside Laurent? Were there hundreds? Thousands? Millions? How many more of these were hiding in
the nebula?
Del dived in and fired his pumped lasers at one of the Substantives, the closest. It squalled in fury and struck out at him with five or six of those awful clawed legs. “No effect,” he said. “Retuning—”
He tuned his lasers further into the blue, came back for another run, tried again. The Substantive lunged at him, just missing with more of those legs. Once again the lasers had no effect.
“Incorrect mapping,” Robin said, as her own Arbalest dived in. “Going to have to hack at this one, boys and girls. These things are resistant.”
“I thought they might have to be,” Maj said. “They probably have to cope with white blood cells and such to get their job done.”
“How were these things activated, Maj?” said Robin. “Net burst?”
“I think so.”
“Huh,” Robin said. “Well, if we can’t destroy them out-right, let’s try overriding them. They have to accept incoming communication. We may not be able to reprogram them — we don’t have the codes for it — but we can try overloading them—”
A moment’s pause. Then Robin came around hard and fired at another Substantive.
It stopped scooping up dust, listed over to one side, and began to drift.
“That’s it!” Del yelled. “Come on, guys!”
They went after the Substantives in earnest, hitting them one after another. One after another, they went down. But more and more of them came out of the Nebula. Maj started to worry, for her power conduits were beginning to complain. You could not run an Arbalest forever like this — you had to take it home and fuel it once in a while. And then there was the matter of—
“Uh-oh,” said Robin.
“What?” Maj said, looking all around her. It was a tone of voice she usually only heard from Robin when they were badly outnumbered.
“They’re moving again, Maj.”
She looked back, and felt like swearing. One of the Substantives that she had shot up with her returned cannons was indeed moving, struggling…coming back to life. Are we going to have to shoot all these things up again? We can’t! Our own power levels…
Nonetheless she turned around again, wondering how they were going to pull this out without having to go back to base and charge, then come back again. The damage to Laurent’s brain would only start all over again. And in the meantime, if the agents from his country should—
“Oh, dear me, no,” Del said.
That was not a tone of voice she cared to hear from Del, either. “What?”
“Black Arrows, guys,” said Del softly.
Maj looked up in momentary panic, which became more than momentary as she saw the black shapes with their red outlines streaking toward them — five of them. But what the—
She opened her mouth, closed it again. “They’re not real Arrows!” she said.
“What?”
“Look at how they’re moving!”
Del and Robin were quiet for a moment. Then Robin said, “They’re slow!”
“They’re from outside the game,” Maj said. “They’re the agents — the ones that activated the microps in Laurent!”
“And the poor dumb clucks aren’t running at multiple G’s,” Del crowed. “They don’t know how far the parameters of ships can be pushed in this game. They don’t know the rules!”
“Then let’s not show them right away,” Maj said. “If they think the normal rules of science obtain here…”
She could just hear the others grinning. “Maj, take point,” Del said, with great relish.
“You’re on,” she said, and reached with both arms into the fighting field, the “glove-box”-like force field which the pilot of an Arbalest fighter used to manipulate ship’s weapons.
The fight that followed was a sad one…for the Arrows.
Maj dived slowly in toward the first of their enemies, watched him react as best as he could…then threw her Arbalest around at 6 G’s and cobra’d, letting him pass her, shooting him up from behind. Elsewhere, Del and Robin were using similar tactics. Each took out one of the Arrows, then went for another.
Maj went for her second enemy vessel, diving close. She passed over the other, canopy to canopy, and got a glimpse of the pilot as she twisted away from the Arrow’s fire. A woman, she thought — blond, small. Her helmet hid her eyes, but not her mouth. She was smiling, a look of great enjoyment, and she dived up and around again toward Maj, firing—
I don’t like your looks, lady, Maj thought, and clenched her fists in the fighting field. The pumped lasers might have been little good against the Substantives, but they worked just fine against Black Arrows, as the Group had proved the other night. Maj’s lasers stitched out blinding from her Arbalest and carved a long line of light and hot metal down the side of the woman agent’s Arrow. The blond’s ship tumbled, but did not know how to handle it — turned, tried to limp away. Maj, though, was in no mood to let it go. She brought the Arbalest around in a turn so tight it would have broken the back of any lesser fighter, 6 G’s or better — the blood roared in her ears, but not as loud as her anger. This woman was one of the people who wanted to reduce Laurent’s brain to so much strawberry jam, one of the people who had made his young life so far hell, and would have done worse to him and the father for as much of their lives as they managed to hang on to after they were both dragged home.
Not a chance, lady, Maj thought. This was one of the people who had, even if only for a night, made her turn her home into a fortress and lock a guest up in the den. Who didn’t care who they hurt if it meant getting Laurent, and apparently dead or alive was good enough for this blond excuse for a human being.
Maj followed her hard, and turned, and turned again, and fired again. The Arrow fled, but Maj pursued — and the Arrow mis-twisted, and Maj found herself sitting, most serendipitously, right on its six.
She fired, and the Arrow blew itself to shreds. Wherever that agent was, in reality, she would not be bothering Laurent again for a little while, anyway. It took a while to get a new ship in this universe.
She rejoined the others. Robin was in the act of putting one last agent out of business, blowing his Arrow to smithereens at the end of a long lazy Immelmann turn that was pure insolence in space. A ragged cheer went up from them all at the end of that. But Maj looked with concern up into the cockpit mirror…and saw that Laurent had passed out.
“Trouble. We’ve got to knock those Substantives down again.”
“Can’t, Maj!” Robin said. “No power. Showing red.”
“We have to go back, Maj,” said Del.
“But we can’t!” Maj said.
“If we don’t,” Del said, “we are genuinely screwed—”
“But Laurent—!”
Then Maj caught the sudden movement. She swore softly and tumbled the Arbalest in y-axis.
And with no other warning, long slender arrows came lancing past and around them through the darkness of space. Not dark ones, though, not the Archon’s ships, but, beyond belief or hope, the white lances of the Cluster Rangers’ elite corps, the Pilum Squadrons, every one of them with an odd piece of nose art added — the Net Force insignia. The Pilums’ pulsecannon weaponry stitched all the space before them with white lines of irresistible fire, plastering the Substantives with pulsecannon bursts…and one after another the giant bugs went limp and still, not moving again.
“The codes have worked,” said one of the Pilum commanders. “I repeat, the codes work. Squadron, go in and clean them up!”
All those long white shapes disappeared into the cloud. A cheer went up from Maj and Del and Robin and Charlie, and a kind of strangled hoot from Laurent. They all turned tail and made their way up and out of the nebula again—
— and came into clear view of the great arm of the Galaxy again, the light triumphant against the darkness one more time; and all the stars sang for joy.
One more Pilum came coasting down by them. “All right, you guys,” said its pilot; and Maj’s head snapped up in surprise, for she knew tha
t voice. She peered across the darkness between them and saw James Winters riding right-hand seat in the Pilum’s forward-thrust lance, with a grim grin on his face.
“Captain Winters…”
“Commander Winters,” he said, “here, at least. You’re done for today, Maj. I relieve you.”
“I stand relieved,” Maj said, and smiled, and slumped in her seat with relief.
“Now get out of virtual,” he said, “and for heaven’s sake go disarm the alarm system and open the front door, because about eight black-and-whites and a paramedic team from Bethesda are sitting outside waiting for you and Laurent to finish your business here, and your mom and dad are being choppered in and will be there demanding details in about five minutes.”
She had never been so glad to get offline in her life.
It was days before the dust settled. Laurent spent many of them in the hospital, having cellular rehab work done on the brain tissue which had been damaged — fortunately, not as much of it as had been feared nor was any of it permanent thanks to Maj’s and Net Force’s intervention — and having the microps removed. They were a seven-day’s wonder at Bethesda, where they were taken for safekeeping until the man who could best manage them arrived.
Maj insisted on being there, at least at a distance. She saw the Swissair spaceplane land at Dulles, and after the cleanup teams got the leftover hydrazine out of the ship, she saw it tugged into the landing ramp — and she waited with James Winters and her father as the tall blond man with the coat that was too short for his long wrists came up the jetway toward them, having been instructed to bypass immigration. She saw her father and the tall man look at each other…and then rush together and hug like a couple of kids. That had been worth seeing.
They had taken him straight to the hospital and left him with the recovering Laurent, with a long story to tell, of which Maj heard at least the highlights. Parts of it, she realized, she was unlikely ever to hear, though her father probably knew about them. All James Winters would say was, “We have some friends in far places. Sometimes they’re in a position to step in and help us. This time was one of those times…and we got lucky. They were able to get Laurent’s dad away from the security forces just as they took him, and out to where he could phone us the disabling codes for the microps. Not a moment too soon…”
