Base Metal (The Sword Book 2)

by J. M. Kaukola

  The door slammed shut behind.

  Bootload Basic

  He should have known there'd be consequences.

  'Never trust the cops.' His oldest brother used to tell him, and the Agency was to cops what oceans were to rivers. Every deal was laden with an Ifrit's discourse, barbed and spiked to ensnare the unwise.

  He should have remembered this, for now he drowned in a tunnel of gold.

  The clamor sang around him. It was as if he stood with his back to a radiance incredible, with all the world viewed through a squinted, shadowed tunnel. Through that pinprick, choked by the golden beams streaming past, he watched the lights swirl on the ceiling, the shadows of doctors in white masks, and their implements gleaming over him. He tried to raise his head, but his neck was too weak. Pain spiked, golden and hot, with a rise in the terrible whine-ring song.

  He collapsed, unable to rise, and tumbled down the golden tunnel.

  Alien words coursed through his mind, echoes of a hundred voices he'd never heard.

  -5.5 kilograms unloaded-

  -equal to the armor's thickness divided by the cosine of inclination from perpendicular-

  -this is my Rifle-

  -haircut, number three razor on the top-

  -blast radius of five meters, casualty radius-

  The chorus blurred into the golden-heat chime, silver lines through the auric base echoed in screams and songs. Numbers clawed from the depths, flooded his vision. He could feel the ache-shape of his bones against the hardjack as he lay helpless, pinned beneath the storm.

  -arm forward, lock the opponent, use your body as the fulcrum-

  -I am the shield of the State-

  "Quiet!" he scream-thought.

  The light receded to the edge of his vision. The pain-clamor dwindled, and the heat faded. He was lying on a bed, white sheets over puke-green plastic, all the walls built of peeled plaster and faded glory. Eyes behind plastic shields stared down at him, white-masked-mouths speaking muted mysteries. He tried to stay in this place, this tawdry and threadbare world, but the voices pulled him to the sea.

  -161 decibels when firing-

  "No." He mumbled. The cacophony dwindled. Every millimeter it gave, he took, repeating his monosyllabic defiance as he beat back the tide. "No."

  The walls twisted like a surrealist painting, all melting clocks and looming corners, impossible angles and bleeding color, with the golden dawn hissing through every crack and crevice. "No. No. No. Quiet." He hissed.

  A bonfire raged in his skull, carved about the scars of his implants. The hardjack was lava, a smoldering spike that pierced his core. Somewhere about the edges, he knew he'd been neural imprinted. They'd used his wire to flash two years of training into his brain.

  -the glory-

  -the duty-

  -the State-

  My mind!

  He'd agreed to it. The case had been hard to argue. He'd taken the deal, and they'd needed a soldier, quick. His wetware had been just good enough to let the Agency get 'unconventional'. He knew it was illegal, but he couldn't argue. 'How bad could it be?' he'd wondered. Now a thousand voices pounded against one: mind rape, a reverse lobotomy.

  -the laws of war forbid-

  "I am me!" He screamed, defiant against the tumult. The Agency didn't have months to train him, so they'd programmed him, instead. It wasn't just data in the imprint. The knowledge carried loyalty memes that threatened to wash him away, poison pills that burst in his mind. It turned out, they'd never intended to trust him. They'd never risked a rat escaping the maze. They'd shoved a wire in his skull and reformatted the drive.

  Some part of him wondered if they did this to everyone. Was this standard training?

  -nine weeks, followed by twelve weeks-

  He screamed in protest, his denial intended like half-formed code, handed to a mask that could not answer. He defied the scalding light and clung to the rock of self, battered against the cliffside until blessed night and a needle's prick swept him away.

  Darkness held for uncounted eternities.

  Sweet and gentle light settled over him as a luminous cloud.

  He awoke and found himself lying on a gurney in a room drawn by plastic white, sterile curtains. The light in his eyes was white-blue instead of piercing gold, and the song remained silent.

  The light vanished, and he heard the doctor speak, "He's stable. Christ, colonel, I think they jammed half the national archive in there."

  A second voice answered, calm and level, like a therapist guiding him through hypnosis, "Thank you, Cal. Just straighten him out. Delete anything that looks like a hitchhiker. Like hell, they're pulling this Franken-stunt on my op."

  "Yes, sir." There came a hiss, and rubber sealed around his mouth. The air tasted sweet, and he sank back into darkness with the doctor's fading words, "It's barbarism, Bill. Just barbarism..."

  Firenze opened his eyes in his study, the fireplace roaring at his feet. Waves of pleasant warmth spread through his robe, a thin barrier between his skin and the cold night air. The balcony door hung open, and the cold seawater breeze brushed over the gently-waving fibers of his blanket.

  He was alive.

  His hair was matted, salty streaks stained his face, his blankets were soaked through from fever, and every ounce of him hurt. But he was here, and he was himself.

  His library was ransacked, books hurled about and torn, paintings stripped from denuded walls. He'd been robbed, vandalized, and beaten. He trembled from spasms he couldn't overmaster.

  "But you stand." Lauren stated proudly. She sat on a pile of pillaged books, every bit the disheveled mess he must be. "They came, they saw, but they could not conquer. You are still you." She smiled from her perch, victorious.

  He tried to sit, but his head swam, despite the cold compress on his brow. He forced out a single question, "How?"

  "You're hooked into the assist right now. When the Agency tried to 'enhance' the imprint, I hopped the carrier and held the fort." She pointed to a new picture over the mantle, one of herself in ancient metal armor, beating away a dragon built from binary strings.

  "Nice." He breathed.

  "You can keep the painting."

  He tried to laugh, but only coughed and fell back into termors.

  She waited for him to stop shaking, watched his vitals until they'd stabilized. She advised, "The castle is secured. The enemy is routed, and the army is in pursuit."

  "The army?" He asked.

  "An army medic, at least, plus some amateur brain slicers. Their techniques are crude but effective, and if they're willing to scrub out the last of this malware, then I'm more than happy to hide until they're done. Although..." she trailed off.

  He waited for the tic to pass.

  "The medics are very fond of this 'memdope'. Near as I can tell, it's some sort of augmented-cognitive-behavioral therapy, complete with chem-blasting the PKM-zeta in your brain. It soothes trauma, but it has all the subtlety of a lorry bomb. You had a fond memory of a hovertrain, I believe. Something to do with balloons?"

  "I did?" Firenze asked. It didn't sound familiar.

  "Did. Past tense is important." She replied. "The Agency stuck you with a nasty worm. It buried itself in core functions so you wouldn't pluck it out. The army took it away, but I can't reason why. You should ask the old man when you wake up."

  "When I wake up?" Firenze asked. "Am I dreaming?"

  "Not for long. Brace for it, because here comes the pain."

  The world dissolved into a wall of digital noise. The dream shattered with a shriek. The connection severed, his wire snapped. The code withered before him, and he surfaced.

  He opened his eyes, again, arose from the recursive dream.

  He was seated on a reclining chair- no, a hospital bed, tilted upwards. He was sore, but for the first time in – how long? – he felt human. There was no ringing, no tunnel, no chorus. He was alone and himself once more.

  The old man stood across from him, arms crossed and waiting, with cl
ose-cropped gray-and-white hair, a bristly mustache, and an iron countenance. He was aged but solidly built, and his bearing enough to fill the room. Firenze immediately caught the silver eagles gleaming on the old man's shoulder straps.

  A distant echo, near ghostly, whispered, 'Colonel, paygrade officer-six'.

  The colonel caught his waking, and greeted, "Good morning, Mister Firenze. You had us a bit concerned." Unlike the agent, there was no mockery in his voice. The colonel pulled a chair up to the bedside and sat down upon it. Every bit of him exuded natural confidence, no bravado or arrogance, but a simple, assured presence. The colonel set his hand on Firenze's arm and said, "I'm Colonel William Halstead, commander of this dog and pony show. Welcome."

  From alien reflex, Firenze tried to salute. He was only spared by the spasm in his shoulder, muscles that seized against false memory.

  Halstead must have seen the motion, because he grimaced and said, "There's no need for that. You're not military."

  "Tell that to-" Firenze broke in a coughing fit. "Tell that to the assholes who turned my brain to soup."

  "That was a... wrong decision." Halstead stated. He picked his words delicately as if to restrain some unprofessional outburst. "I assure you of this: I did not order, anticipate, or condone that decision, and I have done my damnedest to walk it back. You have every right to be furious. I am, too. Rest assured that when this is over, I'm going plant my boot - and a JAG officer! - a half meter up the ass of those responsible."

  Firenze had no response, caught somewhere between fury and numbness.

  The colonel sighed. He leaned forward and admitted, "I know you have little reason to believe me, especially after the Agency gave you the PR tour, but we are the good guys. You were brought here to help us save lives. I was told you're the absolute best chance we have to crack some nasty ICE, and I'd like to talk with you."

  Firenze snorted. He didn't drop his scowl, but he listened. There was never harm in gathering more data.

  "I'm going to be straight. I'm a soldier, so are my men. We get told what to do, when, where, and how. A unit like mine? We get a little more leeway on the specifics, but it's still prescriptive. We don't choose the 'why'. But you? You're not a soldier. You're a civilian with a textbook bootcamp jammed in his brain, dressed up, and thrown to the wolves. You still reserve the liberty to ask 'why', and the right to say 'no'."

  "Then, why?" Firenze asked.

  "Because I need you, my team needs you, and a lot of civilians you've never heard of, need you. Because you're a genius with a known habit of peeling open blackboxes and poking things you shouldn't. Because your profile says you're brilliant, driven, curious, and that you'd be an unlikely fit for my unit. The Agency believes that the best route to compliance is to blowtorch your hippocampus. I think the best way to get cooperation is to give you every reason you should work with me. I'll lay it out, clear and simple, and see if you're the right man for the job."

  "And if I'm not?"

  "Then you leave, I stay, and we all lose. But it's your choice. Let's walk through how we got here and figure out the best route forward."

  Firenze nodded. He'd always enjoyed thought experiments. Even here, he could indulge the colonel.

  "Do you remember how you arrived? Do you remember anything after the flitter landed?"

  Firenze shook his head. "Not really. Just... a blur. A really shitty blur."

  "After you got off the bus, you showed odd signs. You responded to things that weren't there, yelled, twitched, changed your rhythm of speech when prompted. I had you brought down to the infirmary. That was a good thing because you went into seizures right after." The colonel placed a datacard on Firenze's blanketed lap. "There's your record, feel free to go through it. According to the docs and medbot, there was an error with your imprint. The Agency tried to slide a lifetime of soldiering through your hardjack, along with operational resources - encryption standards, a few netsec classes you hadn't taken - but there was some interaction between the imprint, your mask, and the loyalty worm. Doc hadn't seen anything like it. He said it was 'as if your memories had an immune response' to the foreign data."

  Firenze tilted his head and listened. This was new and interesting. If he lived, it might make good research material.

  The colonel advised, "Don't quote me on the specifics, I'm not the doc. What matters is, you rejected it. They tried to put in a base-level command: 'you will not betray the State'. That's dirty pool, but I can understand the sentiment. A lot of lives depend on you, and the Agency isn't one to trust when they can verify." Halstead sighed. At that moment, he looked like nothing so much as a tired father, trying to apologize for his son accidentally running over Firenze's dog. Except, in this case, it wasn't the dog that got flattened. It was Firenze.

  "Sir, this is fucked up." Firenze interrupted, "Why me? If they think they need to shackle me, then why bring me? Why not use someone from your team?"

  "I asked that, myself. Repeatedly." Halstead answered. "But remember what I said about soldiers? We're not entitled to the 'why'. The best answer I got was that someone, somewhere, decided you were God's gift to counter-AI hacking. It was determined that making you into a soldier was easier than making a soldier into you."

  "So someone just picked me at random, and I got screwed?"

  "Welcome to the army." Halstead replied. "There are upsides. You get three hots and a cot, and you get to save the world by shooting bad guys." He grew serious, again, and continued, "But we're not the Agency. We cut out the brain worm, left most of the knowledge. You've got the data for soldiering, but you're no soldier, not yet. Training will be hell for you, trying to catch your body up to your brain and teach you to use those things locked up in there." The colonel asked, "Tell me, what's the beam-steering time of the PAGP99 radar?"

  "Approximately eight nanoseconds." Firenze replied. His words spilled out of his mouth like a reflex. He froze in horror and said, "That's creepy."

  "Yes, it is." Halstead agreed. "It takes years of training to get a mastery of the data jammed in your head. When I first heard what they did, I was horrified. You can't just 'make' a soldier."

  "Well, they sure tried." Firenze said. He ran the scenario through his head, abstracted his situation. Despite the ache in his bones and the beeping of the monitors, the question intrigued him. Retreating into theory was comforting. It let him ignore the fact that practical application had just mugged him in a dark philosophical alley. "I might be evidence towards the contrary."

  The colonel snorted. "You're no soldier. If you were, this entire talk would have consisted of, 'Here's the mission, get your kit, and be ready by oh-dark-thirty.' Knowledge doesn't make you a soldier any more than fighting. It's a holistic view, mind and body. Consider the soldier and the ganger: both fight for territory, carry symbolic colors, keep a code of honor, and are willing to fight, die, and kill for their cause. What makes the difference?"

  "Equipment?" Firenze asked.

  "No." Halstead replied, disgust heavy in his voice. "Everything I listed was a thing, a 'what' or 'how'. There is a reason we don't get to ask 'why'. We've already given our answer."

  The colonel continued, "Most people aren't warriors by nature - they're too timid, too herd-minded - and that's good. Warriors are dangerous. They break things, hurt people. What we're looking for are fighters who are willing to fight for reasons beyond self. A good soldier does not fight for his pride, wealth, prestige, or any other 'thing' which can be gained, beyond the satisfaction of a worthy sacrifice. He gives himself up to his unit, to the flag, to the Articles, and to protect the people back home. No knowledge or tools can compel this mindset, for they are merely things. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

  Firenze nodded. To be honest, it sounded a bit self-aggrandizing, the kind of fancy words used to justify the unjustifiable. Sure, there was a poetry in it, in an antiquated 'banners and glory' kind of way. Maybe it helped the colonel sleep at night, so he didn't have to measure himself against Pathies and ganger
s? On the other hand, the old man had pulled the mind virus from Firenze's skull, so there was no need to be rude. He answered, "You're saying it has to be chosen."

  "Correct. Affirmatively so. If the mindset of a soldier can be given, like they tried with you, then that decision is no longer a choice. Just like a rifle or uniform, it is a thing, and I find myself unimpressed with the type of person who would kill for things. When you had that allergic reaction, I confess I was gratified. It gives me hope that we can't imprint the intangible. It means we still have to choose."

  "Glad I could help." Firenze stated, sourly. "But now you're going to proposition me, aren't you? You want me to 'choose' to be one of your soldiers."

  "Not want. Need." Halstead answered. "I need you to be the kind of man who wants to join. I'd wanted one of my team for this job. I got you instead. You're the only man capable, and I need you to step up, or a lot of innocents are going to die." The colonel's voice was compassion undergirded with steel, like a doctor giving a terminal diagnosis.

  "And if I can't?" Firenze asked. He would have liked to claim defiance, but he knew that fear drove the question.

  Halstead sighed, again, not with disappointment but resignation. "If you can't, then I cut you from the mission and send you home. Most likely, the Agency brings you back to their tender care. My team attempts our mission without you, a lot of people die, and my ghost haunts you in prison."

  The sheer absurdity of it all forced a giggle from Firenze's lips. This was wrong. It was stupid. Why should lives depend on him? He couldn't even hold his own together! But what could he do? Run, back to prison? What would his mother say when she learned? This was stupid. He was trapped, given an option but not a choice.

  Firenze swallowed down the madness, the fear, the dumb horror of it all. He faced the colonel and answered, "I'll do my best."

  Halstead nodded. From his frown, Firenze knew it wasn't the answer he'd wanted, but it was one he'd accept.