Netlink

by William H. Keith

  Civilians screamed and scattered. Two more soldiers closed in on Kara from high and to her right; a laser fired, burning close enough that she felt her hair just beneath the beam scorching and curling. She spun and fired… but the rocket went wild and her instinctive duck-and-twist threw her into a tumble. Another laser fired, aimed at her but striking one of the slow-spinning bodies nearby instead, loosing more scattering drops of blood. Lechenko was still screaming, his body curled into a fetal tuck, his arms folded across his stomach as he spun over and over well beyond Kara’s reach.

  Kara extended her legs and arms as far as she could to slow her spin, then deliberately swung them against one of the floating bodies. The collision absorbed a lot of her rotational momentum, steadying her, though it also set the body tumbling away, robbing her of cover. She was ready with her weapon, though, as the corpse drifted clear. Another guard was in mid-flight, sailing toward her just meters away when she pulled the trigger. The rocket streaked into his face and exploded, slowing but not stopping his rush.

  Then suddenly Daniels, Dolan, and Pritchard were there, emerging from another tunnel, rocket pistols in hand. A trio of white contrails scratched their way through the air, killing the last two security guards.

  “Lieutenant!” Pritchard yelled. “Are you okay?”

  “Okay!” she shouted back. Her rebound from the corpse had sent her drifting into a bulkhead. She collapsed against its surface, then gathered her legs beneath her and pushed off, sailing toward Lechenko. “Lech!” she called. He was no longer screaming, no longer moving at all save for a slow, continuing somersault as he drifted away from the scene of the battle.

  He was dead by the time she reached him.

  Chapter 15

  That’s the way it is in war. You win or lose, live or die—and the difference is just an eyelash.

  —GENERAL OF THE ARMY DOUGLAS MACARTHUR

  mid-twentieth century C.E.

  Sergeant Willis Daniels gently pulled her away. “We’d better get out of here, Lieutenant.”

  “Of course.” She felt numb. Lechenko had been one of the toughest, most experienced men in her squadron. Why did he have to die? She rubbed her ears; it was almost as though she could still hear that final, bubbling scream, a horrible sound she feared she would never be rid of.

  Kara knew death; she couldn’t have served with the Phantoms for as long as she had without losing friends and comrades. But never had the encounter been like this, close and personal and screaming. She felt sick.…

  “Lieutenant, please!”

  “We can’t just leave him.…”

  “We can and we will,” Warflyer Pritchard said. She shook her head. “We can’t drag him along.…”

  Daniels tugged at her shoulder. “Come on, Lieutenant Hagan! What would we do with him? Smuggle him out with our luggage?” When she hesitated, he added, “Gok it, L-T! Lieutenant Ferris told us he wanted us looking out for you! If you don’t come, he’s gonna have our heads on a platter!”

  Reality reasserted itself, as cold as zero absolute. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  The lounge area was deserted now, the civilians all fled to other areas. The four of them managed to get to the hotel’s hub, where Kara hid herself and her bloodstained coveralls in the stall of a public lavatory while Phil Dolan picked up a clean set of coveralls and a can of skinsuit spray from her room. Ten minutes later, presentable once more, she followed the others out to the spin gravity module, joining them in the room being rented by Daniels and Pritchard.

  “Okay, Lieutenant,” Sergeant Daniels said. “Which way out are we taking? Long wait or short?”

  “The short, I think,” she told them. She didn’t want to explain her reasoning. She just knew that, with Lech dead, she had to get out, get away from Aresynch, and the thought of staying here another week or two was too much to bear. “If we hurry, we might make it aboard one of the docked liners around the curve before they get around to sealing this section off.”

  “I agree,” Daniels said. His persona as a Japanese businessman had given him a dark, blunt face with a long mustache, which lent him a somewhat sinister air. “I’m still worried that they might decide to start screening everyone in Aresynch for Companions.”

  “Aw, they wouldn’t try that, would they, Sarge?” Phil Dolan asked.

  “You kidding? Right now, they must be so goking mad the only thing to stop ’em from searching every person aboard this orbital is the fact they’re still under attack. Once our boys on the surface get clear, well, they could be desperate enough to try it. Or something just as bad.”

  “Then let’s stop talking about it and odie,” Kara said, using the military slang term that meant to leave in a hurry.

  They managed to leave the hotel without incident. They didn’t bother checking out, since they assumed that sooner or later, the TJK would piece together which of the hotel’s guests had been involved and would initiate arrest proceedings. Instead, they adopted new bodies, fall-back personalities prepared by the CMI’s Earth-based contingent. Dolan, Pritchard, and Daniels would be, again, traveling as Japanese businessmen; Kara, much to her disgust, was a ningyo, a sex-doll genie, wearing little but a jeweled collar and a flamboyantly revealing scarlet skinsuit. Following Daniels around at a respectful two-paces’ remove, she would be noticed—the skin-suit was designed to make certain of that—but it was unlikely that anyone would suspect that she was a Confederation agent. Ningyos, after all, were not expected to think, and in an illogical twist of commutative psychology, most people had difficulty imagining a full-human pretending to be one.

  Kara didn’t like playing that role. It was demeaning; it was obscene; it might even make trouble for them if some overly libidinous Imperial on their liner decided to try to buy her from Daniels and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Still, it was necessary if they were to carry this off. The watchdog who’d wrestled with her in the Net almost certainly had been able to identify her as a woman, and the guards who’d tried to capture them afterward had probably uploaded full descriptions and images before they’d died. There were millions of civilians at Aresynch, and tens of thousands arrived or departed aboard commercial vessels each day, but, with the Nihonjin culture’s attitudes toward women, only a relatively small percentage of all of those travelers were female. It would be easier for the Imperials to stop and question all women aboard each outbound liner than it would be to question everybody. An identity as a ningyo guaranteed her a measure of invisibility, even when her outward appearance was anything but invisible.

  Wearing their new identities, then, they slipped out of the hotel and boarded a ringskimmer for Aresynch’s second major civilian starport, nearly a thousand kilometers ahead of the sky-el in the synchorbital slot. The name of their liner—smaller and less luxuriously appointed than the Gold Star Teikoku—was Seiku.

  The name, Kara noted, was a bit of Nihongo poetry meaning “Clear Sky.” She hoped that that was an omen.

  The nano QEC was failing fast, making gausslev floating an intermittent proposition. No matter. Ferris extended his warstrider’s legs and took to the ground again, stilting back across the ridge toward the grounded ascraft. The assault force was nearly reembarked and ready to go. The marines and civilian techs had been first aboard, carrying with them the mysterious package they’d looted from the main MilTech Labs building.

  Now the warstriders were falling back, moving two by two as the defensive perimeter closed up. Local resistance was nonexistent, but enemy forces had been detected circling at the very edge of Sandman’s operational scanner area. Skymaster was off-line up in Aresynch now, and there would be no more timely laser bolts out of space.

  Timing on this one was absolutely critical. The assault force would need help getting off Kasei and more help still getting clear of the Solar System. The ascraft was strictly for transport duty between orbit and surface and was not equipped for excursions through K-T space. Their ride, their ticket home to New America, would be waiting for them upstairs…
if—a very big if—they could get clear on their own down here.

  The clock was running, and time was trickling away now. A thump sounded from the north, deep and reverberating, and fresh smoke, illuminated by greasy yellow light, boiled into the sky. The warstriders were being reloaded aboard the ascraft, but the fighters and the surviving transport were being deliberately destroyed. It would take longer to fold them up and pack them back aboard the Artemis lander than the assault force could spare.

  “Okay, Third Squadron,” Sandman’s voice said. “Let’s odie!”

  Ferris did a quick check of his tactical screen, verifying that all thirteen of his people who’d survived the battle were still with him. He felt sad about Brewster. There would be time to toast him and share some remember-whens with the whole squadron later, when they were safely in K-T space and on the way back to New America. Altogether, the three squadrons had lost five striderjacks; ten marines had bought it as well, and eight Confederation Navy personnel had died aboard the San Jacinto.

  With bitter intensity, Ferris hoped that whatever the tech-types had plucked from that building was goking worth it. Some of those men and women had been his friends. And Kara. It would be months before he even knew whether or not she was safe.

  He checked his time sense. Liftoff in five more minutes.

  Good. He would be goking glad to see the last of this world.

  Alerted by coded transmissions from the surface of Kasei, the Confederation warfleet materialized a few hundred thousand kilometers outsystem from the gold and ocher crescent of the planet. They would remain only a few minutes, long enough to pick up the ascraft fleeing Mars and to discourage Imperial pursuit.

  Largest by far of the Confederation ships was Toryu. Despite her name, she was not one of the Imperial ryu carriers, but a Confederation design. Not a dragonship, but a to-ryu, a “dragon killer.” An entirely new type of warship, she was properly classified as a magnetic gun vessel, though it was better known throughout the fleet as a magun.

  Roughly spherical in shape and with a diameter of nearly two kilometers, the magun was essentially a million-ton Naga fragment wrapped around a small asteroid. Drawing power from a quantum power tap, the Naga created and manipulated intense magnetic fields designed to hurl five- or ten-kilogram chunks of nickel-iron in any desired direction at high speed. While it couldn’t match the one-ton throw weights of a planetary Naga, it could accelerate smaller pieces to velocities approaching ten percent of light. Even one kilogram at that speed liberated energies enough to vaporize a city; when they hit a starship, even one as large as a ryu carrier, much of the ship simply vaporized, while the rest was reduced to tumbling, scattering wreckage.

  The exchange with the Imperials was mercifully brief. A hastily assembled squadron, including the carrier Funryu, the Raging Dragon, accelerated outsystem from the Aresynch naval yards, in close pursuit of a small vessel struggling to free itself from Kasei’s gravity well. From half a million kilometers further out, Toryu’s magnetic fields became nearly as powerful, for a brief instant, as those of a spinning neutron star. The projectile launched from her dark surface was too small and too fast to be seen directly, though Funryu sensed the projectile coming. The ryu-carrier had opened fire, but its point-defense weapons were designed to handle slow-moving objects, like missiles, and the incoming lump of metal crossed the final hundred kilometers in three hundredths of a second. The ryu’s AI was fast enough to target the projectile, but the weapons servos were not. Ten kilograms of nickel-iron struck the Funryu on her upper deck just forward of her main superstructure tower, liberating the energy equivalent to a small atomic bomb.

  The prow of the kilometer-long ship vanished in starcore heat, along with most of her forward weapons systems, her crew’s quarters, and her primary fire control. Her bridge, buried deep within the huge vessel’s core beneath dense wrappings of duralloy, was safe, but the rest of the vessel was reduced to whirling, disintegrating scrap in the blink of an eye.

  The other Imperial vessels broke off after that and kept a respectful distance, obviously and with good reason reluctant to tangle with the Confederation fleet.

  The destroyer Constitution retrieved the ascraft minutes later. Together then, as though guided by a single, master choreographer, the ships of the Confederation battlegroup flashed past Mars, cutting past on the dayside opposite the sky-el to avoid the planetary defense system and using the small world’s gravity to sling them into a new course. Accelerating hard, they drove for the outer system.

  Then they shifted into K-T space, mission complete.

  Nearly thirty minutes later, the string of data transmitted by Kara from Aresynch was intercepted by the Surprise, a two-thousand-ton scout craft adrift just above the plane of Saturn’s rings. The vehicle’s powered-down orbit had been calculated to place it on the sunward side of the gas giant eighty minutes after the beginning of the operation and to maintain a clear line of sight to distant Mars throughout the mission’s critical period. Minutes later, a general alert arrived, warning all vessels in Solar space that enemy forces, believed to be Confederation raiders, were attacking Kasei. The alert was upgraded to a System Emergency when the Confederation ships arrived.

  After verifying the transmission codes and assuring himself that this was, indeed, the expected payoff from Operation Sandstorm, the scout’s captain… waited. Near-Saturn space was scarcely crowded, but there were ships enough about—remote prospectors, military sentinels, the research colony on Titan—that he didn’t want to call attention to himself by suddenly switching on his quantum power tap and accelerating for a K-T jump just moments after word of a Confederation attack had been received by the vessels and bases in near-Saturn space.

  Nearly a full standard day later, with military traffic heavy in Kasei space but all but nonexistent in the vicinity of Saturn, Surprise powered up and nudged herself clear of the gas giant, accelerating slowly but steadily for open space. Her IFFs identified her as a privately operated comet miner. Despite the alerts and the war scare, there were far too many vessels moving in and out of Solar space to impose any kind of quarantine or search blockade, a fact that Sandstorm’s planners had been counting on. Unchallenged, the Surprise accelerated to relativistic speeds well beyond the orbit of Neptune, then vanished into K-T space. Though the battlefleet would be carrying back the same stolen data that Surprise held in her memory banks, the scout was nearly twice as fast in the K-T translation as the battlefleet.

  That meant the Surprise would arrive at New America a good twenty standards before the Confederation battlegroup, and over a full month before Kara Hagan and the men who’d penetrated the Aresynchorbital.

  Colonel Masato Watanabe sat slumped behind his desk, watching the pale, motionless sculpture of light that hung above the holo projector there. The image showed a young woman, nude, completely unadorned with makeup, jewelry, or hardware, her facial expression neutral, almost blank. She was clearly occidental, however, with light-colored eyes and hair the color of young wheat.

  Major Yasunari Iwata gestured at the image. “But surely, Colonel—”

  “It doesn’t help us, Major.”

  “The DNA analysis is quite explicit, sir. This should give our agents everything they need to find the person who broke into the Net.”

  Watanabe sighed. Imperial technicians had carefully vacuumed the interior of the comm module scant minutes after the invaders had shot their way out of the area. Though the couch contained minute particles of skin from literally hundreds of recent users, it was possible to match the bits of recovered DNA and make a determination of which phenotype was represented by the most fragments. Since each successive person to enter the module and strap him or herself to the couch tended to obliterate or wipe away the majority of the cells left by previous occupants, it was a near statistical certainty that the phenotype expression represented by the most recovered DNA fragments was that of the last person to lie there. Some of those fragments, drawn from still-living cells, had enabl
ed a powerful medical AI computer to construct this holographic image, an accurate recreation of the person’s normal appearance. Age was a guess, of course, but the likelihood was that the enemy agents would have been young, between twenty and forty, say, and the computer could give a range of facial types based on likely aging modalities.

  “You forget, Major, the fact that this person will be in disguise. She will have, quite literally, a new face, even new fingerprints and retinal patterns, if need be.” He scowled with distaste. “The Frontier barbarians think nothing of rearranging their bodies through the agency of a Naga parasite.”

  Iwata looked chastened. “Of course, Colonel. You are right.”

  Watanabe smiled. “You know, Major, there is among the Westerners an old and racist joke to the effect that they cannot tell us apart.”

  “No, sir. I didn’t know.”

  “Well, there is. But this time, at least, it was we who could not tell them apart from us.”

  Iwata looked puzzled. “Colonel, I do not understand.”

  “Never mind. Did you learn anything from the body we recovered?”

  “Very little, Colonel-san. We attempted to link with the parasite inhabiting the corpse, but it appears the creatures begin losing their internal cohesion shortly after their host’s death. We’d hoped to read the man’s memories at least, but—” He shrugged. “The technique is still in its infancy.”