Originator

by Joel Shepherd

  “SO2,” Vanessa called her fire support. “Fire.” A mark appeared on tacnet, accelerating as it went. The viewer at the window saw, eyes wide, and ran like hell. Vanessa kept her head down, sliding fast, leg entwined with the steel cord at speeds that would have shredded an unprotected leg. Below her, a missile streaked into the forty-ninth floor window, and a massive fireball blew out.

  She reached it four seconds later, pushing out with a hand then swinging in and head first. Hit the floor amidst smoke and flaming debris, fire retardant blasting from the ceiling, and cut the cord. And walked forward in formation, weapon ready, searching the impossible visibility. The walls seemed intact, the missile charge had been an airburst—the surrounding apartments occupied and as yet uncleared.

  Gunfire erupted from a hole in the wall, return fire shredded it. Vanessa pumped in a grenade, in no mood for compromise, and debris blasted back across the room. More gunfire from a new angle, and everyone hit the ground, rolling for cover, returning fire . . . fanatics to be fighting hard in these circumstances, and Vanessa remembered the explosives here and rolled up to dash down the corridor.

  Came face-to-face with someone in a doorway, blood streaked and wild eyed. Shoved them flying across the room and shot the next armed man through the head, a spray of brains across the wall, attention then to the woman on the bed. . . . Medical equipment, life support, bandaged sides. Half alive, it looked, but raising a gun at her with one hand. . . . Vanessa sidestepped and smacked it from her hand.

  Another explosion outside, then a huge one, smashing through the walls and deafening her audio. Gunfire, as the second team came through the corridor outside, having gained access from the neighbouring apartment. And tacnet showed one down and vitals unsteady. . . .

  “Galley’s down!” Azim was yelling. “Need a medic in here asap!”

  “I’m okay,” Galley replied dazedly. “Just winded.”

  “Clear! Clear, all clear! Level 49 is clear!”

  “Check those neighbouring apartments!” Vanessa yelled. “No blind spots! Clear it up!”

  “Vanessa,” came Sandy’s voice, “that’s a human bomb you’ve got there. Put her out.”

  Vanessa stared. The bandages were recent and bloody. On neighbouring tables were covered cases, perhaps for tools, perhaps medical. The life support was definitely medical, monitoring heart rate, blood pressure, just a small portable screen running a downloadable program.

  “I can’t put her out, I’m not equipped.”

  “Then shoot her before she self detonates.” The woman’s eyes were staring madly, lips trying to form some words beneath hearing. Some incantation. A shot from behind Vanessa blew half her head off, and Vanessa swore, turning away.

  “Sorry,” said Taga, not sounding a bit sorry. He stepped past her to check the rest of the room. “Still got a live one here?” Looking at the one Vanessa had pushed flying into the wall, head lolled, eyes closed.

  “Might not be rigged,” said Vanessa, walking away. Really wishing she hadn’t seen that last bit, her head pounding, an awful taste in her mouth. “Be nice to question one of them.”

  “The one that got Galley was rigged,” said Taga, moving to check the unconscious man, tearing away clothes to check for scars or bandages. “Just blew himself up.”

  “Sandy, if you’re right we’ve still got some loose in the building.” She walked into the hall, through showers of fire retardant and smoke, flashing lights and sirens from the building emergency systems. Someone killed the noise, mercifully. Here in the entry hall, all the door and wall were gone. Vanessa stepped past shattered remains into the corridor outside, and here lay Galley, on the point of entering when the human bomb had detonated. His helmet was still on because of the smoke, and Vanessa thought he was likely stunned rather than hurt—a GI, they got rattled by explosive concussion just like straights.

  “Got one,” came a call from farther down. A stairwell, tacnet informed her. “Heading downstairs, pulled a gun on me.”

  “Alive?” asked Vanessa.

  “Um . . . nearly.”

  “Dammit guys, Intel needs some more live ones if we’re gonna find the source.” As Azim and Wolder grabbed Galley under the arms and dragged him to the farside elevators, heading upstairs for some air. Vanessa headed into the neighbouring apartment door, smashed off its hinges by her second squad into an identical suite layout. The fire retardant poured down here too, a mother and father clustered in the kitchen hugging two terrified, screaming children . . . great. She strode to the smashed windows where the second squad had gained entry, disconnected rappel cables swinging in the breeze.

  “We’re gonna have them coming downstairs fast! Don’t let them get into the streets or we’ll . . .”

  “Too late!” someone shouted, with a blurred, jolting visual from somewhere on street level, a man in a long coat sprinting, bag in hand, from tower doors onto the cleared sidewalk. Cleared, except for several cops, who were now in the line of fire of other cops, yelling and shouting at each other to get down.

  Vanessa pulled her rifle up, sighting down the tower side as shots rang out, glass fracturing along the retail sidewalk, holographic displays imploding. . . . “Snipers!” she yelled. “Someone get me an angle!” Because she had none, she saw, sidewalk trees blocking the way, and banners for some upcoming parade strung across the road every thirty meters.

  “Got nothing!” came the return call.

  “I’m blocked!”

  And the cops, terrified at nearly hitting each other, were now recovering to aim at the running man’s back . . . only to find the street behind him still full of crowds clearing the area, and more cops doing crowd control with their backs turned.

  “Shoot him!” Vanessa yelled on police frequency. “This is SO1, shoot him now, he’s a bomb, he’ll take a hundred with him!” Someone fired, hitting a tree. Another shot, a window collapsed. “Fuck!”

  The running man plunged into crowds and cops. “He’s heading for the subway entrance!” A bomb in there could be worst of all, entire train platforms massacred. . . .

  “Hang on,” came Sandy’s voice. And tacnet showed her jumping, lightly armoured with no rappel line, off the top of the nearby three-hundred-meter-tall building. Spread-eagled as she fell, and aiming, rifle to shoulder.

  Exclamations from her soldiers watching. “No fucking way!” Ming summarised. But in free fall, the gaps between those cursed banners opened up, and the angle past the obscuring trees. A GI’s arm would brace steel-solid if need be, internal armscomp and weaponscomp aligning; she could see to millimetre precision exactly where the bullet would hit. Account in turn for a gathering 300-kph crosswind, downward velocity, deflection, five hundred meters range, on a single target amongst all those running, milling crowds. . . .

  Sandy fired. The man’s head snapped forward in a bloody spray. Sandy hit the road, hard enough that the crack! could be heard from Vanessa’s forty-ninth floor. Arms out to save weapon and upper armour from damage, one knee down and probably a hole in the road. Got up, cricked her neck, and began walking back, limping slightly where her armour leg had gone dead, worn now like a heavy trouser leg. Her actual leg, no doubt, was fine.

  “Gives me a hard-on,” said Johnathon from Vanessa’s side.

  “Yeah, me too,” said Vanessa.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “So this is what it looks like,” said Steven, lighting the holodisplay on the table. It showed another of his PT graphs—Psychological Topography—with the Ruben Star prominently displayed. The 3D lines that, when taken together, demonstrated a kind of technologically induced insanity. “Only I can do better than that. Look at this.”

  The graph was replaced by a 3D holograph of a human brain. Implants were in red, tendrils clawing, organic into the brain’s crevices. “This is a brain activity average compilation,” Steven explained. “Take all the terrorists’ brains that we could recover and that were still working . . .” a hard glance at Sandy; he’d warned her he needed more live
samples, “. . . and make an average of their activity profiles. What you’re looking at here is an average of FSA Agents’ brains, voluntarily given, of course. Similar combat augments, similar institutional life experiences, combat experience, tape teach, et cetera. And here is the average of the terrorists.”

  The image changed. “Son of a bitch,” Ari intoned. You didn’t need to be a neuroscientist to see the difference. A five-year-old could see it. The brain was different . . . well, the brain-average. Some sections were swollen to double normal size. Others were shrunken. One natural cavity seemed to have doubled in size.

  “Now these Pyeongwha guys had Neural Cluster Tech implanted at, what, fourteen?” Steven said. Ari nodded. “And I mean these are the fanatics, worst-case scenario, they locked themselves into an institution that was committed to creating a super-race, using a particular kind of uplink tech that they knew damn well was changing their brains. But they liked it. They thought it was a good thing.”

  Does an extremist know he’s extreme? Sandy wondered. Most extremists seemed to think they were normal and everyone else was nuts.

  “Average age here is about forty-eight,” Steven continued. “Often you find the younger ones are more extreme, life experience tends to be random, the longer you live, the more moderate most people become. Most,” he emphasised, as Sandy opened her mouth to object. She held her tongue. “But here we’re finding it gets worse. The technology doesn’t stop. It’s like water in the sand, once it’s begun to carve a channel, the channel just gets deeper and deeper, until it’s a canyon. More and more information passes along those brain pathways, and the others shrivel and die. You could put these guys in reeducation for ten years; I don’t think you could reverse this. They’re committed for life. The only thing that’ll stop them is a bullet.”

  “Well, that would keep the prison expenses down,” Ari offered. He glanced at Raylee, seated alongside in the dark, face lit by the holographic glow. She wasn’t smiling and was biting her lip.

  “Ari,” Ragi said quietly. “You think this is what PRIDE were doing here? Talking to these terrorists about their condition?”

  “Exchanging notes about the voices in their heads, sure,” said Ari. “Looks pretty clear, we know they were talking; I’ve even got some chat-room notes. They didn’t cover their tracks as well as they’d thought.” Unsurprising, Sandy thought, considering Ari was the one tracking them down. “PRIDE are fighting the League. That takes commitment, given how League treats rebels. Extremism’s a virtue for these guys, it looks like commitment, like giant brass balls. They’re even aware of League’s uplink tech problem, it’s becoming hard to miss, there’s outbreaks everywhere. But they don’t see it as some medical condition, they see it as League’s comeuppance. So they wanted to talk to other extremists with fun ideas about neural uplink tech, so naturally they talk to our Pyeongwha crazies . . . only they can’t go to Pyeongwha to do that because it’s kinda under Federation occupation, so they come here.”

  “Fun conversations those would be,” Steven offered. “You murdered a few hundred thousand nonbelievers, I killed a whole moon, let’s get together for breakfast.”

  Sometimes Sandy thought the small blond whiz kid was just a bit too excited about his field of work to think twice about what it actually meant.

  “Pity our one solid lead on a PRIDE agent got his head splattered all over a room before we could examine it,” said Ari. “Interesting to compare the brain scans.”

  “Oh, we’ve got data,” Steven assured him.

  “Reliable?”

  “Sure. We have sources, in League. They come through FedInt, but they’re reliable.”

  Ari’s face darkened at the mention of FedInt. “And?”

  Steven shrugged and put up a new image. Another brain scan. Nearly identical to the horror show it was replacing. “Averaged again,” Steven explained. “That’s why League’s falling apart, right there. The technology’s different to NCT, more advanced. But the effects are nearly identical. And League probably knew for decades and didn’t tell anyone.”

  “Same thing as Pyeongwha,” said Sandy. “They’re crazy, but they like their crazy.”

  “And boom,” Ari said flatly, “we’re all dead.”

  Silence in the room. It was entirely possible that Ari wasn’t wrong. For everyone. Mutually Assured Destruction didn’t deter ideologues. Ideologues weren’t frightened of dying, only of being proven wrong. And sometimes dying was the only way to avoid that. Sandy thought of her final years in the League’s horrid war, all the officers and soldiers still clinging to the rationales that had killed so many millions, desperate to prove that it had all been worth something. Recalled a staff HQ in chaos because some staffer, who had never fired a weapon in combat, had pulled the pin on a grenade while sitting at her desk. Lieutenant “Last Ditch” Maloney, they’d called her, because of her endless lectures about the need to fight till the end. So much for that, then.

  “So all the League’s like this now?” Raylee asked, pointing at the hologram. Sandy thought to ask what she was doing here, but wasn’t so rude as to ask.

  “No, just the extremists,” said Steven. “The degree of suggestibility implied in this model is . . . well, neighbours would be killing neighbours by now. You saw some of the Pyeongwha interviews. It got scary.”

  “Raylee found another terrorist,” Ari told them. “A dead one. Was killed a month ago before this whole thing started, but no one knew he was one, just another cold case until Ray went back over the records looking for clues. This guy was in a VR chat room, trolling for underground contacts with security access. He got into an argument with a guy, then tracked that guy down in real life and picked a fight with him in a bar. Only the guy turned out to be an augment, part-time bouncer, so he killed him, got off on self-defence.”

  “What was the argument about?” Steven asked curiously. “The Pyeongwha occupation?”

  Ari smiled and indicated for Raylee to speak. Raylee abandoned chewing her thumbnail. “Mitchi Wong. A popstar.” Steven, Ragi, and Sandy looked at each other blankly. None had heard of her. “She’s big in a few systems; she’s not even from Pyeongwha, but she has Pyeongwha parents and is big in Anjula. This chat-room guy said she wasn’t much of a singer. It escalated. That’s it.”

  “Goddamn,” Steven murmured. “Can I have your files for SuperPsych?”

  Raylee nodded. “Only found it yesterday, you’ll get it asap.”

  “Mitchi Wong Extremism,” said Sandy. “We’ve found a new standard.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  That morning, Poole came for breakfast. The kids were thrilled and chatted with him about all kinds of stuff, and were happy to have Sandy home in the morning for once. She’d been out all night, debriefing from the Bhubaneswar operation, and had only come home for food. Over cereal, fruit, and toast, she noted another priority FSA feed coming in.

  She opened and saw FOG was monitoring two new incoming ships. These had entered considerably closer to Callay than the last one and were now right on that previous vessel’s tail. She doubted the media would stay silent about it much longer and so opened the feed to the kitchen display so they could all see.

  “They’re chasing him,” Danya observed, as they all stared at the real-time graphic of trajectories across Callay’s spacelanes. “Can we hear audio?” Sandy looked at Poole. Poole gave a shrug. “They’re your kids,” that said. “Ship communications are always intercepted,” Danya reasoned. He spent a lot of time reading about these kinds of security issues. “It’s Tanusha, they’ll decode it, we’ll hear it eventually.”

  He was right, it was nearly impossible to narrowcast ship communications in heavily populated systems, someone would always intercept stray transmission, then feed it to others. Fleet encryption was heavy duty, but in Tanusha, that just gave them a few days’ lag before someone decrypted it. Another reason Fleet usually didn’t say much in populated systems, and in this system in particular.

  “Okay,” said Sandy.
“If anyone tells that I let you hear this, I’ll be in trouble.” Usually that was enough. She activated audio.

  “Okay, I’m getting weapons active.” The voice was Bursteimer’s, on the Runner Caribbean. The feed showed him burning hard on intercept, but the audio graphic showed a five-minute unadjusted time lag. Meaning that while Bursteimer was fifteen minutes light away from Callay, this communication was five minutes later than that, and the feed was replaying the last recorded transmissions, in order. “I’m getting pings. Comp profile says League, possibly EG-40 or 42.”

  Everyone looked at Sandy. “Destroyers,” she said, slowly chewing her toast, gazing at the projection above the kitchen bench. “Both of them.”

  “We are maxed out and running, projecting intercept in mid-zone-2, deflection mid 89 point three, probability slight. Fire grid linkup initiated, all protocols red, await my termination signal.”

  “League destroyers jumping into Callay’s system this deep is technically an act of war,” Sandy translated. “The whole system’s about to go red.”

  “Whoa,” said Danya, eyes wide. The kids had all stopped eating, staring and listening wide-eyed. Sandy kept chewing. She’d seen it a hundred times in the League, though usually from the other end, on board some incoming ship that scared the crap out of a system’s residents with some hostile approach like this. But it hadn’t happened to Callay through the entire thirty-year war, save for the usual false alarms. And the war was supposed to be nine years finished.

  “Captain Bursteimer’s the lead asset on the intercept,” she added. “He’s first responder on the time lag, so everyone coordinates off him. The armscomps will all talk to each other and start plotting fire tracks to cover as much of the League’s approach vector as possible. Then it becomes about guesswork and statistics, but at the very least they’ll make them dodge.”

  “What if they’re not enemy?” Svetlana wondered. “I mean, League’s enemy . . . but I mean what if they’re not hostile?”