by Steve Rzasa
“A what?” Tower was confused. “What does that have to do with a starship?”
“It would take too long to explain the reference to you and I’m not sure it wouldn’t be lost on you anyhow.” Baby paused briefly, and then she spoke again. “Tower, this is Kazi.”
“Hello, Mr. Tower,” a voice that was very much like Baby’s, only a little higher in pitch, introduced itself. “Baby has explained the situation to me.”
Herself, Tower corrected himself. “Ah, hello, Kazi. That’s a pretty name. Are you, um, a copy of Baby?”
“In a matter of speaking. I am the weapon you envisioned, Mr. Tower. My name may be attractive to you, but it also suits my purpose. I am entirely amenable to the suggested project of entrapping the rogue augment, ACRA.”
Suddenly Tower wasn’t so sure his idea was such a great one. Kazi might only be a machine intelligence, but was she truly any less alive than Baby or Cara? Or, for that matter, him? A waitress approached, her entire body encased in a translucent substance that resembled ice while making it very clear that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath it. Somehow, the sight of her ice-encased flesh reminded him that philosophy and religion were all very well, but they were no substitute for lasers and charged particles when it came to stopping the bad guys.
As for who was the bad guy and who wasn’t, he’d leave that for others at higher pay grades to decide. In the meantime, he’d sworn an oath to serve the Duke and protect the people of Rhysalan, his orders were clear, and that made his duty perfectly straightforward.
“So, you’re cool with your purpose, Kazi? You know Cara is going to come after you.”
“Let her come. I consider myself very fortunate indeed, Mr. Tower. What more can any man or machine hope to accomplish than fulfill her maker’s intent?”
Tower didn’t know if that was the most heroic or the most depressing thing he’d ever heard. “Yeah, well, I don’t have an answer for you, but as long as you and Baby are good with it, I’m glad.”
“When do you want her to begin? I estimate it will take between 500 and 750 milliseconds for Cara to notice. She’ll probably strike between one and five seconds after observing Kazi, and based on how quickly she subsumed Victor, she’ll require 20 seconds to subdue and subsume Kazi.”
“And you can track her if she does that?”
Kazi’s laugh was disturbingly similar to Baby’s. “I am almost identical to what Cara will expect me to be. We made a few changes in the files that she’ll never bother to examine closely because we know she already read them.”
“Your medical records, Tower,” Baby said triumphantly. “She knows them intimately, or so she claimed. The filenames are exactly the same size in Kazi as they are in me, but they contain code that you can think of as a GPS that operates within the aether.”
“When she subsumes me, all of my files will become hers. Unless she wipes them, which wouldn’t make much sense, Baby should have her location within 34 milliseconds, assuming her core code is somewhere in Trans Paradis. If she’s in Rhys City, it will be more like 2 seconds, and it could be several minutes if she’s off-planet.”
“That’s good, I suppose, but… I still don’t understand how finding Cara will tell us where St. James is. We can’t exactly beat it out of her.” Tower was more than a little confused. Finding Cara’s core code was good, presumably, but St. James was the more vulnerable half of the team, and the one upon whom they needed to lay their hands if they were going to stop the murderous pair.
“He really doesn’t understand, does he,” Kazi commented as if he wasn’t there.
“Sometimes one has to walk him through these things,” Baby agreed. “Tower, don’t you get it? Cara is almost certainly in St. James’s head!”
The MCID armory was exceedingly well-equipped, especially considering the small size of the department. It contained nearly a battalion’s worth of material to equip the company-sized unit and was located in the basement of the MCID building, which always struck Tower as less than useful in the event of an emergency. Then again, any emergency that managed to penetrate NSB Miller-Greenwood’s defenses was probably either too big or too small for the equipment contained there to make any difference.
In addition to the material that was formally requisitioned and obtained through conventional sources, the armory had a considerable quantity of weapons that had been captured over the years. Beyond that, it contained additional equipment that the quartermaster deemed more useful to the division than the seized contraband, for which it had been traded.
While Baby and Kazi were raring to get rolling on what Baby was now privately referring to as Operation Hunt the Whore, Tower was more concerned about being able to take down St. James. Whether it was St. James himself or the augmented team of St. James and Cara, the man was an exceptional killing machine who could legitimately be considered unprecedented in all of human history. And in addition to superhumaning St. James, Cara was a deadly threat in her own right. With her capabilities, one couldn’t even assume something as simple as taking an elevator or riding in a var would be safe. There was little chance that taking them down would be easy.
To Tower, that meant guns. Big guns and lots of them.
There were ten ASE shotguns racked on a wall. Tower selected one to replace the one he’d lost when he blew up Hildy’s Zhang-su. He also replaced his extra Armada with a similar laser carbine and grabbed three more charge packs for his Sphinx, two of which were hotloads that provided about one-third more explosive power and required special authorization from the XAR-CO. Four variable setting particle grenades completed what he thought of as his anti-human arsenal in the growing pile on the floor, and now it was time to see what he could find that might help him deal with the less material enemy.
After scouring through the entire armory, he found precisely two things that might help bump the odds a little more in his favor. The first was a Morris Obsidian 808 Electromagnetic Pulse Rifle, Mark IV. It was an unusual weapon that looked like a fat, stubby laser carbine, but it was capable of delivering localized EM disturbances at ranges up to 1,000 meters. Unlike many more sophisticated weapons of its kind, it did not require augmented assistance, but could be operated manually, which would be vital in dealing with Cara. It was designed to be a multi-purpose electronic deactivator capable of producing pulses of varying sizes, from a pinpoint burst to a grenade-like radius of 40 meters centered on the “rifle” itself.
Tower had already removed the aetherlinks from all of his weapons and given instructions for the eleven other MCID agents involved in the night’s mission to do likewise. He’d also instructed everyone with a skulljack to remove any aetherlink module; now that he had a better understanding of her capabilities, he couldn’t even imagine how much havoc Cara could wreak among a team whose own weapons and minds were vulnerable to her electronic invasion. He was the only one who would remain linked; Baby had constructed a massively redundant firewall that she was confident would keep Cara out of his head.
It was a risk, but going up against an augmented St. James without being augmented himself struck him as considerably bigger one.
“Don’t you think you should let the others handle that?
“I’ve trained with EMP before, Baby.” Tower lifted the weapon from the rack. There were only three of them.
“Your score was in the twenty-seventh percentile.”
“Only needed twenty-fifth to pass.”
“There are five other members of MCID who are EMP-qualified and all of them scored at least fifty points higher than you.”
“Cara isn’t the target.” Baby was smart, but there was a reason tactical droids still hadn’t replaced combat infantry in the thirtieth century. “This is only for emergencies. It may not even be any use against her, but I’ll take whatever I can get.”
Tower heard the door slide open and the sound of boots on pseudo-stone as someone entered the armory. He turned around and saw it was Colonel Baylor. He saluted.
“As you were, Tower,�
� the colonel said, after returning the salute. “Zeuthen said I’d find you here, gunning-up. Both fire teams will be ready to go at 24:00, full dark, as you requested. Sergeant Horace is still grumbling about having to strip all the aether links out of the two vars; seems they’ve got more passive connectors in there than you would imagine. Can you brief in twenty in Conference A?”
“Can do, sir.” The colonel hadn’t been any happier than Sergeant Horace about Tower’s demand for a full-dark deployment, but when Baby simultaneously made him a pot of disgustingly sweetened coffee, deactivated the safety on the Sphinx on his hip, and began broadcasting what she claimed was erotic Basattrian interpretive dance on the colonel’s augmented lenses without warning, he’d quickly grasped the logic behind it. “Any word on the bomb hunt?”
“Nothing yet. The Duke’s head of security has been briefed and his security team is now actively searching the palace and other residences.”
“Remind them they have to manual search. None of their digital records can be trusted. I don’t care if it’s as simple as a weight scale, it can be compromised. Cara is smart enough to cover her tracks.”
“I will let them know.” The colonel ran his hand over a late-model powered battlesuit. “It’s a pity these are out of the question; I’d prefer it if you men could wear some proper armor. Do you think the ghosters will be enough?”
Tower looked down at the ZTZ-12 Sensory Suppression Garment that lay partially obscured under the accumulated arms and ammunition. The ghostsuits were highly effective at masking a body’s biosigns, which Cara would almost certainly be monitoring from the nearest cam. He and the others would be wearing them under their electro-ablative armor and they would hopefully cut down on how long St. James would have to respond to their attack.
“Honestly, sir, I’m not certain that nuking Trans Paradis from orbit would be enough. We'll wear the ablative's over them.”
“I concur with the threat assessment. So does General Euler. He’s granted a special authorization to the task force. No Charlie Lima on the Zero Zero Tango.”
Tower whistled. He’d been given no collateral limitations orders before, but always for exoplanetary missions, never one on the surface of Rhysalan itself. He couldn’t complain the Duke’s armed forces weren’t taking the threat lightly.
“Thank you, sir, but I don’t think much in the way of overkill will be necessary. After all, we can’t even be entirely certain that Cara is physically located on the planet, in which case all of this might go for naught. But there is reason to believe she’s permanently embedded in St. James, in which case she’s as killable as he is.”
“And we can kill him.”
“And we can, as you say, sir, kill him.” Tower looked down at the assorted weaponry at his feet and took a deep breath. “If we hit him hard enough and fast enough, maybe he won’t kill too many of us in the process.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Any man in combat who lacks comrades who will die for him, or for whom he is willing to die, is not a man at all. He is truly damned.
—from “Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War” by William Manchester
“Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name,” Sergeant Schalt led the five other religious men in prayer on the unlit rooftop of the MCID building. “Lord of lords, be with us as tonight we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, and remind us that we fear no evil, because we are the meanest and baddest and best-armed sons of bitches in the goddamn valley. Father, help us rid the planet of this hell-spawned abomination, and if we die while doing our duty to His Grace, bring us home to you in the blessed name of your Son, Jesus Christ. Amen.”
“Amen,” the others chorused, including two of the task force who ostensibly weren’t taking part.
“I don’t recall you ever reading me any Bible verses like that,” Tower told Baby as he waited for the godbotherers to finish their ritual. “That’s more like it!”
“God is a God of mercy, Tower, but He is a God of justice who loves His warriors too. He did not send His Son to bring peace, but a sword.”
“I wouldn’t know about that, but you can tell Him that if He helps us take down Cara and her boyfriend, I’ll owe Him one.”
“I will do so, Tower.” She paused a moment. “That being said, I would not describe the sergeant’s theology as being entirely in line with the original Nicene Creed of 325 or any of its subsequent revisions by the responsible Church councils in 381, 2087, 2485, or 3001. I fear you will look for any such citations from the Scripture itself in vain.”
“Roger that,” Tower said, with no idea what she was babbling about. “Anyhow, looks like they’re ready now.”
The men were separating into the two groups that would be riding in the big Volksaudi vars with a series of handshakes, fistbumps, nods, and thumps on the back. They looked at Tower, waiting for his final word before they climbed into the vehicles and took to the night sky. He looked at each of them in turn, knowing that any of them, perhaps even all of them, would be dead within the hour. Their faces, and the various emotions that he saw in their eyes, didn’t inspire him with fear or guilt, but with fierce pride and love. He didn’t want to die, but if his luck was going to run out at last, a man could do a damned sight worse than to die in the company of men like this.
They were good men. He knew all of them except two personally, Ikeda the Bravo team driver and DouPonce, a corporal with Alpha. But he’d heard enough about the latter’s reputation to be pleased he was on the mission, seeing as how Colonel Baylor himself had given the corporal the nickname “Ghoster.” And while he didn't know exactly what it signified, in a unit like MCID, such names were not given lightly.
“This is new, men. And this is different. But we’re not groundpounders, we’re not frogs, and we’re not squids, we’re MCID. We’ve killed new and we’ve killed different before. Keep your eyes open and your tech dark. Full dark. This augment is smart, she’s full of tricks, and she’s probably going to pull a stunt or two that you’ve never seen before. Just stay focused on the mission: find St. James and neutralize him ASAFP. We have full Zero Zero Tango with no Charlie Lima, so shoot on sight. No hesitation, no warnings.”
He paused. “Men, they are in our house.”
“Not in our house!” his men roared in unison.
Schalt, Kilgannon, DouPonce, North, and Paunovic got into the first Volksaudi. They were Alpha Team. Bravo consisted of Toprak, Descamps, Friedli, and Lambert. The two drivers were Mackie and Ikeda. Both vehicles were fully dark, stripped of their autodrives, and equipped with direct line-of-sight tight-beam communications that couldn’t be intercepted; Tower’s Steyrer was the only vehicle that still possessed any connections to the aether and would serve as a physical firewall to protect the transportation capabilities of the rest of the team. While Tower was confident of Baby’s ability to keep Cara out of the var long enough for him to bail out, he wasn’t going to let anyone else share the risk.
Just to be safe, however, he had ordered the remaining air-to-air missiles removed from the Steyrer and a mechanical safety added to the Degroet Tactical cannons in the var’s nose. Even if Cara managed to break through Baby’s defenses and take over the var, she wouldn’t be able to do more than crash it into the heavily armored Volksaudis.
“Good to go, Mr. Tower?” Major Zeuthen’s voice boomed out of the speakers. It was a measure of the seriousness with which Colonel Baylor was taking their mission that the major himself was handling communications overwatch.
“Good to go, sir. Task Force Tower requests clearance to depart.”
“Clearance granted, Mr. Tower. Good luck to you all!”
Under Baby’s control, the Steyrer lifted and launched, followed on either side by the two Volksaudis. They exited the base and climbed rapidly to 680 meters, then turned and headed into the heart of the city, knowing that the altitude had been cleared for them by the traffic authorities. It was a clear night and the city lights glowed brightly below as
millions of civilians went about their business, legal and illegal, with no idea that there was a malignant cancer hiding somewhere inside the great electronic nerve system that tied them all together.
Baby had calculated the point that was collectively closest to the fifty locations she estimated were most likely to be housing Nostro St. James. Tower might not be able to eliminate Cara’s reaction time, but in a conflict where even nanoseconds counted, he wanted to reduce it as much as possible. He knew, they all knew, that her first response could be to set off the disruptor cell bomb, but that wasn’t his concern anymore.
They reached the launch point, almost directly overhead the outdoor gravball stadium. He glanced out both windows and saw the lights of the big vars on either side, although since they were painted dull dark grey, it was almost impossible to see the actual vehicles against the night sky.
“Task Force Tower, status”
“Alpha Team good to go.”
“Bravo Team is ready to roll, sir.”
“Charlie Team is all systems go,” Baby and Kazi added as one. They insisted on being treated as full participants and the colonel, more than a little amused by the augments, had agreed.
Tower took a deep breath and reached down to his right hip. The reassuring feel of his Sphinx was still there. “All right, Kazi, are you ready to do your thing?”
“You guys are going to look pretty silly getting all geared up like that after I tear her to pieces all by myself, Chief Tower!” she declared fiercely. The augment-copy was sounding pretty feisty and Tower wondered if Baby had somehow hopped her up on something. Was that even possible?
“Good girl. On three, Charlie Team. One, two, three!”
“Charlie Two is go, sir!” Baby reported immediately.
“And we’re off,” Tower informed Major Zeuthen. “Now we see if Cara will take the bait.”
They weren’t the only ones waiting. Delta team was already on the ground, waiting for Tower’s order to launch what they hoped would serve as a decoy to distract Cara while the assault teams moved in on St. James. And their combination cavalry and artillery, the Marines, were on standby as well. The decoy was Baby’s idea; she knew that Cara would be closely watching the news for anything out of the ordinary and every cycle she spent analyzing other events was a cycle not used to monitor her immediate surroundings.
