Earthweb

by Marc Stiegler

  Morgan stared at the Angel Leader. "You're a woman!" he accused her.

  "Yes, sir!" she repeated, with the barest hint of challenge in her voice.

  Morgan continued to stare for a long moment. "Dismissed. See you at Mission Training Alpha at oh-nine-thirty." He lifted himself up, swung into his wheelchair, and barreled out of the room so swiftly that the members of his new team were still staring as he disappeared into the hall.

  Morgan knew exactly who to strangle for this, and he wasted no time. His target was only a short distance away. He rolled through the outer office, where the military aide barely had time to look up before Morgan crashed into the inner door, slamming it open in his rage. He rolled forward and crashed into the desk. General Samuels sat quietly with a raised eyebrow, watching his visitor, his fingers steepled in front of him. He had clearly expected Morgan's arrival. "What can I do for you, MacBride?" he asked, too casually.

  "She's a woman!" Morgan sputtered.

  "That's a tautology," the General replied.

  "We cannot send a woman on a suicide mission!" Morgan practically screamed.

  "You are indeed a Neanderthal, Morgan. You knew that, didn't you?" The General clicked his tongue. "Well, I won't tell anyone if you won't."

  Morgan slammed the desk with his fist. This time the parrot was taken by surprise, and had to flap for balance. "You can't do this!"

  "Ah. I can't. Indeed." He cleared his throat. "Perhaps, before you go on, you should read C. J. Kinsman's bio. If you had done so before bursting in here, you would have found that, despite your old-fashioned though honorable opinion, I must send her." Samuels rose from the desk, towering above the still raging Angel Controller. "But don't bother, Morgan. I know you don't like to read, so let me just tell you about her. She's the best person we've ever fielded against a Shiva." He held up his fingers and started ticking them off. "First of all, you should have heard of her before. She won the gold medal in the triathlon two years ago." He ticked another finger. "She has five percent more endurance than Whitaker did." Whitaker had been the Angel Two Leader against Shiva IV and they'd thought they'd never get anyone that remarkable again.

  Morgan interrupted. "What about her strength, Samuels? How big a load can she carry?"

  The General continued unperturbed. "Whitaker was twenty percent stronger than CJ," he admitted, "but she's got an IQ of one-eighty. She's smarter than you are, Morgan, and some of her highest marks are in spatial and mechanical analysis." He ticked one last time, closing his hand into a fist. "And here's the kicker . . . she has the fastest reflexes in history. Period. She can devise and execute a new combat strike faster than a mongoose can snatch a cobra." The General smiled wryly. "We have a separate research effort going on just to try to figure out what's different in her neural transmitters. She is so good, in fact, that she'd be a freak in any age except our own."

  Morgan was listening now, past the rage, and into a pensive contemplation of the possibilities. The General knew it was time to deliver the coup de grace. "In short, Morgan, there's never been anybody with a chance like this. Together, the two of you can do it. Morgan, this time you can bring somebody home."

  Morgan sat motionless in the wheelchair. A part of him felt the rage bubble back up, knowing that Samuels was manipulating him, using his weakness against him. But he knew the General was right.

  Morgan's mission differed from the Angel mission in one small detail. He'd never revealed the difference to any Angel. He never would.

  The earnest young people of the Angel team went forth merely to destroy Shiva. In that goal, Morgan's mission mirrored theirs. But beyond that, Morgan needed to bring those earnest young people home again. He had never yet succeeded. CJ might be his only hope. "You win, Samuels," he growled.

  "Thank you," the General replied, as the sorrow slid across his eyes like a nictitating membrane. Morgan recognized the look, and immediately understood.

  In all probability, they had just imposed a death sentence on a remarkable young woman.

  * * *

  Jessica watched impatiently as Morgan and the General went at it. Her monitor displayed the confrontation in living color, courtesy of a vidcam set up in General Samuel's office. Eavesdropping, even at the General's order, made her twitchy, especially when she was listening to arguably the two most important men on Earth in the middle of a private row. But the General had insisted that she study every aspect of Morgan MacBride's life, and the General himself had granted her the viewing rights in his private office. Of course, her viewing rights ended automatically when MacBride left the room.

  But for now she'd forgotten her discomfort with the vidcam arrangement. She was steaming with disbelief.

  How could Morgan MacBride question a person's qualifications just because she was a woman? What was MacBride's problem, anyway? Hadn't he ever met a woman soldier before?

  It didn't make any difference. She'd been watching the world's most revered hero for less than an hour, and she already disliked him. She couldn't do the job.

  She watched as Morgan spun his wheelchair out of the room. Her view cut to the hallway, following him. The next important episode in Morgan's life would start in about half an hour. This would give her the time she needed.

  She walked briskly down the hall, passing Morgan with a curt glance. The parrot gave her a wolf whistle, but Morgan was distracted and hardly noticed that there was another human being in the hall. She reached the General's office and entered almost as forcefully as Morgan had. She could see that the General's aide had a very difficult job.

  With a disarming smile, Jessica slid passed the aide, a young man in uniform. The aide tried to intercept her, but her smile penetrated his defenses easily, throwing his attack into disarray. In the end he threw up his hands and let her go past. She wondered if she had just gotten the kid into trouble, though he did smile back at Jessica, briefly, as Jessica forced the door to the inner office.

  The General had not yet returned to his seat. He looked at her in mock dismay. "Et tu, Brute?" he said, with a hint of humor.

  "I can't do it, General," she said in flat tones. "I cannot think like him."

  The General pursed his lips. "Sit down, Jessica." He pointed to a chair.

  She didn't like being ordered around, but he was so charming she found she couldn't refuse, any more than she could have said no when he demanded that she fly out here this morning. She wondered if this would be a recurring theme in their relationship. She was not going to stand for that kind of treatment. Who did he think he was anyway?

  She sat in the chair as she was told.

  The General owned a quiet office, with plush beige carpet and walls lined with old bound-paper books. She'd read paper books before, but not often, and not recently. It was quaint, really. But as the decor of office of the most powerful man in history, the room's elements suggested strength and ancient wisdom. She felt safe in this room.

  The General returned to his chair as well. He picked up his coffee cup, wrapping his hands around it like it was his last hope of salvation, then made himself set it down again. She saw a curious design embossed on one side of the cup: a red dartboard with a small but glaringly bright bull's eye. Five blue dots of varying sized marked hits, scattered randomly across the target. None of the hits had struck near the center. Despite the shortcomings of the markers, however, the caption read, "High Accuracy." Strange—how could you have high accuracy without hitting the center of the target?

  Jessica brought her attention back to the General, who was now speaking in abrupt, military tones. "Ever had a real enemy? Someone determined to block your every move, thwart every plan and goal?"

  No, not . . . uh, Charley? Jessica thought back. Charley Wenig. Charley had been a division chief for FabChip Consulting. Polished, not unlike the General. Very, very smart, again like the General. But with the delicate moral rectitude of a copperhead.

  Jessica had been brought in to FabChip to stop the interdivisional slugfests, the internecine c
ross-group stealing of hot employees by promising salary increases just for switching teams, and worse, the stealing of customers by spreading rumors about the other divisions. FabChip was its own worst enemy, and its competitors were starting to figure that out.

  Charley had loved it at FabChip. The company had a great customer list, and Charley had figured, why go through the agonizing, usually unsuccessful effort of attracting new customers when plenty of in-house customers made easy pickings? Charley had loved the internal corporate disputes—he thrived on them. From the first day he had known that his vision of FabChip and hers could not coexist.

  For her part, it had taken Jessica a while to glean the same understanding. She learned about a series of not-quite-lies Charley was telling people about her, just about the same time she deduced when and how the corporate fighting had begun. Trouble had started brewing shortly after Charley had joined the company. Charley had created the environment he so enjoyed working in.

  Never in her life had Jessica spent so much mental energy gaming out a single person. By the time she forced his departure from FabChip, she could quote the words he would say in meetings she did not attend, much to the amazement of the people who actually heard them. One devout follower of Charley's who later switched sides had told her that, toward the end, Charley had hired a team of sweepers to check for bugs.

  The General watched as she reminisced. "You never played pinball better, did you, than with a person you detested utterly."

  Jessica sat forward in her chair. "It was different."

  "It is always different. But don't tell me you can't game out Morgan just because you don't like him. Study him till he can't twitch an eye without your knowing it before it happens. Figure out how to beat him at his own game. How would you defeat Morgan MacBride if you were Shiva V, Jessica? And how would you defeat a Shiva that could defeat MacBride? Tell me that, Jessica, and our children's children will sing songs about you for a thousand years."

  She sat quietly in her chair, trying to look unconvinced. She just wanted to live through the next month.

  The General stood up, and the full power of his personality pressed upon her. "Jessica, when we picked you out of millions of candidates because of your success at Angel's Gambit, I had my doubts that you were the right one for this job. But when you told me about human pinball . . . You have all the right characteristics—the speed of thought, the innate tactical and strategic ability, and most of all, the empathic people-reading skills. This is your destiny, Jessica Travis. Accept it. Grasp it with both hands. Make history." He picked up his coffee cup and took a sip. "And go do it in your own office, so I can get some work done."

  Her mind turned back to the night before, the moment when Shiva blew up and she knew she had won. She remembered her feeling that, if she had the chance, she could destroy that bastard machine. She felt calm. She rose, and stood with straight-backed precision of Samuels himself. "Very well, General." Her skirt swished gently as she departed.

  * * *

  Missile Commander Anatoly Vinogrado concluded that being in the lifepod itself was scarier than dying. He huddled there in the recommended fetal position. He cursed the people who wrote the instruction manual and the people who designed the pod, even though they might have saved his life.

  He did not yet know whether they'd saved his life, because he had no way of knowing whether anyone was in a position to rescue him. The pod was pitch-black, blacker than space itself. It had no windows. It was a simple shell of a styroflow that now totally encased him and, incidentally, locked him in the fetal position that he had taken as he popped the thing around his skinsuit. The styroflow—liquid at that point—billowed around him, forming an egg-shaped container that protected him from the cold of space.

  He had no idea how long he'd been here. He couldn't even tell how much oxygen he had left in his skinsuit's minuscule tank, much less how far away a rescue vehicle was—if indeed any rescue vehicles had themselves survived. At least they had a better chance of surviving than Vinogrado's cruiser had had. The Earth Defense Ship Canberra had been part of Task Force Eight, with the mission to attack Shiva V with a huge volley of missiles. The mission had not, however, included a requirement to destroy Shiva V. They knew they couldn't do that, not after the pounding Second Fleet had taken trying to ambush the damn thing as it passed the asteroid belt. No, Task Force Eight's goal was merely to distract it from the real attack—an attack that took the shape of a small dead-black cylinder with five men on board, the Argo, sneaking up on Shiva's docking bay.

  Despite his discomfort, despite the screaming of his muscles to find any slight movement he could make to ease the cramps, Vinogrado smiled wolfishly at the darkness. He personally had done better than all of Second Fleet—one of his missiles had penetrated all of Shiva's defenses. He had hooked in with a two-megaton warhead and gotten a direct hit on one of the plasma-beam tubes. The tubes were necessarily weak points in the hull, openings that ran hundreds of kilometers deep into the guts of the ship. A two-megaton burst on Shiva's bare armor, ten klicks thick, would have merely scratched the surface. But hitting the tube as he had just had to cause some real internal damage. Really. He clung to the belief that he had hurt Shiva V as the long wait in the black silence of the lifepod robbed him of hope. That one hit was his only real testament to having fought with all his might.

  So many of his friends had no testament at all. Every assault on a Shiva was a suicide mission. Less than a quarter of the ships in Second Fleet had survived their all-out attempt to destroy Shiva V. He didn't know the casualty rate for Task Force Eight, but judging from the explosions that dotted his combat screen while he was coaxing his missiles into detonation range, he had the cold, sick feeling that their losses had been even higher. Only the Angels themselves had a lower survival rate than the men who covered the Angel approach. A typical feint at a Shiva to camouflage the Argo's arrival cost as many lives as the Battle of Stalingrad.

  Gloom descended further on him as he reflected upon friends he had lost.

  Suddenly the lifepod jerked, half-spun, stopped, and bounced. It could only mean one thing—they'd found him!

  He could hear the high-pitched squeal of ripping styro as they tore the lifepod apart. The instruction manual said that he should close his eyes; the brightness of the light would be painful after his prolonged sojourn in perfect blackness. He disregarded the manual and watched for the light.

  The manual writers had been right. The light was excruciatingly painful. It was the most wonderful experience of his life.

  Chapter Three

  T minus Twenty-one

  CJ trotted easily down the middle-ring corridor of the center-level. The three surviving members of her team followed closely behind. As she passed a missile storage bay and a power substation she had a nagging feeling that she had seen this layout before.

  Finally, in the distance, she could make out a half-cylindrical mound running across the corridor. She knew it was not merely a random obstacle. Rather, she was looking at part of a plasma beam tube—a cylinder that flared slowly as it extended from the core to the hull of the ship. The full tube diameter was probably about eight feet, but only a four-foot wide section protruded through the floor.

  When CJ saw the plasma tube, in that location, she knew where she was. She was in a Shiva II mockup. Like most of the training facilities, it was scaled down by a factor of ten; it had just as many combat robots as a real Shiva, but it didn't have the vast miles of distance to run—so you could pack a full day's campaign into a couple of hours. CJ and her teammates would get plenty of practice running in their exoskeletal armored frames on the racetracks before the fighting.

  They hugged the inner wall as they ran. Then Morgan's voice came through her earpiece: "CJ, hall middle."

  CJ hopped to the center of the corridor even as she considered the consequences of running a Shiva II mockup. The good news was that there shouldn't be any advanced robots in the simulation. She had wondered why they hadn
't encountered anything more challenging that a roboguard; now she knew.

  She had sprinted barely three steps before she saw an intersection coming up. At the same time she saw why Morgan had moved her to the center. She could just make out the shoulder of a roboguard lurking around the corner.

  She did not hesitate; she raced down the hall and swept around the corner, hitting the roboguard with the blunt end of her spike even as Morgan commanded, "CJ, freeze!"

  The spike, a pole almost as long as CJ was tall, with a sharp tip and a hook at one end, struck the robot in the center of its breastplate. The machine took no damage. No surprise there—the breastplate was the machine's thickest armor. But the force of her charge had knocked the machine back. It swayed on both legs and whirled all four arms in a desperate effort to regain its balance. CJ quickly flipped her staff and jammed the sharp tip beneath the plate. She thrust and levered, and the roboguard split apart with a shattering crack.

  Unfortunately, the roboguard had not been alone. CJ already knew what Morgan was now telling her team: "Two minitanks, Mark II. Akira, sweep. Lars, decoy. Axel, ambush." Morgan said nothing to CJ. She guessed that Morgan had assumed she would be killed by the minitanks before he could even give her instructions.