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Mercedes lay her head back on his shoulder and closed her eyes. "What exactly is a rail gun?"
"It's a device for accelerating bullets and missiles at very, very high speeds, using electromagnetism," he explained.
"Sort of a particle accelerator for really big particles?"
"Ummm, yeah, that's a fair analogy. Though as you can tell, our rail gun there still can't throw stuff as fast as a particle accelerator."
"Ummm." Mercedes nibbled on his ear. He supposed he deserved that, for what he had done to her earlier.
Reggie continued to look at the screen.
In a moment Mercedes sat up. "This really fascinates you, doesn't it?"
Reggie reached his hand behind her head, grabbed her hair, and pulled her close for a serious kiss. When they came up for air, he turned back to the screen. "I'm sorry, but it really is amazing, you know. It saved millions of lives." He zoomed the view back out, so they could see the entire Everest plateau.
Mercedes laughter had a tinkling quality as she asked, "How did they ever get it up there?"
Reggie shook his head. "It just doesn't seem possible, does it?" He turned to face her, giving her his most serious, sincere look. "It must have been done by aliens."
Mercedes clapped. "The same ones that did the pyramids and the crop circles?"
"Of course." Reggie narrowed his eyes. "Don't you believe me?"
Mercedes reached slowly, carefully across his chest. Then, with a sudden lunge, she slapped the button on his palmtop. The screen shut down.
Reggie yelled, "Hey!" but Mercedes had already turned her attention to the nape of his neck. As the vampiress closed her lips upon him, he yelled again . . . but this time the cry was weak, too weak to summon help—even if he had really wanted it.
Mercedes pushed him back into the sofa. Reggie tried to complain again, but this time his response was muffled as Mercedes' mouth closed on his. He put his arms around her and stopped complaining.
* * *
Minitanks and Destroyers jammed the sandstone corridor. Jessica turned, ran down another hall, only to find the members of her team, dead at the dead end. She could not see any of their faces, but they all cried out to her. She ran again, and this time the corridor was empty, empty, and she was lost, no matter how she twisted and turned.
A voice echoed in the narrow halls. "Jessica, it's the General." The voice belonged to Trudy; at least Jessica had finally left the Boyfriend from Hell behind. She opened her eyes. "Okay, Trudy, put him on. But do not let him see me."
"Of course not." The wallscreen opposite her bed winked to life.
Jessica rubbed her eyes. "General. Thank God you woke me up."
The General's face on the wallscreen in her bedroom switched instantly from one of apology to one of satisfaction. "Anything to help you out, Jessica." He paused while she gathered her wits. "I just received some remarkable news. I thought you might want to share it. Join me at the Colorado Springs Burn Center in half an hour."
Jessica started to ask how she'd get to Colorado Springs from western Arizona in thirty minutes, when she heard the whine of a skycar descending.
The General continued. "I sent a rocket courier for you, it should be there any moment."
Jessica laughed despite herself. "Right, General."
The trip was a whirlwind. She forgot to bring Solomon, which left her chagrined because MacBride never would have left Sol behind. Her failure was probably just as well for the parrot, though—birds tended to get awfully cranky if they didn't get a full night's sleep.
The ship hurtled through the air faster than sound. Jessica barely had time to play the obvious guessing game with herself. What could be such good news at a hospital? How could any news compensate for the loss of Morgan MacBride? Had they somehow brought him back from the dead? And if not, why the fuss?
Yet when she landed on the roof of the burn center, the General greeted her with a smile that looked to burst like a ripe watermelon if he did not share the news soon. "This way." He pointed to an elevator.
The elevator stopped a few floors down. Together they walked down the bright white corridor; the General's hard leather shoes clicked with every step, and the sound echoed off the walls and the sterile metal equipment that gave a hospital its characteristic starkly cold feeling. He was in a hurry, and Jessica had trouble keeping up with him.
They came to a closed door. A soldier stood at attention. "Who ordered the guard posted?" the General asked.
The soldier saluted sharply. "General Neldner asked for volunteers, sir. We thought it only fitting."
The General nodded. "At ease, Lieutenant." He shook his head. He smiled once more at Jessica and opened the door.
Jessica stepped through timidly. A curtain obscured the patient's face, and the bedsheets draped most of the rest. All she could see at first was a strong yet delicate right arm.
Jessica walked slowly around the curtain. When she saw who occupied the bed, she stopped dead in her tracks. "CJ," she whispered in stark disbelief. She could see now that the rumpled sheets had hidden the missing legs.
"No need to whisper," the General said, probably in an effort to convince himself, since he was speaking very softly too. "She's still in a coma."
Jessica turned to him with eyes of wonder, questioning.
The General explained. "The captain of the rescue ship knew they couldn't get to her in time—you know, a stealthed ship can't punch a lot of acceleration—so he launched all his life pods on a course to put them between her and Shiva. Think of it as a shield made of life pods." He shrugged. "It sort of worked. Didn't stop the radiation, of course, but it blocked most of the heat and light of the blast." He shook his head. "How she avoided getting hit by a fifty-ton meteor of Shiva armor as the ship came apart, we'll never know. The rescue ship did take a hit, wrecked it good." He laughed. "The captain and the crew all got medals of course." Another pause interrupted the story. "Anyway, the radiation wasn't as bad as it might have been. We used three radical experimental treatments on her, one to flush the radioactive isotopes, one to accelerate full cell replacement, and one to kill the secondary cancers caused by the accelerant." He shook his head. "It seems likely she'll survive."
Jessica looked at CJ again. There was something wrong . . . she walked around to the other side of the bed and gasped. She held her hands to her eyes.
"Like I said, the life pods only stopped most of the heat and light. But the pods vaporized in the blast. CJ still got a bit of the flash."
Jessica stared at the left side of CJ's face, then back at the General. "A little bit of the flash? The whole left side of her face is gone!" She continued the inspection. "Along with the whole left side of her body!"
The General came around the bed. He folded his hands on her shoulders. "Just the skin. Her left side is covered with synthaskin for the moment; the doctors assure me growing and grafting replacement skin will be straightforward compared to other measures already taken." A low guttural sound came from the General's chest. "We have no way of replacing her eye as yet, however."
Jessica frowned. "Missing both legs, an arm and an eye. She'd be better off dead."
Anger clouded the General's expression. "Oh, really, Jessica? You sure? Think CJ would agree?"
Jessica rocked back on her heels. She'd never heard the General angry before. He could be really scary when he wanted to be.
And to be fair, he was right. CJ wouldn't think of dying. CJ would not see the three-quarters-empty glass of her own body. She would pronounce it one-quarter full. "When's she going to be able to answer the question on her own, General?"
Another shrug accompanied the response. "The doctors say she's pretty much fixed now. The only thing she still needs is the will to fight it through."
"CJ? The will to fight?" Jessica howled in laughter. She laughed and laughed, until the tears ran down her cheeks. "I suppose I'd better stop in tomorrow. I expect she'll be up and around by then. If we don't put her to work right away, she'll d
rive the nurses crazy." She thought about all CJ's eccentricities, all the ways C. J. Kinsman would try to drive her crazy, and her laughter changed pitch. It was going to be a long five years till the next Shiva. "Do the people in this hospital know how to make a chocolate malt? They'd better get cracking."
Appendix
by Reggie Oxenford
First of all, I would like to thank the author of this historical work for the opportunity to set a few matters straight. With the experience of having been born long before me, the author has assured me that, even at the turn of the millennium, it was not clear to everyone that technology would lead us to the world in which we now live. So, for anyone who thinks that the emergence of our present-day life was always obvious, I thought I'd point out some of the early works that appeared on the Web back then, describing the first crude attempts to create the most commonplace aspects of our society. These pages should be easy to access through the historical Web archive of your choice.
The Skycar: The earliest work on the skycar was done by Moller International, described at: http://www.moller.com
The Roton: The earliest work on the roton was done by HMX Inc. The roton can be found at: http://www.hmx.com/roton.html
Capability-Based Security: The author informs me that back in those days many writers based their stories on the idea that all the computers in the world would forever be easily compromised by hackers. Rubbish. As everyone knows today, the ubiquitous deployment of capability-based security abolished these concerns. A quaint introduction to these tenets is found at: http://www.communities.com/company/papers/security/
Early work on distributed, secure smart contracts and ecommerce using such security can be found at: http://www.erights.org
Idea Futures and 'castpoints: In the early days of the Web, the 'castpoints that today underpin much of the economy were considered to be forms of gambling and were outlawed. Incredible but true. To learn about the early ideas about idea futures, go to: http://hanson.berkeley.edu/ideafutures.html
To see one of the first Web implementations of an idea futures market (without money! It would have been gambling if people had used really money, right?! Such bloody foolishness), go to: http://www.ideosphere.com/fx-bin/ListClaims
Bidirectional links, link types, filters, detectors, and other standard Web features: In the first implementation of the Web, these standard features did not exist. I know, I know, it's almost incomprehensible to imagine using the Web without bidirectional links, but that really is how our ancestors worked. Imagine what remarkable people they must have been, to achieve so much with such crude and primitive tools. To see early ruminations about how hypertext might work with these standard features, go to: http://www.skyhunter.com/hyper.htm
To see some of the first experiments in upgrading the Web to support these features, go to: http://crit.org/index.html
If you have trouble finding any of these pages in your Web archive, to find other pointers go to: http://www.the-earthweb.com
THE END
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Earthweb
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Appendix