Tony Daniel

by Metaplanetary: A Novel of Interplanetary Civil War

  And—oh, yes—a streak of sadism, of course. Her lover came into the bedroom flush and excited.

  “I have beaten Haysay to within an inch of his life,” said Amés. “It was . . . exquisite.”

  “I can smell it on you,” Carmen said. This was, of course, untrue, but she could feel his power, the electric nature of his presence, that she always felt, and somehow could sense that a portion of that power had been discharged.

  Amés gazed at her and she stretched herself out on the bed. He reached down and ran his hand through her long black hair, then pulled it tight.

  Carmen gasped. Amés grasped her leg with his other hand and, still pulling her hair, rolled her over on her stomach. Standing, she was a good seven inches taller than he was, but lying down now, he seemed to loom over her, like an ominous shadow. She heard him drop his pants. And then he pulled her legs apart and was inside her. He was short enough to remain standing up while he took her as she lay on the bed.

  As always, she thought of his power. Life and death belonged to him. In Carmen’s mind, he was, simply, her king—and she was his subject. It was a relationship of total submission.

  When he was done, he pulled out as quickly as he had gone in. Amés pulled up his pants and went to sit at the piano that Carmen kept in her quarters just so he might play it if he willed. She, herself, was not musical. He ran through some scales lightly while she gathered a robe about her and went to sit in the chair beside the piano. She called up fresh strawberries from the grist and sucked their juice for moisture. She knew she looked very alluring, in the height of her beauty. She fingered the choker of diamonds set in beaten platinum that Amés had given her, and wondered how soon she could get him back into bed again.

  “The planets move about their orbits with stately indifference,” Amés said. He leaned an elbow on the piano and only played with his left hand. “But I will have them. It won’t be a metaphor. Up in the heavens, there I will be. All the wanderers, the roaming stars, will have my name upon them. I will look to the sky, behold that it is mine, and smile.”

  Amés struck a low bass minor chord.

  “What do you think?” he said. “That is the book to an opera I’m working on.”

  “The phrase ‘It won’t be a metaphor’ is a bit of a dead note, don’t you think?” Carmen answered.

  “I need it to fit the timing of a bridge,” he said. “But perhaps you are right. One thing about opera: You must always keep a firm grasp of the obvious, then state it and restate it.”

  “Yes,” she said, then deliberately dropped a strawberry into her robe and reached to retrieve it, wiping the juice along the curve of her breast as she did so.

  Amés looked on, distracted. “Speaking of opera, how does it go in your little backwater province out—where is it? Around Mars? New Caledonia.”

  “Very amusing,” said Carmen. “And it was an ill day. I lost a plaything.”

  “So I heard,” said Amés. “Young Busquets is to be married.”

  He had done it again!

  How could the man know about the inner workings of New Catalonian society so intimately—and everything else, as well? She felt once again the overwhelming sensation that she was merely a character in his life, a bit player in his production—and Amés owned the theater as well! As a child, she had often wondered if she were the only truly living person, and everyone else really robots who turned themselves off when she was not present. Strange to find that you, yourself, were one of the robots and that someone else is the real person whom you are designed to serve and obey.

  “Why you persist in those Catalán games when you have already taken the pot is beyond me, Carmen,” he said.

  “I enjoy rubbing it in,” she said. She came and stood beside him, letting her robe fall open. “Screwing them over.”

  He reached under the fold of the robe and cupped her rear in his hand. She stood trembling, feeling his finger play about on her skin.

  “How goes Neptune?” he said in a low voice.

  “Progressing. The rip tether is deployed. We’ll have them on their knees soon,” she said, and gasped, as he pinched her. “Sir.”

  Amés stood up, still keeping his hand to her, and guided her back to the bed. She let the robe fall from her shoulders and showed him her sun-darkened, muscled back. This body was perfect in every way. She had seen to it that it would be. Sometimes it seemed unfair that she had been born with wealth and beauty and brains. But, for the most part, she realized that this was what made her better than others. What had attracted the Director to her, and made her mistress to the king.

  “On your knees,” Amés said. She turned and faced him and immediately knelt before him. He looked into her eyes and it was as if he were gazing into her innermost self. Very shortly he would be, literally. “Carmen, you must never forget that you are, in the end, a piece of ass to me.”

  She bowed her head. “I know it, sir.”

  “Good, good,” he said. He undressed himself, and she remained before him in contrition for her selfish thoughts. She must always consider him, and only him, and remember her place, just as she expected those below her to remember theirs.

  He tilted her head up, made her meet his gaze again. “But you are a very pretty piece of ass, my dear,” he said. She lowered herself to the floor and lay prostrate before him, kissing his feet. After a moment, she felt his hand once again in her hair. He pulled her up roughly, twisting her hair and hurting her, and threw her hard onto the bed. “That was for the ship you lost,” he said, then he whispered in her ear. “My dear. It is time for me to have you. All of you.”

  She gave in. What else was there to do but to give him what he asked?

  She met his grist pellicle with her own. She caressed his. She whispered to Amés, through grist, the key to her secret heart. He took it, opened her up, and swarmed inside. Within seconds, she was his entirely. Amés spread out through her, through all of her various personas, and she gave them to him, made their thoughts and wills his. He felt her chagrin in New Catalonia Bolsa, participated in her exquisite shame of the morning when Busquets had left her high and dry. He felt the accumulated tradition that had shaped her being, the proud heritage. He entered into her mind and examined her tactics, sifting through her thought processors and intuitions. Her longing to please him, her true lord and master, the king she served. The god.

  Fifteen

  He sprang back to the pilot’s seat and into the virtuality. They were tilting at forty-five degrees to the tether, just at the edge of the magnetic clasp’s ability to adjust. Kwame brought them back up level. They were so very, very low, though . . .

  “Rastin,” he called out, “start climbing that thing!”

  “Yes, Corporal!” Rastin replied, and polarized the magnets. The fields met, aligned.

  The hopper begin to climb up the tether.

  After a moment, Kwame risked a quick glance around the hopper. The sarge was dead. Flashpoint was either dead or unconscious. Out of it. The mission belonged to him and Rastin.

  Back to the virtuality. They were nearing the edge of Triton’s thin atmosphere. Through the top layer and out of it. What to do now?

  Begin preparing the breeder SQUID. They’d had a briefing on the science of the thing, but Kwame had had too much tech material to cover even to begin to put thought into what the counter mechanism was that the brigade’s egghead free convert Major Theory had thought up, or how it actually did its job. He didn’t like to go into a situation without full knowledge—and what a situation!—but you could only do what you could under the circumstances. Under these circumstances, he was going to set the thing to ticking, then get himself and Rastin the hell out of there.

  After all, there was one thing he held in his memory with bomber sight clarity: The breeder SQUID had something to do with a nuclear explosion. That shit could kill you even when you were space-adapted. />
  Another ten klicks and they’d be in a position. He called up the breeder-deployment free convert, which was sentient. She would be getting the hell out of the hopper along with him and Rastin, even if she had left a copy of herself back at base. Dying was dying, and you didn’t like to do it, even if you knew you’d be reincarnated.

  “Access code,” the convert said to him.

  Kwame grunted in exasperation. “What’s your name?” he asked. Another detail he’d failed to learn about the mission. If he got out of this alive, he’d be damned if he went into another situation without all the information that was possibly available to him.

  “Private Dragon, sir.”

  “Don’t ‘sir’ me; I’m a goddamn corporal. Have a look at the situation, Dragon.”

  “I’m aware of it, Corporal.”

  “Then do your job.”

  “I need the lieutenant’s access codes.”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll have to call in for them.”

  “Won’t work, Corporal.”

  “Why the hell not!”

  “Just one copy. To prevent knit subterfuge and subversion.”

  “What fucking genius dreamed up that protocol?”

  “I don’t know that, Corporal.”

  Kwame stumbled over to the lieutenant. Flashpoint wouldn’t be waking up. Flashpoint was dead. He went back to the virtuality.

  “The codes are not available. She’s dead.”

  “I can’t act without the key,” said Dragon. She sounded strained, the convert version of scared.

  “Well, what the hell am I supposed to do about that, Dragon?”

  “I don’t know, Corporal.”

  Shit, shit, shit. The fucking Army is really letting me down, Kwame thought.

  “All right then. Dragon.” He thought furiously. “Can you tell me how to do it?”

  “Do what, Corporal?”

  “Set the damn breeder thing of course, you shithead!”

  The convert was silent for a millisecond. In the virtuality, it seemed a long time to Kwame.

  “Without the key, you would have to use manual override, Corporal,” she finally said.

  “Manual override? Manual override! Why didn’t you fucking tell me there was a manual override?”

  “See the green light beside the lieutenant’s station, Corporal?”

  Kwame looked around wildly, and almost missed it. But there it was, right in front of his fucking face.

  “Got it,” he said.

  “There’s a switch under it. A toggle switch.”

  “There sure as shit is.” A chrome switch.

  “When the light turns red, you would need to flip that switch, Corporal.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That is all, Corporal.”

  “Are you joking? What are you leaving out, Dragon? It can’t be that easy.”

  “That is all, Corporal.”

  Think, he told himself, think. Converts. Good at data. No intuition.

  “Uh, Dragon, when does it turn red?”

  “Five minutes before deployment window.”

  Ah-ha.

  “So, I couldn’t get out.”

  “Pardon, Corporal? Did you ask me a question?”

  “No, Dragon. No, I did not.” He shunted back to actuality. “Rastin!”

  “Corporal?”

  “Get the fuck out of here!”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Get in the escape pod and take it down. I’m staying behind to flip the fucking switch.”

  “But Corporal—”

  “That’s an order, Private.”

  “Who the fuck are you to give me an order, you—”

  “Rastin, shut up! There’s nothing you can do to help me. It’s the only way. Now get in the fucking pod!”

  Rastin gave Kwame a long, mournful look. He had never noticed before how much Rastin’s face resembled a hound dog’s.

  “All right, Neiderer,” he said. “I’ll go.”

  “Then go!” Kwame growled.

  “Jesus Christ, all right.” Rastin grabbed a handhold and swung himself toward the door to the pod bay. “Good luck, Kwame,” he called out, and then he was gone.

  Back to the virtuality.

  “Dragon!”

  “Yes, Corporal.”

  “Go home.”

  “Are we evacuating?”

  “You are.”

  “I don’t understand, Corporal.”

  “I’m staying.”

  Another millisecond of being startled. “Oh. I understand. Corporal.”

  “Download and away with you, Dragon.”

  “Yes, Corporal.” Dragon’s presence withdrew. But she left an image inscribed in the “air” in front of Kwame. He had to look twice before he could believe his eyes. It was two lips bowed into a kiss.

  “Well, fuck me,” he said, then called back up the pilot’s sensorium.

  A bright flash indicated that the escape pod was away. He watched it trail off on its parabola of salvation. I don’t get one of those, Kwame thought. He looked back at the tether. The midpoint was drawing near. Just you and me. Me and evil.

  Fuck evil.

  He waited. The light stayed green above the toggle. He waited longer. Something like an idea. No, not even that. A crazy notion.

  The light shone red.

  Kwame flipped the toggle and ran for the escape pods, He was through the door in an instant. The hopper was shaking violently, and he used his pellicle grist to cling to the bulkheads. By the time he got to the ejection sling, he was crawling on his hands and knees just to keep moving.

  Jesus God, he hoped he could get it to reset itself.

  He interacted with its simple algorithm. The sling reset. Kwame squirmed into it. His body was not at all shaped like an escape pod, but the seat of the sling was curved, just like the bowl of a catapult might be. He got into it, feeling like a pea in a great big spoon.

  “Good-bye, cruel world,” he said. “Or something like that.”

  He ordered the sling to release. The bay door opened. The sling actuated.

  If he had been in an escape pod, he would have been lying flat against a cushioned wall that would, with its grist, exactly match the contours of his body and adjust for all acceleration strains. It would be a rough jostling, but nothing more than uncomfortable.

  This was more like getting slapped in the back of the head with an iron bar.

  Kwame was flung into space at nearly a twenty-gee acceleration. It was almost enough to kill even the space-adapted. Almost, but not quite.

  His mind browned over for a moment. Kwame blinked. Consciousness returned.

  And there he was, flying through empty space. The only direction that mattered at the moment was away. Away from the damned—the truly damned—hopper. Away. He didn’t look back. He couldn’t. All he could do was hope.

  Minutes passed. Triton was above him. Above, he thought, how can that be? Then he realized he was lying on his back with respect to it. What the hell. He mentally adjusted his point of view.

  The shock wave from the nuclear explosion hit him while he was doing this, and, after that, all was confusion. Then the white confusion turned to brown confusion, the brown to black. The black to nothingness.

  When he woke up, he was farther away from Triton. Much, much farther. He could see the whole fucking thing. It had been a long time since he had been in a vacuum, and he’d never been in free fall and a vacuum simultaneously. That was why it took him a moment to remember that he had small attitude sprays built into his elbows and knees. He called up the operations manual and reacquainted himself with how to use them. With a little adjustment, he had himself facing the moon.

  Fuck me, Kwame thought. I’m in fucking orbit.

  He was. Fall
ing around Triton like a human satellite. For a long time, he just looked. Looked on the green-yellow moon. The cantaloupe-rind equatorial area. The volcanic craters of the south pole. The zone where they interfaced. He tried to see the twinkling lights of New Miranda, but then remembered that he was on the opposite side of the world from it.

  “I sure am,” Kwame said, and heard himself speak. That was how he remembered that he had a built-in radio. Of course he did. How the fuck else was he gonna talk in space?

  I have the grist, he thought. I can get on the knit. He tried it. Dead. The lines were dead. Oh yeah, they were jamming the incoming merci. He must be inside the range of their jamming device. Or whatever. It didn’t work.

  But I have a radio.

  He’d need to be over the civilized side of the moon. How fast was his orbit? He had no gauge, except the change in the moon’s position below him.

  “How the hell long can I live out here?” he said. He called up the specs. Five e-days.

  So. Maybe. There was a chance in hell.

  And there were satellites. Hell, there was a geosynchronous minefield above New Miranda. Could he bounce a message off of them? He had no idea where they were. But he sure as hell could guess their general vicinity.

  What the fuck. It was worth a try.

  He turned his radio-enhanced voice up to full amplitude.

  “Hey!” he yelled. “Hey, I’m up here. It’s Neiderer. I’m up here in the sky!”

  He kept it up, kept calling. Calling till he was sick of it and full of the knowledge that it would do no good, that he would die out here. He’d almost resigned himself to that cold fact when he heard the answer, faint but clear.

  His algorithms triangulated on it; he cocked his ear.

  “Hey, I’m up here!”

  The answering call was louder now and, oh shit, Kwame recognized the voice.

  The Old Crow himself.

  “Neiderer!”

  “Yes, Colonel?”

  “What the goddamn hell are you doing up in space?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “You’re slacking off, aren’t you, Corporal?”

  “I can’t say, sir,” he replied. “But it sure is good to hear you.”