Only Superhuman

by Christopher L. Bennett

  “This has been a hard time for the Troubleshooters,” he told Kari, bringing her to a stop at the crest of a footbridge over a babbling brook. “A time of transition, of reinvention. We’ve lost some people along the way … people who didn’t understand what we’re trying to do. Who either weren’t willing to take it far enough, like Tor, or who took it too far, like Cowboy.”

  “Or like Emry,” Kari said in a small voice.

  “But you understand what I’m trying to do, Hikari. You understand how important it is to be proactive. To nip sources of trouble in the bud—judiciously, surgically—before they grow out of hand. You understand, perhaps better than anyone, that the subtlest exertion of force can do the greatest good, if applied in the right way at the right moment.”

  “Yes, sir. I believe I do.”

  “And you know what’s at stake.” He moved behind her and put his hands on her dainty shoulders. “You know better than most what we have to fight. You’ve seen the face of it firsthand. The gangs, the terrorists, the fanatics—you’ve felt the damage they can do to innocent souls.”

  She gazed up at him, and he could see that his appeal was working. He could see the anger smoldering inside that little-girl face. “Yes, sir. Hell, yes.”

  He glared at her. “Sorry,” she said, looking away. But he forgave her. The sweet child hadn’t entirely recovered yet from Emerald Blair’s unruly influence.

  Ahh, Emerald. Now there was an operative he regretted losing. She’d been as wild and uncouth as any Strider he’d ever met, but she’d shown promise. Given time, he could’ve instilled her with proper discipline and respect, or at least enjoyed the challenge of trying. But he’d badly miscalculated with her, failed to predict how her chaotic mind would function. He’d been so sure her bitterness toward the Vanguard, the Neogaians, and the rest would make her a potent tool for controlling them. But Thorne had had better counterintelligence than he’d anticipated, and Blair had been too easily swayed by a childish, impractical idealism. Does she really think I wanted to see anyone tortured or killed? That I wouldn’t have spared those lives if there were a better way to achieve the greater good? There’s no true kindness in sparing one life if you know it will bring suffering or death to hundreds more.

  But Emerald Blair had never truly lived in the real world. An improbably idyllic childhood, a playacting version of a criminal life with little real harm done, an assortment of odd jobs, and then a stint as the TSC sex symbol in residence … she’d had it easy, always getting to indulge her fantasies and illusions. She’d never had to fight for reward and acceptance, never understood the hard work, sacrifice, and discipline it took to make any real difference in the world.

  But Tai would change that. Once Blair had become a Vanguardian tool to interfere with his efforts, it had been necessary to sacrifice her … because few Striders would understand any better than she had, at least not until they’d come to trust the Cereans more. She hadn’t yet borne the full brunt of that sacrifice, but he would make sure that she did. Greg Tai was not a man who allowed matters to remain out of his control for long. As a Terran born, he understood that one could not afford to lose control of one’s environment.

  And Hikari, he felt sure, was the key to making it right. So disciplined, so obedient, she had waited meekly while his mind had wandered, not objecting to the hand that remained on her shoulder—or the other which he realized had been absently stroking her silky hair. Mind your control, he thought ruefully, folding his hands behind him but making no outward acknowledgment of his lapse. “I’m glad you understand what we’re fighting for, Hikari. Because I have a mission for you that I fear you might find difficult.” He came around to face her. “I need you to arrest Emerald Blair.” Her eyes widened; her delicate lips parted in surprise. “Can you do that for me? Would there be a … personal problem?”

  After a moment, her gaze hardened. “No, sir. Emry…” She shook her head. “I thought I knew her better than anyone. I never imagined … sir, she’s a traitor. She let the Corps down. She let us all down. And when I see her again I’m going to punch her right in her lying mouth! Sir,” she finished, daintily clearing her throat. “But … how do I get to her? The Vanguard is protecting her, and—”

  “I know. I haven’t told you the full assignment.” He led her off the bridge, a guiding hand against her back. “No doubt you’ve heard that the Vanguard is arranging a second conference to pursue their so-called alliance of mod nations.” He frowned. “They even have the gall to hold it on Neogaia. Like they’re rubbing our faces in it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But a lot of people seem to be falling for their line that it’s meant to show how Neogaia has reformed, how it’s ready to be part of the Solar community.” He scoffed, and she gave a high-pitched, adorable little scoff of agreement. “Eliot Thorne and his daughter are master propagandists. If we want to keep this from getting out of hand, we have to neutralize them.”

  Kari’s eyes widened. “Neu-neutralize? Sir? You don’t … of course you don’t.…”

  Tai laughed and patted her shoulder. “Of course not.” Another assassination at this point would look too suspicious, and with the cult of personality Thorne had built around himself, would only create a martyr. “What we need to do is discredit Thorne. We need to reveal to the other delegates that Thorne’s true goal is to rule over them, to exploit them for his own ends.”

  “We have proof of that?” Kari asked, surprised.

  “Not as such. But we both know it’s true, don’t we?” She nodded, still seeming uncertain. “It’s no different from what we did with Hoenecker. We don’t need to convict him in a court of law, just destroy his credibility.”

  She relaxed at that. “Of course, sir. What matters is taking away his power to do harm.”

  “Yes. Good girl. However,” he went on, “even without him, the other mod nations might seek to build on his work, to form alliances of their own. Imagine if, say, Neogaia and Mars Martialis began working together.”

  “That would be bad.”

  “It certainly would. So in addition to discrediting Thorne, you and your team would have the responsibility to stir things up between the other delegates.”

  He spoke with her about the specifics as they strolled deeper into the woods—ordering her to make sure her memory buffer was off, due to the sensitive nature of this discussion. She would need a small infiltration team, specialists in undercover and intelligence work, but with combat skills just in case. He brainstormed with her about the forms their sabotage could take: planting spy cameras of Martian provenance in other delegates’ ships, slipping nonlethal doses of Neogaian poisons into the Wellspringers’ meals, that sort of thing. She offered few suggestions of her own, but he was satisfied with her obedience.

  And her enthusiasm for one task in particular. “And while we’re doing all this … we get Emry too, right?” she asked.

  “Best to wait until it’s all in place, but yes. Emerald Blair is an accessory to murder and a fugitive from justice, and apprehending her is a very high priority of this organization. That’s why I insist you have combat specialists with you on the mission. You’ll need help in taking her down.”

  “Ohh, no.” Kari shook her head. “With all due respect, sir … that bitch is mine.”

  Tai kept his smile to himself. Under the circumstances, he could forgive her defiance.

  December 2107

  Neogaia habitat

  Sun-Earth L3 point

  Emry didn’t like being this close to the Sun. It gave her freckles.

  That was the least of her discomfort about attending a conference on Neogaia. But she had striven to overcome her revulsion. Eliot was convinced that the new regime could be worked with—that although they still retained their ideological goal of returning to Earth and transforming it into a natural paradise, they had renounced terrorism as a means of achieving it. And if Eliot said it was so, she believed it. Still, there were some difficult memories to overcome.


  Zephyr hadn’t been much help either. He’d refused to let go of his suspicions about the Thornes. He’d even made insinuations about Psyche being the last person to see Sensei alive. Emry had exploded at that, saying some hurtful things about cold machine logic. She’d tried to apologize later, but he had refused to apologize for “reminding you of your job,” and matters remained unsettled between them. Zephyr had still come along to Neogaia, insisting that he’d stay close if she needed him. But Emry herself had traveled with Eliot in his official diplomatic ship. After all, it was a long journey, and she couldn’t stand to be apart from him for a single night. Zephyr had instead carried a couple of the Vanguardian delegates, including Rachel, now halfway through her pregnancy but as active as ever.

  Zephyr had also been disturbed that Emry had chosen to travel without her Green Blaze outfit. But it didn’t seem consistent with her purpose at this conference. Eliot said she had a vital role to play, testifying about the plans of UNECS and the co-opted TSC. As much as she hated the thought, with Sensei dead, the Troubleshooters were probably a lost cause, and it was best to cast off their trappings if she wanted to make a convincing argument against them. Besides, Eliot had added, something less flamboyant would be more appropriate for a diplomatic affair. He’d had his best tailor custom-make some formal and business wear in a Vanguardian style, making her a better match with the Thornes. She wasn’t overly fond of it at first, but she liked the way she looked alongside Eliot.

  The Vanguard delegation included a number of their leading citizens, statespersons such as Soaring Hawk Darrow and Thuy Dinh and scientists such as Krishna Ramchandra and Rachel. They rendezvoused with Psyche at Neogaia; the Vanguard’s top diplomat had been racing around half the Belt for the past two and a half weeks, making last-minute pleas to recruit as many delegates as possible. This time, invitations had been extended to “mainstream” as well as “mod” nations, and Eliot’s hope was that the conference would end with the formal declaration of a Strider alliance, a unified force strong enough to give Earth pause—and, of course, to bring peace and stability to the Belt. Psyche had taken the Vanguard’s fastest ship and managed to squeeze in stops at Vesta and both the major Outers hubs, Europa and Hygiea. She’d managed to wangle a number of commitments before having to rocket inward to Neogaia. There would even be a delegation from Ceres, though Psyche had not had time to travel there herself. A delegation from Ferdinandea, a minor Cerean hab independent of the Sheaf, had accepted Thorne’s initial invitation without needing further persuasion. Emry hoped that an ally from Ceres might set a precedent; maybe Demetria would come around as well, and perhaps even the Sheaf could be pressured into dropping its opposition.

  Neogaia itself consisted of two adjacent toruses, less than a kilometer in radius but fairly thick in cross section, with the usual free-fall industrial section at the hub and a sun mirror floating nearby. Aside from a few other support structures, it was oddly alone in its Lissajous orbit around the “Counter-Earth” L3 point—sharing Earth’s orbit but directly opposing it, blocked from its line of sight to keep the yearning for it strong (and to hide from routine observation by UNECS telescopes). The Neogaians had never bothered to capture a stroid as a materials source, instead relying on the smattering of meteoroids that clustered around the Lagrange point or on mining expeditions to those Near-Earth stroids that UNECS hadn’t already captured or claimed. The symbolism was clear: the Neogaians saw this as only a temporary home.

  Despite that, they had put a great deal of work into the habitat itself. The docking area at the hub was typical enough, but once Hanuman Kwan met Emry, the Thornes, and their accompanying delegates and began leading them down to the habitat rings, it became clear that Neogaia was a very unusual place. For one thing, the normal elevators were missing. “We believe in doing things the natural way as much as possible,” the monkeylike Neogaian explained. Apparently that included dressing up the walls of the radial shafts to look like cliff faces and climb them on faux vines that stretched hundreds of meters to the ground below. Which wasn’t that unreasonable, given that the faster they descended, the more the Cori force angled their weight vectors to antispinward and made the slope feel shallower. And it was only in the last hundred meters or so that the gravity became substantial. Still, some of the older delegates needed assistance.

  The bottom of the shaft was styled like a largish cavern, and Kwan led them out onto a terraformed hillside looking down into a lush valley. The gravity at ground level was a full gee. The torus’s large cross section allowed for more level ground and more aerial clearance for trees and birds. The lateral walls were disguised as hillsides, and the circumferential curvature of the landscape was obscured by mountains on this end, dense forest on the other. The roof overhead, rather than being the standard skylight arch, looked like some kind of fiber-optic array that could shunt the sunlight from outside to any set of pixels on its inner surface, creating an illusion of a vivid blue Terrestrial sky and a sun just cresting the hills. As Kwan led the tour group through the valley, Emry’s eyes were drawn to their oddly elongated shadows, and she realized they were very gradually shortening as the “sun” crept higher up the (literal) arch of the (virtual) sky. Weird.

  But this was only the beginning. “We have striven,” the elderly simian continued, “to re-create as much of Mother Earth’s extraordinary diversity of climates as possible. Everything from steppes to savannah, rain forest to desert, tropics to tundra. All perfectly balanced and in ecological harmony with one another.” Their surroundings bore out his words as Kwan escorted them from one climate zone to another, each one isolated from the others by artificial barriers, with the circulation of air, heat, and moisture through the habitat carefully modified to provide each sector with just the right conditions. There were even two arctic sectors on opposite ends, and Emry realized they corresponded to the extra heat radiators she’d noticed sticking out from the sides of the torus. Emry was impressed despite herself. She’d always thought of the Neogaians as a small bunch of crazy thugs, but this was the most remarkable, delicate feat of biosphere engineering she’d ever seen.

  “And you can rest assured,” Kwan went on, “that the richness and diversity of these ecosystems are more than matched by that of the Neogaian people. Every environment you see has people living in it, thriving in it, perfectly adapted to its special conditions.” Indeed, every region they passed through was populated by suitably specialized therianthropes, generally going without clothing, selfones, or other technology (although Kwan and the others participating in the conference wore at least some clothing as a courtesy to their guests). Small, simian brachiators and deerlike foragers populated the forests alongside the normal wildlife. The grasslands bore herds of sheep, bison, and the like, but they were herded by men and women with canine muzzles and furry coats. Emry saw an eland taken down by a pride of leonine Neogaians who tore at its raw flesh with their teeth. Mercifully, she saw no humans modded to fill the eland’s particular niche in that ecosystem. That, she thought, would really be pushing the antelope.

  Even the rivers and lakes contained streamlined people swimming with uncanny ease, occasionally breaking the surface to take a breath and waving web-fingered hands at the delegates. The one environment that remained unpopulated by therianthropes was the air. “We’re still working on producing a human form capable of flight in normal gravity,” Kwan explained. “It’s difficult to do the research in these conditions, with the actual space available for flight being so limited. But once we are ultimately welcomed back to Mother Earth, I’m confident we will perfect true human flight.” Emry glared at him, wondering how many live test subjects they would sacrifice in pursuit of this bizarre ambition.

  Don’t expect change overnight, she reminded herself. Once we have the alliance, we can work to bring them back into the mainstream.

  As the tour went on, Emry noticed Psyche working the delegates, buddying up to them and allaying their concerns. Yes, she assured them, the Neogaians
had more conventional facilities underground, and the delegates would have actual beds to sleep in—unless they wanted to try camping out under the illusion of an empty, starlit sky soaring overhead. The thought did not sit well with the inherent claustrophilia of the average Strider, Emry included, but Psyche somehow managed to make it sound enticing. She was certainly laying on her usual charm offensive, focusing mostly on those delegates she hadn’t already won over at the previous conference or during the recruitment drive for this one. Eliot himself did the same, though in a more understated way. For a man of his size and intensity, coming on too strong could be intimidating. The other Vanguardians did their part too, but Eliot and Psyche could have easily done it all by themselves.

  * * *

  By the end of the reception and dinner that evening, the Thornes had managed to produce an extraordinary degree of consensus from the delegates—meaning that they wouldn’t have to spend the first week hashing out the seating arrangements and procedures, and nobody had stormed out in protest. That made for a smooth beginning to the next morning’s assembly. The event was held in a “natural” amphitheater, with its stone walls conveniently shaped to amplify sounds—somewhat belying the Neogaians’ insistence that they wished to shape themselves to nature rather than the reverse. But Emry had decided to take such things as mere eccentricities rather than grounds for contempt. The old regime is gone, she reminded herself. Eliot helped see to that. Even without her transceiver implant active, she could almost hear Zephyr’s voice in her mind, dryly pointing out that revolutionary regimes were typically no better than the ones they kicked out. But she owed it to the Thornes to give this alliance a fair chance. And regimes aside, there’s no reason to be prejudiced against the Neogaians as people. Sure, their beliefs are a little wacky, but most of them probably mean well, right?

  Her open mind was sorely tested when she saw Hanuman Kwan come into the arena with a thong-clad, otherwise naked woman on each arm. The one on his right was Selkie, the curvaceous and bubbly seal-woman from the first conference. But the one on his left …