She had an accent he couldn't quite place. "And you're a welfare princess. I saw you standing in the Dam square while everyone else was working for a living."
Her cheeks darkened in anger. "I devote my time to achieving something worthwhile: your downfall."
"Had any success?" Lawrence had heard of opposites attracting, but this was ridiculous. He was sure she was about to throw her drink over him. Except her glass was back on the bar. She couldn't be carrying a weapon. Could she?
"We will," she said.
"So who do you plan to control our factories and revitalization projects once you've driven us out of your country? Yourself and your friends, perhaps?"
"We'll close down your factories. We don't want that kind of society."
"Ah, green anarchy. Interesting ideology. Good luck convincing everyone to adopt it."
"I'm wasting my time. You're not allowed to think: you just recite company dogma. Next you'll tell me to buy a stake if I want to change the way things are."
Lawrence closed his mouth before he said, Well, yes, actually.
"Are your career and your stake worth so much that you have to build them up on the destruction of others?"
She looked so damn earnest when she asked him. It was the worst kind of student politics: we can change the whole world if we can just open a dialogue. Try opening a dialogue to a mob flinging Molotovs at you. "I've never destroyed anyone," he said lightly.
"You've taken part in the campaigns to pillage other worlds. If that's not destruction, I don't know what is."
"Nothing is destroyed. And our campaigns help fund the greatest human endeavor there is."
"What's that?"
"Establishing colonies on new worlds."
"My God, you're worse than a cybersoldier, you're an ecocide advocate."
"It's even worse than that, actually. I'm here in Amsterdam to join the starship officer college. I'm going to find lots of new planets we can ecocide."
Her head was shaken in soft disbelief. "Why?" she asked, genuinely puzzled. "Why would anyone do such a thing? That's what I never understand about your kind. Why do you always think that you can only achieve anything by violating what's right and natural? If you have this urge, why can't you channel it into something creative?"
"Exploring the universe is the most creative endeavor there could possibly be. It's the culmination of a thousand years of civilization."
"Starflight is the most appalling waste of resources and money. Z-B is practicing interstellar imperialism with its expansion program. There's no worthwhile outcome. We have a planet here that desperately needs our help in just about every domain you can mention, and we can't provide that help because you're bleeding us to death."
"Z-B provides almost as much funding for ecological and urban revitalization projects as it does for starflight."
"But they're your revitalization projects. Revitalizing in your image, spreading the dead corporate uniculture into weaker societies."
"Look, I can see where you're coming from. You want money devoted to issues you think are important. That's perfectly natural politics, convincing governments or corporations to pay for your own pet projects, or convincing enough people to win you the popular vote. Fine. Keep on campaigning and raising people's awareness. But you will never, ever, get my vote, because I will always vote for more star-ships. And the only practical way I get those is through a stake in Z-B. Sorry, I'm not going to be converted. I'm already doing the one thing I believe in the most."
"It's wrong, and in your heart you know that."
"I do not know that. I'm afraid all your arguments fall down with me, for the simple reason that you can't look above your own horizon. You have no sense of wonder, no drive. You've limited yourself to seeing only the smallest pixel in the picture. You practice the worst sort of parochialism."
"I see this whole world and how it's hurting."
"Exactly. This world and no other. Without starflight I would never have been born. I'm not from this planet." He smiled at her frown of confusion. "I'm from Amethi. And we don't practice ecocide there. We're regenerating an entire living biosphere. Something I happen to think is worthwhile in the extreme."
"You weren't born on Earth?" she asked.
"That's right."
"Yet you came here to join Z-B so you could fly starships further into the galaxy?"
"Yep."
Her short laugh was of pure incredulity. "You're crazy."
"Guess so." Lawrence grinned back. "So are you going to wish me luck for my assessment tomorrow?"
"No. That I can never do." Her expression was sorrowful as she turned away.
"Hey," he called. "You didn't tell me your name."
For a moment he thought she was going to ignore him. Then she glanced back over her shoulder, hand running through her buoyant hair as she made the decision. "Joona," she said at last. "Joona Beaumont."
"Joona. That's good. I like that. I'm Lawrence Newton. And I wish you a happy life, Joona."
Finally, just before she reclaimed her barstool, she allowed him to see a slight smile tweak her lips.
Breakfast was as depressing as Lawrence expected it to be. The Holiday Inn restaurant was full of his fellow candidates, all being hearty and cheerful. He joined in, putting on that same mannerly facade the way he'd learned back home when his father had other Board members at the house and he had to be a proper little Newton. It was surprising how easily the deceit came.
The other hopefuls were mostly from upper-management families with big stakes in Z-B, fresh out of college, or with a few years spent in one of the company's various spaceflight divisions. Dressed in his strategic security uniform, and with his starflight experience, Lawrence soon became their focal point. They kept him busy answering questions throughout the meal. He was still telling them about Floyd and the aliens when they walked en masse over to the headquarters building. Lawrence looked around the square, but there was no sign of any protesters. Not that he'd expected them there quite so early in the morning.
Group epsilon three's morning started with the introduction, a half-hour talk from a captain about what Z-B looked for in its starship officers. The usual bull about devotion to duty, comradeship, professionalism. Lawrence got a different version from a strategic security officer every time the platoon was put through a new training course. The captain ended with: "We expect you to give us better than your best"
Day one was devoted to testing their reflexes. The college's i-environment was the most sophisticated Lawrence had ever experienced. They were given full stim-suits to wear, a tight-fitting one-piece made from a fabric of piezoelectric fibers; then led into a big anacoustic room with three rows of gyro-seats. Once they were strapped in, the AS started off with simple coordination tasks. It was easy to begin with, three-dimensional grid alignments, like being inside a hologram pane graph, lining up the glowing green-and-scarlet symbols. They soon progressed to steering fast cars through a maze, and different wheel limitations and engine fluctuations were gradually introduced. Crashes became progressively more violent. After lunch they were given full aircraft simulations, taking up single-seat jet trainers. That was when the AS began to put them under stress, giving them engine flame-outs, failed flaps, spins that were so fast they threatened to make Lawrence vomit. Equipment malfunctions at critical moments. Cockpit fires, with real smoke blowing in through the suit helmet vents and heat searing their hands and legs.
When it was finally over, Lawrence had to grip the gyro-seat's support pillar while his legs regained their strength and stopped shaking. There was a noticeable lack of jovial esprit de corps in the locker room afterward as they all showered and changed.
It was raining when they came out of the headquarters building, a thin, cold drizzle whipped up by the erratic gusts blowing out of the streets surrounding the square. Joona Beaumont was standing outside, her duffel coat hood up against the weather, stamping her feet on the cobbles. There were only three other protesters with her, and the potato sta
ll was absent. They propped up their panes, but couldn't summon up the enthusiasm to shout anything.
Lawrence gave her a quick nod, but she didn't respond. He wasn't even sure she saw him.
An hour later it had stopped raining, and he made his way back to the bar on Rembrandtplein. He didn't bother with a table this time, just sat up at the bar and ordered a mixed mango and apple juice.
Joona arrived a few minutes later. She saw him immediately, and Lawrence offered the empty stool beside him. There was a moment's hesitation; then she came over, shaking the water from her coat.
"You look frozen," he said. "Can I get you something hot?"
She signaled to the barman. "Tea, please. Put a gram in."
"It's bad for you, you know," Lawrence said.
"What, it glitches your circuits? I don't suppose you'd like to lose control, would you?"
"Nothing to do with it. It's a poison, that's all."
"All medicines are to some degree. That's how they kill germs. It's perfectly natural."
"Right. So how did your day go?"
"We made our point."
"Did anybody listen?"
"Being there is our point."
"Then I guess you made it well."
Her tea was delivered. She gave the barman a smile of gratitude.
"You going to ask how my day went?" Lawrence inquired.
"No."
"Okay." Lawrence dropped a ten-EZ-dollar bill on the counter, stood up and walked out. And just how cool is that?
He sort of blew it at the door, when he looked back to see how she'd reacted. She hadn't. She was sitting with her elbows resting on the bar, holding the cup of tea to her mouth with both hands.
He shrugged and stomped off into the night Day two was all about puzzles. The AS controlling the i-environment put him on a small tropical island four hundred meters long and barely seventy wide. A few palm trees and spindly bushes grew along the central strip, but it was otherwise desolate. He was in charge of a five-strong party that had been diving along the offshore reef. One of them was badly injured to the extent he couldn't be moved and needed medical care urgently for decompression sickness and unspecified internal organ damage. There were three islands nearby, one with a resort complex, the second with an abandoned plankton harvest factory, and the third also deserted, but with another diving party visiting it. The resort was farthest away, the plankton plant was known to have an advanced first-aid store with a quasi-AS diagnostic. He only had one boat, which couldn't make it to the resort before the injured man died. There were no communications systems.
Lawrence took a quick look at the map, comparing island positions. He left two people to look after the injured man and set off in the boat to the third island and the other divers. He told them to go to the plankton factory and take the medical equipment to the injured man, then set out by himself to the resort. With just himself onboard, he jettisoned all the surplus equipment he could find, allowing the boat to go as fast as possible. In theory, the medical equipment collected by the other divers should allow the injured man to stay alive while he made the long top to the resort to alert a helicopter rescue team.
The AS allowed the scenario, although the chopper paramedics rebuked him for making the boat trip to the resort by himself. There was an experienced sailor in charge of the other diving team who could have made a faster trip. But the injured man survived.
For his second expedition he was in a deep, rocky canyon in a jungle. His little team was moving a lot slower than anticipated because of the difficult terrain; they were starting to run out of food. The canyon walls were too high to be climbed.
Lawrence asked them for their skills and found one member who was proficient with canoes. The team set about chopping down trees and building a makeshift raft. The canoeist was dispatched downriver to contact their base camp.
After two kilometers the canoeist encountered rapids too severe for the raft. He had to wait until the rest of the team caught up on foot and helped rebuild the raft so that it could be taken apart and carried around difficult sections. Right idea, not enough thought for the method.
An Arctic wilderness came next, with Lawrence by himself at the center of a ring of various equipment caches. To get to the food, which was on top of a pressure ridge, he had to collect the climbing equipment to reach it, but the climbing gear was too bulky and heavy to carry in the backpack; he needed the sledge, which was on the other side of a bottomless gorge. The collapsible bridge to get over the gorge needed the sledge to move it.
He just couldn't work that one out. But he did his best, fetching a single coil of rope from the climbing cache and trying to swing across the gorge. He wound up tumbling down into the black abyss when his ice axe anchor broke free.
After that came a classic cell/maze. The AS put him in a room with five doors, each of which led to another room with five doors. The hazards were mostly visible, with hinged flagstones, spikes stabbing out of the walls, flames, a pendulum, lions, walls that closed in, cutting wire at neck level, electrified segments, stones that fell from their ceiling cavities, tripwire-triggered darts, moss with an acid sap, rat swarms—though there were others like gas and ultrasonics that he didn't find until he was already well into the room. The doors all carried clues to what was in the room on the other side, sometimes numerical; then there were symbols, star signs, even poetry.
He was allowed five goes. The farthest he ever got was eight rooms from his starting place.
He was put in a starship just after it had suffered a meteor collision. Environmental support systems were failing, air leaking, power dropping, network glitched, no spacesuit, few tools. He had to make his way from his own badly damaged section to the lifeboat capsule halfway around the life support wheel.
After that the AS dressed him in a spacesuit that was low on oxygen and power reserves and left him clinging to a small asteroid with his ship on the other side. There were different types of survey sensors dotted across the surface, which he could cannibalize for components and gas as he tried to crawl his way back. The rock's microgravity field was just enough to stop him from achieving orbit by muscle power alone, and weak enough to leave him with all the maneuvering problems of freefall. He actually expired within sight of the little silver craft.
The locker room that evening was even more subdued than the previous night. The candidates all looked dazed and shell-shocked. Conversation was all: "But what do you do after that bit where..."
He couldn't see any protesters in the square. And the weather was a lot better that evening, high clouds and a dry wind blowing from off the land. It was still cold. He quite fancied a hot potato.
Joona was in the bar when he arrived, sitting at her usual place, with empty stools on either side. None too sure of his status, he left a vacant stool between them, and ordered his mango and apple.
"Shouldn't you have something stronger?" she asked. "I'd say you've had a hard day."
"Alcohol isn't going to help. I've got an even harder day tomorrow. Have to keep a clear head."
"Is it worth it?"
He took a long drink from his tumbler. "Oh, yes."
"Doesn't seem it to me. Look at the state of you. What did they do to you in there today?"
"Put it this way. If you ever crash-land on a frozen desert populated by flesh-eating zombies, then stick with me, I'll get you out. Piece of cake compared to what I went through."
Joona cocked her head to one side, giving him an interested look. "And how does that help them select their officers, exactly?"
"It's testing our ability to think under pressure. They put us in all kinds of impossible situations today." He rolled the glass between his palms, regarding it with a miserable expression. "I didn't do very well. I lost count of how many times I got killed. Then again, the others were just the same, judging by what they said."
"How good are you?"
"What do you mean?"
She slid her hands across the bar, pushing the tea cup ahe
ad of her, moving with feline grace as she leaned in toward him. "I mean, you're a... you're a soldier who's seen action. You've been in bad situations for real on those other worlds you plunder, right?"
"Yes. But we're trained in how to deal with hostile crowd or ambush situations. I know what I'm doing."
"Right, but what you're basically taught is how to keep cool under fire. And today they simply turned up the heat.
Were those situations genuinely impossible, or did you just flunk them?"
"You don't take many prisoners, do you? I suppose I could have done better in some of them, if I knew more about engineering and stuff."
"Has it occurred to you that these tests were actually dual purpose? It sounds to me like they were testing your character as well as your ability to think."
Fallen Fragon Page 42
