The A.I. War, Book One: The Big Boost (Tales of the Continuing Time)

by Moran, Daniel Keys

  Melissa du Bois’ father had passed but her mother was still alive. Someone else could be given the job of informing her that her daughter had turned traitor. No one would need to tell her that he, Vance, had intentionally put Melissa in a position where she might fail –

  Melissa had betrayed him. Mohammed Vance’s oldest friend had just forced Mohammed to kill him – had tried very hard to kill Mohammed.

  Who else has he turned?

  F.X. CHANDLER’S HOUSE was a long cylinder, large enough to hold 800 separate rooms. Once, Chandler had run Chandler industries from here – nearly five hundred people had lived aboard it at various times.

  During the TriCentennial, a detachment of Johnny Rebs had attacked it. The surface of the house was still scarred from laser fire and the impact of missiles; Chandler had abandoned it after the attack, had fled Earth and the Unification, and no one had ever invested the substantial time and Credit necessary to repair the house and repressurize it.

  Trent docked the sled at one end of the house. He could see a PKF shuttle decelerating toward the house, only a few hundred meters away now. Vance, he assumed. The PKF corvettes following along behind Vance were close enough to be visible –

  The house was unpowered and Trent had to cycle the airlock manually. He stepped through and into the house, and took the time to dog the airlock door again behind him.

  VANCE BROUGHT THE shuttle to a halt beside the sled Trent had abandoned. He knew he was not thinking well, couldn’t control his breathing or his heart rate, knew he should wait for backup before following Trent –

  He snapped his helmet in place and cycled through the shuttle’s airlock.

  He was not even controlling his own body directly; his battle computer took instructions and moved him like a machine.

  At the airlock leading into the Chandler house, he hesitated. He could see a shinier spot on the wheel that Trent had turned to manually open the lock – had Trent boobytrapped the lock?

  He hesitated a moment – felt the pain in his neck where Adrian had tried to strangle him, before Vance had torn Adrian’s head from his shoulders – spun the wheel, opened the airlock, and when he found himself still alive a moment later, threw himself into the darkness after Trent.

  VANCE COULD SEE the residue of Trent’s heat. Stepped up by his cyborg eyes, it was the dullest possible scarlet glow, floating down the center of the corridor for about fifty meters –

  He flipped on his helmet’s headlamps. Fifty meters away, the corridor dead ended. He removed the glove on his right hand, exposing it to vacuum as the suit automatically clamped tight at his wrist, made a fist to activate the laser buried within it, and kicked forward, right fist out in front of him, left arm down at his side, looking, had he known it, like Superman in flight.

  At the corridor’s end he turned his headlamps off and waited again. The corridor branched off in six directions, four corridors leading away from the center of the house, straight downward toward the outer edge of the house, what would have been the high-G portions of the house back when it had still been spinning around its axis. Two more split off and went forward-up, and forward-down. It took a moment for his brain to correctly interpret the signals from his eyes: the red heat trail went that way....

  Forward-down.

  Closer now. Vance flashed his headlamps to see ahead, down a long and wide corridor that looked made for twenty people to traverse at a time, then went back to infrared; the heat signature was stronger, a steady red glow hanging along what was, in Vance’s current vertical orientation, the corridor’s bottom.

  He kicked off after Trent, lights dimmed, flying down the long corridor, guiding himself with flicks of his hands and feet, using training he hadn’t had cause to recall in two decades. He felt it coming back to him, the old free fall reflexes, still there after all the passage of all those years, when he’d been assigned to Halfway as a new Elite, back in the days before the Castanaveras telepaths had come into his life –

  – back when he and Adrian last served together with the same rank, a pair of young Elite corporals, before Vance had begun the climb that had taken him to a position as the commander of the Unification’s Peace Keeping Force, the second most powerful person in the System behind the Secretary General himself –

  Vance rounded a corner. The flare of infrared was so bright it dazzled. Trent himself, thirty meters away, struggling with a doorway, looking back over his shoulder at Vance –

  Vance shot at him with his fist laser, raked the laser across his pressure suit, looking to open it to the death pressure surrounding them.

  Trent got the door open, ducked through into a brighter room, and Vance followed him, firing as he flew, toward the doorway, the doorway wasn’t closing, hadn’t closed, and Vance charged through and into –

  Dim lights came up around him. Vance blinked, tried to turn his head – he couldn’t move. He was stuck, stretched out with his fist before him, still firing into one of the room’s walls.

  He was in a small dark room with two chairs, before a control panel with a brightly glowing holofield showing a collection of gadgets whose purpose he could not immediately discern.

  Just beyond the control panel was a curved, faintly reflective surface – the brightest thing in the room was the laser firing from his fist, and he could see its reflection on the curved surface.

  Trent’s voice occurred in his earphone. “You should turn that laser off,” it said. “This’ll hurt if you don’t.”

  A hand came around from behind Vance, wrapped a dark cloth around Vance’s exposed hand. The beam winked out and a scorched smell wafted up from the direction of the hand, and abruptly Vance’s hand grew very hot, even with the superconductor network moving the heat away at high speed.

  “Turn if off,” Trent said again. “You’re going to burn yourself if you don’t. Really, now.”

  Vance overrode his battle computer and shut down the laser. He still couldn’t move and didn’t know why. Trent came around into his field of view, and strapped himself into one of the two chairs.

  Vance subvocalized, Can you hear me?

  Trent’s voice in his earphone. “I can. In a few minutes we’ll have pressure again. We lost the air when we came through that door.”

  Why can’t I move?

  “Impact field. Strongest impact field Credit can buy, turned all the way up. On the upside, you’ll probably survive the bombing when your guys start shooting at us. On the other upside, you can’t come kill me, because you can’t move.”

  My troops will board this house. They won’t fire upon us.

  “Oh, they will,” Trent said. “They’ll be mad in a minute. Well, scared. Are PKF allowed to get scared? Mad, I guess, scared but sublimated into productive-shooting-at-people. The house is about to fire on them.” He glanced at the control panel. “Right about … now.” He touched one of the glowing spots inside the holofield. Nothing happened, so far as Vance could tell. “Lasers first. We’ve got some missiles as well, but I’m saving those for when the situation becomes dire. Isn’t that a great word? Dire. OK, I think that’s about right.”

  Trent leaned forward, reached up and cracked his helmet. He hesitated a moment, apparently unsure of the air – and then lifted the helmet from his head. “No worse than Martian air,” he said. “That’s not an endorsement.” He unstrapped, came over and stood behind Vance – Vance felt his helmet crack open, felt his helmet being removed. “There we go,” and this time Vance heard Trent via his ears rather than his earphone – not a big difference in the sound; his ears, like his earphone, were mechanisms.

  “If you promise not to shoot me,” said Trent, “I’ll soften the field around your arm enough for you to lower it.”

  “I won’t make that promise.”

  Trent sighed. “I appreciate that. I probably wouldn’t have believed you if you had. I know you’re not a casual sort of liar like me, but you might think it honorable to lie to someone holding you prisoner. I wouldn’t bet one way or
the other. Jesus and Harry, that smell – whose blood is that?”

  “Not mine.”

  “Right. Can you breathe OK?”

  “I am having no problem breathing.”

  “You were breathing pretty hard just now.”

  “I was preparing to kill you.”

  “Ah,” said Trent wisely, “that would explain it. Hang a sec, I need to shoot at your ships again, they keep coming around on us as if they’re thinking about docking. And … yep. I think I disabled that one. Six corvettes? What did you think you were chasing, a bunch of psycho SpaceFarer troops?”

  “You turned Adrian Hilè.”

  “I did.”

  “How?”

  Trent shook his head. “You’ll figure it out, but I’m going to make you go to the trouble. You owe him that.”

  “Who else?”

  “Oh, hell, most of them.” Trent smiled at Vance. “OK, sure, even you know that’s a lie. Really? Just members of your personal staff. Plus family, friends – high value targets.”

  “Is this amusing you?”

  “You standing there, covered in another man’s blood? No. I like my metaphors to be more, you know, metaphorical.”

  “An impact field capable of controlling an Elite. You were prepared.”

  “I didn’t know it was going to be you,” Trent admitted. “I thought likelier Melissa. What did you figure the odds were that I’d get to her? Even Credit?” Trent glanced at Vance’s frozen features. “Higher, huh? That’s rough.”

  “She might not have failed.”

  “But you’re the one who put her in the spot where it was likeliest she would.” Trent shook his head. “Surprised me when I found her at Halfway. I didn’t think you’d be that hard with people you loved.” Trent studied him. “Are you really that awful an excuse for a human being? Are you telling me you don’t love her? A woman like Melissa? She’s worth ten of either of us.”

  “Twenty of you,” said Vance. “I’ll still execute her when I catch her.”

  “Yes,” said Trent. “There’s that. Trapped in who you are, aren’t you? You let her go, you’re weak. Worlds tremble at the thought. Me,” he shrugged, “I’m a lucky man. I don’t really have to care what anyone thinks.”

  “You’re irresponsible.”

  “Responsible to something else,” Trent suggested.

  Vance studied him a moment, then looked away.

  The room shook around them.

  “Ah, there we go,” said Trent. “Missiles. I had explosives mounted all around the entry you and I used – your missiles just set them off. Feel that? We’re tumbling – you’re going to feel some acceleration in a minute when the –”

  THE HOUSE, WITH six PKF corvettes clustered about it, shuddered visibly and then one end of it blossomed into light.

  The house moved.

  MOHAMMED VANCE FELT as though he’d been slapped in the face. Even through the impact field the force was enough to rattle him to the bone.

  Trent was thrown from his chair, slammed up against the far wall. He lay motionless for a moment, then got a hand on the seat of the chair he’d been sitting in and pulled himself toward it.

  Trent said softly, “Ow.”

  Vance could see the holofield – it cleared abruptly and instead of the controls Trent had been watching, it showed the Chandler estate, drifting and now tumbling slowly around its long axis.

  Trent strapped himself into the chair. “I may have miscalculated some of the ... bouncing … we’re about to take. Ah, here we go –”

  THE HOUSE TUMBLED through space. A series of explosions rocked it – to the watching Peaceforcers it was just a light show, brilliant white explosions going off in regular pulses …

  Later analysis showed that the explosions came in regular succession – in those moments of the tumble when the house was so oriented that the explosion imparted more Earthward velocity to the structure.

  The tumble and the explosions continued – and then came an explosion much larger than anything before –

  The house shattered and came apart.

  THE SHOCK THIS time was even worse. The acceleration pressed Vance back into the impact field, in successive waves of force that passed through Vance and made it hard for him to draw a breath. He grew dizzy and found himself unable to communicate with his battle computer.

  Trent, strapped into his seat, had it worse. It knocked the breath from him, left him curled into as much of a ball as the chair’s strapping would permit. He sat in the chair, sucking at the air, trying to get air into his lungs, for what seemed an eternity.

  “That,” he gasped finally, “was the armory going.”

  Vance was having trouble seeing. He shook his head as much as the impact field would allow. “This house did not have an armory.”

  “Not until recently,” Trent agreed. “Not much of an armory, I grant you – just stuff that blows up in a more or less controllable way … Give me a few minutes, I’ll see what I can do about the tumbling. The house has attitude rockets, plus the navigation rockets that were used to move it about when it was originally built here. Oh.” The holo of the house had vanished, was again replace by the control grid –

  “The house has broken into three pieces,” Trent said. “I … did not see that coming. Let’s see what we can do about this.” His hands moved through the holofield, touching lights here and there. After a while he closed his eyes, and sat quietly.

  Most of twenty minutes passed in silence – Vance said nothing.

  Finally Trent stirred again. “Well, that’s that. I’ve cured some of our tumble, but in the process we’ve picked up even more speed Earthward. I don’t think your Peaceforcers are going to be able to board us, tumbling the way we are at this speed. Oh well. I guess that can’t be helped. We’re heading for the atmosphere … and we’re going to burn up like a meteor when we hit it.”

  25

  … and this is another of the Things That Trent Did: Trent did, once, surf a house down out of orbit.

  – Melissa du Bois, in The Exodus Bible.

  THE CONVERSATION THAT followed, Mohammed Vance remembered to the end of his days.

  It was some while after Trent’s announcement before Vance said, “I modeled you, walking through the wall.”

  “Modeled me a good bit, it seems. Poor Jason.”

  “That bright room, the holoprojectors.”

  “You can’t quite get that bastard to look right no matter what you do, can you?”

  “Using the holoprojectors available at the time – if the lights are low enough that the image looks solid, the image glows. If the lights are bright enough that the image doesn’t glow, you can see the wall through it.”

  “Yeah. That’s a tough one,” said Trent sympathetically. “And your eyes are even harder to fool than that, of course. You’d have seen the grain in even a modern holo.”

  “Are you saying you really walked through that wall?”

  “I’m not saying anything. You brought the subject up.”

  “I read your interviews. The ones you gave in 2078.”

  “Studied them, you mean.”

  “Studied,” Vance agreed.

  “Those were such a waste of time. I kept expecting that girl to ask me what my favorite color was.”

  “She asked you everything else.”

  Q. So I take it you consider yourself more one of the ‘live fast, die young, and leave a good looking corpse’ crowd?

  A. I didn’t say that.

  Q. But do you think that?

  A. Nope. (Trent grins at her.) I’m the live fast and never die type.

  “I think you’ve managed live fast. Never die is looking questionable at the moment.”

  “I’m not dead yet, Vance. Neither are you.”

  “When we hit the air, do you have plans for our final moments? Or do we just burn?”

  “I’m still hoping to actually not die,” Trent informed him. “Don’t you want to see your wife again? Catch Melissa, execute he
r? Purge the PKF of people who have some semblance of a conscience, like Adrian Hilè? Pull Jason Lucas from space and scare the living hell out of him some more?” Trent studied him. “Let’s keep a good thought here.”

  “Jason Lucas?”

  “Didn’t you guys pick him up? I sent you a message telling you to, after I tossed him off the Unity.” Trent paused. “He wasn’t going very fast.”

  “We were occupied,” said Vance, “chasing you. I don’t know if anyone did.”

  “Oh.” Trent thought about it. “Well, I hope they did. If I start killing people I want it to be on purpose. And, of course, I’d probably start with you.”

  “Oh?”

  “I might not even have to kill anyone else, afterward. You’d be an example to the whole universe of the limits of my damn patience.”

  “Not an enlightened attitude. You’ve spoken about ahimsa before.”

  “Those stupid interviews. Ahimsa is the doctrine of infinite love,” said Trent. “I don’t know if I’m a good enough man to live it. Reverend Andy keeps telling people I’m a bodhisattva, but he likes me and he’s prejudiced. I have – moments, where I think I’m awake – but they pass. A real bodhisattva, I think, would live in that place.” Trent shrugged. “Anyway, the problem with ahimsa is this – it only works on people. People can look at each other and see other people like themselves. But some people aren’t people. They don’t live in their forebrains, they live in that little reptile core we all have.

  “A human being,” said Trent, “won’t kill you if you don’t threaten him. Dragons will. If you try to practice non-violence with a dragon, the dragon will eat you, while marveling at your foolishness.” He shrugged. “It’s what dragons do. You can’t hold it against them.”

  Trent added, “I suspect you might be a dragon, Vance. I’ve never been sure.”

  “You’ll forgive me if I don’t explain myself to you.”

  “Or to yourself? ‘The latest Gospel in this world is, Know thy work and do it. “Know Thyself”: long enough has that poor “self” of thine tormented thee; thou will never get to “know” it, I believe! Think it not thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou are an unknowable individual; know what thou canst work at; and work at it, like a Hercules! That will be thy better plan.’ ” Trent paused. “Thomas Carlyle. They were a canny bunch, those old Scots. That bit’s reminded me of you every time I think of it.”