by Tony Daniel
SUPERLUMINAL
A Novel of Interplanetary Civil War
TONY DANIEL
Contents
Introduction
PART ONE
LINES IN THE GRIST
One
It was late autumn in the northern hemisphere of Planet…
Two
Her name was Ping Li Singh. She’d been a child prodigy…
Three
This manual is a guide for the military use of…
Four
This wasn’t going well at all. Colonel Theory, deputy…
Five
Military grist is effective for both attack and defense,…
Six
About the only thing Aubry liked about Mars was the…
Seven
Physically concealing a weapon or demolition charge…
Eight
Timing was everything in the rebellion business. Aubry…
Nine
Grist-mil delivers itself. The methods used are a…
Ten
As the Federal Army commander—the supreme leader of…
Eleven
Grist-based weapons and demolition devices are…
Twelve
If it wasn’t for his son, Sint, Kelly Graytor didn’t think he…
Thirteen
One day Techstock came to Li in her office at Sui Sui…
Fourteen
One of the most effective uses of grist weapons is to set…
Fifteen
Father Andre Sud still had doubts about his decision to go…
Sixteen
The intelligent soldier will consider the physics of the…
Seventeen
Nirvana was burning with a green, silent flame, fueled by…
PART TWO
THE FALL OF IO
One
General Meridian Redux was in the wrong place at the…
Two
Sulfur. You can’t get the stink off your skin, out of your…
Three
There was only one thing Llosa knew for certain—that…
Four
Winny Hinge aboard Cloudship Sandburg, brought to…
Five
Defend gristlock at all costs. Those were the orders for…
Six
Llosa knew he had to kill the man. The pain in his leg…
Seven
We were at Mount Pele when the nail rain fell. We knew…
Eight
Leo Sherman felt like a traitor, but there was nothing he…
PART THREE
TRANSFINITE GESTURE
One
If two people want to use a secret code to communicate,…
Two
Twice, Jennifer Fieldguide refused Theory’s calls. The…
Three
Danis Graytor added another thought to her secret cache…
Four
In the late twentieth century, the Earth cryptographers…
Five
Jennifer had been baffled from the start by Theory. She…
Six
Danis stood silently just inside the door. She knew better…
Seven
Quantum computers, with their ability to resolve problems…
Eight
The attack on Noctis Labyrinthus displayed in the virtuality…
Nine
With the advent of the grist, quantum cryptology became…
Ten
Li moved into a new phase of her professional life at Sui…
Eleven
Pelota was invented nearly seven hundred years ago on…
Twelve
Receiving the Hand of Tod as a gift from the dying time…
Thirteen
The truth is, if Li hadn’t been so desperately lonely, she…
Fourteen
Aubry was simultaneously descending into the dark…
Fifteen
Li arranged her escape from Mercury with a certain…
Sixteen
All is not lost. All is never lost until the final whistle…
Seventeen
Danis, in Dr. Ting’s memory box, was bewildered. Her…
Eighteen
The rats weren’t going to kill Li. They weren’t even…
Nineteen
The partisans had defeated Noctis Labyrinthus security.
Twenty
Danis felt the shock in her deepest being. Heat.
Twenty-one
During Li’s detention and debriefing by the DIED norm…
Twenty-two
“Where are you going for Honor Day?” said the female…
Twenty-three
“So that’s my story,” Li told the Jeep. “And here I am,…
PART FOUR
THE BATTLE OF THE THREE PLANETS
One
The first e-year of the Federal Navy was a trying time for…
Two
Jake Alaska was furious at General Sherman for being…
Three
On Tacitus’s virtual ship the sea was forever clear and the sky…
Four
On paper, he looked unstoppable. But C. C. Haysay…
Five
Childe Elrondius strode forth in his shiniest plate armor…
Six
“It’s not a bad way to go,” said Gerardo Funk. “Escapism.
Seven
Colonel Theory had only one command to follow: Hold…
Eight
On Triton, Jennifer Fieldguide was visiting the boy. They…
Nine
Kwame Neiderer waited with his platoon once again for…
Ten
TB—the man sometimes known as Thaddeus Kaye…
Eleven
“We’re engaged at the Mill,” Major Monitor reported to…
Twelve
Sherman’s lightning raid on Charon was supposed to be…
Thirteen
They had been in the jungle a long, long time. Melon said…
Fourteen
High above Neptune, fifty Sciatica-class attack ships were…
Fifteen
Twenty thousand soldiers came swarming out into space…
Sixteen
Austen turned her attention to the two destroyers, which…
Seventeen
The Boomerang and Cloudship Tacitus were doing it…
Eighteen
Pluto. Of all places—Pluto! He’d overshot by a hundred…
Nineteen
General Kang Blanket had decided that he was facing…
Twenty
The fight for the Sciatica attack ships was hard and…
Twenty-one
All Naval Academy students, men and women, have the…
Twenty-two
Even though he had Sherman boxed in and near defeat,…
Twenty-three
Sherman breathed a sigh of relief. So far the plan had…
Twenty-four
“Austen, have you got an angle on that bastard?” Twain…
Twenty-five
Theory felt relief the way a free convert does—at a…
Twenty-six
General C. C. Haysay was astounded. All four ships in…
Twenty-seven
“They pulled back briefly, but now they are continuing…
Twenty-eight
The only good thing about living in the catacombs of the…
Twenty-nine
The man people called C made his way through the grand…
Thirty
Elvis Douri couldn’t wait to surf the merci after school…
Thirty-one
Corporal Alessandro Orfeo had never been to Neptune.
Thirty-two
The DIED attack had become a siege. That h
ad been one…
PART FIVE
EPILOGUE
One
The lights of the laboratory compound were bright, and…
Two
Leo Sherman looked at his father ruefully. Somehow,…
Three
“You’re older than I,” said Cloudship Lebedev. “Maybe…
Appendices Glossary, Guide, and Time Line Internal Download
Appendix One
Appendix Two
Appendix Three
Appendix Four
Appendix Five
Appendix Six
Appendix Seven
Appendix Eight
Appendix Nine
Appendix Ten
Appendix Eleven
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Tony Daniel
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
JILL SPEAKS
Back Channel Merci Coded:
Leo Is Coming and Will Know the Key Word
I have found her, TB! I have found Alethea Nightshade. But you have to stay there! If you come to this place, they will bite your head off, and then where will you be? You have to listen to Andre and Molly in this regard. Things have changed.
First we looked at the records of the experiment that made you—me and some Friends of Tod did. I have to tell you about them someday. Oh, and I finally had sex, even though he didn’t know he was the first one. He is coming your way soon, and if you are reading this, he has given you the code word. He can tell you much more about what’s happening in the Met, but don’t ask him about the sex.
He has romantic notions. I think maybe I broke his heart. But there was nothing else to do, and there isn’t any time to waste on regret at this moment, so that’s where I have to leave it.
We have an army. You will not believe this, but it is made up of rats and ferrets, working together. With the Friends of Tod’s help and using what happened to me as a template—how I became a girl—the rats and ferrets and everything else from the Carbuncle and from every hiding place in the Met have become human beings. It is a strange thing, because they are still rats and ferrets and everything else in a way. And they all started out as computer programs that got away when somebody wanted to erase them.
Oh, most of the rats stayed being rats.
What can you do? It isn’t a happy world for rats, and they sometimes get twisted inside and cannot be redeemed.
But TB, I promised you I would find her, and I did. You always said that she would be spread out, hiding even though she did not know she was hiding, broken into a million pieces or more, and curled up in the smallest cracks in the grist, and I very much believe that you were right, but things have changed.
The war has done what you and I could never do. All of those crevices have been poked into, all the cracks have been lit up by a searchlight’s shine. The only ones who got out alive are my friends now, and they are on the run like me. What is bad for the free converts of the Met is useful for finding Alethea, though. She can’t hide in the backwaters of the virtuality anymore because Amés is trying to kill all the free converts, and coming close to doing it, too. There are some free converts that he needs, yes, but most have been rounded up and flashed to a place…
It is a horrible place, TB. They are reformatting millions and millions of people. Wiping them away. A guard there couldn’t take it anymore, and she came to tell us the story, but it wasn’t long before the Department of Immunity found her, and now she has been murdered, too.
I am sorry for all these people, but I think—and the ones I am working with are sure of it—that Alethea is in there, distributed among the free-convert prisoners. My friends think she’s fled the cracks and crevices where she could no longer stay and found a place inside the only places complicated enough to hold all her pieces. Is she still enough herself to know what’s happening to her? I hope not, TB, I really hope not. Maybe she can’t know a thing, not really. Maybe she’s just puzzle pieces. Maybe not.
But we’re pretty sure she’s with the free converts of Silicon Valley.
She’s hiding in the darkest corner of the darkest place in the universe.
It is not going to be easy to put her together again, but I think it can be done. We will have to win some battles before we can do it, though. This may take some time, but I know you are very patient, and—believe it or not—even I am a lot more patient than I used to be.
But don’t worry, in case you think it makes me tame. Nothing makes me tame. I will kill anything that gets in the way of keeping my promise to you.
Anything or anyone, no matter who they are.
I will bite them.
PART ONE
LINES IN THE GRIST
Years 3014 to 3016, E-standard
One
It was late autumn in the northern hemisphere of Planet Earth. The Jeep pulled away from the remains of an ancient service area, and rumbled north on the shattered pavement of the old Taconic Parkway of New York State. The trees’ leaves were just past their peak and had changed to the russet of old blood.
Still, thought the Jeep, enough foliage to hide in, if it came to that.
Once again, the truck hunters were on his trail. The Jeep sensed it through the ground itself. Piezoelectric shock waves fluttered the foil of the detectors in his cargo bay. He didn’t even need to listen to the grist to hear the hunters coming.
The sun was high and glinted hard off the Jeep’s windshield. The sky was without clouds. These were latemorning hunters, then. Not especially dangerous. They were probably all piled into a soft-bellied roller—transportation that would flow into the bumps and potholes of the road and allow them to become pleasantly drunk without getting jostled about. No, these particular truck hunters were not a serious threat to the Jeep—although they might get lucky and take down a thoughtless pickup if one came out of cover to graze on hydrocarb grasses. Still, it paid to be alert, and to put as much distance between yourself and the truck hunters’ guns and takedown devices as wheels could take you.
Abruptly, the Jeep spotted a narrow opening—less than a road, more than a path—in the forest to the west, and he turned into the trees without slowing down. The trail was just wide enough to accommodate him, as he knew it would be.
The Jeep always knew where he was going and never needed any directions. He was nine hundred years old. The ancient jeep trails of the lower Hudson River were his creation. Some he had completely forgotten, or seemed to forget, but when he came upon them, their destination, their crossroads, and their landmarks would spread out in his mind like a bud unfurling into a flower, and he would turn right or left, and always be on the right track.
He was multiply recursed, imprinted time and again on the substrate of the metal, plastic, and fabric of his chassis. You could take him apart piece by piece, you could smash him to a cube, you could blow him to smithereens, and he’d always come back. He would grow a new Jeep.
It had happened before over the years. Accidents, exploding tires and rollovers, tank explosions. Always, parts had survived, and from those parts the Jeep would become himself again. For the last one hundred years or so, there had been the truck hunters. Many of his compatriots in the forest had been taken. The best way it could happen was to be destroyed outright. The worst way…that was when they immobilized the truck with disruptive quantum effect charges, then sliced off a portion—a hood ornament, a grill, a tailgate with the logo written across it—and eliminated the remainder. Then they took the trophy away. Back to where they came from. The Met.
The Jeep didn’t really understand the Met, nor did he want to. All he knew was that the truck hunters usually arrived in helicopters flown from New York City. Nobody much lived in New York City anymore, so they must descend from space, where everyone lived. And that is where they must return with their trophy pieces. He could only imagine that the truck parts were displayed on walls (he pictured the Met, when he pictured it
at all, as a series of tight, impassable enclosures), and perhaps, for the amusement of the truck hunter or the hunter’s guests, made to speak now and again in the limited way that such primitive robots could synthesize speech. One thing the Jeep did understand about the Met—it was no place for light trucks or utility vehicles.
The Jeep had so far escaped from the truck hunters. This was an easy task most of the time. The hunters had many pieces of tracking equipment, but the equipment all came down to electromagnetic wave detectors or grist. The e-m was easy to baffle. The Jeep incorporated the best in stealth technology—vintage defenses from before the nanotech era. It was precisely these interior baffles and shields that made him such a prize for the truck hunters. Such things were no longer manufactured, and the Jeep could only assume that the knowledge of how to make them had been misplaced.
