Asimov's SF, March 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Byron nodded. A thin smile slipped across his face. It occurred to Jason that everyone in the room understood who was in charge of this expedition.

  * * * *

  They slipped into the water two miles off shore. It was a long swim, even for people with their bodies, but Francesca had decided it was necessary. Pleasure boats usually stayed within a mile of the shore, and Francesca felt they had to minimize the danger that a boat full of late night revelers might spot their cruiser and wonder why a patrol catamaran had taken up a parking position at such an odd hour.

  The waves were only a foot high. Jason could see the stars when he happened to look up, but overall the swim was about as interesting as a long series of laps in a darkened indoor pool. It didn't matter. He had Francesca beside him and he was doing something he couldn't have dreamed of doing just a year ago.

  He had taken his first swim two days after the tucfra had given him the body he had inhabited during his training. His trainer, Sergeant Shardi, led him through a two mile run and finished the session with a plunge into the shallow end of an outdoor pool. Jason had never taken a swimming lesson, but he thrashed across the width of the pool with his best imitation of the swimmers he had seen on TV. Sergeant Shardi let him relax after he finished the second lap and he spent ten minutes hopping around in the water like a schoolboy. He actually did a couple of cannonball dives off the rim of the pool, holding his knees against his chest and raising a splash that would have made him the envy of the kids he had once watched from his wheelchair.

  As far as I'm concerned, Francesca had said, I'm Michael's wife. They gave me the job and I've done it. The information in your briefing was correct—I have become quite fond of him. He may not be the best man for the job he's inherited, but he's a kind, decent man who loves music and pleasure. I'd rather see him running things than a lot of people who may be tougher and more ruthless and all the other things our wonderful Director of Security thinks Michael should be. I've been here for thirteen years and I've done a good job. I wouldn't have done it half as well if I didn't like Michael. And didn't like being married to him.

  The wonderful Director of Security was Michael's stepbrother, Frederick Gratzhausen. According to the original plan set up by the tucfra (or the human bureaucrats who did their planning), Jason had been dispatched to Sovereign Jersey so he could replace Michael for a few weeks and counter a coup Frederick had been developing. Michael would be kept in a safe house until the danger passed and return to his rounds thinking he had spent the time in a pleasant rehab facility while Francesca looked after things at home.

  Instead, Jason had arrived at the handover point—a secluded twelveroom weekend “cottage"—and discovered Colonel Wolsner and Lieutenant Traine slumped across an oversized dining room table sleeping off the effects of one of the stealthier contemporary drugs. Frederick had deposited his stepbrother in his own version of a safe house and Jason and Francesca had spent two months maneuvering against Frederick's underlings while Michael lay in a hospital bed, attached to a tube that could deliver a dose of one of the faster contemporary poisons anytime Eileen Levar opened the right valve.

  A guard shark approached them as they entered the artificial lagoon outside the boathouse. The shark was only about six feet long, but it looked like it was half teeth when it rolled onto its back three feet under their bellies.

  Francesca broke radio silence. “Can we assume our charming friend Kelly McMay is operating the shark?"

  Jason smiled. “It does look like his kind of smile, doesn't it?"

  The boathouse had been upgraded during the period when Michael Gratzhausen's grandfather had been establishing his control over the area that had become the Commonwealth of Sovereign Jersey. The boat door was a massive sliding affair that looked as if it could stop any weapon a well-equipped smash-and-grab raiding party would have in its arsenal. The structure above the door was a windowless wall spotted with hatches that obviously concealed gun emplacements.

  They had already decided Byron Traine's team couldn't blast through the door if they had to launch an assault. Byron's force would have to land on the beach and pick its way through the automated defenses that protected the beach house from an attack from the land—a process that could take a full quarter hour under the best circumstances, and longer if their adversaries had added a few extra gimmicks to the arrangements depicted in the family databanks.

  The door slid open. The shark flashed them another look at its teeth and disappeared into the blackness of the water.

  The gap in the doorway was about three feet wide. Francesca stroked ahead of him and Jason let her take the lead. He slipped below the surface just as Francesca's hands dug into the water on the other side of the door. He might have to let her go into danger first, but nobody had told him he had to stay ten strokes behind.

  The door rumbled shut. Jason shot to the surface and they lifted their face masks and treaded water back to back.

  The docking pool was a big floodlighted rectangle with walkways on three sides. A pleasure boat loomed above them on their left—a sixty-footer, according to the knowledge Jason had acquired when the tucfra had prepared him for life among the elite. Two racy-looking motorboats bobbed on their right. In front of them, about two Olympic laps from their position, two figures were standing in the center of the rear walkway. One of them matched the simulations of Eileen Levar the tucfra had shown them. The other, as promised, was Michael Gratzhausen.

  Eileen had two tortoiseshell guardcats sitting in front of her. She was wearing a close-fitting brown beret and a loose lab coat that could have draped over most of the bulges a weapon could produce.

  Jason frowned at the man standing on her left. Michael looked as if his captors had been stuffing him with drugs. His shoulders were slumping forward. The face drooping between the shoulders looked slack and listless. Jason was examining the same handsome face and the same broad-shouldered physique he had been admiring in his dressing screen, but he wasn't seeing the verve that had flooded through him from the moment his brain had connected with Michael's glands and muscles.

  Francesca's back stiffened. “That's not Michael."

  She pulled away from him with the clean, silent strokes he had watched her use when she launched into a sprint during her morning laps.

  “It's the copy. They've brought us the copy. Stroke for the bow of the first motorboat. We'll climb out there."

  Three splashes hit the water. A gray barrier rose out of the deck in front of Eileen. She dropped to one knee and Jason realized she was holding a weapon.

  It was a confusing moment. Jason had been prepared for a trap that included aquatic guard animals and he had stopped worrying about that possibility when it had become clear the docking pool was empty. Guard cats were non-aquatic. He had assumed the cats might attack when he and Francesca climbed onto the walkway. He had already started thinking about the best way to cover Francesca when they reached the edge of the pool.

  The third splash added to the confusion. They knew Eileen Levar had been developing a copy of Michael. She was an expert in tucfra body transfer technology. The tucfra wanted her neutralized precisely because she was a renegade who had the details of their most powerful technology stored in her head. But a body needed a brain ... a fully stocked, properly trained brain ... the product of eight months of work, the tucfra claimed, even with the advanced techniques Eileen Levar had mastered....

  The cats were plowing toward them like a pair of torpedoes. If Eileen Levar could make a copy of Michael, she could obviously transform a pair of guard cats into an aquatic death squad.

  Francesca's gun snapped. “Protect yourself,” Francesca said. “They're after you. I'll take care of Eileen. You're the one she's aiming for."

  Jason's hands were already reaching for the pocket that held the laser sword. He left the pocket sealed and plunged under the surface.

  A huge surge flowed through his body. Two long strokes of his arms pulled him three yards below the surface.
He was outnumbered three to one but he had the body the tucfra had given him—a body that had capabilities even Michael couldn't imitate.

  Francesca was radioing the patrol boat and receiving a broken-up reply that consisted mostly of Byron Traine complaining he was receiving a broken-up message. She rattled out a report anyway, starting with terse sentences that let Jason know she was firing at Eileen and using one of the speed boats for cover.

  The light from the boathouse lighting system lit the water with a green glow. The cats stayed on the surface as he slipped toward them from below and he saw them as featureless silhouettes. Their paws were churning the water like motorized paddles.

  As a boy, lying in bed with useless muscles, Jason had usually watched the action series that featured female adventurers. He had shied away from male action heroes because they made him feel he was watching someone he might have been—or at least someone a nine-year-old boy could believe he might have been. The big exception to his preference for female protagonists had been a mass of muscle who had roamed around Stone Age Africa strangling lions and killing zebras with his bare hands. Konga's feats had been so absurd, even to a nine-year old mind, that Jason had known there wasn't the slightest possibility he could have done such things himself if he had been granted a normal life.

  It hadn't occurred to him that he might someday inhabit a body that had been touched up here and there by an alien species that had been remodeling its own bodies for a couple of thousand terrestrial years. In the New England Confederacy, he would have been committing treason if he had expressed a yearning for a normal body crafted by the alien despots.

  The cats altered their course, one left and one right, and slipped beneath the surface. They were still dark, featureless shapes from Jason's viewpoint but their bodies seemed to elongate. Their hindquarters were wiggling like the sterns of seals.

  He pulled his legs underneath him and shot toward the surface with his body upright. Rigid fingers stabbed into the belly of the cat on the left. Feline stomach muscles yielded before the pressure of a bone and muscle spear. He couldn't puncture the cat's skin, but he could crush its soft organs between his fingers and its spine.

  His left hand jumped to the animal's right rear leg. His fingers clamped around its ankle. The hand that had just stunned it with pain and internal damage grabbed the leg higher up and applied a twist. Tendons tore. Bones snapped out of joints. Jason bobbed to the surface and sucked in a lungful of air.

  The second cat popped up beside him. Claws raked across his legs. A forepaw reached for his head.

  He blocked the paw with his left arm and kicked away from the cat. He flipped over backward, spine arched, and started a loop that would, if all went well, end with another upward drive.

  The cat came down after him. They met face to face as he was pulling out of his dive and he decided Konga might have had the right idea after all.

  It took a little feinting and twisting but he ended up just where he wanted to be, sprawled over the cat's back with his left arm wrapped around its body and his right hand pressing against the bottom of its jaw. The strongest muscleman the human race had produced would be making a huge mistake if he tried to strangle a lion on the open plains. But a human with a tucfra-enhanced body could probably hold a smaller carnivore under water until it drowned.

  The cat struggled underneath him. It rolled onto its back—a maneuver that might have done some damage if it had been squeezing him between its weight and solid ground—and he held his body pressed against its spine.

  Motion jerked his attention to his left. A big shape loomed out of the underwater murk. Eileen Levar's Michael-puppet reached for him with clumsy sweeps of its arms.

  It would have been a laughable opponent if he hadn't been clinging to the cat. The human at the other end of the connection was obviously transmitting direct orders to the double's limbs. She couldn't give its unformed brain a general order like attack or kill and let it handle the details.

  Jason, on the other hand, was trying to defend himself against her maneuvers while he was holding onto a writhing, death-dealing mass that seemed to be taking an exorbitantly long time to drown.

  The puppet's arms closed around his ankles. It held itself against him in the same way he was holding onto the cat and he realized the three of them were dropping away from the light.

  Francesca was still transmitting a play by play. The barrier in front of Eileen was armored and it seemed to be opaque on Francesca's side and transparent on Eileen's. Eileen could pop up behind it at any point with her weapon trained. Francesca's hopped-up reflexes gave her an edge but so far it seemed to be a standoff. Francesca was firing over the top of the barrier, in the hope she could keep Eileen down, and Eileen was jumping up at random and snapping off hurried shots before Francesca could shoot back.

  “I'm forcing her to concentrate on me, Jason. But that's the best I can do."

  Francesca could switch to an armor-piercing charge. The Jersey Guard had opted for a controlled-velocity, separate-propellant system for its police weapons. They could set their guns at a low-velocity stun or a high-velocity lethal setting and the gun would calculate the range and inject liquid propellant into the combustion chamber as required. The maximum setting would drive a bullet through most of the armor manufactured on the planet. But each increase in force required a bigger squirt of propellant. Francesca's gun would burn up most of the propellant in its fuel tank if she set it at maximum. And there was no guarantee the bullet would penetrate the barrier anywhere near Eileen.

  For Jason, at that moment, Eileen Levar's gun was rapidly becoming a remote consideration. The immediate issue was a decision that was becoming more pressing every second. Should he assume he would still have some oxygen left in his lungs when the cat died? Or should he turn his attention to the thing that was dragging him toward the floor of the docking pool?

  He let go of the cat and yielded to an uncontrollable impulse. His hands snapped into position in front of his face, palms outward, and he cowered behind them with his head lowered. The cat made a half turn and did what he had hoped it would do. It decided the air at the surface was more appealing than a few slashes at the impertinent biped who was trying to kill it.

  The puppet was holding Jason's legs in a bear hug, with its face pressed against the backs of his calves. Jason had to engage in an exercise in contortionism, but he managed to reach behind him and place his left hand behind the thing's neck while he cupped its chin with his right. Choking wouldn't do the job. He didn't have time. Neither would a thumb in the eye or some other attempt to inflict pain. The puppet might feel the pain, but the woman controlling its actions was comfortably isolated from the responses hammering through its nervous system.

  The puppet's grip loosened seconds after Jason snapped its neck. He fought his way free and rose toward the light as if he was ascending into a particularly attractive version of the afterlife.

  His brain felt as if it was getting ready to explode but it still responded to the precepts his combat trainers had tattooed on its circuits. He swiveled his head right and left as he broke the surface and saw the cat eyeing him across six feet of low waves. The crack of a gun seemed like a distant, half-understood background noise.

  The cat threw back its head. Its mouth dropped open. It thrashed at the air as if it was slapping at an insect and settled into the water.

  “Get under water,” Francesca ordered. “Get behind the yacht."

  Jason plunged beneath the surface. He had to repress every impulse his nerves and glands seemed to be telegraphing. His lungs were still half empty. But he knew he had to move before Eileen Levar fired at him. He was lucky she hadn't locked her sights on him while Francesca was shooting at the cat.

  He came up near the bow of the big pleasure boat and yielded to the luxury of sucking in three deep breaths in succession. Their communications net was obviously hopping from frequency to frequency as it dueled with a jamming system. At the moment it seemed to be winning. By
ron and his assault team were racing toward the beach. Francesca was telling Byron he should land but he shouldn't attack.

  “Don't trigger the defense system,” Francesca said. “We haven't seen Kelly. We have to assume he's standing by Michael and she's willing to have him turn the valve. If she's crazy enough to try this, she's crazy enough to try anything."

  “We'll beach in about one minute,” Byron said.

  “Stay open. Don't move unless you know exactly what the situation is. Have you caught your breath yet, Lieutenant?"

  “I'm active,” Jason said.

  “Stay covered. Be prepared to fire when I give the word."

  Francesca was already hauling herself onto the walk on the other side of the pool. She actually looked noticeably awkward for one brief moment—an event that was so rare it surprised Jason every time it happened. Then she flowed to her feet and ran, gun in hand, toward the barrier.

  Jason had been removing his own gun from its sealed pocket as he watched her. She was obviously counting on her enhancements, in the same way he had assumed he could tackle the cats with his bare hands.

  He thumbed the on switch and a green light advised him the gun was functioning. His left hand clutched the prow of the pleasure boat.

  “Select full automatic L3,” Francesca said. “Lay down covering fire."

  Jason shoved two selectors into place. He locked his left hand around his right wrist and sprayed the air over the barrier, right to left, with the gun aimed high. L3 was a low velocity, sublethal load that would keep ricochets to a minimum. Most of the bullets would flatten against the back wall and fall straight down.