by Barry Kirwan
It always is.
“I mean Blake, well, he’s a true hero of course.” She tested the ground with the toes of a boot.
How Shakespearean, he thought. We come here not to praise Caesar…
“But, well, we need someone with – I don’t know how else to say it – that killer instinct. Obviously Blake can kill – has killed many, in battle. But as a soldier. We need someone more –”
More what, he wondered? What do we need more than a hero?
She continued: “Sharper, politically astute, a real strategist. Someone who can lead without weapons. Someone with a social vision.”
Her words became more direct, less hypothetical. She was convincing herself, building an argument until it resonated with truth. He knew this path so very, very well.
“Someone like –”
“Shakirvasta.” Dimitri couldn’t resist supplanting the conclusion. He prayed for her to laugh, or shout, to say how preposterous it was. But instead she stared at him, as if she had just noticed him for the first time in hours.
“Exactly!” She beamed. “Back on Eden, Cheveyo was right about you, the genetic engineering really works, doesn’t it! No one else but you can see.”
Oh yes, he thought, scaffolding a smile, I see perfectly these days, no longer lost in the haze of a woman’s scent or my own accolades. No one sees clearer, sharper, than a blind man who recovers his sight.
“But we should keep this to ourselves,” she said, her enthusiasm re-kindled. “When the time is right, after the battle…”
He didn’t hear the rest, didn’t need to. Having worked at the frontier of oceanographic geo-engineering for two decades, he’d crossed paths with Shakirvasta’s Titan Corporation more than once. He knew the man to be a ruthless tyrant whose methods bordered on criminal. Right now, Shakirvasta, the CEO of the most powerful company Earth had ever seen, was keeping a low profile, biding his time. But his true colours would come out, sooner or later.
“Let’s tell Vince Plan C is ready,” he said. She bounced over to him, a vestige of Jen re-emerging as she threw her arms around him. He lifted her easily off the ground so that she clung to him, and he clasped her tight. It took every molecule of his will to finally let her go. Louise, attack now, please, right now, while she is still mine.
The radio shrieked its brief whistle, and Jen eased out of his grip, and snatched the radio from her waist pouch. “Yes?” she said, turning away from him. “Understood. We’ll be ready.” She clicked off the radio, slotting it back into place. She spoke to the violet, early evening sky. “She’s here”.
Chapter 10
First Strike
Louise awoke with a start. As she’d done since the labour camp in Thailand during WWIII, she sprung immediately out of bed. She manoeuvred into a face-down dog-stretch on all fours, exhaling as she pushed her pelvis back and up into the air, straightening out her arms and shoulders, locking her elbows and knees, elongating her spine. Her forehead rested on the floor. When her lungs were empty, she waited a while. She then inhaled and flipped up into her customary three-minute handstand, heels resting lightly against the wall, staring upside-down towards her empty cot. She’d slept alone, not caring what the other two got up to, whether making love or plotting against her.
Blood pumped into her head, smothering the embers of sleep, but not the nightmare that had woken her. She ignored the ritual nagging of her biceps, and let the dream remnants drift back into her consciousness: the Chorazin Medical facility back in New LA; Micah just out of his coma; Antonia paralysed on the floor; somebody behind her with a gun; a click, and time slowing, the sound of a pulse-charged round scorching its way out of the pistol’s barrel, roaring like a runaway train toward the back of her head. She turned, with difficulty, and the scene shifted: she and Vince making love furiously in his office, him slamming into her, she face-down over his desk. Again, she craned her neck to see his face, and the scene morphed into a place she didn’t recognise: a deep purple sky cleaved in two, a blood red gash allowing millions of insect-like creatures – Q’Roth, she now realised – to rain down onto a fluorescent rainbow-coloured city. Someone held her hand, but she couldn’t tear her eyes from the scene as the plague of armoured, metallic blue-black locusts feasted on the spiders, bleaching the city in minutes. An oval object tore up the hill towards her vantage point. She squeezed the hand she knew could only belong to Vince, but she could not otherwise move. As the object arrived it slowed in front of her. A mirror. She saw first Vince’s reflection, his brazen blue eyes level as always, then her own – but she was Q’Roth, her trapezoidal matt black head punctuated only by the three diagonal vermillion slits on each cheek. Her mouth opened impossibly wide – the way a Great White shark’s double-jointed jaws unhinge – and she emitted a grinding howl, shattering the mirror, thrusting her back into the waking world.
She lowered her legs, controlled and straight, down to the floor, waited ten seconds, then stood, her breathing rate only marginally above normal. Why Vince? He killed me! She slipped off her sleep-wear and strode naked into the needle shower. Without hesitation she set it to ice cold.
The water chilled her skin first to tingling, then to numbness. Images surfaced of her and Vince in happier times. Partners in every sense of the word. More than once she’d come close to renouncing her Alician heritage and going completely over to his side. But instead her life had ricocheted down a dark alley, after a messy operation in Moscow, where she’d been – what had he called it? – over-enthusiastic. He’d defended her tactics to their Chief, but he’d never treated her the same way afterwards. They got assigned different partners for six months, and after that got to work together again, but… She should have said something, healed it, but she never did. Too bad. She increased the water pressure till she started to shiver.
And now the Alicians had also abandoned her. She felt she was walking a tightrope across a chasm, unconvinced the rope would make it all the way to the other side. She focused, then leaned her head backwards, the shards of glacial water peppering her face, cleansing her resolve. Vince. He was the key. She’d deal with him and no one else. She had to admit it would be good to see him again, assuming she could repress the reflex urge to shoot him dead on sight. She shut off the water and grabbed the towel, drying herself roughly. She wrapped it around her and held herself for a moment, closing her eyes. She didn’t know what she’d say when she saw him. Didn’t know if – how – she’d tell him about the ship she’d vaporised. She’d have to be in a position of power, or the others would kill her in an instant. One way or another, blood was likely to spill today – it was up to Blake and the others how much. She donned her black Alician battle uniform. She caught herself smiling; it would be good to see him again. After all, they’d both killed so many people; what’s a little murder between friends?
Louise occupied the only chair on the bridge of the hunter-destroyer vessel – the Q’Roth never sat, so had no use for seats, but she’d had it installed. It emphasised her position over the other two, standing a few metres behind her at their consoles. She surveyed the images and holostreams of data cascading a few metres in front of her. A waterfall of shiny black figures tumbled against a mustard background, the alphabet unmistakeably Q’Roth, like Chinese calligraphy but with much more attitude: curling blade-like serifs, serrated and hooked with spiked barbs. She understood most of it.
When Sister Esma and the Q’Roth had re-animated her, too much of her original brain matter had been blown away by Vince, so they’d had to install some of the Q’Roth variety. She was a hybrid. She felt no different, except her bloodlust was keener than most Alicians. Compassion seemed like an outrageous concept – only the fittest should rule, the rest should perish or serve in utter obedience. She couldn’t remember if she’d felt the same way before Vince’s bullet. She considered her lover a moment – he had always been a ruthless bastard in humanity’s terms. Like her he had no time for weakness, instead crushing it underfoot. That was why she could deal
with him.
“What do you see, Hannah?” she said, not turning around.
There was a pause before Hannah answered, like a child answering a test, Louise thought, uncertain of either the answer or the consequences of an insufficient response.
“I see all three ships, but one of the transponders has been de-activated. The other two are faint, as if something is masking them”
She waited, but nothing more followed. “When I ask what you see, Hannah, I don’t just mean what you perceive with your eyes. What do you understand of their strategy? What do you recommend?”
Hannah coughed. “They must have realised there are transponders and located them. But they’ve only had time to disable one of them. The one with the nuclear device on board. So… I recommend we jump the other two ships into the sun and attack the third ship.”
Louise stood up. You’ll be first to go, she thought, you’re not worthy to carry our new genes. She turned. “And what do you see, Jarvik?” She was glad to have him back onboard – the fact that he had been to the surface and back so quickly meant he would have had no time to upset her plans. There was no way she’d have let Hannah go to the surface.
He lifted his chin and spoke to the datastream. “I see a recursive tracker algorithm encoded into the two surviving transponders.”
Hannah’s eyes flashed accusingly to the holostream and her own data screen; she’d missed the encrypted information.
“I see a trap,” Jarvik continued. “The moment we activate the two other ships, the third will have our transponder code, and no doubt will jump to our position and detonate.” He paused, but Louise remained still, not even nodding agreement with his assessment. He continued. “I propose we use the transponder I planted on the nuclear device to transport it to their new home, the city, and detonate it there.”
Louise allowed the shadow of a smile across her face. It was certainly tempting. The humans’ intentions were clearly aggressive, extreme, desperate. It would be … just. But she had no time for such archaic concepts. There was no right and wrong. There was simply what was. All that mattered in the end was always who survived, and who would rule. Nevertheless, she was impressed that the humans had been relatively ingenious. She’d have to find out later who had engineered this little ruse – maybe someone to recruit, to replace Hannah.
She returned to her seat, facing forward again. “Hannah, let’s see if you can redeem yourself with something a little less taxing. Is life on the planet sustainable?”
“Yes,” she replied, her voice groping for sounder footing. “They’ve found a food source, and water is plentiful.”
Louise ran her fingers through her thick blonde hair. “Jarvik, what do we do after we’ve destroyed them all?” She heard an intake of breath, then – rare for him, perhaps even a first – hesitation.
“Perhaps I spoke rashly,” he said.
She waited. It wasn’t enough for her to be leader; she needed them to understand that she was literally their superior. That was the essence of command.
Hannah got there first. “What would you suggest?”
Louise leaned back against the chair. “We need them alive, for now. But if we ask anything from a position of weakness, they will subdue us, and kill us eventually. First we have to break them. Sister Esma used to say there were two rules of negotiation. The first rule is to avoid asking anything from an enemy. The second rule is that if you do have to ask for something, make sure your enemy is on his knees when you do so.”
She raised herself again from the chair, and strode back to the central console midway between Jarvik and Hannah. “Time to educate them in the meaning of the word strategy.”
* * *
Micah studied the screens in front of him in the Mobile Command Centre, the MCC as everyone called it: a high-tech truck crammed with advanced surveillance gear, most of which he’d never even heard of. It was parked in the open plain, midway between the Q’Roth ships and the city. The stealth vehicle dampened all external emissions including bio-thermal signatures, employing chameleon-ware camouflage, so it was virtually invisible to the naked eye – unless you knew where to look. Micah had no illusions, though, and doubted it would fool Q’Roth sensor technology for a second. He despaired of the military’s blind obsession with techware solutions but, then again, he had no better idea.
He stared at the central array in front of him, a flat screen with scratchy images darting and flashing, making him squint. A greasy-haired young military tech guy fussed over the controls, triple-checking everything. Micah had no intention of distracting him: he’d never used a military Optron before, let alone a field model.
Micah had been an Optron reader for the past five years back on Earth. The virtual reality immersion kit had enabled him to surf the high density data-cores slipstreaming back from space missions such as Blake and Zack’s Ulysses trip to Eden, checking vital telemetry as well as comms. But it was art as well as science. All Optron ‘readers’ created their own Optron landscapes for data encoding, surveillance and interrogation. Only one in a hundred could do it, and as little as one in a hundred thousand could do it well. He didn’t feel particularly clever, it was just the way his brain was wired. What he had always loved, however, and what more than compensated for the occasional blinding migraines, was surfing the data, flying over surrealistic terrains of metallic hues and textures, spying occasional animals representing semi-intelligent sub-routines. But this, he reminded himself, this method he was about to try, he’d never done before.
He’d met military Optron readers once or twice at conventions, and one guy, Hal, had talked about it briefly while they were all getting drunk in Patti’s bar in underground Sylmar. He hadn’t known at the time if Hal had just been bull-shitting or not. Hal had said that after unmanned aerial vehicles and drones in the early part of the century, whereby remote-control surveillance and weapons platforms could be flown pilot-less into enemy territory, came the next generation. Initially these had used micro-cameras – same idea, just smaller and so even harder to detect. But this still only amounted to what was known as tele-presence: someone far away looking at a camera or vid-shot taken somewhere else. It never had the same level of rapport as being there, and so the understanding, the awareness and the reflexes were all a little off.
As Optron technology developed out of the necessity both to handle ultra-high bandwidth telemetry, and still make human sense of it, the military seized the opportunity to advance their deep cover surveillance capability. Essentially, a cluster of self-organising micro-units were fired into enemy territory and acted as a dispersed neural net. An Optron reader could then ‘join up the dots’, fusing the signals into a data landscape much as in a conventional Optron session. The technique had helped turn the tide in several pitched battles in the last weeks of the War. The only downside, Hal had said, was that it had fried the brains of a dozen or so readers on the way.
Micah ran a finger around the collar of his jumpsuit. It felt decidedly stuffy in the MCC, despite the aircon. He’d never ‘flown’ a military Optron, and hadn’t been trained for it. He began to wonder why he’d suggested it in the first place.
Colonel Enrique Vasquez, whom he’d met in Cocos and travelled with to Eden, hovered behind his right shoulder. The military commander had a shock of white cropped hair cresting a high brow. That was the second thing anyone noticed about him, the first being the missing right arm. Once Vasquez’s teal-coloured eyes locked onto somebody, though, that person never once glanced at the missing limb.
“It’s time,” Vasquez said. “The Optronic micro-clusters were sent up an hour ago, they’ll have dispersed in spatial orbit by now.”
Micah picked up the plastic glass of chilled water, gulped it down, then glanced around at Sandy, Jennifer, and Antonia. Sandy winked at him, Jennifer glared, and Antonia found something excruciatingly interesting on the opposite wall. Business as usual. Shakirvasta was also supposed to be there, but hadn’t arrived. Maybe he has more sense. He picked
up the black skull-cap with wires trailing out of it, and weighed it in his hands. “I’ve never worn one of these before,” he said, casually, as if talking about a new style of hat. This could turn my brain into mush.
Vasquez laid his surviving hand on his shoulder. “Vince told me you’re the best Optron reader alive, Mr. Sanderson.”
The only one alive, Micah thought, and used to a civilian Optron with the full suite of protective cut-outs and safeguards. But this is mil-tech; they don’t care about a few brain deaths on the road to victory.
Jennifer chipped in behind him. “For God’s sake, put it on, Micah. We need the intel, or else we’re all dead anyway. We need to know where her ship is, how many are onboard, what their tactical situation is. Otherwise she’s going to wipe us out.”
We don’t actually know that. Maybe Louise just wants me and Vince. Louise may be Alician, but she has her own agenda; always had, always will. As Micah eased on the clammy black rubber headpiece, Sandy joined in.
“Commander, it is only his brain that can be fried, isn’t it? I mean, the rest will remain, er, serviceable, won’t it?”
Before Vasquez had a chance to answer, if indeed he ever intended to, Antonia rushed over, stooped down towards Micah, and pressed a moist kiss on his cheek, then retreated just as quickly. A deep blush crawled across his face. He decided he’d better not dwell on it, and pulled the headpiece tight over his scalp, then flicked up a thumb. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”
Vasquez leaned over so only Micah could hear. “There may be some pain: sharp, pricking sensations. Try not to cry out, it’s bad form in front of the ladies.”
He sincerely hoped Vasquez was attempting humour.
The Colonel straightened up, cleared his throat, and spoke louder. “You’ll be less immersed than you’re used to, so you can talk to us occasionally if the need arises. We’ll be watching the data streams and holo-images you construe with the Optronic software. Remember, a lot of what you see will be in space. That can be pretty disorienting. Keep a mental foothold on Ourshiwann, or else you’ll lose your bearings. If you need to exit at any time, just say the word ‘Exit’ and we’ll cut you loose.”
