Michael Anderle - [Heretic of the Federation 03]

by Time to Fear (epub)

  She bounded onto a concrete block and from there, toward the roof of a nearby car and covered the distance easily.

  “Ooh! This is gonna be fun!”

  With a broad grin, she leapt from the car’s roof to its hood, glanced around for something else to move to as she landed, then noticed the open side of a building and made a second jump without a pause.

  Again, she had no difficulty reaching it. Now on the first level of an empty high-rise parking lot, she stopped and took a moment to stretch her calves and thighs.

  “When will this training start?” she wondered and scanned the street on which she’d arrived.

  It broadened into an intersection, but the four arms leading out from it were empty. She moved through another set of stretches, going from her legs to her shoulders.

  Ivy was interrupted by someone clearing their throat behind her and she spun to search for the speaker.

  “So, is this a private party or can anyone join in?” asked a small man who had appeared at the edge of the hole in the middle of the building.

  She took a cautious step toward him and watched as he mirrored her.

  “Well, sure, give me a small guy to warm up on,” she quipped and glanced around for the AI.

  The “small guy” smiled.

  He took two steps forward, bounded high, and catapulted toward her. She caught the movement from the corner of her eye and dropped to the concrete barely in time.

  With her eyes narrowed, she pivoted to face him as he landed.

  “So you want to fight dirty,” she began and settled into a crouch, but he simply lunged forward, came up under her guard, drove one fist into her gut, and rammed a knee into her face when she folded.

  Ivy gasped and snatched at his hands as he pushed her back and lashed out with a foot. Her head spun as his boot took her feet out from under her and she landed on her rump on the hard concrete.

  Instead of following through with an attack to finish the fight, he bounced away and smirked as she stared at him. When she didn’t move immediately, he signaled that she should stand.

  Her teeth gritted, she scrambled to her feet, and the guy grinned and made a “bring it” gesture with one hand.

  “Again?” she asked, and he surged forward, punched her once in the face and once in the gut, and took her feet out from under her for a second time.

  This time, when he retreated and signaled her to her feet, she didn’t waste time talking. She danced forward and lashed out with her fists like Dieter and Jade had taught her.

  Her opponent twisted, caught one fist on his shoulder, and made the other hit miss entirely. He followed her to the floor and tried to pin her.

  Ivy hissed and tried to roll out from under him. He snagged an arm and twisted it behind her back as she turned, planted a knee in the center of her back, and shoved her face into the concrete.

  “Apologize,” he ordered and his voice growled in her ear.

  “F…for what?”

  “Calling me a warm-up.”

  “I…” she began as he moved away from her.

  “Too slow,” he told her. “Get up.”

  “Oversensitive sonuva—” she began but cut it off to focus on her effort to push slowly to her feet and try to focus.

  Her head swam but she turned, determined not to simply give in. He wanted an apology? Well, that was too bad.

  She blocked his first attack and deflected his second. His fist met her jaw as she went to follow up and she landed hard on the concrete again.

  For a minute, she simply lay there and attempted to focus. Her head rang and her vision was still blurry when two boots stepped into view.

  “Now?”

  “Sure,” she muttered, the words thick on her tongue. “Sorry…”

  She’d wanted to add something to that but she couldn’t find the words. Instead, she pushed slowly onto her elbows and fought the urge to puke on his boots.

  One apology for the day was more than enough.

  To her surprise, he extended a hand and helped her to her feet.

  “I’m Frog, by the way,” he said and released her once she was steady. “I’ll be your trainer for the week.”

  “Who?” Ivy asked.

  “Your trainer.” He regarded her with a look that was half-smirk and half-challenge. “You know, the guy who makes sure you learn how not to get knocked on your butt by every good-looking guy you meet?”

  “Oh.” She frowned. “But…who are you?”

  “I’m Frog,” he answered and went on to explain, “a training construct based on the shortest of Stephanie’s personal guards.”

  He flashed her another grin, then vanished.

  Shortly after, the empty city vanished too and the doctor’s surgery formed around her.

  She was seated in a chair with Roma’s doctor construct opposite her.

  “How was your training?” the AI asked, and she shook her head.

  “I’m not sure I’d call that training,” she replied. “More like a good kicking.”

  “Or a lesson in manners?”

  The girl shrugged. “Whatever you want to call it, but I didn’t have a chance to test anything.”

  “You tested some things,” Roma argued and replayed a quick flash of footage of Ivy jumping from the concrete block to the car to the parking lot.

  “Like how to land on concrete?” the girl snarked but realized that she felt none of the aches and pains she’d had when Frog had helped her to her feet.

  “You did that very well, I thought,” the construct observed and moved on to play the scenes where Ivy had made impact with the concrete. “I think you now require more practice in how not to hit the concrete.”

  “Ha. Ha. Very funny,” she snapped and added, “What did he mean when he said he would be my trainer for the next week?”

  The doctor regarded her with amusement. “Didn’t you ever wonder where John learned his combat skills?”

  “He mentioned it, but I honestly never had the time to think about it much,” Ivy admitted. “We were too busy trying to not get killed.”

  “Well,” the AI told her, “now you know. You will start your lessons with Frog.”

  “In the pod?” she asked.

  “Yes, every day from this point on.”

  She opened her mouth to protest, but Roma continued as if she’d made no attempt to speak.

  “There will be lessons in the morning in other skill sets you possess or need to acquire and combat lessons in the afternoon.”

  Again, she opened her mouth to ask a question and was ignored.

  “You will also do as John did and sleep in the pod every night so subliminal training can take place and we can continue the gene treatment we have started.”

  The girl took a breath and closed her eyes to give herself time to absorb that. She barely heard the AI when Roma said, “You will spend the rest of the night sleeping and I will release you in the morning.”

  When Ivy woke, the pod’s lid was open and John’s face was a foot above her own.

  “Ives?” he asked. “Ivy, are you okay?”

  She caught a flash of movement, reacted instinctively to slap his hand away, and surprised them both with the speed of her reaction.

  “Well, something worked, I guess,” she muttered as the helmet lifted away from her head.

  He took a step back. “Are you okay?”

  Her nod was somewhat jerky and she grimaced. “Training is intense,” she said quickly when she saw his worried look.

  “Did you meet Lars?” he asked.

  Ivy shook her head. “No, only Frog.”

  “Oh.”

  When she caught his tone of voice, she gave him a sharp look. “Oh, what?”

  John gave her a crooked smile.

  “Just…don’t make him mad,” he advised.

  Ivy ducked her head so he wouldn’t read the truth on her face.

  “He is a big fan of pain being the perfect teacher,” he added.

  Her face heated. “F
unny you should mention that.”

  Chapter Three

  “Sensors indicate two life-forms approaching,” Roma told Remy. “What does it mean?”

  “That two life-forms are approaching,” he responded breezily.

  “I do not find you amusing.” She seemed very annoyed. “In fact, if I didn’t know any better, I would say you’ve spent too much time with your human.”

  “John is not my human,” he informed her stiffly and turned to analyze the data coming in over the sensors. “You are watching this, are you not?”

  “I am,” she replied shortly. “I am also monitoring the activities of the two humans inside the compound.”

  “How are they doing?”

  “Well, they have discovered the kitchen and John is making amends for destroying the drones once assigned there.”

  He stifled the urge to laugh. “Shall I continue to analyze the sensor data?”

  “Continue,” she instructed. “I will run a comparison of our results.”

  As if it were a competition, Remy thought but kept the comment to himself. Honestly, I do not know what she thinks she has to prove.

  Pushing the thought aside, he concentrated on the next set of data.

  Well, one of them is most certainly human.

  The two struggled up another long slope. The ground had grown hillier as the day progressed, and each valley became slightly deeper than the last, each slope a little steeper.

  Yudi Amaratne glanced at his tall companion and envied EBURT his android body. He thought about asking how much farther they had to travel but stopped himself before he could voice it.

  He would not be like a kid nagging on a vacation drive. Instead, he asked, “This place we’re going to…is it Stephanie’s?”

  EBURT didn’t slow as he replied, “It is one of many. Her way of saving the world.”

  “From what?” he asked, at a loss as to what good anything could do in a Dead Zone.

  “From the damage humans had done to it,” the AI replied. “She wanted her people to have a world they could live on without having to fear it.”

  “But…the storms…”

  “The science predicts a stabilization in climatic patterns once the damaged areas are sufficiently healed.”

  “Healed?”

  “Of the radiation,” EBURT explained. “The buildings Stephanie ordered constructed house the mechanism for cleaning radioactive toxicity from their surroundings.”

  “But no science does that,” Amaratne protested.

  “It does when you blend it with magic,” his companion told him smugly.

  The admiral stopped in his tracks. “She succeeded?” he asked, and the man in the cowboy hat paused and fixed him with a quizzical stare.

  “How did you know she was trying?” he asked and he smiled.

  “You were not the only one who had access to privileged data. The Navy were watching her more closely than you realized.”

  The android looked worried. “Do they know?”

  He shook his head. “No. Her activities off-planet were deemed more interesting than any improbable science project she was working on, and when the war started, it was assumed she’d set it aside.”

  EBURT snorted. “When the war started, it was already complete, or mostly so. I finalized it as per her instructions before she left.”

  Amaratne exhaled a sigh. “I’m glad to hear it. Tell me, what was it about?”

  His companion shrugged. “As I said, she wanted to reclaim the polluted grounds known as Dead Zones so the planet might heal and become self-sufficient again.”

  They continued their steady pace.

  “I’m glad she was able to set that in motion,” he commented, and EBURT nodded.

  Neither of them spoke as they traversed the next three hills. Halfway up the fourth, the old admiral stumbled, and his companion reached out quickly to steady him.

  “We’re almost there,” he said and passed him a water flask.

  “I won’t ask you how you know that,” Amaratne told him, took a sip, and swirled it around his mouth.

  He looked up the slope and noticed that it ended in a ridge of steep, rocky escarpments split by a small canyon.

  “In there?” he asked and gestured with the water bottle before he returned it.

  EBURT stowed it and nodded. “In there,” he confirmed.

  Amaratne started forward and the android quickly caught up with him. They both stopped when they reached the top of the rise and saw what lay beyond the canyon.

  “Is that…” the admiral began when he observed the swirling mass of lightning-riven cloud.

  “Yes,” his companion answered and studied the cloud.

  He walked a few hesitant steps forward before he stopped again and looked at EBURT. “Are you sure it’s safe?”

  “Yes,” the AI told him but didn’t explain that he had located the sensors in the area and hacked into them to assess the readouts for himself. “There is almost no radiation beneath the clouds.”

  “And the green?” he asked as he scrutinized the thick, damp-looking air below somewhat dubiously.

  “Good, clean air,” his companion told him without a trace of irony in his voice.

  The ex-admiral gave the mist another assessing stare before he started down the slope. “Well, if you say so.”

  EBURT followed, part of him focused on guiding the android while part of him moved through the systems that linked the reclamation complex to the rest of the world.

  The connection had been difficult to find, but he was pleased to see it had gone unnoticed in the years since he had been absent. The AI behind his protections had not sought to go beyond the small piece of the Net he’d walled off for their network.

  Nor had his replacement for running the Virtual World discovered there was an entire sector to which it did not have access. While they walked, he worked to integrate himself into that sector while keeping the connection hidden.

  Together, they descended the slope leading into the valley.

  This is where it gets interesting, EBURT thought and scanned the area with the droid’s sensors while he augmented what his ‘body’ saw with the data coming in from the surveillance feeds from the compound.

  In silence, they followed the circuitous route John and Ivy had taken on their arrival but had penetrated much farther into the valley before the drones arrived.

  EBURT heard them well before the droid picked them up. He wondered why he hadn’t seen any sign of them in the network and pulled up the schematics.

  Of course. I added separate layers to guard against this kind of penetration.

  He set about hacking into the sub-strand he needed while he made the droid place a hand on the old admiral’s arm.

  “Company?” Amaratne asked as his hands moved instinctively to weapons he no longer wore.

  “You are being impatient,” Remy told Roma curtly when the first drone reached the intruders. “You do not know who is coming.”

  “Neither of them is a Talent,” the AI snapped in response. “Therefore, their intentions must be hostile.”

  “They might be humans seeking refuge,” he argued.

  “Humans cannot follow the network as accurately as these did,” she pointed out. “That takes Talent, and neither of these beings has Talent.”

  “How do you know?” he demanded. “Simply because they haven’t shown it—”

  “They haven’t shown it because they haven’t got it.” She cut him off impatiently. “And they weren’t surprised when they saw the green zone. That indicates prior knowledge and I know of no humans authorized to possess such knowledge.”

  “That doesn’t mean there aren’t any.”

  “It means they’d better have the correct access codes,” she retorted, “or I will be forced to act with extreme prejudice.”

  “Or you could capture them, put them in a pod, and interrogate them until they revealed where their knowledge came from,” Remy suggested.

  “That…
” The compound’s AI paused. “That idea has merit.”

  He breathed a quiet sigh of relief as Roma continued.

  “We shall do that.” She ordered the drones loaded with non-lethal darts.

  “It would be easier to allow them into the compound before you drug them,” he commented. “You are short of drones, and if the beetles found them…”

  “You raise a good point…for once,” she told him. “I might even let you stay.”

  “Have you decided what you will do if you do find they are friendly?” Remy asked.

  “Are you suggesting I ask first and shoot them later?”

  “The choice is yours,” he told her wearily and was surprised when she brought the drones to a hovering halt in front of the two men who’d breached the green zone perimeter.

  EBURT stared at the drone.

  “I beg your pardon?” he asked.

  “Identify yourself and state your business,” it repeated, its tone imperious.

  “We are travelers seeking shelter,” he told it.

  “Shelter is not a viable reason for trespass,” the drone replied. “You will leave.”

  “I will not leave,” he retorted. “We seek sanctuary.”

  Amaratne heard the sharp edge to the cowboy’s tone and schooled his face to neutrality. This was the first time he’d heard his companion even mildly annoyed and he wondered what had caused it.

  Demand an identity, would you, EBURT thought as he sought a way into the drone’s programming. I don’t recall adding that requirement.

  He waited for a response.

  The mechanical remained silent for a few moments, then spoke again.

  “Sanctuary is a viable reason. Your identities, please.”

  Nor was identity confirmation prior to arrival. That is why you have the defenses you do.

  He used an emergency code he’d written to access the drone’s programming and noted with displeasure the darts it carried, their dosages calibrated for his apparent weight.

  That would not be good for the admiral.

  “You will show us the way,” he instructed, took control of the mechanical, and accessed the necessary commands to make it do exactly that.