Tony Daniel (30 page)

The Department of Immunity message began to repeat itself.

“Oh shit,” Leo said. “I guess I tripped some sensor that I didn’t notice.”

They rushed toward the exit. The door would not open.

“Shit!” Leo yelled, and banged against it. It didn’t budge. Then he concentrated and put his hands to it. “Damn security lock,” he said.

“Let me try,” said Aubry. “I’m pretty good at that sort of thing.”

“Jesus, I promised your dad . . . shit! Shit! It’s too complicated for my lockpick subroutine.” He backed away from the door and Aubry swarmed her pellicle grist into contact with it. The lock was very complicated. She slid completely into virtuality and had a long look at it. There was no way past the intermeshed barriers facing her. It was like a fence in front of some important building.

But was it really like that? Or was the complex barrier just the picture it presented in the usual virtual view? She fed the data into one of the non-visual paradigms that her mother had taught her how to use. In this way she was able to “feel” the shape of the lock. Feel it and . . . feel
around
it.

It was a three-dimensional façade of a four-dimensional matrix. That is, this was the presentation in the “touch” paradigm she was employing. What she had really discovered was a back door in the programming. Aubry reached “behind” the lock, as if she could reach behind a door and open it from the other side. There was no way to visualize that in three dimensions, but there was no problem for the daughter of a free convert to see the lock this way.

She clicked the door open. “There we go,” Aubry said.

“Remain in position,” blared the walls. Aubry and Leo did exactly the opposite, and ran out into the halls.

It was too late.

A Department of Immunity sweeper unit, bristling with gas nozzles and needles that gleamed evilly and dispensed something awful that Aubry didn’t even want to guess at, was gliding down the hall. It used its grist to turn the corridor into Velcro ringlets. Its own surface, top and bottom, was covered with tiny hooks, and it latched into the new-formed ringlets, then let go, and so advanced toward them in the hall. The sweeper drew closer with the sound of a constant Velcro ripping.

“Do not move do not move do not move!”
the sweeper intoned in a woman’s voice.
“Cease flight, cease flight cease flight!”

Again, Aubry and Leo ignored the instructions and turned to run down the corridor the other way. But the sweeper was incredibly fast, and they had no chance of escape.

“When we round that bend,” Leo called to Aubry, “you keep going. I’m going to try to hold that thing up.”

“Hold it up? Leo, you haven’t got a chance.”

“Do what I, say, kid!” he yelled at her. “If I hear any more guff from you, I’m telling your father.”

“Leo—”

“Do it, Aubry!” They came to the corner. “Now!” Aubry flew around the corner—

—right into the arms of a woman.

The woman was barely larger than Aubry, but she stopped Aubry’s motion without seeming to move a muscle. Then she grabbed Aubry by the shoulders, and, before Aubry could say a word (or even think), the woman shoved Aubry behind her. Then she reached around the corner and did exactly the same thing to Leo.

“What the fuck!” Leo exclaimed.

“Keep her out of the way,” the woman said to Leo, and pointed at Aubry. Then the woman unslung something long and pointed from her back. She rounded the corner.

For a moment, Aubry and Leo stood together, amazed. Then they could not help themselves, at least Aubry felt she could not, and Leo joined her. They peered around the corner.

The woman was advancing on the DI sweeper. It was easily five times her size. She did not waver for a moment. The sweeper extended what Aubry supposed was a gas nozzle of some sort. The woman immediately and expertly inserted the tip of the long rod she carried into the nozzle. There was a soft
birr,
as of grinding machinery, followed by a little puff of smoke somewhere in the sweeper’s innards. Then the woman extracted the rod and ran back to them at breakneck speed.

“It’s going to blow,” she said matter-of-factly, and pulled them around the corner with her.

It blew. Boy, did it blow. A rush of heat and light picked them up and threw all three of them a good ten meters down the hall they were in. A noxious smell filled the air, and Aubry could barely see for all the smoke.

“Are you Friends of Tod?” the woman asked them.

“Yeah,” said Leo.

“He said there were more coming.” She quickly shook his hand, then took Aubry’s and shook it. Aubry withdrew her hand and stared at it for a moment, then looked back at the woman.

She was repositioning the rod on her back. She was still small, but Aubry felt a sudden chill go through her.

This woman could kill me with her little finger, Aubry thought. She could kill me just with a look, probably.

“Pleased to meet you,” Aubry said. Face the things that scare you, her father had told her more than once. It doesn’t make them any less scary, but at least you can see where their claws are when you are looking at them. Aubry had never thought she’d meet the living embodiment of her father’s metaphor. This woman was kind of scary.

“My name is Jill,” the woman said.

The Borrasca

A Memoir

by Lebedev, Wing Commander, Left Front

Although a full recounting of my role in the recent hostilities is what I am about here, I would be remiss if I did not fill in a few details as to my own background and some general facts about cloudships. Most people have never met a cloudship, after all, and you cannot communicate with them by the normal channels of the merci. Especially in the period before the war, cloudships, rightly or wrongly, considered themselves a breed apart, and there were those in our number who made arguments to the point that we were a different species than other human beings, and that we were as far above
Homo sapiens
as
Homo sapiens
was above
Australopithecus
. I was not among these who made such an argument, but I must admit to a certain aloof attitude toward anything having to do with the solar system inside of the orbit of Pluto.

You see, I had gotten out of there, and I had no intention of ever going back before the war began. In fact, if you had told me that I would not only return to the solar system, but be part of the attack on the Met, I would have laughed in your face (that is, provided you were not a cloudship without an aspect, in which case you would not have had a face to begin with).

I was born on Earth, in old Russia, in 2376. The less said about my early years, the better. I came from wealth—old Moscow Mafia money, now washed by a few generations, it was claimed—and my first thirty years were, as they once said in America, nothing to write home about. In fact, I did not write home for a period of fifteen e-years, except to keep my banker (and so my father; they were the same person) informed of my current whereabouts so that he could send my regular checks. This period of debauchery could not last, and did not. I remember waking up one noontime in a London gutter. (I have since tried to discover which one. I believe it was somewhere on Shaftesbury Avenue in the Central District, but as to the exact drainage slough, my memory, understandably, fails me.) I lay in that gutter, surrounded by rotting city detritus, with the hot sun upon my pate and my head on fire—that is, with a hangover, and not literally—as sometimes happens, I’m told, with the new bioactive drugs. I had on no clothes, and had contracted a most violent case of sunburn. What’s more, I was the object of considerable attention from several of the passersby, who were by no means entirely respectable characters themselves. I got me to a flophouse, but it was a long, excruciatingly painful, and humiliating journey, let me tell you. And I lay there for near two weeks, recuperating, my skin peeling off as if I were a eucalyptus tree.

It was during that time that I made a holy oath with myself to get as far away from the sun as a man could get, and stay there, so that I might never experience its blistering power again.

This was a promise I was destined to break, but more on that anon.

Well, this was Earth in the 2300s, and space travel was still horribly expensive and out of range of even a rich young fellow such as I. No, the only way into space was through merit in those days, or at least the appearance of merit through professional qualification. And the way to qualification, I discovered to my horror, lay through scholarship. I had to start very nearly at the beginning, for I had left school when I was fifteen and very nearly could not read by this point in my career.

I shall not recount the history of the arduous first years. Determined to avoid the pitfall of depending upon my father’s grudging generosity, I enrolled in night classes, where I reacquainted myself with the alphabet and with the arithmetic operands. I eventually matriculated to college, and by that time I had made the odd discovery that I actually
liked
learning and was not at all bad at it. This was as much a surprise to me as a man must feel when he discovers that, to his horror and happiness, he has fallen deeply in love with an ugly woman.

From college, I went on to graduate school, and received my doctorate from the University of Wisconsin in the old United States, where I wrote my dissertation on the Formation Mechanics of the Oort system that rings our solar system. So you see, I had not forgotten that my life’s purpose was to be getting as far away from the dreaded old Sol as I could possibly get. I took particular satisfaction in the fact that my studies required a great deal of nighttime work at observatories, and included one trip up to the old Hubble-Penrose Platform then in Earth orbit. This was my first spaceflight, and my first experience of weightlessness. I immediately applied, and was accepted for, a position on the old Farside Station of Luna. At first, I was very excited about getting off Earth, but I quickly discovered that, during the lunar “day,” a sunnier and hotter spot had not been discovered (this was before the settlement of Mercury, of course). The single bright point of my stay on the moon was a new friendship I formed there with a historian who had managed to get himself stationed there. His name at the time was Lucius Montgomery. We became fast friends, and discovered that we had the same goal in life, but completely different motives. It was at that time that, as a joke, we began referring to one another as our favorite character or author in literature. I cannot remember the genesis of this practice, but believe it had something to do with the way one used to sign the old “e-mail” of that era. In any case, I took on the name Lebedev, from Chekov’s “Ivanov.” I shall not divulge my first name, since it would mean nothing to most of you, and those to whom it might ring a bell are those whom I would rather not know.

Lucius Montgomery became Tacitus.

Bob fiddled madly as Makepeace Century’s ship,
Mrs
.
Widow
, approached Triton. The reel he was playing seemed very familiar to Andre Sud, but try as he might, Andre couldn’t quite place it. Outside, Neptune wheeled by underfoot as the living quarters of the ship catapulted over itself to create a semblance of gravity. The ship’s spin, clearly visible through the transparent floors, had, at first, been disconcerting, and a bit sickening, to Andre.

[But you can get used to just about anything that isn’t actively trying to kill you,] his convert portion said, and Andre nodded to no one but himself.

“All right, Bob, I give up,” said Andre. “What is the name of the song?”

But instead of telling him the title of the tune, Bob just laughed in his maniacal way and continued sawing away at it. Andre joined TB and Molly Index, both of whom were sitting at a table playing an odd memory game.

“It’s that cookie,” TB said, after staring at the table for several minutes. “You ate all the chocolate chips out of it.”

“Damn, you’re good,” said Molly. She reached over, picked up the cookie, and finished it off. “My turn,” she said, then turned her back to the table.

Upon the table was an assortment of items: three more cookies, two glasses, one a wineglass, and a bottle of red wine, a piece of string, a bandanna, and five keys, four of which were broken. TB reached over and turned the label of the wine bottle, which had been facing him, to the other side of the bottle, facing away. “Okay,” he said. Molly turned back around and began to study the table. Neptune wheeled underneath them once again.

Bob’s fiddling went from antic to something more sedate. Makepeace Century climbed down the runged wall next to the accessway.

“Troubles,” she said. Her face, always one grimace away from appearing haggard, was lined with a frown.

“What is it?” Molly asked.

“Three black ships,” Century replied. “Come and see.”

They climbed up to the accessway and Andre felt himself getting lighter as they approached the larger part of the ship, around which the tethered living quarters swung. Soon they were in zero gee. He’d always been fairly good at moving about in free fall. With the cessation of spin, Neptune had stopped turning relative to the passengers and was dead ahead of them out the ship’s forward viewport.

“Have a look in the virtuality,” Century said. Everyone shifted over to the local merci. They were hanging in space, bodiless. Neptune was many times closer, and the ringlets were clearly visible. There, against the blue of the planet, were, as Century had described them, three black ships.

“Something strange. We are only seeing those ships by electromagnetic signals. Not a merci band is connecting.”

“Yes,” said TB. “I feel it. The merci is being jammed.”

“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Molly said.

“It can’t be done,” Andre said. “Theoretically.”

“I’ve seen this class of ship before,” Century said.

They were enormous scythes, bound together with barbed wire.

[The scythe handles are a half mile thick, according to the sensors,] Andre’s convert whispered. [The length is more than five miles from blade to handle end.]