Transcendence (13 page)

Boom as another torpedo arced toward where the laser had last pointed, following a complicated trajectory to something Pehr couldn’t see. The torpedo—barely a meter long and as thin as a wine bottle—looked like a sliver of glass, one end molten orange, glinting in sunrays and the reflected light of swollen Neptune.

“
Hit home, baby,” Pehr said. Things were good. Then he read a line; he had a feel for timing:

“
Crew, it’s time I let you know something. We’re on an undercover mission to destroy a top-secret NKK weapons installation on Triton. We—”

“
Captain?” Janus interrupted. “That surrender message I reported? He’s speaking in English now. You’re not going to believe it. Some kind of discovery of an alien artifact. On Triton. An alien artifact, Jack. Think of it!”

“
It’s a cover for the weapons installation!” Eyes shouted.

Pehr moved aside his splice and looked at his crew. They both stared at invisible readouts or 3VRDs. He watched a line pass unspoken, then another. Dead air was bad, but not fatal; on-the-ball editors could repair almost any omission. But Pehr needed to finish up the series on a strong note. He extemporized.

“
Janus, attempt to verify transmission and continue evasive maneuvering. Bombardier, maintain defensive action. We’re going to survive long enough to find out whether Triton has been hiding a weapons installation or an alien artifact, even if it kills us!”

Complications, danger, decisions, alien artifacts. . . . Even without a script—perhaps because they were working without one—Pehr felt alive. No longer was he the weak and lonely man. The bandanna-boy in his pocket gave him strength again, as he had often before. And the show was good. Life was good.

“
Chirr!” Clarisse screamed, her head pounding as if it had just taken a hard kick. The EarthCo ship had seen her hunters. They had destroyed the first.

She tore herself free of the hunter’s shattered pov and dove into that of the second. The optics flickered; something had gone wrong. She cursed again. Not only were these Z-tech hunters visible to the EarthCo sensors—they’d been guaranteed invisible!—but their systems were falling apart as well.

Clarisse allowed herself a second to draw a deep breath and think nothing. She would not allow anger to swallow her up, not now, when using it tactically could give her strength. Once—only once in her adult life—her anger had nearly chewed her up.

The man had been Russian by ethnicity, though he grew up an NKK citizen in Changchun, China. During Clarisse’s fourth year of service as Coordinator of Protection, Nikolai had joined the station in the capacity of fighter-trainer. The Sotoi Guntai had sent him and one other man to Neptunekaisha aboard an Ami-class fighter, a vessel several iterations obsolete but still better than the junk she called her fleet. Nikolai’s sensual face often wore a faint smile that Clarisse couldn’t decide was mocking or desirous. Intheflesh, he knocked on her cabin door every time he returned from a training mission.

“
Your pilots are weak,” he would say, chiding yet seeming to include her in his joke. Or, “You must be a worthy opponent,” or, “I pray for the day we are given an enemy to fight.”

Clarisse couldn’t stand his intrusions on her privacy, especially by a man with that Russian face. He looked so much like Ivan, her adopted older brother who had taken such pleasure in providing young Clarisse with adult 3VRD games she couldn’t understand. His favorite was “Interstellar City,” so hand-to hand violent that it was rated “A-Type Adults Only.” Time and again, Ivan had pried open her headcard and fed the program to her, all steel passageways and explosions and smoke and rivers of blood; she had learned, at thirteen years of age, how it felt to break a man’s ribs. But Ivan always beat her, until Clarisse was in her fifteenth year. She had turned his arachnidan aliens against him, and blew a hole in his abdomen when he turned to run. But he couldn’t run far, since he had inadvertently taught her how to block headcard escape until virtual death.

Oh, yes, he had been a lovely brother! She often spat when she thought of him, even now, decades after his card-death.

Nikolai looked so like Ivan. Yet she was certain she sensed sexual desire in him for her. Having never held a man, intheflesh, in loving embrace, she had no idea how to respond to this. Especially since she thought she might be wrong.

After he had been with Neptunekaisha for 20 Earth-days, Nikolai pounded on her door after a training mission and said, “Your pilots are ruining me. I need a worthy opponent.”

Clarisse had simply stared at him, his breath fast and deep, his eyes flashing with laughter and desire, his skin seeming to radiate sex that she felt she must either seize or repulse. . . . Her own heart beat madly within her ribs, as it had on so many occasions during her trek across Asia. She didn’t know herself—in these matters—well enough to tell if she hated this man or needed to throw her thighs around his waist and pound her flesh against his. He made her feel vulnerable, and that was unforgivable.

“
I need you to spar with me,” he said.

“
Kaigun Taii Nikolai Sekiguchi,” she responded in the formal, “I challenge you to a sparring match. You may use your vessel; I need no more than a refitted sportster to defeat you.”

And he had laughed, burn him, just as Ivan had.
Is he mocking me?
she wondered. Ivan would laugh whenever Clarisse offered a challenge. She could not read Nikolai, damn him!

So they suited up and walked the narrow corridors in silence to the ship-bay. Everything on the station was white plastic—like every station—painstakingly cleaned each evening after shift’s end by Neptunekaisha citizens who considered it important to eat regularly. Four technicians led the way, tools in hand but clearly lost in 3VRD preparations. When they entered the bay, the technicians immediately opened panels on the two selected craft—panels covering components their systems-scans had shown needed attention.

The bay opened 40 meters to each side, ten from floor to ceiling. But it was not spacious, cluttered with loose rocket motors, equipment, and several craft in various stages of disrepair. Clarisse noticed with displeasure that all wore the black smudges of mild laser burns; so her new fighter-trainer liked to use a little realism to scare the pilots into better soldiering. She could accept that. She knew the value of fear and self-preservation. Apparently the burns hadn’t done any real damage.

Three airlock-chute doors stood at the end of three rails, and every craft sat on a rail that led to one of these. All was contained within the station so that nothing disrupted its aerodynamic shape.

Wordlessly, Nikolai indicated his sleek ovoid fighter, as if offering it again to Clarisse. She felt her stomach rise toward her mouth, furious that he would think himself so much better than she that he could present a threat with one of the re-fit ships. Maybe he even thought he could, using a re-fit, beat her. Her body trembled.

Now she told herself that she understood Nikolai. He had come to Neptune to put her in her place. NKK had probably sent him to test her, to tempt her, to beat her down. She would teach this snide youth a lesson; she would demonstrate to NKK what made a Sotoi Guntai Series Honorman.

Clarisse boarded her chosen sportster, a nine-meter Jorokobi atmospheric design with dual x-ray lasers mounted in each stubby wing. Its methane ram-rocket could only safely propel the sportster to half the speed the fighter could attain in an atmosphere, but the wings would make her craft more maneuverable. She could only fight with the lasers, while Nikolai would have access to lasers, a small particle cannon, and two Taifu missiles—all of which, of course, he would only fire in 3VRD. Except for light doses of real laser, she reminded herself. Clarisse climbed an aluminum ladder into the open canopy of her sportster, spliced in to its systems, closed and sealed the canopy, then waited.

The technicians working on her craft soon commed her that all was go. She contacted the ship-bay server and ordered it to eject her and Nikolai’s ships. A moment later, the sportster bumped forward along its track and was led into the airlock—which irised open just as the nose of the craft was about to contact it and irised shut just after the tail swept past. Then the outer door irised open, and the bay’s magfield propelled her several hundred meters behind the station at 2
g
s. The ramrocket ignited, and she was under power.

As par for such training exercises, she limited herself to using only the ship’s server, which was a passable upgrade. Clarisse spliced in and overlaid the ship’s control system landscape atop the povs afforded by six cameras which sensed a spectrum from the infrared to the near ultraviolet.

She located Nikolai, rocketing away at full acceleration, leaving chaff—server-confusing programs and 3VRD mini projectors of his fighter and assorted psychedelia—in his wake. But she knew how to sort out the real data, and instructed the server to ignore the rest. She accepted the role of pursuer and gave chase.

During the next minutes, Nikolai placed hundreds of kilometers between them, finally disappearing from Clarisse’s long-range povs. Now the chaff became dangerous, since it was all she could sense of him. She prepared for his next move: The fighter would fall upon her from above or below, maybe even from the rear, having circled back through the dense atmosphere beneath or gone hyperatmospheric. Nikolai would have left self-powered chaff, probably projectors, indicating routes that he had not taken, adding to his pursuer’s confusion. Great banks of cloud flashed past; in her rear pov, Clarisse watched them glow as they ignited briefly in the oxygen-rich exhaust.

Ah, I know what you are doing
, she thought.
You will leave a path that tells me exactly where you have gone, yet think I will not follow because that is too obvious. Or maybe you have foreseen this train of thought. No matter; I change the rules. I will continue to be the pursuer, not become the waiting victim
.

She cut her rocket and entered glide-mode. Nikolai could not track her exhaust now, and soon—once she had fallen deeply enough into the atmosphere where he would fear to enter—none of his sensors could pick her out. Down there, amidst the convection storms and cyclones, she would re-ignite the ram rocket and stay below the “clear” upper atmosphere for . . . 50 kilometers, she decided.

A wall of white-edged blue cloud slammed against the sportster; she emerged for a moment, then re-entered the dense haze. She did not break out again. Clarisse smiled, feeling her face tight with expectation and childhood rage. This is what a man gets for trying to fool me.
Who does he think he is? Who do the NKK policymakers think they are, sending him here to test me? Why did that fool Nikolai think he could deceive the master of warfare?

Neptune’s heavy gravity made the craft sink very fast even though its lateral velocity was still high. Nikolai would just now be correcting his course, turning back to confront her. He had probably spent the past few minutes estimating Clarisse’s radius at full speed, and would be scanning for her as soon as his sensors were within range.

Ding, the sportster’s server scored Nikolai a ticker-point: Nonlethal perimeter hit.

Clarisse re-ignited the ram-rocket and dove, making the decision in a split second to seek the storms rather than open air.

She was enraged. How could he have found her so soon? He was out of range, he had to be. His vessel only flew so fast. Then she recognized her failure: He had gone hyperatmospheric, but much sooner. She had been chasing a ghost. Clarisse, master of 3VRD combat, had been defeated in the very arena that was her forte—the technical, the electronic, the virtual. She was the one who had grown fat and lazy.

In her mind, she saw Nikolai’s loaded smile again, and knew it for what it was: He has been mocking me all along, she told herself. I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you all, one by one, from lowliest official to the Kaigun Taisho of the Sotoi Guntai himself.

At that moment, she learned something about herself: She recognized that it was not patriotism that had made her fight like a wild dog against EarthCo whenever she had a chance. She had never killed a man nor ruined the structural integrity of a spacefaring vessel for NKK. Every fight she had won had been fought for hate, for herself.

NKK’s enemy was her enemy, since NKK’s enemy was EarthCo. She had ruined small AMRCO Earth-Moon merchantmen during exercises, but her heart hadn’t been in it. Those few EarthCo merchantmen . . . now those were battles dear to her heart. Watching their hulls rupture as gases and debris spewed out the holes she had punched, Clarisse felt a fraction avenged. EarthCo, the faceless yet many-faced entity that had punched holes in her life . . . EarthCo had and would continue to suffer by her hand.

Now, during these high-velocity seconds of descent deep into Neptune’s stormy Middle Atmosphere, Clarisse saw a picture of herself that was at first difficult to accept: I would fight against NKK itself, I would destroy every Neptunekaisha station winging through the sky high above me—I would do these things if they could hurt EarthCo. If it would hurt EarthCo more than enough to justify the damage it would do to me.