Star Soldier Page 13

  “I see.”

  “Actually, one could say it became a magic sword that turned and attacked us.”

  “Yes, yes, quite colorful, General, but what is your point?”

  “Our old swords, sir, break every time we try to defeat the magic sword. My first theory was to throw so many old swords against it that in time the magic sword would become nicked once too often and shatter. That doesn’t seem to be happening, or it’s not happening fast enough. What we need is a better sword.”

  “You mean create more Highborn to throw at the first batch?”

  “That’s not a bad idea, sir.”

  “It’s lunacy. The first batch turned on us. Why not the second?”

  “You’re probably right, sir.”

  Enkov scowled. And by that, General Hawthorne believed that his time was limited.

  “Sir, what about a new and better sword, even better than the first sword? This new sword we shall be able to control?”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “That in deep space a habitat orbits Neptune. Actually, it’s in deep-Neptune orbit. It appears to be like any other of the hundreds of habitats orbiting the gas giant. In actuality it’s the home to a secret and special project.”

  “What project?”

  “The creation of a new and better sword, sir.”

  “Men, General?”

  “Soldiers, sir, who can outfight Highborn.”

  “Are you mad? What’s to stop them from turning on us like the Highborn have?”

  “These are quite different creatures, sir. Their very makeup allows us to implant deep controls.”

  “Out with it, man! What are they?”

  “Cyborgs.”

  The old withered eyes narrowed. Enkov glanced at his bodyguard. “You mean like him?”

  “No, sir. Infinitely more deadly. And if I may say so, sir, most inhuman in their efficiency.”

  “You’ve actually made enough of these… these cyborgs to change the war?”

  “Not yet, sir.”

  Director Enkov spat the stub of his stimstick onto the carpet. There it smoldered until the bodyguard crushed it with his foot. “What do you mean ‘not yet’?”

  “I need the go ahead for phase two, sir.”

  “What is phase two?”

  “If the Director would be so kind as to glance at the holochart on my desk….”

  For a second they stared eye to eye. Hawthorne wondered if the old man was going to order the bodyguard to kill him. He began to judge how fast he could jump for the gun in his desk.

  Then, with a wheeze, ancient Director Enkov began to work his way to his feet to come and look at the holochart.

  2.

  Far from the raging civil war—past Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus—orbited blue Neptune. Hundreds of habitats orbited it, and many colonies had sprung up on its various moons. The majority of the space habs had been constructed out of weird ice, making them glittering, colorful motes in the eternal night of space. It insured that the Ice Hauler Cartel was one of the major powers in the Neptune System.

  The continuing, growing thirst for weird ice and the constant need for new sources of water had finally led the cartel into experimental ship construction. IH-49 was the third of its kind. It was being readied for a long and hopefully momentous journey. However, within the command module things had already started to go wrong.

  “That’s impossible.”

  “What?”

  “My game froze.”

  Osadar Di frowned, not sure that she’d heard correctly. Paranoia came easily to her. Thus, she always checked and rechecked everything that could possibly go wrong. It made her an excellent space pilot.

  Osadar shut down her scanning program and pushed VR goggles onto her smooth forehead. She had short dark hair, dark worried eyes and a scratch on her nose. A bit too tall for an ice hauler, she had long shapely legs highlighted by her blue-colored jumpsuit. The suit had a red IHC tab on the left shoulder. The cramped command module held screens, consoles and claustrophobically close bulkheads. The commander sat in the middle of this mess, the pink-faced life support officer to his left and Osadar to his right.

  The commander, a tough old man with short silver hair, experimentally tapped his VR monocle.

  “What game could you possibly be playing at a time like this?” asked Osadar.

  “Antiquity.”

  ”The Antiquity Game?”

  “Not Earth’s. Neptune’s.”

  Because light moved so slowly, three hundred thousand kilometers a second, each planetary grid only linked with computers in its near vicinity. The time lag of say from Earth to Mars—something over five minutes—was too much for players of a complex game like Antiquity to react successfully to each other’s moves.

  Osadar checked a screen. The commander used ship’s AI (Artificial Intelligence) to run his ultra complex character. A laser lightguide system hooked him into the nearby Neptune III Net.

  “What’s wrong with this thing?” he complained.

  “Explain.”

  “I just ran a diagnostic, and Ajax checks out.”

  “Who?”

  “Ajax!” He scowled. “My character in the Trojan War.”

  Osadar shook her head.

  “The Greeks and Trojans, Achilles and Hector? Didn’t they teach you anything in the Jupiter System?”

  “Give me the code,” Osadar said.

  “Eh?”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Oh. Thanks. The code word is Asimov.”

  Osadar put her goggles back on and manipulated her gloves. “There isn’t anything wrong with your character.”

  “That’s what I said!”

  “So what’s wrong?”

  “Ah ha! Found it. The laser-link is down.”

  Osadar frowned. It was her habitual look. She tried to squeeze off a message to the nearest IHC station. Zero. She ran a diagnostic on communications. Check. So she sent another flash. Another zero. Either the diagnostic lied or IHC had gone off-line, which wasn’t possible. For that would mean IHC no longer existed. The Ice Hauler Cartel owned communications out here—they even owned her at present. Any space hab orbiting Neptune or one of its moons used their patented lightguide net-web.

  The commander cursed in old Angelic. Sometimes he took his historical excesses to extremes.

  “Now what?” Osadar asked.

  “Ajax crashed! Do you know how much time I put into him?”

  “Ask the AI why he crashed.”

  “AI isn’t responding.”

  Osadar’s stomach clenched. She tried the AI. The ill feeling grew, producing a touch of nausea. Then her eyes, those worried dark orbs, glistened with fear. The AI couldn’t answer because its entire ram was being used. What in the devil was going on?

  “Ask computing what’s wrong with the AI,” the commander told the LS officer.

  “…Can’t, Commander. Something’s jamming inter-ship communication.”

  Fear stabbed Osadar’s heart. She tore off her VR goggles and shucked off the gloves. Breathing deeply, she tried to control her panic. Then she unbuckled herself and floated to a portal.

  “What are you doing?” asked the commander.

  Osadar grabbed a float-rail and pressed her palm on the lock. Nothing happened. She floated to the other portal. It, too, refused to open. She bit back the moan that tried to rush past her teeth. As calmly as possible, she flipped a terminal-head and punched in override. Then she cranked open the portal by hand. On impulse, she set the locks so it couldn’t slide shut on her.

  “Commander, I’m getting a red reading in computing.” The pink-faced LS officer looked up in confusion.

  “Osa?” asked the commander.

  “I’m going outside to manually override the laser-link. I want Dominie Banbury to hear about this.”

  “Do you really think that’s warranted?”

  “Don’t you?” she asked.

  The commander pondered a moment a
nd nodded. “Wait a minute, though. I’m going with you.”

  3.

  Toll Seven allowed himself a faint smile. Ship’s AI had succumbed to his program. The Master Plan went forward with flawless precision.

  He shook his bald head—he looked like a robot with plastic flesh, with a shark’s dead eyes. He used inner nanonics to dump chemicals into his brain’s pleasure centers to dampen his joy. Neither fear nor happiness must mar the smooth working of the plan. Clean concentration was paramount. That blood globules floated past him, under him, over him and behind him meant nothing. The raw stench of gore influenced him not at all. Even more importantly, the adrenaline that had surged through his body when he’d fought ship’s security had been carefully drained away by his inner nanonics. The enemy bio-form floated head-down behind him, a trickle of blood still oozing from the torn throat and adding to the floating hemoglobin.

  Toll Seven issued the next command through the leads in his fingertips. He’d plugged his first three fingers into computing slots. The converted AI obeyed and locked all inner ship’s doors. Toll Seven then slipped a computing cube into the security key. He checked his inner clock. Nine seconds to gassing. Once the IH-49 crew was immobilized, all eighteen of them, he would begin transferring their bodies to his stealth pod. Nothing would be wasted.

  “Attention, First Rank,” said the AI.

  “Yes?”

  “Three crew members have exited the ship.”

  With his broad, seamless face as smooth as ever, Toll Seven slipped a VR monocle over his eye. “Transmit image.”

  Through virtual reality imaging, he saw the bulky vacc-suits and the twinkling stream of hydrogen spray that propelled them. With a flawless knowledge of the ship’s layout, both inner and outer, he realized that they jetted to the laser-link.

  His nanonics dumped extra chemicals into his brain and throughout his body. Anger and bewilderment weren’t allowed. He considered his options. Gassing would commence in two seconds.

  He gave the AI its instructions. Then he pushed off, floated through Homo sapiens blood and headed for an airlock. He would have to dispose of these three personally.

  4.

  Despite the gnawing uneasiness in her gut, the near certainty that Fate had given her this pilot position only to shaft her more deeply, Osadar was awed once again by the sheer gall of her job—no one traveled farther out of the Solar System.

  The vast bulk of IH-49 contained fuel for the ion engines. Huge magnetic fields were needed to contain the reaction mass. Thus, fully eighty percent of the ice hauler was fuel tanks and thrusters. It was a long trip into the Oort Cloud to plunder ice comets. The majority of those comets coasted slowly one hundred thousand AU from the Sun. Earth was one AU from the Sun. Neptune was 30.06 AU away. Of course, most of the journey to the Oort Cloud would be made while asleep. Once there and in the name of the IHC, they would crawl over the space debris like a virus, attaching engines, setting up fuel feeders and placing automated missile launchers. It would take many years for the comets to arrive at IHC Pluto Receiving Station. The long history of inter-solar commerce (and piracy) demanded the automated missiles. It was tough work, lonely work, but it would pay well.

  The forward part of IH-49 contained the spherical crew hull. To Osadar it seemed as if someone had magnetized the hull and run it over a junkyard. Landers, pods, jacks, missile tubes, coil lines, thruster modules, endless bundles of Wasp 1000 Missiles and a host of engines that would be frozen into the comets had all been attached to the outer hull.

  Far to her left winked a green light atop the laser-link. Behind it, dominating space, hung blue Neptune with its few, wispy white cirrus clouds. Triton, the biggest moon, was a black speck against the blue gas giant. The endless space habitats, the majority of them built out of weird ice, weren’t visible against Neptune’s bulk. Even so, in 2350 A.D. this was humanity’s newest frontier, unless one counted the few commercial and scientific outposts on Pluto and Charon.

  “Commander!”

  “Yes, yes. Spit it out.”

  Osadar heard both the commander and Technician Geller in her headphone.

  “I just lost contact with the LS Officer,” Technician Geller said. The LS Officer had remained within the ship.

  “What? Impossible.” Hysteria edged the commander’s gruff voice.

  Osadar tried the channel. Zero. She squeezed shut her eyes and forced herself to remain calm. She was gladder than ever she’d taken time to don a zero-G worksuit. Back at the airlock, neither the commander nor Technician Geller had wanted to take the extra effort to get into one. They had donned simple vacc-suits, no doubt figuring a quick look and a wrench could fix what was wrong.

  She looked back. Both men dangled in space in their silver vacc-suits. Geller had strapped on a propulsion unit and a tool kit, the commander only a tether. Both men allowed themselves to be dragged by her. Which was simply common sense.

  Her worksuit was practically a miniature spaceship. She wore a rigid pressurized cylinder and a transparent helmet dome. The worksuit had an integral thruster pack that contained three hundred seconds of acceleration. Perhaps as importantly, three waldoes—remote-controlled arms—were attached for heavy-duty work. The third waldo mounted an integral laser torch, the other arms had power-locks made to grab onto a ship’s hull.

  She was beginning to wonder if the worksuit’s two weeks of life support wasn’t going to be its most important feature.

  “Try again,” shouted the commander.

  Osadar winced, chinning down her speaker’s volume. Carefully, she gave a bit of thrust, slightly changing their flight pattern. The two men tethered to her upset the computations. She readjusted and squeezed out a bit more hydrogen. White particles sprayed out of her thrusters. She wasn’t rated pilot first class for nothing.

  “Is this sabotage?” asked the commander.

  “What else could it be?” Osadar asked.

  “But how?”

  “Or maybe even why?” asked Osadar.

  “What?”

  “Why bother? All we’re doing is getting water for Mars. At least I think that’s what Dominie Banbury contracted for.”

  “Maybe someone wants IHC to renege on its contract,” the commander said.

  “No,” said Technician Geller, “this is inside work. I bet this is part of a takeover.”

  “Who in the Cartel has the muscle to take on Dominie Banbury?” the commander asked.

  “Dominie Yamato—”

  “Knows better than to try any of his ninja tricks on Dominie Banbury’s projects,” the commander growled.

  “This does have the feel of something the ninjas would try,” Osadar said. During her first weeks of training, they’d pumped her full of Cartel history.

  “That’s what I’m saying,” said Technician Geller.

  “Nonsense,” said the commander. “The Cartel Dominies aren’t fools. To outbid or try a takeover now would be lunacy. There’s too much money to be made.”

  Osadar knew the truth of that. Ever since the Social Unity Government had broken apart in civil war there had been bonanzas of credits to be made supplying both sides. She’d heard the Highborn were winning. Maybe the Highborn didn’t want Mars to feed its Atmospheric Converters with trillions of tons of comet-water. For that matter, maybe the Social Unitarians wanted to nix the deal, too. She shrugged. She had no idea what either side really wanted. Thinking about military and political matters only reminded her of all the dead friends she’d lost in the Second Battle of Deep Mars Orbit. And that was something she avoided as much as possible.

  What was that buzzing? She checked her headphones, raised gain. The buzzing increased. She lowered gain. Then she raised her eyebrows and turned back toward the commander. He waved frantically and touched his helmet. She waved a waldo arm to show she understood.

  Someone jammed communications.

  Now what?

  Now keep going, she realized, as she stared at the millions of stars around her. In the lone
liness of space you don’t stop and conjugate, you think and DO before your air runs out. Whomever their enemy was—and this was feeling more and more like creepy ninja work—the enemy knew they were out here. So she had to get to the laser-link and inform IHC what was going on. But if Dominie Yamato was behind this… a cold prickly feeling gnawed her guts. Once she sent the message, well, in her worksuit she would accelerate toward the nearest IHC station and request a pick up from a Dominie Banbury crew. Two weeks of life support would be plenty of time for someone to come and get her. But what about the commander and Technician Geller?

  Maybe… she licked her lips. Maybe she could convince them to inject themselves with Suspend. Sure, that was a long shot. But they couldn’t go back into IH-49 and survive.

  Suspend slowed biological functions. It could keep a badly injured person alive longer. If injected into a dying person, it retarded cell death, but only if injected before the heart stopped. That could be critical these days. There was resurrection-after-death with Suspend. Brain thieves used it all the time, supplying black-market chop shops with the needed brain tissue to construct bio-computers.

  Osadar tried to calm her jack-hammering heart, but the need for speed compelled her to squeeze more thrust. She held onto the trigger too long. They accelerated away from the hull. She readjusted. Thrust again. They went toward the hull too fast.

  “Easy, Osa,” she whispered. She concentrated, trying not to listen to the heavy breathing in her ears. Carefully, she squeezed another burst, braking.

  She looked back. The commander and Technician Geller gained on her. The tether line was flexible and just because she slowed, didn’t mean they did. The commander gathered the extra line, looping it. Good. Smart. He was thinking. But then he was a crusty old space dog. He probably had a plan, would tell her things she should have thought of. Twinkling exhaust sprayed out of Geller’s pack. He braked and kept the tether between him and the commander taut.

  Osadar shivered. She raised the worksuit temperature. In another few seconds, the commander grabbed her. She had greater bulk in her zero-G worksuit. Still, the shock of the collision jolted her. He clanked his helmet against hers.