Tony Daniel - Metaplanetary 02, page 50
Twenty-two PLUTO SYSTEM E-STANDARD 12:12, APRIL 10, 3017 Even though he had Sherman boxed in and near defeat, Blanket was an aggressive man at heart, and he didn’t enjoy biding his time. Besides, Blanket was working for a commander who was even more impatient than he. Amés would want to see progress very soon. Three weeks was too long for a standoff. Sherman was beginning to make Blanket feel a trifle ridiculous. Why couldn’t he finally defeat the man? Blanket considered another flushing run at the fremden forces. What luck that he’d been able to talk Haysay into sending the five extra ships to Pluto. I’m going to have to revise my opinion of Haysay, Blanket thought. He may be slow as molasses, but he’s not the bumbler I took him for. One of those ships, the Calcio , had taken damage from a broadside of rocks from the Boomerang. There were several thousand casualties as well. But the breach was sealed, and the ship had been brought back into service immediately in a backup role. It wou
Twenty-three PLUTO SYSTEM E-STANDARD 04:53, APRIL 13, 3017 Sherman breathed a sigh of relief. So far the plan had worked—with a few snags. The orbits of Pluto and Charon were now in Federal hands. The surfaces were another matter entirely. His Virtual Extraction Corps had established some beachheads down there. They had volunteered for what seemed like a suicide mission to rescue the Federal paratroopers from the grip of the renegade surface grist, and they had succeeded. Many of the VEs, over half, had been lost to the murderous grist below—wiped from existence as completely as any erased computer program might be. But Philately and her corps had succeeded in breaking many of the biological soldiers free from the grip of the surface. There was no doubt that they had saved a good portion of the Third Sky and Light’s Company C. Now those soldiers could be recovered. The Met forces had pulled away. No doubt Blanket got wind of what was coming from the Oorts, Sherman thought. Blanket woul
Twenty-four NEPTUNE SYSTEM E-STANDARD 11:02, APRIL 7, 3017 CLOUDSHIP AUSTEN “Austen, have you got an angle on that bastard?” Twain spoke to her in a tense voice over the special merci channel cloudships used for intership communications. “He’s moving too fast,” said Austen. “I’m headed outward from the planet, not inward. I’ll have to reverse course and match velocities.” “Okay,” Twain replied. “Looks like she’s going to get a shot, goddamn it.” “What do you think she’s armed with?” “Don’t know,” said Twain. “Nothing good. If I follow her much farther, I’m going to get trapped in the well and pulled down into the atmosphere.” “Don’t you do that, Twain!” Austen exclaimed. She knew that the old cloudship was brave enough to sacrifice himself. “Don’t worry about it,” Twain answered. “I’d crash into the Mill and kill fifteen thousand souls for nothing.” Austen had momentarily forgotten about Twain’s troop contingent. It was just so unusual for cloudships to be carrying large numbers of bio
Twenty-five NEPTUNE SYSTEM E-STANDARD 14:00, THURSDAY, APRIL 3, 3017 FEDERAL ARMY THEATER COMMAND Theory felt relief the way a free convert does—at a lessening of logical paradoxes within, a mathematical unknotting. “Give me a report, Major Monitor.” “Twain has disabled the Mediumrare , and she’s surrendered, sir.” “Good.” “I don’t think Twain likes it,” Monitor replied. “I think he’d rather have blown her out of the sky.” “He is accepting her surrender, isn’t he?” “Of course, sir,” Monitor replied flatly. “He’s deployed Company A, and they’re preparing to board her.” “All right, then,” said Theory. “What about Company B?” “They were too late getting to the scattershots,” Monitor said. “The minesweeper put up a fight and delayed them. They did some really brave atmospheric dives with those Sciaticas, but they only managed to pull 394 out in time. I have a count of 2,923 missing and presumed dead from falling planetward.” Theory frowned. Dammit. Only a little more time, and more could h
Twenty-six NEPTUNE SYSTEM E-STANDARD 15:21, THURSDAY, APRIL 3, 3017 DIED FLAGSHIP AZTEC SACRIFICE General C. C. Haysay was astounded. All four ships in the inner planetary system…lost. Not a good thing. Not a good thing at all. Bad. Amés was going to flay him alive. Got to think. Think about your pellicle getting peeled back and Amés reaching in to yank out the mollusk meat within. No. Tactics. Strategy. His ships were splayed all over the outer system like rising welts on a beaten back. Red, bleeding welts that would scar. No amount of grist repair work would hide them. Amés would never let them heal. Haysay found himself softly whimpering. “Did you say something, General?” Major Zane’s overly solicitous voice was almost unbearable at the moment. “I did not!” Haysay snapped back. “Do you have any orders, sir?” Haysay nodded. “Just a moment,” he said. “Shut up and let me think.” “Yes, sir.” Damn Zane and his even-toned responses! Couldn’t he appreciate when it was time to panic? I have
Twenty-seven NEPTUNE SYSTEM E-STANDARD 17:09, THURSDAY, APRIL 3, 3017 FEDERAL ARMY THEATER COMMAND “They pulled back briefly, but now they are continuing the attack,” Monitor reported to Colonel Theory. Theory considered. Was there something to be learned from this strange DIED maneuver? He could not fathom what it might mean. He had the nagging feeling that he was missing something important. Not for the last time, he wished that Sherman was in-system and in command of the defenses instead of himself. “We have the Mencius and the Longreach at .58 kiloklicks. They are on a tangential vector to Triton’s orbital plane, one north–south, the other east–west,” Monitor reported. “Cloudships Homer and McCarthy moving to intercept.” “What about Nereid?” “Cloudship Carlyle has established an interior orbit. He’s almost as big as the moon, so he is providing optimal cover.” “They’ll save him for later,” Theory said, “if they have any sense. Have him remain in position.” “He won’t like it.” “Carl
Twenty-eight NEPTUNE SYSTEM E-STANDARD MID-APRIL, 3017 THE TRITON HOME FRONT The only good thing about living in the catacombs of the Greentree Way meeting hall on Triton, thought Father Andre Sud, was spending time in the verdant garden where he had done some of his best rock balancing. Throughout his sabbatical before, then through all the crises over the past years when other matters might have claimed their attention, his parishioners had kept the garden tended, kept it ready for their rock-balancing priest’s return. They had a lot more faith in me than I did, Andre thought. It was faith that had not, apparently, been misplaced. But the garden was a mess. The foliage was getting trampled, and the central meadow was turned to mud. That couldn’t be helped. The garden was located deep underground, with a slow-fusion plant providing heat and light between the garden and the surface. Over this complex was the Greentree meeting hall on the surface—a meeting hall that, because of its low
Twenty-nine MERCURY LATE APRIL 3017 MONTSOMBRA The man people called C made his way through the grand arch of San Souci, the Interlocking Directorate headquarters on Mercury. It was the long noon of the Mercurian “day.” C didn’t dislike the light, but he preferred darkness. Night was the natural element for his work. C was the definition of nondescript. Gray clothes. Dark shoes. The only unusual feature he possessed was a set of startlingly green eyes. He made his way through the gardens in the enormous pressurized atrium and boarded the cable lift that would carry him up the small mountain that was at the heart of the complex. The mountain was called Montsombra, and, despite appearances, it wasn’t a natural mountain at all. It was a gigantic mound of grist, through and through. On the apex of Montsombra sat the palace of La Mola. That was where Director Amés dwelled. He kept his physical aspect in La Mola. But the true, whole Amés was in the mountain itself. Every bit of grist in the
Thirty THE VAS E-STANDARD 15:36, THURSDAY, APRIL 17, 3017 BATTLE DAY Elvis Douri couldn’t wait to surf the merci after school adjourned for the day. Now he could play Battle Day. Usually, he’d immediately disconnect himself from the virtuality after classes and go out and play for a couple of hours. He and his friends had built a fort in the swamp outside their residence block, and there were several additions in the planning stages, including a lookout and a booby-trapped moat (provided Samantha Nooks ever got hold of that poisonous medicinal grist she swore she could swipe from her father, who was a pharmacist). But he hadn’t been out to the fort in days. Instead, most afternoons found Elvis sitting like a statue in the “full-pellicle rip-chair” he’d gotten for his birthday—the one that encased your body and gave grist-to-grist contact for a virtual experience that the advertisements called “Reality to the Nth Plus 1 Degree.” Elvis didn’t know what that meant exactly, but he did know
Thirty-one NEPTUNE SYSTEM E-STANDARD, MIDNIGHT, THURSDAY, APRIL 3, 3017 NEPTUNE Corporal Alessandro Orfeo had never been to Neptune. Hell, he’d never even been to Pluto. He’d spent most of his nineteen years in the Kuipers, somewhere between Neptune and Pluto, digging for right-handed proteins. Not for the regular kind you could make in a lab, but for the exotics that it took nature millennia to cook up. Orfeo might not be able to read and write so well, but he goddamn knew his protein sequences as well as any man or woman living. He even understood why the stuff was so valuable: Enhanced into a modified form of grist, it was used to build important and delicate structures inside human bodies where regular left-handed protein would cause a perpetual immune reaction. It was a prime component in the really good Broca language adaptations, for example. And that grist was why everybody could speak to each other, despite almost everyone having a different dialect of Basis—practically down t
Thirty-two NEPTUNE SYSTEM E-STANDARD, 19:30, THURSDAY, APRIL 17, 3017 FEDERAL THEATER COMMAND The DIED attack had become a siege. That had been one of the possibilities all along, of course. It wasn’t an acceptable outcome, and Colonel Theory didn’t like it one bit. But, as Sherman had said to him before he left, a siege was a hell of a lot better than going out in an idiotic blaze of glory. But it isn’t as good as winning, Theory thought. He wanted to win—to protect the territory and those he loved, certainly. But also not to let Sherman down. No military commander, either in the Federal Army or in the DIED forces, had ever given a free convert such as Theory so much responsibility before. Doing just all right wasn’t acceptable to Theory. It never had been. Captain Residence had checked in moments before. The DIED paratroop attack had been blocked. The latest big wave, once again dropped in camouflaged by a nail rain, had been held to the outskirts of New Miranda. Those who had droppe
PART FIVE
EPILOGUE
One The lights of the laboratory compound were bright, and the entire area around the main complex was swarming with grist. The Jeep had no trouble finding the place; concealing his movements from the outrider security grist-mil proved to be a bit more difficult, but not impossible. The laboratory was in the wilderness, and the security algorithms had to compensate for stray animals and vegetation, or it would spend its energy and computing power responding to every leaf fall or squirrel scamper. The Jeep was nine hundred years a creature of the wild. Over the centuries, he had seen many a black bear and spent days following one or another of them to find new pathways and territories. Upstate New York bears roamed almost as widely as the Jeep, and they knew the landscape. You could learn a lot from following bears. The Hudson Valley was full of them now. And so the Jeep camouflaged himself as a bear. It was a straightforward decision. There were more complicated ruses he might have use
Two Leo Sherman looked at his father ruefully. Somehow, even though he’d traveled over a billion miles to reach the man, he felt like he was letting the Old Crow down once again by arriving in so unceremonious a manner. Of course there was no way his father could recognize him in the all-encompassing getup of Private Aschenbach. This fact gave Leo no comfort whatsoever. Sherman cleared his throat and glared down at Leo—Leo was sitting in a hard metal chair in the brig of the Boomerang —and harrumphed his throat clear. “Soldier, I have exactly no time to waste,” his father said in his familiar growl—the growl that had preceded various groundings, allowance withholding, room confinements, and dozens of other punishments during Leo’s rambunctious youth. “So if you are wasting my time, I will see that you are shipped back down to the surface of the planet forthwith and given over to the muck that’s taken over down there. Do you understand what that means?” “I understand completely,” Leo re
Three “You’re older than I,” said Cloudship Lebedev. “Maybe you can tell me if that is what I think it is.” “Well,” Cloudship Tacitus said. “Well.” There was one second of silence from the old cloudship. Two. Finally, he spoke. “I can say without qualification that there truly is something new under the sun. Or orbiting it, in this case. What the hell is that?” “If I’m not mistaken, it’s a—” “I know what it is , Lebedev! What I mean to say is ‘what is that doing there?’” They were both watching an image on a restricted back-channel feed on the merci network used exclusively by cloudships for communications. The image originated from far out on the Dark Matter Road that stretched between the solar system and the Alpha Centauri system. The signal was coming from Misha, the only daughter of Cloudship Tolstoy. She was stationed on a little-known tributary to the Road, a spit that led away from the Road, running onward for ten thousand kilometers in the general direction of the constellatio
Superluminal, Tony Daniel - Metaplanetary 02
