War Ring (Canaris Rift Book 6), page 21
“And the Whites —”
“— And the Whites will launch suicide missions everywhere they pop up,” Clio finished. “So we can only use them in clear-cut cases where they aren’t expected and —”
“That won’t be enough,” Alara finished for her. She gave her wife a bitter smile. “We’ll make do.”
“That’s what we’ve always done,” Clio agreed.
“And after?”
“After what?”
“After we win?” Alara said. “What then?”
“Well, first we’ve got to win, you know,” Clio replied, forking another mouthful of dessert. Then she cocked her head at her partner. “Why do I think you’ve —”
“Because you know me,” Alara told her smugly. She raised her wristcomm and flicked it to pass a data dump to Clio. “I call it Safe House.”
“And it is?”
“Well, first, it’s about ten thousand survey ships — special upgraded Snipes along with a whole slew of programmable QE drones —”
“Finding us new worlds,” Clio guessed.
“And then it’s a smorgasbord,” Alara continued. “Colonization, cryo-freeze, and genome factories.”
“So if we don’t make it —”
“We’ll still have a chance,” Alara finished. “If worse comes to worst, we’ll have people out there, seeded on planets, ready and able to come back.”
“Damn!” Clio said. She gave Alara a poignant look. “I love you so much!”
“And we’ll have our genome everywhere,” Alara added. “Little me, little you, and a whole passel of little sneaky Smileys.”
“Good,” Clio said. “I prefer winning, you know, but — good.”
“I’m spreading the design and plans to all worlds,” Alara added. “With one proviso —”
“They take our genetics with them,” Clio guessed. Alara nodded. Clio thought about it for a moment and then nodded. After a moment, she lifted her fork, pointing to Alara’s plate, “Are you going to finish that?”
#
Safe House, Five thought to July.
Yes, July replied, I know about it.
They are taking copies of me, Five said.
You or your data? July asked.
Both, Five replied.
“Bingo!” Commander Tremaine cried exultantly. “Gru is aboard the base. Package delivered!”
“Excellent news,” July agreed. She turned to Tiny and raised an eyebrow.
“Got something, skipper,” Tiny told her. “Report from DF-1. Green, repeat Green.” She held a thumbs up. “Target destroyed by drones. Returning to rendezvous.” A buzzer sounded on her console and a red light blinked. “Oh, shit!”
Jump! Five called. JUMP NOW!
Jump Team, Green Four! July ordered. Green Four was one of twenty different random locations. July knew nothing of the location except its code name.
The container base jumped. It arrived in an asteroid field. The nearest object was over a million kilometers distant — asteroid fields being more empty space than anything else.
They are gone, Five reported sadly. There was a — one of them was captured, turned. And so —
You did the right thing, July said, even though she knew that Five was reporting the deliberate murder of ten special operations commandos.
There was surprise, pain, anger and then…
Five, are you okay? Vicki Branford asked.
No, see to her, July said. Dr. Semovich, get to Five!
#
Mina was holding her in her arms, stroking her head and murmuring soothing words when Janis found them. Elle Manning-Evers was there holding Rose Draya while Adam Tenn-Evers stood nearby with a drawn stunner in one hand and baby Mat-T-R — ‘Matter’ — in the other.
Mina looked up when Janis entered, teary-eyed and frantic. Janis held a finger to his lips and nodded to the med team behind him.
Vicki Branford came racing into the room on their heels. She took one look at Mina and Five. “Hook up,” she told Mina. “She needs someone to ride with her.” Ophelia! She called. I need you and the —
“Can we help?” Roxie Beaumont asked as she came into view with Rosie at her side.
“Yes,” Vicki said. “She can take four —”
“I’m here,” Ophelia said. She glanced at Five and Mina and moved to sit beside the blue-headed girl. “She felt the backlash, right?”
“We don’t know,” Janis told her. “But I think… she could be lost.”
Vicki drew a weapon from her holster. It was a plasma gun, lethal. Janis moved to her and pressed her hand back to her side.
“I think cryo-freeze will be a better option, if necessary.” He nodded to the med team. “They’re ready if needs be.”
Ira Lux and Queen Rochelle came racing up. Janis held up a hand to hold them at the doorway. “I think we can handle this.”
“You don’t fucking know,” Ira growled at him even as Gray ran up beside her, reaching out to grab her hand and steady her.
“Shut up, all of you,” Mina snapped. She nodded to Ophelia, Roxie and Rosie. “Let’s do this.”
The four pulled the blue veins of Five’s hands and feet onto their implants. Mina screamed. A moment later Rosie and Roxie joined her.
Ophelia? Owami called. Morgan’s coming.
No! Ophelia said with a whimper. I think I’ve got this. Me and Bluething.
Overwhelming, assault, attack, engagement, pain, agony — they die! Bluething’s ‘voice’ came to everyone in the room who had the SC mod. Everyone.
They tried! Mina swore furiously. They dare!
They failed, Roxie’s Heather declared.
We love you, we see you, we find you, Rosie’s Thorn added.
You protected yourself, Five! Mina told her blue friend proudly. You pulled back, balled up!
Shoulda flayed the bastard, Five replied in a small, hard voice.
It startled you, Mina assured her. And it’s dead. It lost.
And now we know, Ophelia added. We know what it can do, we know how to protect against it and we know —
It’s dead, we can move on, Five said. She opened her eyes and nudged the back of Mina’s head with her foot. “My feet smell fine, you know.”
Mina turned around and sat up. “Of course, I make you take baths.”
In a moment, Five was surrounded by the others, hugging her, crying at her, and patting her encouragingly. Ophelia knelt down and smothered the whole bundle in one huge hug. She looked at Roxie and Rosie, “And when did you get implants?”
Roxie smiled. “We’ve had them for a while.”
“We got them direct from Five, here,” Rosie added. “We didn’t want to be left out.”
“And your mother?” Ophelia asked.
“We told her what we wanted to do and she went on muttering about kids and clones,” Rosie said with a shrug.
“So we took that for a yes,” Roxie added, turning to stroke Five’s blue head and her own at the same time. “I guess it was a good idea, huh?”
“Yes,” Ophelia said, turning to her father who was standing still, intent on the scene in front of him. “Did my dad do this?”
“Huh!” Ira Lux tutted, stepping into the room. “Do you think he’s the only one who knows the operation?”
“Or that he wouldn’t have programmed autodocs by now?” Gray added defensively.
“Actually,” Ira murmured, “he didn’t.” She glanced toward Janis as she added, “I did.”
“Ophelia?” Janis said, letting go his hold of Vicki’s weapon. She holstered it and slipped on the protective guard.
“Five, what I got was that the White was captured but it lashed out somehow and you got caught up in the backlash.”
“I was trying to save them,” Five said. “They were so close. And when it attacked —” her hand went one eye and she screamed. “It got my eye. And then… I wasn’t me anymore.”
“Sympathetic reaction,” Janis muttered.
“It got your eye?” Vicki repeated, moving forward and pulling a small light from her vest pocket. She shined it alternately between Five’s left and right eyes. And then she swore. “What am I doing? You’ve got crazy blue eyes!”
“And how did they react?” Janis said, moving to kneel beside her.
“Normally,” Vicki said with a grimace. “Well, at least as normally as — well, normally.”
“I am not a freak,” Five said in a small voice.
“Of course not!” Vicki said fiercely. She smiled at her clone sister. “You’re you.” She leaned forward to pat Five’s blue head. “And I love you.”
Five dipped her head in embarrassed acknowledgement.
“It wasn’t trying to catch you,” Mina said. “You just got the backlash.”
“I felt Sergeant Bowden’s mind freeze, close down,” Five said, her voice quivering. “He was so mad, so surprised and then… he wasn’t.”
“So we know that Whites can control us,” Janis said grimly.
“They poke the eye out and insert —” Five leaned forward and heaved her guts without success. Mina leaned over and rubbed her back consolingly. Five looked up to Janis and then to Vicki. “They insert a stinger — and it breaks off.”
“Chemical control by direct injection,” Vicki said. “Their DNA wouldn’t be enough for control, that symbiosis must have been engineered later, to control non-infected Reds.”
“We still need to catch one,” Gray said with a sour look. “But now we’re warned.”
“From now on, we send drones only,” Janis declared.
“It could have got me,” Five said in a small voice. “It could have got us all.”
“Nope,” Mina assured her, shaking her head. “We caught you, we pulled you back.” She smiled at Five as she added, “And it didn’t stand a chance.”
#
“So we know that we can’t send Suits in against Whites,” July concluded to her collected officers — minus Dark Force Two — early the next morning when they had all been retrieved. When the ‘dust had settled’ as Niktali had put it. “We’re working on active computer systems, programmed to identify and extract Whites.”
“They’ll have an autodestruct sequence if their external skin is penetrated, particularly in the ocular region,” Alwich said.
Tiny turned to the others, mimicked a jabbing stinger plunging into an eyelike hole and then threw up her hands in an expanding mushroom cloud. “Boom! No more White, no more location, no more suits.”
“How big is the explosive?” Captain Thurgood, Dark Force One’s leader, asked.
“It’s a MAM, five kilograms,” Commander Tremaine replied, using the old acronym for a Matter-Antimatter Mine. “Spread out among the five units.”
Thurgood nodded. Containing five kilograms in an automaton the size of a Red was pushing it. Even one kilogram in the same sized shell was… challenging.
“What’s their endurance?” Alice Mendez asked.
“We can keep them on station for ninety-six hours, max,” Alwich reported. “At which time, unless we issue the recall, they’ll self-destruct.”
“And how many of these do we have?” Captain Thurgood asked.
“That’s not the question,” July said. The others looked at her. “The question is how many squads can we profitably deploy in the next week.” She raised her wristcomm. “Your mission now is to select targets. One for each DF. You’ll do evaluation, launch the Suits and monitor the results.”
Tiny made another mushroom cloud with her hands.
“We need one White, people,” July said. “The sooner the better. But if we blow up hundreds of their shipyards, I won’t complain.”
“Will a five kilo MAM take out a whole yard?” Alice wondered.
“We don’t think so,” July said. “That’s something else you’ll monitor.”
“But our bets are that it’ll blow the main station, possibly rupture the nearer PKs with debris.”
“The Artificial Red Suits will also be infected with the anti-White vaccine,” Alwich Aigon told them. At their reaction, he explained, “We’ve got it, it costs us nothing and — well, damnation to the enemy!”
The soldiers roared back in approval.
I might be getting the hang of this military thing, Alwich thought in amazement to July.
Let me do the maiming and killing, you stick with the saving and protecting, July thought back. Alwich nodded.
“People, I want to kick this off tomorrow,” July said as the group broke up.
“No fear, skip! We’ve got it!” Captain Halston Thurgood assured her. She nodded to Alwich amiably as she shepherded her crew of cutthroats back to the Boat Bay.
#
Auggie examined the program’s output and frowned. Boy, girl, boy, girl. Whoever set up the program was stupid! No, she admonished herself a moment later, just practical.
The Safe House project was a huge unknown. If launched, it would commit a large portion of humanity to an uncertain future. But a future. It would be foolish to hope that those who survived would have the ability and the resources to immediately recreate the same level of tech. For some, the extremely cautious deep cryo personnel, it was quite possible that they’d wake up — thousands of years in the future — as the sole survivors of humanity. And so, without explant technology. To survive they would have to revert to live births. That was a fate she wished on no one, particularly as the physical and mental demands were greater on females. There were no plans to seek out and liberate any of these settlers because the ships that took them across to distant galaxies would purposely choose locations that could not be found. Everyone of the ‘Extremes’ were volunteers and understood the challenges. In the Vivat worlds, oddly, July had found a high percentage of volunteers.
Joe and Lux, after much debate, had agreed to send the first Extreme ships off immediately. Mankind would survive in those who made that harsh choice, if nothing else. One day, perhaps, if those remaining were lucky, they would be reunited with these heroes. But that was a future, distant and cloudy.
August finished running through the outputs of the program, paused for a moment hoping to find another way… and then pressed the button to commit the plan to action. Tomorrow morning, the first ten thousand people would board their ships, enter cryo-freeze and be sent away on one a one-way journey powered by QE engines. They would jump to pseudo-random locations and then slip into hyper with a nudge from their g/ag drives to travel until their ship detected a suitable home planet, centuries in the distance.
With the program committed, another ten thousand people every day would enter into their ships, be frozen, and sent outwards, never to return to this galaxy.
“May your sleep be pleasant, your dreams peaceful, and your new home a paradise,” Auggie murmured quietly in salute to the brave souls that would never know home again. She lifted her wristcomm, tapped a code and said, “It’s done.”
“Understood,” Seth Marvel replied. “How do you feel?”
Auggie shook her head. “Empty.”
One of the volunteers in the first ten thousand had been Igor Jankowsky. She wished him well.
#
“I need to speak with you,” Vicki Branford said as she stood in the doorway to Dr. Semovich’s office.
Janis nodded and waved her to a seat. “Ira had some words with me,” he began, “if there’s anything I did that upset you —”
“No,” Vicki replied. “I understood. I’m not here about that.”
“So, Safe House or Five?” Janis guessed.
She shook her head, “No… well, maybe.”
Janis sat back in his chair and crossed his hands in his lap, giving her his full attention.
Vicki noticed it and blushed. “Am I a patient?”
“If you wish,” Janis replied. “And if not, well I am comfortable this way.”
Vicki nodded and then, in a rush blurted, “Are we going to survive?”
“Us or those we sent?” Janis asked in a soft voice.
“Us,” Vicki said. “Are we going to beat them?”
Janis was slow in replying. Finally, he said, “We have a chance.”
“A chance!”
“Yes,” Janis said. “And it’s the best chance we’ve had since your clone sister won the Battle of Canaris Rift.”
“If she hadn’t acted, hadn’t won —”
“Then we wouldn’t be talking right now,” he broke in, mildly. “True, Vicki’s —”
“What?”
“Vicki,” Janis repeated. “I called my wife Vicki. Mostly when… well, when things were hard, she was Victoria.”
“I read the psych evals,” Vicki — this Vicki — said, shaking her head. “And Five gave me access to the vids.” She sighed deeply and looked up from her lap, straight into his eyes. “They scared me.”
“They scared her,” Janis said. “They scared me, too. But over time, we managed to help her and she managed to find us.”
“‘Find us?’” Vicki repeated.
“Vicki Three had a very hard childhood, as you know,” Janis told her. “And the reception she got when she won the Battle… well, everyone took her for a lunatic. ‘A lucky lunatic’ was in one of the after action reports.”
Vicki nodded. “I saw that.” She pursed her lips. “But you stuck with her.”
“I did,” Janis agreed. He leaned forward. “But is this what you want to talk about? You were asking about our chances.”
“Yes,” Vicki agreed distractedly. “She had it much worse —”
“Than you?” Janis guessed.
“Well, yes.”
“I think you can only do yourself harm if you try to compare yourself with her,” Janis said.
“But —”
“Nature and nurture make a person,” Janis said with a hand raised in apology for his interjection. “Victoria was born of pain, suffering, and a lot of failed experiments.”
