by Les Petersen
Before I could go any further, before I could take advantage of the code break, Bleeder reported in urgently. The OTHER reading was a high-level bombing raid. BB origination. Immediate evacuation.
Medusa had screens up before I could speak, GaZe had the vessel turned against the tow of the current, the anchor roaring back onto the deck. We snapped over Ho’s motor launch as if it was kindling. Sansan surfaced nearby, a clone of Ho clinging to her. She morphed into bird-shape and took to the air. Half the angel-hawks plummeted toward her. She went stellar and they followed. Medusa’s dolphin surged toward the battleship, took on torpedo shape, primed and deadly. The other angel-hawks dropped toward it.
Guns turned on me. Medusa created a sonic boom, deafening all the targeting locks, but they still began cranking out flak and ICE. The water dissolved into spray, sails buckled from chain shot. I punched out, hit full throttle as the bombing raid filled the sky. The destroyers rose in acceleration.
Flames seared the horizon, caught it up and tore it apart. The river began to boil in its bed. I had us out of the harbour on a rooster-tail of steam just as the harbour clamped closed with a slam of teeth. It took paint off the stern, but trapped the destroyers. I lifted off the water, went ballistic as the torpedo struck the battleship and it was Pearl Harbour again. A roar of exploding ammo, a ball of air and data burning so brightly that all our sensors were deafened. I kept my throttle hard over, roared ahead of the heat pulse. Tora Tora Tora!
“Sansan, secondary sensors! Go manual.”
Sight, sound, but no taste, smell or touch. It felt like being wrapped in cotton wool. We were airborne, free of the info-drag. I tapped in coordinates, headed for the Needle.
To either side of us the earth on the riverbanks rippled as all the Steel Hand’s defences came on-line. Gargantuan concrete shields lurched into the air. The air defences, riding on back of the shields, began punching out blossoms of CrackerJack and Secure. Angel-hawks took flight like phoenixes rising from the flames. The whole sky was glutted with spiralling dogfights, A2A missiles, heat seekers. Stat-drops smacked against concrete, gun emplacements shattered, angel-hawks burst into incandescent tendrils and great cracks began appearing in the defences’ reinforced hide.
And then it began to rain. At first softly, like a misplaced shower raining over a desert; then a dense blanket dropped from the sky with the roar of a wave ripping apart a pebbly beach; thunder filled the sky, bolts of lightning. Wizards came down with the torrential flood. Mary Poppins all over again. Or Magritte. Storm clouds blotted out the dogfights, water ran off the concrete, flooded into the cracks and covered the fires. Where the water went, there too went the wizards.
The Steel Hand migrated so fast that landform still held its impression, a lake shaped like a city map. One moment all the land was writhing concrete and the next completely bare of any man-made structure. And silence. Eerie. The rain kept falling, hissing out of the sky, obliterating all the marks. The lake began to close over with earth.
The horizon cut out any further reading, though the OTHER kept monitoring it. Charlie patched up full senses and they came on-line as we hit open ocean. It sprayed beneath us, torn up by our jets. Sansan dropped out of the sky, alone and shining. Proud. She merged with the jet.
“Status, Medusa?”
“Double safeties, Harry. No loss of data. GaZe reports no internal interference. One hard track.”
I looked behind us, could see nothing amongst the clouds. “Display.”
“Not possible, Harry. Full lock out. Military, with double alpha coding.”
What the hell were High Command doing chasing me? Some days it rains, other days you’re soaking in it. “Closing?”
“Just tracking our jet wash, Harr—.”
“Excuse me, Harry,” Sansan cut in. “Dansen backup systems coming on-line.”
What the fuck had happened to the twenty minutes to the backup Lucy Clarke had suggested? Time flies when you’re having fun. “Hold closure: we’re too deep. Triple safeties, Medusa. All report!”
They snapped to attention. “GaZe up. Eighty percent free. HaRf at sixty-two percent free.”
“Bleeder up. Twelve percent free.”
“Sansan up. Fifteen percent free.”
“Medusa up. Three percent free.”
Three per cent defences. Cutting it too close. “GaZe, can you close out the Mil?”
“Negative, Harry.”
“Then help Medusa take evasive action. Put up smoke and prepare a torpedo. We might have to watch for the fat lady and give her some singing lessons.”
You may not see the problem, but it’s staring you in the face. I wasn’t on the HoloCloud where I could just turn off the machine and return home with the flick of a switch or by looking away from the screen. I was a level down, in the underworld, in virtual; where everything you do is double buffered. I could be anywhere in the world and at the same time, I was trapped in the Dansen, locked out, one reality replaced by another. It is all well and good to say “lift the headset off and you’ll be back in the booth”, but anyone who has spent time in a virtual suit will tell you there is a moment of disorientation from one world to the next. Haven’t you ever woken from a dream and not known where you are? Or better yet, have you ever dreamed you were awake? That’s what we’re talking about. You take that a level down and you’re playing with some serious shit. One level down and a split second of awareness-loss confuses you for too long. You’re open to suggestion. An old hypnotist’s trick. You don’t know if you really have left the Net, whether you’re still in virtual, or whether you are walking around amongst the clones. Who wants a term of office in the loony bin? Who wants Game Over?
That’s why we have a Needle. It’s the mind control, all that Zen stuff you need to get over the hump when you rise through levels. Don’t muck it up. Danger, Will Robinson.
I still had time to sort this out and not suffer from the mind charge, time to work it out. It’s all about levels, after all. Search the level, find the key, climb the stairs—the game routine they used repeatedly and sold millions of copies. Use the ribbon, soft search. Begin.
Map tools.
It came on-line, but in fragmented form, interference from some unknown source. GaZe moved to refresh it, but it was still patchy. I split the windows, created multiple copies of myself and sent them out to fill the gaps. My world was a patchwork of images, each a nosecone view as they searched. In the centre of my world was a map, growing larger as more areas filled in. Beneath that was cockpit vision. I sat and waited.
Maybe I should tell you—
Grey-cards came out of the clouds and the OTHER showed a new heat wave sweeping over the area. “Split action and Share, gang. Go soft cover.”
It was like watching parachutists leaping out the back doors of a Hercules, or spiders free-falling on Cloud lines. The PAN dropped out info-dumps complex enough to create hypertextual islands on the surface of the water: trees grew, roads appeared. I went evasive, flipped over, dropped toward the water, then zipped to upper atmosphere in a heartbeat. The Grey-cards peeled over in formation, swarmed toward the decoy, trying to discover how they had ported to some other environment. I dropped to my previous position. “Sansan, open system, migrate Needle to our present location.”
The yellow and black circle of iron appeared beneath our wings, its displacement creating enormous ripples in the surface of the ocean. A wave smashed over the island and the Grey-card formation spread to record the havoc. I flipped over, hit return, but the Needle had brought with it two small Bluefins, both latched to the doors like remora. I slapped escape, torn between running for the exit and waiting until the blue fins grew tired of sucking away at the steel. Feeding on my hard work. Medusa sent in a trawler, but the Needle wouldn’t permit the closeness of the programme and shifted away from the trawler like it was partnering it in a dance. Either I took the Bluefins with me and hoped to catch them before they ate away at my virtual system, or else I dropped into the data and sub
merged until the backup was finished.
The backup began in the far corner of my world, lifting a layer at a time into the air and depositing it back down again, cloning information. If it copied my configuration it could reproduce it and dissect it at leisure. All my secrets revealed. An absolute no-no! The OTHER was reading critical levels. I didn’t bother swearing.
As I was deciding my next steps, the Needle suddenly disappeared. Gone in a flash of violet sparks. Concussion waves knocked me out of position and I had to correct with jets to stay in place. It brought me to the attention of the Grey-cards and one of them left the formation, turned away from the islands, turned its nose cone toward me. That’s when I swore.
It had black markings down its flank, spirals bisected by a wave and no prizes would be given for guessing who it was. Gilamens!
Medusa reacted immediately. A hive of lancers flared toward the Grey-card and I closed my wings, plummeting toward ocean as each lancer divided, replicating as fast as the system would allow, filling the air with a wave of attack craft.
My timing was out. I wasn’t fast enough and I had tried to do too much. Gilamens shifted away, dropped out of the system. The heat wave flooded the area with requests; the ocean clacked closed, data frozen ahead of the backup, all secondary systems on hold and all primaries running support only. It was like working in treacle.
The remaining Grey-cards took lancers through access, turned to stone. They dropped toward the ocean, feather slow. Medusa cancelled defence action, but the servers were so slow that the nothing could stop lancers from locking onto the military jet that chose just that moment to enter the area. It created smoke and chaff and took a defensive half-turn, but against a slow system it had no chance. The lancers slammed into it and it exploded. Not just once, but three times. Instant replays.
The backup roared across the world like a tidal wave. My helm wasn’t responding. I fell toward an ICE-covered ocean, holding the joystick hard against my chest, legs thrust against stirrups, the heat wave warning slamming in me. I had barely enough time to scream “Shut down! Full abort,” before the backup raced over me with the sound of an express train howling out of a tunnel and the system flared into brilliance.
Chapter 7
The wave past over me – through me, out of me – and the stick came active again. I banked out from the dive, tore into the sky and headed for cloud cover, wings shrieking from strain. The throttle vibrated in my hand, still responsive, but a little warped. The islands beneath me were still blossoming, creating a continent, the only area of movement on the ocean; no vessels, just flat data. The backup flowed further away, sipping and spitting out the world like a road-laying machine or a tank track.
The Heads-up was dead, transparent. I levelled off, put us toward the city and dropped into autopilot. “Team up.”
They didn’t respond. No one said anything.
“Reinstate! Team up.”
I could hear the wind outside the cockpit, the dials ticking over on the dashboard and the world beyond the fuselage hissing in my ears. I was alone.
On the dashboard, a warning light began to blink. Fuel. Time. Fuel. Time. I tried for an extension, but came up short. Locked out.
Two military choppers came over the horizon, side by side, roaring across the blue sky with a throb of blades and trails of creamy vapour. They looked like body-builders’ torsos, so over-pumped with muscles that their arms were incapable of sitting against their sides. In their fists, they held weapon pods, a thousand eyes.
Why not layer me with trouble? When the man is down, kick for all you’re worth.
I held position, let them approach – what else could I do? When I couldn’t give a friendly signal, they circled like sharks and lock-on warnings began to drum in my head. Audio hissed in my ear, “Identify yourself!” Female. Harsh as iron scraps.
I gave it to her as straight as I could. “Flintlock. I’m stranded.”
The lock-on didn’t waver. “Yeah, sure buddy. I need more than that. Give me specifics.”
I felt like telling her to go fly a kite, but it would avail me nothing. I watched the map filling in and drew it out as long as I could. “Harold Earner; Special Investigations Officer. I was investigating the Steel Hand and got caught in a raid. It’s blown my JON.”
“Flintlock does not acknowledge your identity.”
That was too fast. “I’m unassigned. On 408. Private investigation.”
One of the Mils turned side-on, dropped beneath me. Radar showed it closing off retreat. “Now you listen to me, buddy. We told you, Flintlock does not recognise you. Now you give me a password, or I’ll blast you out of the sky.”
“Yessir! Gravity four-oh-five-five” I said. “Or was it chicken soup?”
“Keep it to yourself, Flintlock.” It took her no time at all to run a check. “All right, you pass the test. You Flintlock boys ought to learn how to walk before you drop in here. Or wear diapers. You see one of ours out here?”
I breathed a sigh of relief. “No, Ma’am. I’ve had no visual on a Mil.”
“She was last reported in this area, tracking an illegal.”
I wasn’t going to fall for that ploy. Deny and die. “I had something tailing me, came up on the panel, but I lay no visual on it. Could’ve been her though why she’d think I was an illegal. Just before the backup came through? She pretty?”
She didn’t reply to the question. While she was doing whatever it was, I scanned the map. The Steel Hand had to have a remote port here somewhere, a place they could use as a backup lift to the Net, somewhere recruits could come down and meet them, before being indoctrinated. If things got any tighter I’d have to move there fast enough to leave my imprint behind. I hoped the Dansen was capable of it.
The lock-ons still pinged in my cage. The fuel light was blinking double time. The map still had too many dead zones and it didn’t look like the Mils were going to work quickly. I was dead in the air. I don’t like asking for help, but there are times when ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ seems the best option. I hailed the Mil. “I don’t mean to interfere with your business, Ser, but I have a problem. The system is going to reject me in a moment and I’m locked out.”
She laughed at me. “Your system was never on this level as far as we can ascertain. We’re thinking maybe you’re just a Flintlock Cameo.”
Now that hurt. “Hey, I’m no Cameo. What about my charm and good looks?”
She ignored it. Then she became nasty. “Flintlock has no record of a Harold Earner. Even on 408. You’re bull-shitting us. We don’t have to assist you.”
They were going to desert me. “Hey now, let’s not get—”
“You want our help, you give me a life fact, buddy.”
If I gave them one fact from my life, they’d fill in the details and have me trapped. “Look, I’m on 408…”
“Then we’re busy, Flintlock on 408.” They flicked past me in a gasp of air, were gone over the horizon before the signal had cleared from the speakers. The time-bar on the panel had hardly any colour left. The map gave no access marker. I began swearing then, as loud as I could. I punched every key, alternated, controlled, shifted and slapped out every Macro. HOME. HOME. HOME. Append.
An escape pod popped into existence. I fumbled into it, just as the time graph faded out. The world turned grey, insubstantial, secondary; like the after-image of a flare. I curled into a ball for protection, hung suspended above the transparent ocean, listened to the howling wind. The air was filled with blowing leaves, torn from a tree I could not see and they rushed past me. I tumbled along with them, lost.
Kren put the coffee cup back on the table and sat back in his chair. His blouse was slightly open, revealing his lace covered cleavage. “You know what your problem is?” he said, running a painted fingernail through the spilt coffee, drawing spirals, “You don’t give anyone the benefit of the doubt. You’re paranoid that the world is after you and everything anyone does is aimed at you. You’re too uptight to see the way things ar
e. You ought to grow up.”
I wasn’t going to listen to him go on about it anymore. “And do you know what your problem is? You are a self-replicating, self-centred son of a bitch.”
He smiled at me. “Just a bitch, if you please. Okay, maybe the way I have told you isn’t too tasteful., but I would rather you heard it from me, rather than one of the guards or—”
“Fuck you! You wouldn’t know how to be tasteful if your life depended on it.”
He ran a tongue over wet lips, not smiling at all. “Have it your way. I won’t talk to you if you’re going to get demonstrative.” He pushed away from the table and walked out of the room, swinging his hips.
Have it my way, he said. He tells me he’s living with Shahn and that I’m paranoid. Fuck him. And fuck her. Christ, I feel like crying.
The leaves tumbled in thicker folds and for a while the sky and leaves formed an Escher tapestry. I rocked back and forward, holding my knees, singing to myself. Lola. Lo, lo, lo, lo, lah.
Clouds rolled off the water and streaks of light tiled the ripples of the ocean, the wind surfed past the walls of the escape pod and I closed down and sat there. Mindless. Not thinking. Just waiting. No memories. No information.
Sometime later a speck appeared on the horizon, moving toward me.
Walking in the air came a man with a map tucked under one arm; a gold chain of a fob watch laced to his navel. He was dressed as if going to dinner; suit with tails, grey cummerbund, white handkerchief in breast pocket, top hat. He walked by rolling off each foot, turning the toes of his leather shoes slightly before flicking the leg out straight and then moving onto it. Nothing held him up and the leaves blew past him as if coloured rain was falling. His face was warped and so old and cracked that time could gather in the creases and his cropped hair had greyed and thinned. He smiled slightly, like he had forgotten any other emotion and this was the last he could manage. He walked up and touched the side of the escape pod, looked into it and tapped the glass. He raised a hand and pointed upwards. “Mr Earner, we must leave this place.”