by M S Murdock
He couldn’t let her turn him into an ally!
OOOOO
“He escaped?” he found himself asking a few moments later.
Ardala had finally given him video after he’d threatened to trash her system, and from there it had only been a short time before he’d pulled the truth out of her.
“It would appear so, yes.”
“So that means he’s alive!” Holzerhein’s voice rose with excitement. “But how did he manage an escape?”
Ardala’s expression was a blend of annoyance and fear. “I don’t know. I wasn’t on board when it happened,” she said vaguely. Simund didn’t have to know that she’d sent Wilma Deering, an NEO colonel, in her stead. It would be a bit difficult to explain, she thought to herself. “All I know is that NEO was involved somehow, that I will have more precise answers for you soon.”
“NEO?” Holzerhein asked, incredulous. “NEO has Buck Rogers?”
“I’m not certain, but I think so, yes,” Ardala admitted. She seemed to collapse in on herself, waiting for the explosion.
“That’s beautiful!”
“What.”
“Wonderful! Beyond my wildest dreams! I’d thought we would have to arrange a rescue after I’d taught him to properly hate us, but this is even better. He’ll learn to hate us from the best enemies we’ve go.”
“You don’t have to be sarcastic.”
“No, no, I’m not.” Holzerhein could hardly contain himself. He felt like a kid at Christmas receiving an unexpected and lavish gift. “Really. This is just what I wanted. You couldn’t have done better. Thank you. I owe you a favor. Oh, this is going to be grand!” He excused himself, leaving Ardala still confused. He had so much to do!
OOOOO
Holzerhein spent the next few days preparing for war. He knew that the first battle would be soon, because if it weren’t, then the war would be over as soon as RAM got its thought-control satellite on line, and the traitor on the board of directors-almost certainly an NEO spy, considering how quickly they had acted to take Rogers-would have warned them about that. So, the battle would be soon, and since NEO was unlikely to tell Holzerhein exactly what they intended to do, he needed to prepare for any eventuality.
Foremost was the matter of backups. NEO was bound to raid the palace even if their major strike was elsewhere, and they were bound to do some damage, damage that could even affect Holzerhein in the matrix if they happened to hit any of the major data
transfer lines. He wanted to be sure that all of his backups were as current as possible before then, so that even in a worst-case scenario he would at least still remember who he was fighting when he came back on line.
Not that he knew Rogers well at all. Rogers was still practically a complete mystery, a name and a reputation only. By going to battle with him the way he was, Holzerhein was violating his own know-your enemy directive, but he really had no other choice. Sometimes the exigencies of war dictated taking risks that one wouldn’t otherwise take.
But one could always minimize the risks in other ways. With that in mind, Holzerhein updated his backup copies in the matrix, tucked copies away in various stand-alone peripherals, radioed encoded copies to RAM archives off planet, and just in case the real worst-case scenario-that NEO won the war in the first battle-happened, he even provided for that. Rogers and Masterlink had given him the idea, actually. If they could return after nearly five centuries, to continue their lives and their battles, then Holzerhein could see no reason why he couldn’t do the same. Launching himself in a satellite was a poor idea, though, with the amount of debris floating around out there these days, so Holzerhein had come up with something a little more likely to be noticed. More likely to be noticed, and also less likely to arouse suspicion in his eventual discoverers as to the true nature of their find.
At the summit of Mons Olympus, the largest volcano on Mars, was a crater some sixty kilometers across. It was a volcanic caldera formed by the col lapse of material into the molten pit of lava at the center before it had hardened, and as such it held some of the tallest sheer cliffs in the solar system. It was a favorite tourist attraction, and because of the opportunity the volcano gave for examining the interior composition of the planet, it was also under continual scientific scrutiny. It was no problem for Holzerhein to commandeer a remote-control drilling laser, fly it to an as-yet-unexplored cliff face, and spend an afternoon carving the bit pattern for his own' consciousness into the rock. Now it was a time bomb, waiting for the inevitable scientific expedition to find the strange pattern of cuts, photograph it, and store the photo in their database, where Holzerhein would come to life once again.
That taken care of, he returned to Pavonis to see what news his spies had been able to uncover concerning NEO’s activities after acquiring Buck Rogers. Kelth Smirnoff, his chief security attachment officer on Earth, delivered the message.
“Something interesting is happening,” the spymaster’s code-reconstructed and electronically altered voice said from the middle of a swirling green blob of hole interference. “Don’t know what’s causing it, but NEO is mobilizing for an attack. By the equipment they’re readying, it looks like a long-range raid, quick in and right back out again, and the word is that their target is Venus. Could be; Venus is just about at conjunction right now, but I don’t have a clue what they’d be after there. I’m working on it. Kelth out.”
Holzerhein sent an acknowledgment, and told him nothing. That was clever of NEO to plant the Venus rumor; he saw no reason to blow such a beautiful deception. Not that he was going to act on the rumor-he wasn’t going to actively help NEO with their plan-but he would give them that much. As a gift to Rogers. Beyond that, however, he was on his own.
Holzerhein’s spy reports continued to come in, but they got stranger and stranger. The NEO ships had indeed taken off for Venus, passing through the tail of the comet that was even now rounding its way toward eventual impact with the Martian South Pole, but shortly after that encounter they had all changed course and accelerated at top speed toward the outer solar system. The only possible planetary encounter along their vector was Uranus, but it would be impossible for small craft such as theirs to make it that far. Yet Uranus seemed to be their destination.
Two days later, the entire company encountered the notorious Black Barney’s pirate fleet and were captured down to the last ship. It made no sense. They were supposed to be attacking RAM, not losing their entire force to some profiteering clone warrior halfway across the solar system. What had they thought they were going to accomplish way out there? And what was Holzerhein going to do for a war now?
He spent the next week alternately fuming about the disruption to his plans and wondering if he could have missed some vital clue, but as the time drew on and his spies intercepted more and more “what do we do now?” messages between the remaining NEO outposts, he reluctantly came to believe that the rebel organization had just committed suicide.
Good grief, was he going to have to switch sides and fight RAM himself just to find a worthy adversary?
OOOOO
That turned out not to be the case.
OOOOO
It happened thus:
The terraforming comet had finally wound its way through the inner solar system and was making its final approach toward Mars. Meteorologists had predicted-with one hundred percent certainty--severe storms over the entire planet, coupled with moderate to severe quake activity. The entire planetary population had dug in, battened down the hatches, and were waiting for it to blow over as they had done every few years since the terraforming project had begun, but Holzerhein had directed his consciousness up to the top of the elevator and was watching with the scientific teams as the comet slowed in its approach, curved around under Mars’s gravitational pull, and drifted majestically through the last few thousand kilometers toward impact.
It was a beautiful sight. It was two o’clock in the morning at the base of the elevator in Pavonis, and most of the planet w
as dark from their viewpoint at the top. The comet was an immense apparition of light sweeping past, its tail already millions of miles beyond them, it’s head a tiny irregular disk that grew steadily brighter as it drew closer. It was a small comet as comets go, but to someone dangling from a thread attached to the planet that it was about to smash into, it looked like the wrath of a particularly vengeful god.
Holzerhein was barely aware of the traffic controller’s voice calling off the distances, but something made him pay attention when the controller said, “Now entering upper planetary defense shield layer. Shield temporarily down . . . making transit. . .upper shield restored. Entering midlevel shield zone . . . shield down . . . making transit . . . restored. . . lower shield down . . . making transit. . . restored. Impact in fifteen, fourteen. . . .”
And suddenly, out of the comet’s nucleus, streaked a dozen, two dozen fierce points of light, curving hard away from the impact point, accelerating northward around the curve of the planet and diving into the atmosphere to leave two dozen bright meteor trails in the night sky. Two dozen streaks pointed straight at the base of the Pavonis Space Elevator!
The comet struck. Icy cold instantly became a hot ring of flame spewing outward, the shock wave racing after the tiny escaped specks. Both the polar ocean and the cometary nucleus flashed into steam, the steam cloud rising high above the atmosphere before gravity began folding it back to rain down upon the entire southern hemisphere.
Holzerhein hardly noticed. All his attention was on the tiny specks of light, specks that were without a doubt the NEO attack force, already decelerating toward Pavonis and the RAM coprate palace. He’d been tricked! The ships heading to Uranus had been decoys, nothing but shells with drives and pilots to draw his attention while the real attack force hid deep in the comet’s ice and waited for RAM to bring them down through their own defense shielding. Ingenious! It had to be Rogers’s plan. Holzerhein would never have expected such a devious plan from NEO-obviously hadn’t expected anything of the sort, because they’d caught him completely by surprise. He hadn’t a single patrol in the sky, and the ones on the ground were all waiting to ride out the quakes along with everybody else.
He turned to the traffic controller, who had also seen the invading craft peel away from the comet at the last moment, and shouted, “Full military alert! Get our fighters in there!”
“But sir, the shock wave will-”
“I said get them in there, now! Pavonis is under attack!”
Holzerhein dropped back into the matrix, flipped to the palace, and immediately encountered Rodney. Without reality mode to give him substance, the butler program was merely an annoying presence in the matrix next to Holzerhein, a presence that said, “Excuse me, sir, but you have an urgent communication from Terendon Freil.”
Terendon? What the hell could Terendon want?
Whatever It was, it would have to wait. "Tell him I’m busy now." “He said it was an emergency.”
“This is an emergency. I’ll talk to him later. Now get out of my way!” Holzerhein pushed past the butler and on into the matrix, heading directly to the palace guard address.
He didn’t bother with announcing himself. He simply accessed the hole projector in the guard captain’s office and blossomed into being before his desk. The captain’s reflexes were good; he had his gun out and had fired a beam right through Holzerhein’s chest before his image was fully formed. Holzerhein ignored it. “NEO forces are about to attack the palace,” he said. “Mobilize the guard, and get ready for air strikes. Do you understand?”
The captain swallowed hard as he bolstered his pistol. “Yes, sir.” He turned toward his command console and began shouting orders, but Holzerhein was already gone.
He began accessing camera after camera, perimeter sensor after perimeter sensor, in an effort to locate the NEO attack force, but he needn’t have bothered. They announced their presence in an unmistakably direct manner: by blasting their way straight in through the roof of' the relatively unshielded south wing and landing their fighters directly in the rubble. Holzerhein tried to access cameras there, but the ships blasts had taken out more than just the roof. The matrix was dead all around them.
The guard hadn’t arrived yet. From a vantage point across the courtyard Holzerhein could see into the wing through one of the collapsed walls. Only six or eight fighters were there, with maybe twenty people; the others must have stayed hidden in reserve or were engaging RAM’s fighters and drawing them away from the palace. If there were any RAM fighters. With the shock wave from the impact traveling through the atmosphere in its deadly sweep, roiling the upper atmosphere especially, it might be impossible for fighters from Deimos military base to get through. No doubt NEO had planned on just that.
But what were they doing with such a small force? In the south wing Holzerhein could see flashes and hear the sharp crackle of hand weapons, and he knew that the four or five guardsmen who had been on regular duty there were dying under heavy fire. He watched, helpless, as the attackers swept on into the main building. Behind them, their fighters rose back into the night sky, leaving the south wing empty.
Was Rogers with them? Holzerhein couldn’t tell. His enhanced vision was hampered by the darkness, and he was too far away to hear words.
He accessed the guard captain’s console just long enough to say, “The rebels are now in the main palace. Get your men in there!” Then he flipped there himself.
The matrix still held where the rebels hadn’t damaged the building. Holzerhein tracked them down by the sound of their running, accessed a holo projector directly in front of them, and fired it with narrowed beam at the first figure to come into view. It was wearing blast armor, but the shrouded figure was barely in the beam’s path long enough to damage even an unprotected person before he dived, rolled, and came up shooting. He missed with the first shot, but his second took out the projector and the camera beside it, blinding Holzerhein once again.
The NEO rebels rushed onward, encountering occasional palace guards, but blasting their way through with ease. Holzerhein tried shooting at them with his holo projectors a few more times, but the lasers weren’t powerful enough to do any real damage with a single sweep, and he wasn’t fast enough with his aim to track a moving target long enough to inflict more than superficial burns before they destroyed the projectors. Where in hell was the main security force?
A deep rumbling came from nowhere in particular, grew until it was louder than the noise of advancing NEO rebels, and began to shake the building. The first of the quakes from the comet impact. The rebels didn’t even slow down. They dodged into a side corridor and clattered down a stairway, took a left, down that corridor, then a right, down another stairway-and Holzerhein began to see where they were headed.
The computer complex was down this way. The computers that formed the matrix’s nerve center occupied two full floors beneath the palace, and the NEO raiders were heading straight for them.
Holzerhein flipped back to the guard captain’s station once again. “Where the hell are your men? Those NEO creeps are about to-”
“Holzheimer.”
The word jarred him to a stop. It had been spoken not by the guard captain, but by someone else in the room. Holzerhein turned to see Terendon Freil standing there with a look of triumph on his face. So that’s what he’d wanted earlier. And since he’d been unable to lure Holzerhein to him, he had gone to the most likely place for Holzerhein to show up, made most likely because the guard captain was part of the conspiracy and his actions would eventually draw attention.
Well, it had.
Terendon’s triumphant look twisted through doubt to worry to fear in a couple of seconds as he realized that the hologram before him was not disappearing under the attack of a virus program. “Holzerhein!” he shouted. “Holzheimer, Holzheimer!” “Terendon,” Holzerhein replied softly. “Yes, Terendon Freil. Descriptive, isn’t it? The democratic spy. Of course; it makes perfect sense, now. Freedom for the masses,
worker incentive-what else? Elections? Oh, no doubt elections. Were you planning to run?”
That last carried a double meaning: Terendon had been inching for the door as Holzerhein spoke. Now he focused the holo projector once again, this time into a beam just beside Terendon’s head. He held it steady for the second it took until the wall behind him began to smoke and finally burst into flame. Terendon leaped back and shouted to the guard captain, “Shoot the projector!”
“Let’s make it a little more sporting,” Holzerhein said, tracking across the room with the beam and raking it across the captain’s eyes. The captain screamed and threw out his arm to cover his face, but it was too late. Eyes were the most sensitive part of a meat body; the laser blinded him instantly.
Terendon bolted for the door, but Holzerhein reached out through the matrix and triggered the wall sensor, slamming the door closed in front of him. “Not so fast,” he said, laughing softly. “The party’s just getting started.”
Just for insurance he shot the captain’s hand as well, forcing him to drop the gun. Then he began the slow process of cooking both of them alive with the laser, starting with their feet and working his way up.
He hadn’t forgotten the NEO troops. While he was taking care of Terendon and the traitorous guard captain, another copy of himself sped off to take command of the guard. He found them in the east wing, uselessly setting up barricades as if for a siege, but with a few sharp commands he had them up and running back into the main palace, toward the computer section.
They were too late to stop the attack. Even as Holzerhein sped on ahead, pieces of the matrix began winking out of existence around him. They were shooting at the computers! With each shot, an entire section disappeared into nothingness, leaving gaps big enough to swallow a dozen Holzerhein at once. Errant control signals began coursing through what was left of the matrix, activating and shutting oil services and devices at random, knocking out peripherals and bringing others on line. . . .