"You got that in one," Charlie said from behind her. "That's the myelin sheathing that holds the brain cells together, people, and they're glomming it up like there's no tomorrow. This keeps up for very long, there won't be a tomorrow for one of us."
Maj was acutely aware of Laurent, behind her, looking out at this with astonishment and horror. "Let's go get 'em, then," she said.
The three fighters dived in. Maj, though, was already calculating odds, and beginning to despair. There were at least fifty of these things scattered around that she could see. Substantives had no weapons that she knew of other than brute strength and consuming anything that got in their way--but how representative were these of the true number of microps presently inside Laurent? Were there hundreds? Thousands? Millions? How many more of these were hiding in the nebula?
Del dived in and fired his pumped lasers at one of the Substantives, the closest. It squalled in fury and struck out at him with five or six of those awful clawed legs. "No effect," he said. "Retuning--"
He tuned his lasers further into the blue, came back for another run, tried again. The Substantive lunged at him, just missing with more of those legs. Once again the lasers had no effect.
"Incorrect mapping," Robin said, as her own Arbalest dived in. "Going to have to hack at this one, boys and girls. These things are resistant."
"I thought they might have to be," Maj said. "They probably have to cope with white blood cells and such to get their job done."
"How were these things activated, Maj?" said Robin. "Net burst?"
"I think so."
"Huh," Robin said. "Well, if we can't destroy them out-right, let's try overriding them. They have to accept incoming communication. We may not be able to reprogram them--we don't have the codes for it--but we can try overloading them--"
A moment's pause. Then Robin came around hard and fired at another Substantive.
It stopped scooping up dust, listed over to one side, and began to drift.
"That's it!" Del yelled. "Come on, guys!"
They went after the Substantives in earnest, hitting them one after another. One after another, they went down. But more and more of them came out of the Nebula. Maj started to worry, for her power conduits were beginning to complain. You could not run an Arbalest forever like this--you had to take it home and fuel it once in a while. And then there was the matter of--
"Uh-oh," said Robin.
"What?" Maj said, looking all around her. It was a tone of voice she usually only heard from Robin when they were badly outnumbered.
"They're moving again, Maj."
She looked back, and felt like swearing. One of the Substantives that she had shot up with her returned cannons was indeed moving, struggling...coming back to life. Are we going to have to shoot all these things up again? We can't! Our own power levels...
Nonetheless she turned around again, wondering how they were going to pull this out without having to go back to base and charge, then come back again. The damage to Laurent's brain would only start all over again. And in the meantime, if the agents from his country should--
"Oh, dear me, no," Del said.
That was not a tone of voice she cared to hear from Del, either. "What?"
"Black Arrows, guys," said Del softly.
Maj looked up in momentary panic, which became more than momentary as she saw the black shapes with their red outlines streaking toward them--five of them. But what the--
She opened her mouth, closed it again. "They're not real Arrows!" she said.
"What?"
"Look at how they're moving!"
Del and Robin were quiet for a moment. Then Robin said, "They're slow!"
"They're from outside the game," Maj said. "They're the agents--the ones that activated the microps in Laurent!"
"And the poor dumb clucks aren't running at multiple G's," Del crowed. "They don't know how far the parameters of ships can be pushed in this game. They don't know the rules!"
"Then let's not show them right away," Maj said. "If they think the normal rules of science obtain here..."
She could just hear the others grinning. "Maj, take point," Del said, with great relish.
"You're on," she said, and reached with both arms into the fighting field, the "glove-box"-like force field which the pilot of an Arbalest fighter used to manipulate ship's weapons.
The fight that followed was a sad one...for the Arrows.
Maj dived slowly in toward the first of their enemies, watched him react as best as he could...then threw her Arbalest around at 6 G's and cobra'd, letting him pass her, shooting him up from behind. Elsewhere, Del and Robin were using similar tactics. Each took out one of the Arrows, then went for another.
Maj went for her second enemy vessel, diving close. She passed over the other, canopy to canopy, and got a glimpse of the pilot as she twisted away from the Arrow's fire. A woman, she thought--blond, small. Her helmet hid her eyes, but not her mouth. She was smiling, a look of great enjoyment, and she dived up and around again toward Maj, firing--
I don't like your looks, lady, Maj thought, and clenched her fists in the fighting field. The pumped lasers might have been little good against the Substantives, but they worked just fine against Black Arrows, as the Group had proved the other night. Maj's lasers stitched out blinding from her Arbalest and carved a long line of light and hot metal down the side of the woman agent's Arrow. The blond's ship tumbled, but did not know how to handle it--turned, tried to limp away. Maj, though, was in no mood to let it go. She brought the Arbalest around in a turn so tight it would have broken the back of any lesser fighter, 6 G's or better--the blood roared in her ears, but not as loud as her anger. This woman was one of the people who wanted to reduce Laurent's brain to so much strawberry jam, one of the people who had made his young life so far hell, and would have done worse to him and the father for as much of their lives as they managed to hang on to after they were both dragged home.
Not a chance, lady, Maj thought. This was one of the people who had, even if only for a night, made her turn her home into a fortress and lock a guest up in the den. Who didn't care who they hurt if it meant getting Laurent, and apparently dead or alive was good enough for this blond excuse for a human being.
Maj followed her hard, and turned, and turned again, and fired again. The Arrow fled, but Maj pursued--and the Arrow mis-twisted, and Maj found herself sitting, most serendipitously, right on its six.
She fired, and the Arrow blew itself to shreds. Wherever that agent was, in reality, she would not be bothering Laurent again for a little while, anyway. It took a while to get a new ship in this universe.
She rejoined the others. Robin was in the act of putting one last agent out of business, blowing his Arrow to smithereens at the end of a long lazy Immelmann turn that was pure insolence in space. A ragged cheer went up from them all at the end of that. But Maj looked with concern up into the cockpit mirror...and saw that Laurent had passed out.
"Trouble. We've got to knock those Substantives down again."
"Can't, Maj!" Robin said. "No power. Showing red."
"We have to go back, Maj," said Del.
"But we can't!" Maj said.
"If we don't," Del said, "we are genuinely screwed--"
"But Laurent--!"
Then Maj caught the sudden movement. She swore softly and tumbled the Arbalest in y-axis.
And with no other warning, long slender arrows came lancing past and around them through the darkness of space. Not dark ones, though, not the Archon's ships, but, beyond belief or hope, the white lances of the Cluster Rangers' elite corps, the Pilum Squadrons, every one of them with an odd piece of nose art added--the Net Force insignia. The Pilums' pulsecannon weaponry stitched all the space before them with white lines of irresistible fire, plastering the Substantives with pulsecannon bursts...and one after another the giant bugs went limp and still, not moving again.
"The codes have worked," said one of the Pilum commanders. "I repeat, the codes work. Squadron, go in a
nd clean them up!"
All those long white shapes disappeared into the cloud. A cheer went up from Maj and Del and Robin and Charlie, and a kind of strangled hoot from Laurent. They all turned tail and made their way up and out of the nebula again--
--and came into clear view of the great arm of the Galaxy again, the light triumphant against the darkness one more time; and all the stars sang for joy.
One more Pilum came coasting down by them. "All right, you guys," said its pilot; and Maj's head snapped up in surprise, for she knew that voice. She peered across the darkness between them and saw James Winters riding right-hand seat in the Pilum's forward-thrust lance, with a grim grin on his face.
"Captain Winters..."
"Commander Winters," he said, "here, at least. You're done for today, Maj. I relieve you."
"I stand relieved," Maj said, and smiled, and slumped in her seat with relief.
"Now get out of virtual," he said, "and for heaven's sake go disarm the alarm system and open the front door, because about eight black-and-whites and a paramedic team from Bethesda are sitting outside waiting for you and Laurent to finish your business here, and your mom and dad are being choppered in and will be there demanding details in about five minutes."
She had never been so glad to get offline in her life.
It was days before the dust settled. Laurent spent many of them in the hospital, having cellular rehab work done on the brain tissue which had been damaged--fortunately, not as much of it as had been feared nor was any of it permanent thanks to Maj's and Net Force's intervention--and having the microps removed. They were a seven-day's wonder at Bethesda, where they were taken for safekeeping until the man who could best manage them arrived.
Maj insisted on being there, at least at a distance. She saw the Swissair spaceplane land at Dulles, and after the cleanup teams got the leftover hydrazine out of the ship, she saw it tugged into the landing ramp--and she waited with James Winters and her father as the tall blond man with the coat that was too short for his long wrists came up the jetway toward them, having been instructed to bypass immigration. She saw her father and the tall man look at each other...and then rush together and hug like a couple of kids. That had been worth seeing.
They had taken him straight to the hospital and left him with the recovering Laurent, with a long story to tell, of which Maj heard at least the highlights. Parts of it, she realized, she was unlikely ever to hear, though her father probably knew about them. All James Winters would say was, "We have some friends in far places. Sometimes they're in a position to step in and help us. This time was one of those times...and we got lucky. They were able to get Laurent's dad away from the security forces just as they took him, and out to where he could phone us the disabling codes for the microps. Not a moment too soon..."
Other parts, which she did hear, gave Maj the shivers. "There's the matter of the agent that Cluj's people sent over to 'recover' Laurent," Winters said. "Quite a nasty lady--we were glad to catch up with her. There are several incidents which have happened on U.S. soil that we are going to be happy to have the chance to take up with her at last. She'll be here for a while."
Maj grinned at that. The woman's face had been one of those she disliked at first sight--it was good to know there had been reason for it.
"You thought it through, Maj," Winters said to her, much later. "You thought it through, and you followed the hunch when it came to you--and the hunch bought the time that was needed for response by those equipped to respond. You can't do much better than that. I'm proud of you."
She said nothing, and simply walked along by him, basking in the praise.
"Now," he said, "we'll talk about why you didn't call me earlier." And he talked about that, earnestly, for about fifteen minutes, during all of which Maj's ears burned so fiercely that she thought they might set her hair on fire.
Finally, though, her father, walking on the other side of James Winters, spoke up. "She would probably have called you the night before, Jim," he said, "if I hadn't talked her out of it."
"True?"
"True."
Winters simply looked at Maj's father and shook his head. Her father shrugged. "I invoked Occam's Razor," he said. "Mea culpa."
"Mmm," Winters said. "Now that you remind me, I seem to remember having put Tabasco in your vodka once."
"That was you?"
Winters nodded. "Another mistake. So we've made one apiece, now."
"Can I have that in writing," said Maj's father, "and will you give it to my wife? At your earliest convenience."
The men stood there grinning at each other.
"Where will Laurent and his dad go now?" Maj said after a moment.
Winters sighed. "It's no surprise we have a protection program for witnesses and other assets," he said. "I think we can fairly qualify Armin Darenko as an asset, since he has apparently invented one of the most useful surgical and therapeutic tools of this century. Wouldn't be surprised if he gets the Nobel out of it. That will come later, though. Right now, since he shows no particular interest in returning to his native country"--and his smile went appropriately wintery--"we'll 'adopt' him and Laurent, find a quiet place for them to settle where they won't be bothered...and let them fade into the background."
Maj smiled. "New identities..."
"I have a feeling your group may acquire a new member," Winters said, "with a new name. A couple of your Net Force Explorers associates, of course, are likely to be privy to the information. But I don't think that's going to be a problem."
"No," Maj said, "I don't think so, either."
She smiled, hearing, in the back of her mind, the Galaxy singing; though not nearly as loudly, at the moment, as her pride.
Seven for seven, she thought. Or nine, or ten...
Whatever!
Table of Contents
Cover
Praise
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Safe House (2000) Page 19