Revolution: Book Three of the Secret World Chronicle - eARC

by Mercedes Lackey

  “So do you want me to do something about her?” Khanjar asked. “It would not be difficult to arrange an accident. Although it might be difficult to keep her from calling for help if she is as clever as you say. She might even have some sort of bio-sign monitor in her person just in case of such a thing.”

  He turned to face Khanjar again, this time smiling broadly. “Not just yet. Killing a spy is never as useful as insulating them and having them work against their own purpose. This was…a bad day. But…there’s always a silver lining to every cloud, my dear.” There must have been something off about his smile, however; cracks beneath the surface of the mask that he was wearing. It obviously disquieted Khanjar even more than his brief flare of fury had. Well, good. It was time his little bodyguard saw the iron under the harlequin glove. “When the time comes, however, I’ll want to put a personal touch on removing Ms. Ferrari from this world.”

  Resolution

  Mercedes Lackey

  Something that came into play later…after Red almost ended up as Doppelgaenger’s chew-toy, I decided I was never going to be without fast transport again. Ever. A little more hack-liberation and there was an ECHO-jet backpack in my closet. I may not be bright sometimes, but at least I learn from my mistakes.

  Overwatch was good, but it was a kludge. I knew it, even if no one else did. Hot news flash to you, dear reader, in case you have not been paying attention. Yes I really am that paranoid. Yes, I really do second-guess myself that much.

  Even if my parents and Hosteen were all over making a copy of it for Department 39. In the back of my mind, I’d been letting the math simmer ever since Mark One was up and running.

  And eventually, as these things go, it was soup.

  In Vickie’s experience, although work might not be a cure for heartsickness, but if it was technical enough, it was at least a distraction. It had been a very long time since Vickie had undertaken any truly major techno-magical projects. Overwatch as it existed wasn’t one; it was a kludge, a lot of things she knew how to do fudged together. They all worked, but they did not compose the seamless integration she would have been proud to show off.

  Overwatch also had two big problems. It wasn’t nearly as secure as she wanted, and it couldn’t self-repair.

  A couple of mornings after the rescue of Djinni, her alarm had woken her with something a lot different from her usual musical selection; at the time she hadn’t thought much of it since it seemed to be out of the Djinni’s playlist, a song by VnV Nation. And the first verse had just seemed to play into her general depression…but then the lyrics, and especially the chorus, had taken an abrupt shift, and she couldn’t get it out of her head. It had been like a shot of double espresso, and by the time she sat down at the keyboard and ran the usual trouble-shooting and coordination of the day, she was no longer content with what she had—and she had her much-needed distraction.

  She set to work that night, when the action cooled down a little. The Thulians were into their predictable cool-down after a defeat, the Rebs were back to pettier crime, and Verdigris…was Verdigris. If there would ever be a good time to work on a revamp, it would be now. And if she ever needed a distraction, it was now.

  As always, the math came first. The computer-end of Overwatch was all right; some new programming and some tweaking would probably be needed, but the computer hardware was solid and most of the software just as good. So, begin at the beginning, the human end. What could she have…and what did she need? What would give them something that was bullet-proof, or at least as close to ninety-nine point nine percent as Murphy and Schrödinger would ever allow?

  She worked at it in a red-hot fever until she ran out of brain-juice, went to sleep with diagrams and equations dancing in her head, got up, and in between jobs as the eye in the sky, kept at it. It took three days. And on the afternoon of the third day, with all of the glyphs and equations, the diagrams and signs, the interface-parameters and her Probability Calculator, all floating in the air, in a full circle around her, she put the final variable into place.

  As she sketched it in, everything snapped together in Probability Space, a full globe of flows and math and magic, coming together seamlessly with the sound of an ethereal chime, not unlike the pure note struck from a perfect bell of crystal.

  Every mage knew that could happen, when you created something that was, well, perfect. She’d even been a witness to it three times in her life. But it had never happened to her, until now.

  The air in her workroom reverberated with it, and she held her breath, awestruck at the wonder of the thing she had just made—in theory, at least, and in mathemagic, theory was most of the way to reality. She might have stood there forever if she hadn’t been snapped out of her trance by the sound of tiny stone hands clapping together and tiny stone feet jumping up and down. She looked to the door to see Grey and Herb standing there. Herb was jumping up and down in glee, still clapping. Grey’s eyes were as big as plates.

  My gods…Grey said, all his usual sarcasm vanished, Victrix, that is a Masterpiece.

  She felt a smile of sheer joy spreading over her face. “Yes,” she said, simply. “Yes it is.” Then she gathered up the design with a sweep of her hand, balled it up, and tucked it into Storage Space. “And now we make it happen in realspace instead of just theory.”

  * * *

  When the design was complete, Vickie invoked the spirit of Nikolai Tesla via the quantator with a request for the design of some very specific items. As it happened, these items were so small they required their own manufacturing process. Fortunately, it was a process that ECHO already used in the medical department for nano-surgery bots, (and probably was the same military process that had created John Murdock’s implants, although no one was talking about that) and with one tiny adaptation, the nanotech churned out a hundred and fifty each of three devices. They were each about the size of a micro-memory chip, and to keep from mixing them up, Vickie’d had them made in red, blue and green, respectively. Tesla had been very curious, and very puzzled, by what the empty socket was for. “Crystals” was all she would tell him. “Just add that to the design for the bot-maker. I’ll supply the crystals.”

  “But what are they for?” Tesla wondered.

  “If I tell you, I’ll have to kill you,” she replied, only half facetiously.

  Bella had been just as puzzled by the bowl of silvery “sand” that had come with the meticulous manufacturing protocol, but she trusted that Vickie knew what she was doing—and asking for.

  Bella had just surreptitiously delivered the results—not hard since all of them would have fit in a cereal bowl with room to spare. Now the real work was going to begin.

  When she was done, she would have her Masterpiece. An Overwatch net that couldn’t be spied on, couldn’t be hacked, and wouldn’t be bothered by a couple miles, or a couple million miles of earth and stone between Vickie and her teams. An Overwatch net that would fix itself. One she could replicate anywhere, any time. One in which the components could never be taken and used by anyone else. One which…eventually…she might even be able to interface with a counterpart for the computer end that was pure magical energy. But that was down the road. This was now.

  After the initial three castings to separate out the defective units, then the units that, for one reason or another, wouldn’t interface with magic properly, she had a hundred full sets of three components each. More than enough for now, which would give her the window to make more later without running short now, as she brought people into the net that were not yet part of their pocket rebellion.

  Initially she picked out three sets, one each for her, Bella, and Sovie. Herself, because she damn well wasn’t going to subject anyone else to something she wouldn’t use, and Bella and Sovie because, as healers, if something was going to trigger rejection in the user, they’d pick up on it, and they’d be able to save themselves from any ill-effects.

  With the first test run a complete success (and Sovie full of enhancement ideas
specifically for the medical corps she wanted Vickie to add), she brought in Red Saviour and introduced her to the New and Improved Overwatch. Within an hour, the Commissar was ready to declare her a Hero of the People…which was kind of a nice change from being called a “Daughter of Rasputin.” Of course, the fact that Vickie fudged a little and pretended that it was all tech and very little magic might have had something to do with that.

  So…now the hardest sell of all. And…the biggest risk.

  “Overwatch: Command: Open: Private: Red Djinni,” she said, as she brought out the tiny box that contained the set of three devices that had been tuned to Red, and Red only, just as the other sets had been tuned to their respective recipients. Overwatch obligingly opened up Red’s private freq. “Red, you busy?”

  “Nothing I can’t break off.” There was a grunt, and a yelp of pain. Not Red’s. “There. Broken. Damn, I hate dealers. Lemme deliver him to the cops, darlin’. You need me for something?”

  “Yep. At my apartment.”

  A long pause. Most probably since this was the first time she had actually invited him here. The last time…well, he’d come in the window, and it hadn’t been by invitation. I wonder whatever happened to my letter…She’d never found it after she woke up, alone, in her bed. Grey had probably gotten rid of it. He was good at things like that.

  “Roger,” he answered. “On the way over.”

  “Take the roof, I’ll leave the window open.” She didn’t want Bella coming in on this, so while she waited, she went to the door and turned all ten locks. Doing the implants took a lot of concentration, and if that concentration was broken, she might have to retune and re-cast them all over again. Then she went and got Red’s chosen tipple, Redbreast whiskey, out of the liquor box. She wasn’t quite sure how he was going to react to this. She left the bottle on the coffee table and poured a double shot into a sour glass, and waited.

  He did come in the window…cautiously, this time; eased himself to the floor, and stood there, looking oddly uncertain. She walked over to him and handed him the drink. He took it. Looked at it. Sniffed it.

  “Are you seducing me, or bribing me, Vix?” he asked, finally.

  She tried not to wince, and succeeded. “Bribing you,” she replied. “Come sit. I have a lot of ’splainin’ to do.”

  Gingerly, he took a seat in the chair across from the sofa. She sat on the sofa, and held the little box in her hand. The plastic warmed to her touch.

  “Overwatch isn’t perfect,” she said, finally. “It’s rather far from perfect. It’s not the rig here, it’s the interface with you folks. I’m using a kludge to keep track of you, another to futz the radio freqs so they’re less likely to be read or hacked, the headsets are subject to being lost, broken, taken away…the list goes on.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s a helluva lot better tha—” He stopped, and his eyes narrowed above his scarf. “You’ve improved it?”

  “I’ve replaced it,” she said, simply. “With what’s in here.” She held up the box. “Tested it on me, then Bella and Sovie, then the Commissar. There’s just a few catches, so far as you are concerned, and the big one is…I have to implant the pieces. They’re permanent.” She grimaced. “I know how you are about your privacy and—”

  He held up a hand. “Hold it. Vix…I trust you. Let’s do this. Then you can give me the sales-pitch, or the test-drive, or whatever it is.”

  She thought her jaw was going to hit the floor. She could hardly believe it. He…trusted her. Trusted her with his privacy. It was so stunning that she actually forgot to breathe until Grey swatted her ankle with a pinpick of a claw to remind her.

  “Uh. Okay then.” She swallowed. “Thank you. Thank you for that.” She shook her head a little. “All the magic’s been done except the implantation process, we can do that here rather than my workroom. Ready?”

  He finished his drink. “Sure.” Without being asked he took off the scarf. He was Brad Pitt today. She chuckled a little, despite still feeling breathless. Part scared, part wanting to…well, that was never happening. Part nerves. Maybe it was a good thing the welter of emotions was so complicated; he’d likely never be able to pick out the lovelorn part.

  “Ear first. This is both a microphone and a speaker, and it goes in your middle ear. I’ll be able to hear everything you do, you’ll hear me normally…and I’ve got a gain-rider on both input and output so even if I get hysterical and start screaming, I won’t deafen you, and even if you get ’splodied, I won’t get deafened at my end.” She leaned forward with the tiny green lozenge, about the size of a large bead, on the end of her finger. “This is made by the same setup that makes the ECHO nano-surgery bots.” She was extremely pleased with herself that her hand didn’t shake as she touched the device to just behind his ear and “told” it where to apport itself. She double-checked the placement with Overwatch. It was seated. Good, now part two.

  “Now the voice pickup mic. This replaces your throat-mic. Open wide.” She extended her finger towards his mouth, which he obediently opened. The red one, the size and shape of a grain of rice, went up into his soft palate.

  “Now the hard one. This replaces the camera. And it adds something more. You’re getting a HUD.” She grinned as his eyes widened a little, despite the churning of her guts. It was nice to surprise him. “It gets better. This is where techno-magic becomes magic-tech. There’s no camera. There will be nothing for anyone to see if they look in your eyeball, or to interfere with a retina scan. It won’t be in your eye. It wraps itself around the back of the eyeball between it and the socket and plugs into the optic nerves. No camera needed. It reads what the nerves send to the brain, and projects the HUD info directly to the brain from Overwatch. Unless someone gouges your eye out, may that never happen, they will never know it’s there. It’ll work with a gunsight, or anything else you use too. So, right or left?”

  “Works with a sight—right, then, I guess.” He licked his lips. “Can I have another drink first?”

  She poured for him. “Now…this one has to migrate, so I need you to hold still while it does its thing. It’ll feel creepy, until you stop feeling it. When you stop feeling it moving, it’ll have settled in place.”

  He finished the drink, and she leaned forward and put the blue ovoid in the corner of his right eye and told it to start on its journey. “Don’t touch your eye,” she warned him, as his hand twitched. “Here, have another drink.”

  About the time he finished it, the HUD in her own eye reported Red Djinni: Camera: Placed.

  “Feel anything?” she asked.

  “Not now,” he replied cautiously.

  “Okay, the next step is for me to activate it, but not bring it up live yet.” She sketched the activation diagram in the air between them, and said “Fiat: Red Djinni Overwatch Interface: Activate. Let’s go to the Overwatch room. I want you to see the whole boat. Bella and Sovie didn’t care, and Saviour was so enamored with the new toy she just wanted to go out and do some smashings. I think you’ll appreciate it.”

  It took about a minute for the whole array to get itself seated, verify that it was in the person it was intended for, and get ready for coming up live. She relaxed a bit more; only one hurdle to go. It took about the same amount of time for things to settle in as it took them to get to her Overwatch room. She motioned to him to take her chair. When he’d done so, she gave the final command. “Overwatch: Command: Red Djinni: Live, go. Command: Red Djinni: Feed: Monitor Four.”

  Monitor four opened up a window, showing—her, of course, with the HUD graphics coming on in Red’s vision, and then as Red swiveled the chair, the view of all of the monitors, the HUD identifying all of them for him, obligingly.

  “Overwatch: Override, override, override. Transfer control: Red Djinni: Red Djinni,” she said with satisfaction. “There. Red, you are completely in the driver’s seat for your implants. It’s got voice recognition. No one can override your implants but me now. If you want to go completely dark, just say the word ‘pri
vacy’ and however long you want to go dark for.” She raised an eyebrow as he swiveled back to look at her again. Huh. Didn’t know I was that good at the eyebrow…“Mind you, if you go longer than eight hours, it will give you an alarm and you’ll have to reinstate it. And I’ll get the alarm as well. And if you go over the amount you specified, again, we’ll both get alarms. The last thing I need is for another Detroit situation to come up.”

  “Yeah, well I still cannot believe the mouth on you. I’ve heard five dollar hookers who didn’t swear like that. In—what? Three languages, so far? And the idea of finding myself in the middle of another lightning strike is…” He looked back at her, and the Overwatch system ID’d what she expected it to ID. She saw, on the monitor, what his HUD was telling him. “…Vix…why are you packing heat?”

  But his reply had allowed her to release tension—and a nagging fear—that she’d had even though the devices had responded perfectly to him. “Because,” she said, taking the Glock out of her waistband, and laying it down on top of a cabinet, “If you hadn’t given me the right answer to the ‘Detroit’ cue, I was going to unload the full mag into you, reload, empty the second, and run like hell.”

  He considered that, and nodded.

  “I was ninety percent certain it was you, because the devices are tuned to the recipient and only the recipient,” she told him. “Even if someone was to dig them out of you, he couldn’t use them, unless he was identical to you on the DNA level and the magical level. Still…better safe, and this was my last test. I don’t know how good a mimic DG is…Anyway, you’re you, so let’s get on with the tour. The comm works by using Quantum Twinning and the Laws of Unity, Contagion and Similarity. I have crystals twinned and tuned with the ones in the implants in sockets in an array back there, and we actually do not use anything like a frequency. Quantum Twinning says that twinned particles always react the same, no matter how far apart they are. So when your crystal picks up or sends information, so does mine.”