by Alec Saracen
“We need multitaskers. Polymaths. The more roles someone can fill, the better.”
“Fleischer,” Ceq said. Sam and Zhai looked her way, and she shrugged. “I'm just saying. You want Fleischer.”
Zhai considered it. Juna Fleischer was far from his first choice. She didn't play well with others – but she wouldn't have to. Ceq was right. Fleischer came with about a dozen specialist AIs, which were no substitute for real attaches and logisticians and treasurers, but just about the next best thing.
“Contact her,” he said to Sam. Now that he was thinking of mavericks, disruptive people who would do five jobs at once even if they had to walk all over four other people, another idea occurred to him. “And Tetaine.”
“Are we scraping the barrel, boss?”
“No,” Zhai said. “We're opening a new barrel. And call Lho Pangleng, obviously. Well, not call, unless you've really been brushing up on your Xoma. That covers all our bases, yes?”
Sam glanced up from his watch, where he'd been noting down Zhai's orders. “Um, not really. That's only tech and intel–”
“All we need.” Zhai turned to Ceq, who was watching with vague disinterest. “Ceq, we're getting a small SSA team with us, but I'll see to it that they report to you. We have no idea what the situation on the ground will be like, so bring everything you think you might need.”
Ceq brightened. “Everything?”
“Everything.” She would probably bring a tank now that he’d said that. “We're leaving tomorrow. We'll need a ship – liaise with Kaudorang on that one, talk to the port managers.”
“Got it,” Sam said. He checked his watch and frowned. “Tetaine is planetside.”
“Then tell him to drop everything and get on the space elevator.” Zhai checked his watch. “Within four hours.”
“Right,” Sam said uncertainly. “And, um, if he doesn't-”
“He will.”
“...right.”
Now the old blood was flowing. Zhai felt twenty years younger, as invigorated as if he'd just slapped on a dozen stim-patches. An embassy! A proper posting! Oh, he’d missed this.
“I'll go and, um,” Sam said distractedly, and disappeared off down the corridor. Zhai watched him go, a smile playing on his lips.
“One last dance,” he said, half to Ceq and half to himself. “Are you ready?”
Ceq grinned. “Always.”
His good mood lasted an hour.
It came to an abrupt end in his quarters when, as he was packing his clothes, he emptied a drawer of socks and caught sight of that familiar maroon box, stuffed away to be forgotten at the back of the drawer. Against his better judgement, he took it out, as usual underestimating the heaviness of it. He flipped up the leather-covered lid, knowing what lay inside.
The medal glinted under the light, a flat disc of gold three inches across. Its sole marking was the seven-pointed star of the Coalition, scored from edge to edge. The inscription, in elegant white-gold lettering, was on the underside of the lid:
AWARDED FOR
OUTSTANDING SERVICES TO
THE COALITION FOR THE DEFENCE OF HUMANKIND
TO
GUMEIGO ZHAI
BY ORDER OF THE FIRST CIRCLE
132 A.E.
He stared down at the shining gold disc, and his reflection stared back across the years. He'd been so very young. But, he thought, old enough that he should have known better. Suddenly, as if they were there in his bedroom, he heard the angry chants of the crowds outside the embassy, echoing up through twenty-seven years of distance, as if they'd been locked away in that damn box all that time.
Zhai snapped the lid shut and closed his eyes for a moment, breathing deeply. He hefted the box in his hand, wondering for a moment if he should take it with him out of some masochistic need to have a physical reminder to hand.
He might as well pack his millstone.
Zhai placed the box back in the drawer and slid it shut. The ghosts of Naro could wait for another day.
3
Four around the corner, but that wasn't a problem. Grey Hawk danced up the steps and sprang out, her smart-aim drawing red haloes over targets. She brought up her gun, squirted off four dampened shots – velocity and mass calculated perfectly, enough to guarantee the kill – and rolled, safely ducking back into cover before the bodies hit the floor.
She counted the thuds, then moved out. A flicker of her eyeball and a tongue tapped on two rear teeth brought up the floor plan ripped from the local cloud to the upper left corner of her vision. Three tiny flexes of artificial muscles overlaid it with her unified sensor matrix. Not many left now.
Over the bodies, dodging the pooling blood – no traces, no footprints – and to the elevator. She knew the model by sight and called up the relevant codes with her free hand, forcing the doors open onto the empty shaft. Maglev style, no cables, so it was a climb job. To her side went the pistol, fixed in place as soon as it touched her hip, and into the shaft went Grey Hawk.
Handholds appeared in white. Reactive movement protocols made automatic adjustments to her motion as she scrambled up the wall, leaping to grips and ledges barely a centimetre wide. If she'd needed to, she could have done it without handholds, either by gouging them herself or by activating her feet's friction layer.
Predictably, the elevator started descending above her. It came down at two hundred kph, which meant Grey Hawk actually had to be quick. Another code on the next set of elevator doors – for no particular reason, this one failed.
Huh, she thought. So that's how we're playing it, is it, Lake?
Time to improvise. Back down the shaft, through the same doors she'd come in through, rolling out of her directed swan dive and into the corridor as the block of metal screamed past, then back into the shaft and up. Nothing in her way now.
The elevator screeched to a halt below and began its ascent, hoping to crush her the other way. Grey Hawk mentally sighed. She identified the weak point on the elevator's top maintenance hatch as it blasted towards her. One careful shot blew the lock open, and one careful jump left her on top. She wrenched up the hatch and dropped into the elevator, where there were six hostiles waiting for her. They'd just thrown that in to play for time while they thought of more obstacles. The old Grade Twos and even Ones wouldn't have broken a sweat. For Grey Hawk, a Grade Eight Liberator, there was time to plan her next move while semi-automatically incapacitating her attackers.
She grabbed the last one by the throat and crushed the windpipe with one hand while letting loose the smartware on the elevator with the other. The elevator's destination changed to the two-hundred-and-ninth floor. Grey Hawk made her preparations.
When the doors opened, she was met by hostile fire peppering the elevator. Her protective helmet had ballooned into life around her before the first bullet left the barrel, and for the last few seconds she'd been cooking a knuckle-sized shock grenade. Her throw was perfect, and the situation ideal. The clustered group of hostiles had nothing but air to protect themselves, and the shock 'nade did its grisly work. Liquefying bone brought the hail of bullets to an abrupt stop.
Over the dead and towards her destination. The presidential suite lay ahead of her, protected by a hostile security robot. That's more like it, she thought, relishing the challenge. Sensors told her it was a heavy beast, armed and probably shielded. Running straight at it would come off maybe 70% of the time. The other 30%, of the time, she'd be pulverised. It was tempting, but Grey Hawk decided to play it safe.
The walls were unrealistically thick and impenetrable, so smashing through a few of them wasn't going to work. She could have made it to an outside window and clambered around the robot without ever engaging it, but that was tedious and time-consuming. No, Grey Hawk was determined to go through the bastard.
Flipping through her advanced settings with eye movements and serpentine flickers of her tongue, she came to the reboot settings. As she approached the corner, she activated one of them on a timer, switched to her in-bui
lt EMP generator, and leapt out.
The pulse fried everything in a ten-metre radius, which just about included the robot. It also included Grey Hawk. Her vision went black and she crashed to the floor, completely senseless but still conscious.
Text appeared in front of her sightless eyes.
REBOOTING...
Her vital functions sprang back to life a second later, and Grey Hawk picked herself up. The robot had no such luxury. It drooped uselessly in the middle of the corridor, all its armaments and defences shut down by the EMP. She approached and ripped out a few sparking circuits with surgical precision, preventing any unexpected resurrections, then went through the door it had protected.
The target, highlighted gold, was cowering behind his desk. Grey Hawk gave him a quick nerve shock to immobilise him, then slung him over her shoulder and blasted out a window with a shock 'nade on low settings. She had a feeling she knew what was coming, and her suspicions were proved correct when she heard the familiar whooshing noise of a gunship drifting up from below.
She considered for a moment, then turned, shot a miniature harpoon into the floor from her gun's modular secondary barrel, and jumped backwards out of the shattered window.
A gleaming thread of microfibre spooled out behind her as she fell. The gunship, taken by surprise, reacted too slowly, and she was long past before it started to change course. Grey Hawk watched the sky recede, watching the numbers flickering on her HUD, and triggered the slowdown mechanism.
It 'failed'.
Oh, she thought, come on.
More improvisation was called for. She swivelled in mid-air, diverted as much power as possible to grip and motion compensation, and triggered the hard stop on the microfibre. The harpoon held. So did her arm, just about, though bright red stress warnings flashed across her HUD. Still fifty metres above the street, her downwards motion translated into a jerking swing, which brought her over the lush garden of trees and bushes in front of the skyscraper.
It would do.
She released the fibre and fell, directing power to her legs' shock absorbers. The bush she picked collapsed completely beneath her weight, but it did enough to slow her down. The damage was moderate. Limping slightly, she started to run, but the world slowed down to a crawl around her. Colour faded away completely.
“Oh, no, no, no,” she said aloud. “Bullshit!”
MISSION FAILED appeared in imposing black letters emblazoned on the sky.
“No, Lake, that's absolute bullshit,” she said. She dumped the target on the ground, watching his neck flop. She had survived the incredible physical stresses of the descent without much difficulty, but the target's unaugmented body was just too fragile. She had cutting-edge nano-level enhancements from her head to her toes; the target had a business suit. “The slowdown mechanism would never fail.”
“It does,” Lake's disembodied voice said. “0.06% of the time in high-stress testing. So what happens then?”
“I survive anyway.”
“Your target didn't.”
Grey Hawk made an obscene gesture at the sky. “If the mechanism fails at the same time as I'm carrying a target, then it won't matter what I do, because I'm about to get hit by a meteorite or to, I don't know, suffer a catastrophic brain haemorrhage. You can't just throw ridiculous bad luck at me and expect a perfect solution. What's the point? It's never going to happen.”
“The purpose of the sim tests are to test your ability to react to–”
“–unexpected dangers and fluid hostile situations,” Grey Hawk said. “We've all read the manual. Tell me how I did.”
“You failed.”
Grey Hawk ground her teeth in frustration. “Fine. Without the failure, assuming I got down safely, how was I doing?”
There was a pause before Lake answered. “You were thirty-one seconds faster than the current record. But you failed.”
“Only because you made me fail.”
Another pause. Then: “I accept that the obstacles I created were not entirely realistic, but neither is real life. Things go wrong out there. I'm just trying to prepare you.”
Grey Hawk sighed, and ended the simulation. The world disappeared, replaced by Lake's anxious round face staring at her from behind his array of terminals – and someone else, standing behind him. Watching her.
He looked familiar. He was clearly a Liberator, as the unstealthed power signatures emanating from beneath his dark clothes told her, but she couldn't place him. His face was broad and full, of Qienchuan or Akesean origin, with clipped black hair and wide, close-set eyes. Grey Hawk frowned. She knew most Liberators by sight, but not this one. He was practically ancient by Liberator standards, clearly in his forties or even fifties, which put him in the early generations, maybe even as old as Grade Two.
The man caught her expression and smiled. “Grey Hawk. Sorry to sneak up on you. I wanted to watch you in action. My name is Black Horse–”
“Oh shit!” Grey Hawk blurted, then felt her cheeks grow hot. “Sorry. I just – you're Black Horse?”
Black Horse grinned. “Expecting someone more impressive?”
“No, I – I just didn't expect you,” Grey Hawk said, painfully aware of how lamely that had come out. Black Horse! She'd written essays about Black Horse. His dozens of missions were somewhere between history and legend. It was Black Horse who had assassinated the president of Qinchai when she had been on the verge of signing her world into the FSN, Black Horse who had helped rescue Dachau Noo from a Xanang prison on the eve of his execution, Black Horse who had disabled the separatists' dirty bomb during the Calsan civil war – and Black Horse had come to see her.
“I'd have screwed up pretty badly if you had expected me,” Black Horse said. He turned to Lake. “Sorry, Lake, but I've got to steal your prize specimen for a while.”
“I think we were done anyway,” Lake murmured. Damn right, Grey Hawk thought. Like hell was she going through another one of Lake’s bullshit stacked-deck sims today.
Black Horse's grin grew wider and toothier. “Well, that's fantastic. Grey Hawk, care to come with me?”
Like everything in Liberation, it was a genuine question, not an order. Like everything in Liberation, the question had only one answer.
Black Horse extended a hand to help her up out of the sim pod. As he did, Grey Hawk couldn't help but notice the slight miscalculations in the tightness of his grip and the pull his arm exerted on hers. She had never seen a Grade One in the flesh before. There were only two of them left, and only Black Horse survived in Liberation. The technical specs of the earlier generations of augmented Liberators were classified, but now she had a fair idea of how far ahead of their distant ancestors Grade Eights like her were.
Black Horse seemed to know exactly what she was thinking. “I know, I know. I'm obsolete.” He blew out his cheeks. “You Grade Eights are incredible.”
“We've recorded a performance increase of one to two percent over the Grade Sevens across the board,” Lake said proudly. “Plus major increases in durability and protection, as well as the neural dispersal – you could drop a building on a Grade Eight's head and they'd probably come out intact.” He paused, then seemed to reconsider. “More or less intact, anyway.”
Right now, Grey Hawk felt like an entire city could fall on her and she would shrug it off. Over the last six months of testing, bored with the repetitive scenarios they were flinging at her, she'd started running her own programs to see just what she could survive. She hadn't managed atmospheric reentry yet – the heat and friction overloaded too many systems – but she was certain that there was a way to live through it. The technology that had replaced her body was dizzyingly advanced. Invincibility was within her grasp. She just had to find the right techniques.
“I hope that the durability is never truly tested in the field,” Black Horse said. A shadow seemed to pass across his face. “But it will be. Repeatedly.”
He turned quickly and made for the door, leaving Grey Hawk scrambling to keep up. La
ke started to say something as the door slid shut behind them, but he was cut off before he got it out.
“Walk with me,” Black Horse said, already setting off down the white-carpeted corridor. Grey Hawk followed him, matching her stride to his. Black Horse looked over at her, the smile returning to his face. “You know why I'm here, don't you?”
If Grey Hawk's heart weren't in cryo storage, it would have beat a little faster.
“I think so,” Grey Hawk said. She'd meant it to sound calm and assured, but it had somehow come out uncertain and wavering. She tried again. “You're sending me into the field.”
“Nobody's sending you anywhere,” Black Horse reminded her gently. They turned a corner, brushing past a couple of distracted engineers deep in esoteric discussion, and headed out over the ten-storey skybridge linking Tower Three to Tower Two. Outside the long windows, Val Yustrid stretched out like a crystalline forest, its square-shouldered buildings gleaming white in Plenty's crisp winter sun. On her left, the space elevator was a pale thread curving away into the sharp blue of the sky. On her right lay the river, its surface sparkling with sunlight, flanked for kilometres downstream by legions of interconnected hab-blocks.
Grey Hawk flushed. Pale almost to the point of translucency, she had always been quick to redden, and her face was the only part of her which still had natural skin. “I know – I mean –”
“I know what you mean,” Black Horse said, “and so do you. You're right. You will be offered a choice of whether to go into the field or not.”
“I want to go,” Grey Hawk said. “I'm ready.”
He glanced over at her, with an expression equal parts amusement, exasperation, and pity on his face. “No, you're not. You're too young, and too inexperienced.” Grey Hawk, outraged, started to object, but he held up a hand to silence her. “Let me finish.”
He came to a halt and turned to face the window. Grey Hawk stood next to him, watching a train silently arrow past on the slender white rail below, waiting for him to continue. The way he switched from personable to serious in the blink of an eye kept her constantly off balance.