by Kalina, Mark
"Can't see any difference from here," Zandy said.
"Well, I can. You look better. Longer legs, no? Very nice. Anyway, if you want to see the differences in the new me up close, I think we can arrange something."
"I'd like that," Zandy said, and leaned forward to kiss him.
Sex with Gan had been a good idea, Zandy mused, as she sat in the descending Orbital Elevator capsule, watching New Ionia swell in her seat's display. More than anything since she woke up in her new avatar, it had made her feel that nothing had really changed. Of course, that was nonsense. Everything had changed. She was a daemon, inhabiting a bio-technical android body made to look like her old self. But having sex with Gan had felt almost the same; both of them had been a bit clumsy, a bit tentative, but there was nothing alien or artificial in the feeling of their love making.
And it was still the same Gan. And that gave her the best, most comforting confirmation yet that she was still the same Zandy.
"Where are the brats?" Zandy asked, trying to keep her voice light, standing in her formal Fleet Blacks in front of her mother, seeing her old home for the first time in more than ten thousand hours.
The old apartment was a shock, even though it looked unchanged from her memory of it. The garish flower print pattern of the walls, the faded colors, the extruded plastic furniture. It wasn't even that cramped, not compared to station-side quarters, though in a gravity field the available volume was a fraction of what it would have been in free-fall.
But it was so shabby, Zandy thought. And so primitive. Her data link detected almost no wireless signals at all. Nothing except for the navigation signals from the air car traffic lanes, far above. Neither were there any data screens; almost no electronics at all. She had been forced to hire a courier to deliver a hard copy print-out telling them that she had leave and was planning to visit; her family still didn't have any other way to receive the message.
The sounds of the place were all of people: people talking, cooking, working. Even with her new, synthetic, olfactory sense, the smells were the same as she remembered; fresh bread and fried onions, some hints of pungent spices. After the sterile smells of the Academy Station, it was almost sensory overload.
"Where are Aeson and Dora and Kleo?" she asked again. It was obvious that her brother and her sisters weren't in the apartment, though their things, assorted toys and school-issued plastic data prints, were all over the place.
"I sent them away for the day," her mother answered, in a flat tone, not angry, not glad... just resigned.
"God! Why? I only have twenty hours leave left. I haven't seen them in a tenkay!"
"I don't want them to see you."
"What?" Zandy said, suddenly seemingly unable to speak louder than a whisper.
"If they see you, looking like some sort of... whatever you are..." her mother was whispering too, a harsh sound, to go with a face set with sudden, vicious anger, "they might decide to follow you. I've already lost one child. I won't lose any more.
"You look the same... Almost the same," her mother went on, "but it's not you. It's not the same Zandy. I've lost you, but I won't lose them."
"How could you do that?" Zandy asked. "Why?"
"Beg pardon, Tel Neel," her mother said in a false bright voice. "That's the right way to address you now, isn't it? Since you're aristokratai now? I'm just a demos, so forgive me if I get it wrong."
Zandy had left without a word, walking out of the apartment that had been home, once. Her father had met her at the street corner as she started back towards the transit station.
"Alekzandra," he said, again in a tone that was neither glad nor sad nor angry.
She looked back at him, saying nothing.
"I'm... I'm sorry," he said, not quite meeting her eyes.
Zandy felt tears running down her face; she had been told that her biosim avatar could cry, would cry at any stimulus that would have made her cry before.
"Tell... tell my brother and my sisters," she said, looking down and trying to keep her voice clear through the tears, "that I've banked some of my pay for them. When they're old enough, they can access it at the New Ionia Fleet Service Bank. It's in their names. They can use it... pay for a better school, or even a place in the city... out of the residence zones.
"You too, if you want," she went on, still not looking up. "I'll leave your name in the account too... if you want to..."
"Zone Garnet is my home, Zandy," her father said, softly.
"...And not mine," she whispered.
"I didn't know avatars could cry," her father said.
"Now you know."
17
Labeck Pyer, or rather Pyer Beck, leaned his head forward against his steepled fingers. The situation was getting worse. Since he and his team had relocated to this planet, the plan had grown more and more complex and the execution more and more frayed.
The local agent's clumsy attempts to clean up had exploded into a mess far worse than what would have happened if the man had left things alone. Pyer thought he could now deduce, to a reasonable certainty, who his agent must be. A very highly placed agent indeed. But that made no difference. The surviving daemon from the Hegemonic assault-ship was gone, stolen from where it had been stored before it could be eliminated.
And there seemed to be problems with the remaining swift-ship. Its prior captain was unaccounted for, had not reported to her new command... At least the data captured by the swift-ship had been dealt with. Pyer had to admit that the local agent had handled that quite well. If only he had left it at that. For that matter, if only Pyer's superiors hadn't decided to try their convoluted and complex cover-up involving the destruction of the freight-liner.
At least that part of the plan had gone well; the ship had been destroyed in a very visible manner, and the pirates who had done it were gone as well, destroyed. With them was gone any possibility of that part of the plan unraveling.
Pyer assumed that other evidence was now being planted, by other deep cover operatives, showing the entire thing to be some sort of trade cartel war. How that was supposed to convince anyone, given that a Hegemonic assault-ship had gone missing, was lost on Pyer, but someone above him in the chain of command at least thought that there was a way.
At any rate, that was none of his concern. All he had to do was clean up the mess in his own operational area. He had to find the captain of that swift-ship. He suspected that if he did that, he would find the interceptor pilot as well. Once they were dealt with, that would complete the damage control for the local agent's stupid premature assassination attempt.
It was annoying to Pyer that, when he reported back, he'd have to report the local agent's success in erasing the data from the swift-ship in the same breath as the idiotic assassination attempt. In deep cover operations, there was always a tendency, usually wise, to go for whichever course of action required minimal effort. All too likely, in the judgment of his handlers the success would counterbalance the failure. And since leaving the local agent active was the course of minimal effort, he would be kept in his current place. Pyer would rather have simply cleaned the man up and started local infiltration again from scratch; in Pyer's professional experience, people who made the sort of mistake that the assassination attempt represented were too dangerous to use as assets, even if they sometimes did good work.
But that didn't matter; it wasn't Pyer's call. Indeed, Pyer had not, and would not, even confirm if his suspicions about the identity of the local agent were correct. No, the problem ahead of him was how to find the fugitive Hegemonic Fleet officers.
It was possible that all of his problems were unconnected, but he had to assume otherwise. He was fairly certain that the fugitive captain, her name was Tralk, had regained control of her swift-ship, a move he was certain had been prompted by the assassination attempt. The local agent had been able to trace records of her signal transfer from the surface to her previous command and then back down again, but since then there had been no trace of her.
The ability of daemons to transfer themselves from place to place was infuriating. Most of them did not like leaving their android bodies behind, but when they needed to, they could.
On the other hand, that ability was not unlimited, and perhaps it could be used against them. To transfer a daemon required a hyper-bandwidth data link, usually a laser comm of considerable power. The swift-ship had the capability to send and receive that sort of data density, but not too many places planet-side had the same capabilities, and a lot of those would be off-limits to the fugitives.
He was almost certain that the fugitives would want to return to the swift-ship in orbit. He was willing to bet on it. If he could cover the locations that the daemons could use to try their transfers, then they would come to him. For a moment, he considered using local assets, hired guns, maybe local criminals, to watch the locations and kill the fugitives. But that would require using the local agent to obtain them; Pyer had nowhere near the time available that it would take to forge such contacts himself. And he did not want to use the unreliable local agent again, for more reasons than one; the man might do something stupid again, or he might do the job well, but expose himself to scrutiny in the process.
No, despite the risk, the best course of action was to use his own support team of commandoes. They didn't fit in perfectly, but they were all trained at infiltration, and all were skilled and dedicated soldiers, more than able to do the job. He'd need to find out all the possible uplink points, and have to hope that he wouldn't have to spread his men too thin to cover them all.
---
"How are you doing?" Muir asked.
"OK. Better," Zandy answered. "I guess it's easier the second time... I took almost a hundred and fifty hours to adapt to my first avatar."
"It does get easier...," Muir agreed.
Zandy was sitting on a bed in a little rental housing unit, holding her new head with her new hands. The two other officers were sitting in cheap-looking extruded plastic chairs. A noisy ventilation unit in the corner gave a faint but rhythmic hiss-thump, hiss-thump as it moved air through the dusty room.
The view out the window showed what looked to be an industrial neighborhood, seen from what Zandy guessed was about the 20th floor. The building facing the window looked to be some sort of chemical factory, with rows of pressurized tanks and a maze of color coded pipes, though the colors were faded and patchy.
Zandy had woken up in this little bed, obviously in a new, un-configured avatar. But given what had happened, she was not sure how much of her disorientation was from the new avatar and how much from what had been explained to her.
Executive Officer Muir Zanados and Demi-Captain Freya Tralk had explained the bewildering situation to Zandy, letting her link into the portable data unit that they had captured from the would-be assassin, as well as one of their own data units.
Zandy told herself that, given her disoriented state, it was too much to deal with. Instead, she concentrated on simply acclimating herself to her new body. She could feel the rest of it, the chaos and anger and grief at the loss of the Conquering Sun, the confusion and sense of betrayal at the attempted assassinations, all waiting under the surface. But she could not bear to deal with any of it. Not yet.
"Thank you for getting me out of there," Zandy said, abruptly.
"Owed you," Captain Tralk said. "You're part of my command now. And anyway, I wasn't about to leave you helpless in that holding tank."
"What now?" Zandy asked.
"Well, now we get back to my ship," Tralk said. "I'm sorry to say, but your new avatar is going to be a very short ride. We're going to need to get to a secure hyper-bandwidth data link and leave all these avatars behind."
"Oh," Zandy said. "Why bother waking me up, then?"
Zanados interjected, "we needed a place to put your daemon, to get you out of the holding tank. Your records had full face and body-type specs on your preferred avatar, and the quickest thing we could think of was to just purchase an avatar for you. Also, no offense, it was probably the best thing for your mental state given how long you had been in a low-res holding 'net."
"Right," Zandy said, surprised at the bitterness in her own voice, "I suppose there'd have been no point rescuing me if I went irretrievably catatonic or something..."
Zanados looked at her sharply, then away, but Captain Tralk met her eyes.
"I'm sorry, Pilot Officer Neel," Tralk said, "about what happened. I'm not sure I can fully know how you feel, losing the 'Sun. But Muir and I feel some of it too. We'd been attached with the Conquering Sun for a long time... under Captain Ari-Kani's orders for a long time. We've all lost friends."
"It must have been expensive," Zandy said, flat-voiced.
"Expensive?" said Captain Tralk.
"This avatar."
"Well, yes," interjected Muir Zanados. Captain Tralk seemed not to mind.
"Rather expensive," he went on, "particularly since we required very rapid work. But we have the resources. Or rather, we had them. At this point, my private numbered portfolio is getting rather thin, and my other accounts are too easy to trace. On the other hand, it is technically a Fleet mission expense... so I hope to be reimbursed, eventually."
Captain Tralk nodded. "Good thing you're rich, Muir," she said.
"It's a resource, Captain," Muir answered. "You're the one who always says, use the resources you have."
"Why bother?" asked Zandy.
Tralk answered, "given how long you'd already been in a storage 'net, I thought a generic female avatar would be a bad idea. Psychological shock to a daemon that's been in long-term storage is no joke. And it's not a matter of being 'tough enough' to handle it. No one is.
"And anyway, we couldn't just rent a generic avatar; they have tracking tags built in," Tralk continued with a grim smile. "Whereas a limited custom biosim like this is pretty hard to track once we picked it up. Luckily, we could match most of your recorded specs without getting beyond what the vendor could do from one of their default female models. As is, the one you're wearing is fully synthetic; no cloned tissues, of course."
"It's... it's a nice avatar," Zandy said. "I guess it's lucky that... I guess I'm lucky that you could match it to me so closely. I... ah..." Zandy took a deep breath, "...thank you. For getting me out."
"You're part of our squadron," Tralk said. "We don't leave people behind if we can help it."
"Well, we can rule out the System Defense Fleet base and all the local government installations," Muir said, a few hours later.
The three of them were sitting around a small fold-out table that was part of the rental unit's minimal furnishings. Muir's pers-comp was set up in holographic mode at the center of the table, displaying a schematic map of New Capital City.
"True. They're almost bound to be watched," Freya said.
"Does that leave us anything?" Zandy asked, almost idly.
"Not much," said Muir.
Finding a hyper-bandwidth link to get them back to the Ice Knife was going to be a problem. They had to operate under the assumption of a local traitor in a position of power, and that ruled out every obvious option. It made a physical transfer, using a surface-to-orbit shuttle or taking the orbital elevator, more or less suicidal. It was far too easy for the enemy to watch those. But the presence of a traitor also meant that every government-run uplink installation might be watched as well.
In any case, the attempt to transfer back to the swift-ship was going to have to wait until the ship was ready to fly. With her reactor in the midst of a restart, the Ice Knife was stuck, and they would be stuck aboard h
er if they carried out the transfer of their daemons before the ship's reactor was ready. But, in the meantime, Freya had wanted to do as much as she could to plan out their eventual escape from the planet's surface.
"Are we certain that we couldn't get in and complete the transfer before our hypothetical watchers could react?" asked Muir.
"Can't chance it," Freya said. "First off, all three of us will take some time to transfer. Secondly, they've tried to kill us before. If the traitor has enough resources, and if he's who we expect, he does, then he could have armed men at each of those locations."
"Armed men at the local System Defense Fleet facility?" asked Zandy. "How could he manage that?"
"They'd be local System Defense Force guards, most likely," answered Freya.
"Shit. That's bad," said Zandy.
"Very," said Freya. "For all that this is a Hegemonic World, Pilot Officer Neel, I think we need to consider ourselves in hostile territory.
"For that matter," Freya went on, reaching into her formal uniform blouse and pulling out a needler pistol, "you need a weapon."
She held the pistol out to Zandy. It was a large needler, Zandy saw, as needlers went, though still a compact little pistol; much smaller than the side-arm laser holstered at Captain Tralk's side. Zandy took the proffered needler somewhat hesitantly.
"We took it from the security man who was guarding the storage 'net you were being kept in," Muir said from behind her. "It's got twin-ammo feed; chem-stun and high explosive darts in the magazine. There's no tracking hardware or bugs that I can detect.
"This way we're all armed." Muir went on, holding up his own needler, an even more compact weapon, finished in shiny mirror black with the grips inlayed with platinum wire.
"No bugs?" Zandy echoed, and Muir nodded. She wasn't trained with needlers. Fleet Academy training focused on laser weapons, Fleet standard issue. Zandy tried to activate her new avatar's wireless data feeds, found them workable. The needler's tiny internal computer interfaced and sent out a simple data feed, showing basic loading, firing and safety information for the weapon. The data coming through the new hardware had an odd feel to it, almost like an unfamiliar taste.