The A.I. War, Book One: The Big Boost (Tales of the Continuing Time)

by Moran, Daniel Keys

  They were drifting over the surface of Ceres. Radar gave Trent the distance, two hundred fourteen meters and growing slightly more distant with each second. Bad news; the corvette had taken Trent nearly ten klicks away from the nearest airlock leading down into pressure. But –

  They were only four klicks away from the Temple of ’Toons asteroid, and drawing closer.

  First things first; from his tool belt Trent withdrew an emblade, a knife with a blade one molecule wide at its edge, only eighty molecules wide at the back of the blade, and turned it on. He might be able to go around the ship, and cut the cannon directly; but Trent knew the PKF inside the ship were looking for that. If it even looked as though he were going to try it they would boost to shake him free, come back around and fry him while he tried to escape on wrist and ankle rockets – if he left the airlock he had to do it quickly.

  The corvette’s schematics and alternates popped up into Trent’s awareness. Provisionally good news; on roughly eighty-five percent of current corvette models the fuel lines, carrying monatomic hydrogen, ran only four meters back along the hull – and a bonus: right next to them was the optical link between the cockpit, engines and weapons.

  On the alternates, the other fifteen percent –

  On the other fifteen percent Trent would die trying it. On those models the fuel lines ran along the other side of the hull. The instant they realized he was out of the airlock they would boost on him, come back around and chop him up.

  Nobody lives forever, Trent thought. But let’s try.

  He pulled himself up out of the airlock and shoved himself off down the length of the corvette. He didn’t try to slow himself; a meter before the correct spot, he dropped the tip of the emblade down to touch the hull. The emblade skittered along the hull, and then abruptly dug in, bit all the way down to the handle. Slowly as he was moving, the blade’s drag still barely impeded Trent’s progress along the hull; he coasted another five meters before coming to a stop. If his luck was up he had just sliced through the main fuel lines and the optical link –

  If his luck wasn’t up he was about to die.

  He stood up on the hull of the ship, looked at the small bubble of rock now a mere three kilometers away, the Temple of ’Toons Asteroid –

  Somewhere out there in the starry black sky was the Elite who had chased him out of Ceres; Trent’s optics could not locate him. With any luck he’d reach the Asteroid, or be picked up by the Vatsayama, without ever having to see the man again.

  Trent took a quick, shallow breath, lifted his hands and lit the wrist rockets.

  He moved off from the corvette and without intending to found himself holding his breath. It wouldn’t take long; he probably wouldn’t even feel it if the cannon were still functioning –

  Nobody shot him, and the corvette dwindled away behind him, drifting motionless through space.

  WHILE HE WAS less than five hundred meters from the Temple of ’Toons Asteroid, turned around and descending toward the Asteroid feet first, preparing to brake, the Elite hit him from behind at high speed.

  The impact almost knocked Trent out. The Elite had not matched speeds well, or had not tried to; the Elite hit Trent from behind at nearly sixty kilometers an hour. Even the Elite was unable to keep hold of Trent; they spun away from each other after the impact, tumbling off through space.

  He couldn’t breathe. Trent had already altered the air mix in his suit; it was nearly pure oxygen. He sucked oxygen in little sips, trying to fight for breath past the constriction in his chest. He couldn’t breathe and could barely see and what he did see of the universe was not promising, spinning stars and the Ceres and the Temple, revolving around him as he tumbled. He couldn’t see the Elite and didn’t know where the man was. His inskin made the correct decisions, took over the scalesuit and gave the commands to brake and slow the tumble. It did not give him much of an advantage; Trent knew that the Elite’s battle computer was performing the same task for him. The spinning universe slowed, stabilized –

  The Elite hit him again. Trent barely saw the man before the Elite boosted into Trent. He hit Trent with his ankle rockets blasting, got one hand looped into the belt Trent’s toolkit hung from, and pulled Trent in to him. The Elite no longer had the autoshot, but that hardly mattered: he could shoot directly through the gloves of the combat suit, if he had to. The suit would seal against death pressure at the wrist, and the Elite’s hands wouldn’t even notice the vacuum.

  They struggled together, locked in silent dance. Trent got his left hand on the Elite’s free wrist, locked the servos for that hand in place, and was reaching for the hand holding him by the tool belt when the Elite pulled Trent even closer and tried to head butt the cracked faceplate of Trent’s scalesuit. Trent jerked backward in a panic, and the Elite’s helmet cracked into the scalesuit’s metal chin. Trent pushed the Elite as far away as he could get him, and for a moment they hung there together, motionless, looking at one another through their faceplates.

  The name painted on the Elite’s combat suit was Capitaine R. Colbert.

  “I know you,” Trent started to say, and then he and PKF Elite Captain Roger Colbert struck the surface of the Temple of ’Toons Asteroid, together, at forty-four kilometers per hour.

  3

  TRENT DID NOT even have to move to know that something new had broken. His left leg hurt, burned fire from the knee down, and that was the good news; it meant that his spinal cord was still in one piece.

  His inskin was chattering at him, and in his own voice, too, which seemed a bit much. Trent ignored it, made no attempt to move and tried to figure out if he was going to live.

  He still had air. That was good, air was good. The faceplate was still cracked, maybe a little worse than before, but it was holding his air in. All you could ask of from a faceplate, really, particularly one that had taken a round from an autoshot square on. Holding in the air was an excellent beginning, excellent ending, excellent everything.

  All he could see were stars and part of Ceres, off in one corner of the faceplate. They’d hit on the Temple’s dark side.

  Abruptly the universe came back into focus. Trent’s inskin reintegrated –

  They drifted together, Trent and Elite Captain Colbert, only a few meters above the surface of the Temple. Trent’s scalesuit still had the left hand locked around Colbert’s right wrist. The Elite was not moving, which was certainly more good news and nothing to complain about. The Elite was as far away from Trent as he could get with Trent’s scalesuit locked onto his combat suit.

  Broken left ankle, Trent guessed. Wrenched left knee. Dislocated right knee, and the ligaments, already stiffened by past injuries, had probably gone with the socket. Cracked ribs, sure. The scalesuit was not in much better shape than the protoplasm it protected: the hand locked around Colbert’s suit would not unlock, the faceplate was cracked, and something was wrong with the airplant. The airplant was the least of Trent’s worries; he expected he’d be dead or safe before he had to worry about foul air.

  What a bad day this is turning out to be, Trent thought.

  A voice came, silently, over his secure channel: TRENT!

  Over the general bands, at the same time, he got: “Ehhhh, what’s up, Doc?”

  THIS IS CAPTAIN BITTAN. WE’RE LOCKED IN ON YOUR BEACON AND ARE EN ROUTE TO THE TEMPLE. E.T.A. SIX MINUTES. THERE’S A PKF CORVETTE IN THE AREA, SO BE CAREFUL.

  Laughing hurt. “Now they tell me,” Trent whispered aloud.

  “Hey, Buddy. Yeah, you, pal.”

  Trent calculated, blasted once with his free wrist rocket. He and Elite Captain Colbert rotated together, lovers holding hands.

  It was Bugs. Trent had known it, from the voice, that Brooklyn accent. He stood there with a carrot in one hand, hovering over the Temple’s rocky surface, eying Trent skeptically. “We’re closed, pal. You and yer, uh, friend there, you gotta leave.”

  COMMAND, said Trent. THIS IS AN EMERGENCY. WE REQUIRE IMMEDIATE MEDICAL ATTENTION. WE NEED TO GET
INTO PRESSURE.

  The holograph of Bugs Bunny hesitated, said, “Look, pal, why cause trouble for yourself –” and then the voice ceased and Bugs vanished. A different voice said, “Do not move. Medbots from Ceres CityState are being routed to your location with a pressurized ambulance.”

  Trent closed his eyes and floated in the pain. Jesus and Harry. Only a few more minutes.

  The Elite moved.

  The sudden blast of fear shocked Trent into awareness. He did everything with the servos in the scalesuit, afraid to rely on his own joints and muscles, pulling himself around to face the Elite, the waves of pain simply unreal, laser in the right scalesuit index finger coming alight, and screamed at the man, broadcast it on every PKF communication band, “I’m going to let your air out!”

  Colbert had covered his faceplate with his free hand.

  Trent stared at him through his own cracked faceplate, heart pounding. The Elite’s hand covered much of his faceplate, but not all of it –

  Deep, jagged cracks covered every exposed centimeter of the man’s faceplate. Trent had never seen anything like it before except on the suits of dead people, which probably described Colbert. Trent turned off his finger laser, and with his right hand took a firm grip on the wrist of the hand Colbert had covering his faceplate. In pressure, the Elite was many times stronger than Trent; but the servos in Trent’s scalesuit were roughly as strong as the servos in Colbert’s combat suit: close enough for government work.

  In a very soft, French-accented voice, Colbert said in English, “Please not.”

  “You ever box?” asked Trent.

  “What?”

  “First rule of boxing is, don’t hit the other guy’s fist with your face. It’s the same principle with asteroids.”

  The fear in the man’s voice was palpable. “You are going to kill me, aren’t you?”

  “No, but I might let you die, you murdering bastard. On your honor as an officer of the Peace Keeping Force Elite, if I save your life, will you ever kill anyone again?”

  The silence stretched away.

  “Jesus and Harry,” said Trent softly, “I will fucking leave you out here.”

  “I won’t,” said Colbert finally. “I prom –”

  Colbert’s faceplate blew out around his hand.

  Glassite chips rattled against Trent’s own cracked faceplate. Colbert’s startled features appeared, staring at the hand that had been keeping in his air.

  Trent knew exactly where they were: the Temple was only a kilometer wide. The nearest airlock into pressure was a hundred and eighty meters away.

  The Elite would not need his air to receive a radio message: Trent said, “Trust me,” and boosted across the asteroid’s surface with the Elite in tow.

  A hundred and eighty meters. Sixty meters accelerating, adjusting for the added burden of the strangling Elite, a flick of wrist rockets here, ankle rockets there; Trent could not use the wrist rocket on the hand locked to the Elite at all. It left him with three rockets for maneuvering, and slowed him considerably.

  Turnover; a simpler maneuver, normally. Trent got his ankles around, faced into the direction of his travel, and braked. Even with the help of his inskin he and the Elite rolled together around their common center of gravity, threatening to tumble. Trent used microbursts on the rockets to keep them in line, afraid to use full boost, afraid it would send them into a tumble that would cause them to miss the airlock, and kill the Elite.

  The main airlock, leading into the pressurized areas of the museum, loomed up in front of them and Trent knew that there was no way he could slow them in time.

  His aim was good; the airlock’s front door was already open, and Trent and the Elite, joined at the wrist, hit it together. They did not hit hard – twenty kph, tops.

  HE OPENED HIS eyes to pressure.

  His scalesuit’s helmet had been removed. Trent wondered who’d taken it off – his inskin must have unlocked it while he was unconscious.

  They floated in the entryway leading to the main museum area, in Exhibition Court A: a wide area, forty meters long, nearly eighty wide, twenty high along the assumed vertical, with holo projectors mounted on all six surfaces.

  Exhibition Court A.

  Warner Brothers.

  The glowpaint shone dim, tuned low for the night. Trent wondered what time it was, but couldn’t care enough to consult his inskin.

  Elite Colbert sat facing Trent; he must have pried Trent’s hand off his wrist. Colbert’s helmet and gloves had been removed; the gloves rotated slowly in mid-air well above the Elite’s head. Colbert floated in the same horizontal plane with Trent, eyes half open, watching Trent.

  “I took your helmet off,” said the Peaceforcer in a ragged voice. Vacuum damage to the vocal cords. “Your scalesuit said you were suffocating. Your airplant was dead.”

  Colbert had not changed much in the ten years since Trent had seen him last; a thin man, now in his late forties, with sharp features and the glassy black eyes of an old model Elite. Blood dripped from his nose. He’d been upgraded since the last time Trent had seen him; under the design in place when Colbert had been cyborged, Elite had had a single laser buried behind the middle knuckle of the right hand; they made a fist to fire it.

  Colbert’s right index finger, pointed at Trent’s face, glowed red at the tip. It looked as though somebody had painted a tiny red oval on the tip of Colbert’s finger.

  He had cocked his thumb above the finger, like a child making a gun.

  “Should I say thank you?” Trent asked the man.

  “Don’t,” Colbert whispered. “If I hadn’t made that promise to you, would you really have left me out there?”

  Trent stared at the glowing finger. “What promise?”

  “Not to kill anyone, ever again.”

  “Oh, that. That’s just what I say to everyone.” Trent thought about it, and then told Colbert the truth. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’d have done.”

  Colbert nodded. His thumb dropped down, like a hammer falling –

  Trent winced. A second later he was still alive –

  Colbert whispered, “Bang,” and closed his eyes.

  Trent released a slow breath he hadn’t known he was holding. Red dots swam in front of his eyes. “Honor. It’s one of the things I least despise about the PKF.”

  Colbert said nothing. He floated with his eyes closed.

  “How ya feelin’?”

  Trent turned his head to look at Bugs. “I’ve had lots better days.”

  “Sorry about that out there, pal.” Bugs took a bite of the carrot, chewed it thoughtfully. “Can’t be too careful these days. People will do practically anyting to get a free pafoimance.”

  “I expect.”

  Bugs grinned at Trent. “Gus Allen, right? You come here a lot.”

  “Right.”

  “Want to see a good one while we wait for the ambulance?”

  “Can you do that? I thought you were closed.”

  Bugs looked indignant. “Sure. I can do anyting, Doc. I run this place. Why, I practically own it, practically.”

  “Sure,” said Trent. “Love to.”

  Bugs considered Trent. “Can you make it into the next room?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Bugs nodded. “That’s all right. We got holos, we can do this one anywhere.” The lights in the entryway dimmed to darkness, and in the black space before Trent’s face, a stage appeared, a smoky stage in a dimly lit night club –

  “This is my favorite,” said Bugs. “I love this bit.”

  It was the scene from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Daffy Duck and Donald Duck playing dueling pianos. “Yes,” said Trent, “I can understand that.”

  “Two ducks at once,” said Bugs happily. “Can’t do much better’n that.”

  What is it about ducks, Trent wondered idly, that invites abuse? That was something to think about.

  He watched Daffy and Donald abuse each other, the holo of Bugs Bunny laughing besid
e him, until the Vatsayama arrived.

  4

  TRENT’S OLDEST AND best friend, Jimmy Ramirez, met Trent at the Anarchist Free CityState at Vesta when the Vatsayama docked. The Vatsayama had four PKF Elite, and four regular Peaceforcers, in its brigs. Except for Colbert, the Elite had been kept unconscious since surrendering; the brig was designed to hold drunk SpaceFarers, not Elite cyborgs.

  Trent had known Jimmy Ramirez since he had been eleven years old, and Jimmy thirteen; but there was a certain awkwardness in their greeting that had not been there a few years ago.

  “Maybe they should call you Trent the Unkillable instead,” said Jimmy after Trent had cycled through into city pressure.

  At thirty-one years of age Jimmy Ramirez was a roughly handsome man who had never had biosculpture; the bounty on him was a mere quarter million Credits, the same size as the bounty on Reverend Andy. The lack of biosculpture was part the bravado of an ex-semi-pro boxer, part practicality; nobody on Vesta was likely to try and kill Jimmy, and Jimmy had not left the Anarchist Free CityState in over two years.

  Trent grinned at him and pushed his way out of the airlock gingerly. The corridor was empty except for Jimmy; it was what Trent had requested, a basic safety precaution. His left ankle was wrapped, and his left knee; his right knee was in a cast to keep it immobile. His ribs had been reset and pinned in place and wrapped. He was closer to being healed than a human of previous centuries would have guessed; his immune system, under direct control of his inskin, had him regenerating bone and tissue at a furious rate that had left him starved during the trip to Vesta. Still, on Earth he’d have been in a floatchair. “Nah. If they did that, people would start trying to kill me instead of catch me. Given a choice –”

  “I see your point.” Jimmy held out his hand, and Trent took it for the handshake. He was not a man comfortable with touching other men, Jimmy Ramirez, not even if it was the best friend he had ever had. But the emotion in his voice when he spoke could not be missed. “I missed you, man. It’s been a long time.”