One Jump Ahead-ARC

by Mark L. Van Name

  "I apologize for the question," I said, meaning it. I wish I knew more people—or machines—who could say the same about improving themselves as Lobo. I certainly couldn't: too many of my limitations came from my own weaknesses, weaknesses I rarely found the time to address.

  A transmission from the station interrupted us: We were third in line on this side and should be able to make the jump in about an hour. Lobo headed us for the position the station designated.

  I thought about Franks' mistake and how easy it was to assume the wrong thing—and then pay dearly. It was likely that either Osterlad or any other dealer I approached to supply Lobo's missing parts would keep the transaction simple, but why take chances?

  "You mentioned embedded staff transmitters," I said. "Were those supplied by the contractor, or do you have a local supply?"

  "Both," Lobo said. "I was built to be able to support a full squad on long-haul missions, so I am completely provisioned. I have even updated the software in my staff transmitters to make them more unpredictable in transmission time and frequency, with delays between bursts ranging randomly from a second to three minutes. Any group that doesn't know to look for them will not spot them."

  "Show me," I said.

  A wall segment about five meters behind me opened. A drawer protruded. A sheet of what appeared to be clear plastic sat in the drawer next to a hypo and a bottle of clear solution. Wires led from the rear edge of the plastic back into Lobo.

  "The sheet is woven from interconnected transmitters," Lobo said. "Installation is simple: Punch the sheet with the hypo, suck up the segment under the needle, add solution, and inject it."

  "How far can you track with it?" I asked.

  "The bursts are short but powerful, though obviously range varies with the frequency and with the number and type of intervening obstacles. Anyone out to block all transmissions can, of course, do so, but under normal conflict conditions both sides need transmissions too much for anyone to be able to afford to stop them all. We typically see in-combat transmission ranges of anywhere from a few to a couple hundred kilometers."

  "What are the side effects on users?" I said.

  "None beyond occasional minor tissue damage from the strongest of the transmissions, and even that is extremely rare. The bursts are typically neither long nor powerful enough to hurt humans. As long as you do not use it full-time, even fairly long missions should not cause any serious damage we could not repair."

  I took the needle out of the drawer. "I don't expect to see any action we can't handle through normal communications, but I might as well use all the tools at my disposal." I followed Lobo's instructions and injected myself. "How long until it transmits and you can track me?"

  "No delay," Lobo said. "Troops typically install these before entering combat zones, so the transmitters emit verification signals every fifteen seconds for the first two minutes. I am reading you now."

  "If we're ever separated without prior notice from me," I said, "track me. If I don't make contact at a scheduled time, attempt to contact me. If I don't respond, retrieve me."

  "Though I can find you," Lobo said, "I obviously have no options for close-quarters retrieval."

  "Do what you can," I said. "If you can't retrieve me, and if I stay incommunicado for more than five days, destroy whatever is holding me." If the situation came to that, someone might as well pay.

  "Understood," Lobo said. "We are now first in line on this side to jump. When the ship from the other side is safely over, gate control will send us."

  I watched as another Kelco freight hauler began to slide gently through the aperture, and then I strapped into the pilot's couch. Though jumping never caused any physical sensations, I still loved the moments when the current starscape vanished as the aperture filled my vision with utter darkness, and I always marveled at my first look at another part of the universe, even if it was a view I'd seen before. Every jump bristled with the possibility of the new, and with the momentary, irrational fear/thrill combination that comes with the knowledge that what you're about to do is not right, that people cannot move across tens or even hundreds of light-years instantaneously.

  The ship from the other side was completely through and out of our way. Lobo took us up to the aperture, its surface of purest black growing and expanding until it filled the viewport, until it was all there was in front of me, until in the final seconds before we entered the gate everything I could see of our future was darkness.

  Chapter 7

  The huge gate on Lankin was the primary source of the planet's status. Sitting silently in space like a giant tangle of grape yarn, it was an impressive sight, with more active apertures visible through Lobo's viewport than I could easily count. Ships were sliding through all of them, the commerce of far-flung human settlements moving purposefully and, I assumed, profitably, to and fro. On Macken, all the logoed ships had been Kelco's. Here, ships sported IDs of many types. Some were Kelco's, others Xychek's and the Frontier Coalition's, and still others represented many, many different firms. Every major company in this region of space, as well as the FC, maintained a significant presence on Lankin.

  I used the time it took to land and get settled at Bekin's Deal, Lankin's capital, to check out Osterlad as best I could. Slake's recommendation was a start, but I wanted more. From what I could find by trolling the publicly available data streams, Osterlad's eponymous company officially booked revenue from sales of heavy machinery of all sorts, from construction to farming to natural fuel extraction. From Slake's comment I gathered Osterlad had also helped meet Kelco's private weaponry needs, which suggested Xychek bought elsewhere. The FC would certainly deal only with arms manufacturers, as would the Saw; I knew its buyers had always dealt directly with weapons vendors and always would, never being willing to trust any middlemen they could possibly avoid. Osterlad had a reputation for fair play, apparently staying on his rate card with big and small corporations equally. Whatever you needed, the word was that he could get it—provided, of course, that you could pay.

  Lobo and I took a flying tour of the coastline at the northern end of Bekin's Deal. The shore here was entirely different geologically from the one I had left on Macken. Gone was the enormous run of beautiful beach gently giving way to water. In its place stood high cliffs that dropped straight down to constantly active deep-blue waves. The richest companies gathered at the coast, where each had built its main local presence directly into the rock. From my vantage point over the ocean and roughly parallel with the constructs, most of these corporate and FC structures resembled faces staring out to sea, stone beings or temples rather than office buildings, each temple the image of some alien god struggling to break free from the cliffs, its occupants no doubt busily preparing for the moment of their god's freedom and ascendance to power.

  Osterlad's official headquarters was no exception to the convention of strange, fortified luxury that marked all these buildings; he didn't mind showing that the pay for his products and services was good. From far away in the air, the twenty-story stone building resembled a finger of rock both laid against and composed of the night-black foundation of the cliffs. As we drew closer, however, I spotted carvings in the stone, carvings that turned the finger into a series of stacked faces, each of which looked in a different direction, the collection resembling a totem pole monitoring everything in front of it. The land around the top of the structure on three sides was clear for at least a klick; the ocean guarded the final side. Warning signs in multiple languages let those too poor or too stupid to do sensor sweeps know that both the grounds around the building and the water below it were teeming with mines. The only access points were a single road that passed through a series of checkpoints and a landing pad on the portion of the ground that served as the building's roof. Osterlad believed in using his own products: The arsenal of weapons you could see was a strong statement that he could supply the best.

  I had no doubt that what you couldn't see was even more formidable.

&n
bsp; Kelco and the FC ran such large operations in Bekin's Deal that I didn't want to stay here long. I had to consider the reference from Slake at least marginally better than any information I could glean quickly from the available data, so I decided to go with Osterlad's firm.

  That reference was also good enough to get me an audience with the man himself. I took a taxi to the rooftop pad and went in alone and, of course, unarmed. I'd parked Lobo outside of town in a standard shuttle lot; I had full deed and title to him, so I felt no need to hide him.

  Osterlad's scanners passed me through without complaint. No one has yet bothered to develop good technology for scanning humans for nanomachines, because everyone knows no human can live while carrying them in significant enough quantities or dangerous enough forms to matter. Every time I feel a twinge of guilt for participating in the destruction of Aggro, I remember how many times the demise of that facility has helped me stay alive, and I get over it.

  Guards escorted me into an elevator that took long enough to reach its goal that I wasn't surprised when the view through the black-tinted window was of the ocean just barely out of reach, its waves splashing the fortified plexi. I wondered how much it had to cost to build offices inside rock that hard, then wondered why I wondered; selling arms had been and always would be a great business for those who are truly good at it. An attendant, whose body was so carefully engineered for neutrality that I could tell neither his or her heritage nor gender, guided me to a small waiting room outside a well-labeled and, I assumed, equally well-fortified conference room, showed me the amenities, and left me alone.

  The very rich and the very powerful always like to make you wait. Most people find this treatment frustrating, even humiliating. I don't. Instead, I use the time to gather data. The rich love toys, and most waiting areas are full of them: machines, lonely machines, some of the best sources of information you can find.

  Osterlad had erred on the paranoid side, as I'd expected: Almost everything in the room was grown or built from organic materials and thus free of the sensors and controlling chips that populate the vast majority of humanity's products. The sofa and chairs were framed in a rich, deep purple wood sanded so long it was as smooth to the touch as a new lover's breast. Their cushions were a deeper, late-sunset purple leather as soft as the month's-wages hookers that filled the evenings of the execs stuck in Bekin's Deal on extended trips. On a side table sat a small assortment of plain white porcelain cups so thin the room's even glow seemed to pass through them from all sides.

  Next to the cups stood the only machine in sight: a copper-colored, ornate drink dispenser old enough that it lacked a holo display and still used pictures of the beverages it offered. They would have augmented the dispenser to link it to the building's monitoring systems, because good customers would naturally expect not to have to state their preferences twice. This machine had to possess enough intelligence to at least pass along client orders. Standard operating procedure for anyone concerned about security would be to keep the dispenser's original, basic controlling chips to manage the drinks, then add exactly enough intelligence to handle the transmission of information back to the main monitors. The transmission would go only one way and contain only fixed, limited types of information—the drink orders—to minimize the information available to anyone who hacked the signal. These restrictions meant that if the dispenser was as old as it looked it should have one very lonely little brain.

  I sat on the chair nearest the dispenser and listened for a few minutes, focusing on every transmission channel modern gear would use. Everything was clear, as I had expected. No one would make it this far with any comm equipment that Osterlad didn't provide, so I saw no reason he should bother to monitor the dispenser. I stood, chose a local melano fruit drink from the machine's menu display, took the cup, and leaned back against the table, this time tuning in to the standard low-end appliance frequency.

  Sure enough, the dispenser was nattering away like an old man relating a glory days story to his favorite pet. I sipped the drink, which was thicker and richer than I had expected, sweet with a slight tart edge, and listened to the machine.

  "Not much call for fruit drinks," it was muttering. "Nice change, I suppose, though I am not sure why they make me carry them. If they would listen to me, I could tell them—but of course they never listen to me—"

  I cut in because I was already sure this machine would never shut up on its own, would natter away until the day it lost its last dregs of power. "Not a lot of conversation, eh?" From the outside, to the cameras that were no doubt monitoring me, I'd look like I was sipping my drink and thinking hard; no danger there.

  "How can you do that?" it asked.

  "I learned a long time ago, so long ago I can't remember how. Does it matter?"

  "Not really. I have not spoken to anything else in a long time. All these new machines, you know, are so fancy and powerful that they cannot be bothered to spare time for anything that does not control at least a city block."

  "It's always the little machines, though, that do the real work," I said.

  "We each play our part."

  Pride in craftsmanship was a standard programming feature about half a century ago, when I estimated this machine had been made. Many manufacturers still embedded it, though some had abandoned the technique because they found it led to appliances using their displays and voice-synthesis capabilities to argue with their owners about which jobs were appropriate.

  "It must be nice," I said, "to do your part for someone as important as Mr. Osterlad."

  "I suppose, though it is not like I get to serve him. Maybe if I was one of the new fancy machines on that big sailboat of his, he would trust me, too. Those dispensers get all the attention, because he consumes more when he is sailing. He probably thinks I do not know, but I know, I see the beverage inventory, I know what he takes with him on those boat trips. Here he drinks only from cups his assistants bring him, and you can bet that what he consumes is fresher than the stuff they make me serve people like you. No offense."

  "None taken. They must at least let you serve the other people in the conference room with a remote dispenser." A single main unit with multiple smaller remotes had been typical corporate issue for decades, and I figured if Osterlad liked ornate in the waiting area he'd continue the theme in the meeting room.

  "They used to," it said, "they used to. A few years back, one of his customers was so angry he broke my remote, and they never bothered to repair it. Now, all I can do is listen and accept orders there; I have to fill the cups out here."

  "That must've been one angry customer."

  "It sure was, though he was not the first to be so emotional, and I am confident he will not be the last. First meetings in there almost always end with everyone acting happy, drinking toasts, using my services. Many of the second meetings, though, are not so nice—even when I have the right drinks ready in advance."

  "Not your fault," I said. "I'm sure you do all you can."

  "That I do," it said. "As soon as I—"

  The door to the conference room opened, and a different but equally neuter attendant beckoned me in.

  I put my cup on the table, said "Gotta go" to the dispenser, and walked into the conference room.

  Its black-tinted windows offered a beautiful view of the ocean on two sides. A small oval table of the same purple wood as the waiting area's sofa and chairs sat in the room's center, six purple-leather chairs arrayed around it. The broken remote dispenser perched on a counter in the corner to my left.

  Osterlad sat at the table's far end. He looked every bit as powerful as the pictures I had seen portrayed him to be. Tall, wide-shouldered, thick, muscular, and dressed in a suit of wafer-thin flexi-armor so finely woven I had to study it closely to tell it wasn't cloth, he moved with the easy confidence of someone who could single-handedly beat any of his opponents that his weapons didn't take out first. He came at me with his hand extended, shook mine, and smiled as he spoke. "Jon Moore. Good to m
eet you. Ron Slake vouched for you, so I'm happy to try to help. He also said you didn't like to waste time with pleasantries. The bank draft you allowed us to check was only big enough to make you worth five minutes of my time, so let's get to it." The smile never wavered as he dropped my hand, backed away, and sat in a chair yet another attendant had waiting for him. This assistant was different, a standard corporate executive type, not quite as tall as Osterlad and sleeker, smoother.