One Jump Ahead-ARC

by Mark L. Van Name

  Whatever "it" is.

  Whatever myself is.

  I've changed so many times, been broken and rebuilt in so many ways by so many different forces that though I still seem to me to be me, I can't honestly say what bits are original working equipment, what bits new, and what bits broken, repaired, or replaced.

  I shook my head and turned onto my back. At this rate, if I wanted to be operational when the stealthie surfaced, I needed to push aside that attitude, bow to the wisdom of the stealthie's designers, and take its standard-issue sedative/wake-up combo. I inhaled slowly, focused inward, and as I gently let out the breath pressed the button for the drug cocktail. The stealthie would wake me when the ten hours were up and we were near the surface.

  I felt a slight prick in my neck, and then I was out.

  Chapter 9

  I awoke with a start, pinned down, disoriented, and feeling trapped, until I realized the things gripping me were the stealthie's massage units working the kinks out of my arm and leg muscles. I felt better than when I'd gotten into the box; the stealthie was proving to be worth everything I'd paid for it. The overhead timer showed a few seconds past ten hours, and the depth meter said we had ascended to thirty centimeters below the surface. The survey camera was already peeking out of the ground, its wide-angle image clear on the display beside my head. I thumbed the swivel controls and took a slow look around. The night was clear and bright with the light of Floordin's three small, clustered moons and the glow of the stars shining through a sky as clear and unpolluted as unexplored space. The clearing was deserted.

  Time to move.

  I gave the stealthie the okay to complete the ascent. A few minutes later, the top slid open, and I climbed out. From the stealthie's cargo compartments I took a comm and sensor unit, a sniper's trank rifle, a couple of gas rats, and a pulse pistol. I stuffed the rats in a pack with some food and water, set the open code on the stealthie, and sent it back underground. If all went well and we had time, we'd come back for it later that night. If we couldn't, it would either wait for the day we could return or provide an awfully bad surprise for anyone else who tried to mess with it.

  As the stealthie descended, I moved a few meters into the woods on the path to the house, stopped, ate two protein bars, drank a liter of water, and used the sensor unit to scan both the area and all the transmissions it could detect. Nothing with an IR signature larger than my lower leg showed anywhere in the few-hundred-meter range of the unit. I didn't catch any guard chatter, so with luck Osterlad's security people had believed our earlier show. Lobo was transmitting clearly and strongly, my own voice coming at me with a distress message. From the particular recordings Lobo had chosen to play I knew that he was safely beyond the range of Osterlad's ships and that the people in the mansion, presumably led by Johns, had sent via courier through the jump gate a request for a long-range salvage ship.

  After stretching a bit and relieving myself, I set out for the house. The forest was young enough and the night bright enough that I was able to sustain a normal walking pace.

  We'd set my sensor unit to use Lobo's signal and the standard feed from the weather sat to track my position, so when it indicated I was within ten meters of the outer edge of what should be the range of a good installation's ground-sensor scans, I stopped. A slight breeze kept the night cool, but the air was moist and thick enough that a small layer of sweat coated my arms. Normally the nanomachines in my system stay out of everything, from sweat to refuse, that leaves my body, but I focused my instructions that they do otherwise this time, then rubbed dirt on my sweat-covered lower arms.

  Slowly at first, and then increasingly faster, the nanomachines deconstructed the dirt and made more of themselves. Small, barely visible clouds formed above my now nearly clean arms. I made each cloud split and sent the resulting four smaller clouds to gather more material from the forest floor.

  A short while later, four vaguely man-shaped clouds hovered just above the ground near me, two on my left and two on my right. I had them increase their speed until they were emitting enough heat that my wrist sensor read them as alive, and then we all moved ahead. If Johns and the team staffing Osterlad's mansion were running IR scans, they would at least have to wonder which of the five men now approaching the building was the one they wanted.

  The forest ended about thirty meters from the mansion, the trees abruptly yielding to a dense, short, soft grass that glowed gray in the moon- and starlight. I set the nano-clouds to continue moving until they touched the nearest wall, at which point they'd reconstitute as much of the dirt as possible, with the last operational nanomachines vanishing into the soil and disassembling themselves when they were far enough from me that they could no longer communicate easily with their counterparts in my body.

  I scanned the house through the scope on the trank rifle and found four guards, two sitting on chairs on rooftop observation decks and two leaning against the corners of the building that I could see. I assumed they'd have counterparts on the other side of the house, so I needed to move quickly to take out all eight guards before any of them noticed they were under attack.

  I stretched out on the ground in a sniper's posture and sighted on each of the two lower guards, making sure I had a feel for how far to move the sight after the first shot. The sight was strong enough that at this distance I could tell that the guard to the rear should consider using skin treatments to deal with some nasty scars that appeared more real than fashion statement. I put a needle in his neck, aimed at the front one, and fired a needle into him. He sank to his knees a second later and then fell face forward onto the ground. I swung the sight back to the rear guard, and he was also down, stretched as if he'd tried to take a step and then fallen.

  The gun was a pleasure to use, the recoil minimal and the sound little louder than a light breeze through the trees. I repeated the process on the two upper guards, tranking first the rear one and then the front. The first fell almost immediately off his chair and over the edge of the roof. He hit the ground relatively flat on his back, the impact making a thump I was afraid the guards on the other side might hear. The second stayed conscious long enough to reach for the needle in his neck, then passed out and fell face-first off the side of the house, the sound of his crash a barely audible crack in the night. The fall probably killed him. Though I'd hoped everyone in the house would survive, I was too far into combat mode to experience more than a passing moment of regret. I still had work to do.

  The nano-clouds were two-thirds of the way to the house, the night was still quiet, and no guards came running. Lobo's message hadn't changed to the recording we'd reserved as his way to tell me I was in imminent danger. All was well.

  I sprinted for the wall nearest to me and flattened myself against it as soon as I could. I breathed through my nose and strained to hear if anything had changed, but the world remained quiet.

  Staying close to the wall, I made for the back of the house, knelt at the rear wall, and advanced carefully toward the far corner. I sighted through the rifle as I prowled forward. When I was about five meters from the building's far edge, I swung out from it until I could see the guard around the corner. I squeezed off a shot, kept the sight on him long enough to verify he dropped, and raised it to check out the guard above. This one sat a bit forward of where his counterpart on the other side had been, but he went down just as quickly. He fell onto the roof, and though I couldn't hear the sound of the impact I worried that one of the remaining outdoor pair or even someone inside might have heard the noise. I had a clear view down the side of the building, so rather than risk losing time by moving forward I sighted on and quickly shot first the lower guard and then the upper. The upper fell off the building and landed on his back near the feet of the unconscious man below him.

  No one moved, and no alarm sounded. I abandoned the rifle and sprinted for the rear door.

  I'd considered picking the locks, but Lobo and I had agreed that as good as I was, Osterlad's security systems were
probably better, so instead I planned to open a central section of the door. I grabbed some dirt, spit in it, gave the nanomachines instructions, and rubbed the damp soil on a portion of the door about half a meter above the floor and roughly thirty centimeters in diameter. In less than two minutes the nanomachines had decomposed enough of the door to let me slide the gas rats through the still-growing opening. I set each rat gently on the floor, thumbed them active, and backed away. Each arm-size canister sprouted four small mechanical legs and a pair of front-mounted sensors, then took off. The house was a decent-size mansion, maybe thirty-five or forty rooms spread across its two floors, but the rats were fast and each carried enough colorless, odorless sleep gas to put an entire apartment complex to bed. I'd worked with this gas before, so the nanomachines wouldn't let it do more than tickle my nose and throat.

  I instructed the nanomachines to disassemble, then headed to the front corner of the house. I paused to check status, continuing to admire the night while avoiding looking at the guard who'd fallen. Nothing new appeared on my sensor unit. Lobo's distress message droned on. Though the bits of light oozing from the house's front fixtures polluted the evening a bit, I couldn't help but be struck yet again by the brilliance of the star display. I'd never been in this part of space before, so the vista was new, as full of magical potential and promise as the stars over Pinkelponker when I was a boy. I've never lost my love of the night.

  I gave the rats fifteen minutes, more than enough time to work the interior of the place, drew the pulse pistol, and walked up to the front door. It was locked, but the pistol easily blasted away the frame around the lock. I went inside. True to form, the main office was clearly visible from the reception area; men like Osterlad are never far from work. Its door was open. I approached the office from the side, listening and looking for trouble, but everything was as quiet as it should be.

  Inside the office a circuit cube—Lobo's new weapons' complex—sat in a plexi container on a conference table. Johns slumped over the desk. I took off my pack, put it on the table, and stuck the pistol inside. I added the plexi container, closed the pack, and turned to the door.

  Johns stood and shot me in the left hamstring.

  I went down hard, the pack still on the table, blood oozing from a hole the size of my thumb and pain screaming through my system for a few seconds until the nanomachines cut it off. The fact that the blood was flowing gently and not spraying meant he hadn't hit an artery, and the ragged hole suggested he'd used a projectile. That was fine by me: the nanomachines could disassemble anything inside me. They were already working to seal the hole, so I rolled onto the wound to hide the activity from Johns, who was now standing over me.

  "Mr. Osterlad read you correctly," he said. "You are soft. No one's quite clear on how you dealt with those anticorporate ecoterrorists on Macken, but the word is that you let them live." He shook his head slowly. "Mr. Osterlad also said you'd be dumb enough to try to make the exchange. I should get a nice bonus for being the only one who realized that you'd try to steal it. Mr. Osterlad and I agreed that I should take inoculations against every major nonlethal chemical agent we carry—and if a chemical is in active use, we carry it."

  The hole in my leg was nearly sealed, but I stayed down. I had to get out without showing Johns the wound, because I didn't want to explain how it had healed so quickly. If someone like Osterlad got his hands on me and brought in enough scientists, they'd realize the Aggro experiments hadn't ended in failure and turn me into a lab animal until they figured out how to make more people like me. I was sure I wouldn't survive the process.

  "You guys were never going to honor the deal," I said.

  "True enough. The price you were paying was more than the market value of the control unit, but a Predator-class assault vehicle with a fully operational complement of weapons is worth many times the price of those controls. We are in business to make a profit, after all."

  "I can still pay," I said. "I had planned to leave the money." I had, though I knew he would never believe it. "You take my payment, I take the control unit, and we finish the deal, just as planned. You make a large profit. Everyone wins."

  Johns leaned against the table and laughed. "We're not negotiating. We're waiting for the gas to wear off so the security staff can take charge of you. That probably means I'll be stuck with you for another few hours, eh?"

  I nodded.

  "When the staff wakes up, we'll keep the control unit, interrogate you, and take all your money. In a day or two, a company salvage ship will come through the gate and retrieve the PCAV." He went back to the desk and sat, his gun still pointed in my direction but his attention no longer solely on me. "I definitely should get a hefty bonus out of this."

  When the guards rolled me over, Johns would see the healed wound. As long as his interrogation team didn't hit me with too many drugs at once, I could probably withstand at least the first few rounds of questioning, but that would only make them more curious. My stomach felt like I had broken in two as I realized I had no options. Killing in combat is bad enough, but at least the stakes are clear and you enter the field knowing what's coming. Killing like this chips away at you, one of the reasons I've kept to myself for so long, one of the reasons, I now had to admit to myself, that I've never felt I could afford to stay anywhere for too long or get too close to anyone.

  I stuck the tip of my index finger into the small amount of blood still lingering around the edges of the nearly healed hole in my leg, rubbed the blood on my fingertip into the pool of blood on the floor under me, and gave the nanomachines instructions.

  I looked at Johns and said, "You're wrong, you know."

  "About what?"

  The blood turned black and rose into a small cloud hovering just above the floor. I kept talking so he'd continue to look at me and not at the slowly moving nano-cloud. "I'm not soft," I said. "I'm just torn. Part of me needs the action, but most of me despises the cost." The cloud was under his chair, almost to the wall, and picking up speed.

  "Then we're doing you a favor," he said, "because we're deciding for you. You're out of it now."

  The cloud floated up the wall until it was higher than Johns, then spread out over him and gently fell onto him, a barely visible nano-dew coating his hair, ears, and clothes.

  "No," I said, "I'm not."

  Johns reached to scratch his ear, then dropped the gun and grabbed his head with both hands.

  "What's happening?" he asked.

  I stood and knocked the gun out of his reach. "It'll be over soon. I'm sorry."

  Johns struggled to stay upright as drops of blood dripped from his ears and eyes. "This won't change anything," he said. "Osterlad wants the PCAV and the bounty on you." His body fell forward onto the desk. "He won't stop."

  "What bounty?" I said.

  I grabbed his shoulders, but he was gone, his head vanishing into an ever-darkening and growing cloud that wouldn't stop until it had consumed his entire body; I saw no point in leaving any evidence.

  Great. Someone had put a bounty on me, and the biggest arms dealer in the region was after it.

  I'd wanted a vacation. Instead, I was in a fight, and I didn't know who my opponent was.

  I turned away, grabbed the pack, and headed out of the room. Outside, I called Lobo on the wrist unit and sat down to wait for him, trying to lose myself in the stars that now promised no new magic, only more of the same trouble I'd never wanted and always seemed to find.

  * * *

  "I have firewalled the new unit," Lobo said, "run every simulation I possess, and it comes up clean. I am ready to take it live. You are my owner, so I need your permission to do so."

  We were in low orbit above Osterlad's mansion, with at least half an hour still to go before the people in the house should wake up. "Do it," I said.

  A few seconds later, weapons displays flashed to life across the gunnery console where I sat.

  "Everything's operational," he said. "I appear to be completely functional again
."

  "We need to take out the shuttles to buy ourselves a bit more time, so let's use them for a pulse check. Show me video."

  "What about the house?"

  I considered wiping it, sending a message to Osterlad, showing him what it would cost to mess with me, but I knew he'd never listen. The only ones who would pay were the guards and the staff in the house, people who were doing their jobs, nothing more, their lives of no importance to him. "Leave it alone," I said. "There were no witnesses."