One Jump Ahead-ARC

by Mark L. Van Name

  "So am I!" said Red.

  "So who's good?" I said again. "If these clowns are bad, and it sure sounds like they are, tell me about someone good."

  "Oh, they are bad," said Blue. "Their accuracy rate is down since my last comment, over sixty percent misses, and they've shown no new grasp of strategy."

  "Who are the top ten players you've encountered?" I asked.

  Keeping these machines on track was always a challenge. Questions that focused on facts and game lore were always the best choice. Each one rattled off ten names I didn't recognize.

  "I bet Mr. Osterlad is a strong player," I said.

  "As if he'd play here," Blue said.

  "He plays strictly on private rigs," Red said, "and even on those systems rarely. I can't find a single public score for him."

  "I see you're the machine to ask," I said.

  Not to be outdone in any data contest, Blue chimed in. "You're lucky that old box knows anything at all. Osterlad's never even been here, as it would know if it had half the intelligence I did and realized it could check with the drink dispensers and credit systems on our network; none of them has ever dealt with him. It's not a gaming problem, of course; Osterlad simply does not come in."

  I sighed; so much for the hope that he might do the executive drink-and-game crawl to show he could hold his own with the rising stars.

  "Of course," Red said, "if that weak-sister pile of scrapings had bothered to check the private forums, it would find, as I already did, that Osterlad posts scores privately from some of the classic shooter rigs on his sailboat, and that he typically beats his guests—not that those old games are anything at all compared to what I offer."

  "What we offer," Blue said, "though with the failing projectors along your perimeter it's amazing the players can tolerate the images you deliver."

  "Failing projectors!" Red said. "I cannot—"

  I tuned out. Osterlad wouldn't be coming here, and from what Blue had said he probably wouldn't venture into Queen's Bar at all. I suspected I could find some of his people, but kidnapping one or even several would be unlikely to get me anywhere with someone like him; he'd just write them off.

  I chatted with a couple of the other gaming tables and a washroom sanitizer, but they knew even less of use to me, and none had ever seen Osterlad.

  I'd hoped this would be simple, but I should have known better; Osterlad was too successful to be flashy in a business that valued privacy almost as much as firepower. A direct approach would be necessary.

  I wandered up to the bar and waited for the attention of the head bartender, a feisty gray-haired woman who had to be under a meter and a half tall.

  "Another glass of melano juice," I said, "and a question." She stepped back reflexively. I thumbed fifty times the price of the drink as a tip. "Just a recommendation: I need a tour shuttle's codes."

  She checked her own wallet and came closer. "Bar None Travel, a couple hundred meters down Laura's Lament," she said. "They can help you find a suitable tour ship."

  "I don't want a whole ship," I said. "All I need—"

  She cut me off before I could say more. "I heard you the first time," she said, "and it was more than I wanted to hear. Bar None Travel is where I'd go if I were you." She filled my glass and left.

  I finished the overly sweet drink—Osterlad's dispenser had provided better, no surprise there—and headed out. I needed to obtain those codes, pick up a few special supplies, and then take Lobo out of storage.

  It was time to get a better view of Mr. Osterlad.

  Chapter 11

  The bartender was right about Bar None Travel, which sold me a set of ID codes for a small tourist shuttle that made more money for its owner by sitting in storage and renting its identity than it ever had by carrying passengers. Loaded with those codes and sporting a little custom camo work Lobo generated for the occasion, we fit in perfectly with the other ships. Swarms of them flocked up and down the coast of Bekin's Deal, platoons of gawking tourists staring out of their translucent portals, floors, and walls at the natural cliffs and the man-made rock edifices built into the pitch-black stone here and there along the coastline.

  Our perfect cover did nothing to ease Lobo's annoyance at the time he'd spent in storage.

  "I know I've told you drink dispensers were stupid," Lobo said, "but I was wrong. I only thought they were stupid because I hadn't spent any time in recent years with dirt-bound loaders. Now, though, thanks to you I have that valuable experience. Yes, now that I know what stupid really is, I have a whole new appreciation for drink dispensers."

  We were easing our way through the tourist throng, our gently weaving course keeping us within monitoring range of Osterlad's headquarters but not stranding us in any one position for long. Lobo was monitoring the movements of people in and out of Osterlad's building, but so far there was no sign of the man himself. Normally, I appreciated Lobo's powerful multitasking capabilities, but after listening to his whining for the better part of the morning I couldn't help but wish that his designers had somehow made the speech and sensor systems compete for the same processor cycles.

  "How many times," I said, "do I have to explain to you that I had no other reasonable option? I couldn't exactly walk down the streets of Queen's Bar with you, now could I? Picture me at the SleepSafe: 'I'd like a room for one, please, and a giant holding vat for my PCAV.' "

  "Jon," Lobo said, "there's no need for sarcasm. I will accept your apology."

  I resolved yet again that if I ever meet any of the programmers who worked on Lobo's emotive logics, I'll lock them in storage for a month with him, a loader, and two drink dispensers.

  Our first view of Osterlad came at lunchtime, when a trio of bodyguards led him the three paces from a pop-up executive elevator to the idling ground transport, a heavily armored limo nestled in the center of a diamond of similar vehicles. We tracked Osterlad's convoy as it rolled along the main coast road. A two-seater VTOL craft followed about twenty-five meters behind and above the motorcade. It stayed back as the crew reached a restaurant that hung off the edge of the cliff on carbon-fiber supports that blended nicely with the rock from which they jutted. I briefly considered making a play for Osterlad there and then, but only briefly: The place was thronged with business, so the collateral damage would be unacceptably high. I hadn't been able to shake the image of Johns' dissolving head; the last thing I wanted was to pile up more casualties.

  While Osterlad enjoyed his lunch, I snacked on some local produce I'd picked up at a Queen's Bar open-air market where you could buy everything from fresh fruit, to fish and fowl still flopping, to projectile and energy weapons, to an assortment of injectables and ingestibles that would put any clinic or drug center to shame, to men and women augmented with the latest in sexual prosthetics.

  Lobo kept us with the tourist flock, so we enjoyed close-up examinations of the various business and government rock edifices. My earlier impression of them as verging on temples wasn't far off. Most faced the ocean with facades adorned with columns, terraces, statuary, and other belief-system trappings no doubt intended to inspire and intimidate visitors. The faces of Osterlad's building glared at the ocean as if daring it to take on the arms dealer. Under IR and broadband transmission scans—neither a feature of the standard tourist viewings—many of these same architectural goodies ran hot, their signatures revealing them to be little more than thin coverings over active weapon and sensor systems.

  When Osterlad emerged from the restaurant, we migrated back toward his headquarters, but we gained no new data. The procession took a slightly different route this time, winding away from the main road and looping on a longer path back to his headquarters, the VTOL maintaining its protective position; his team was too good to repeat a route.

  Maybe we'd fare better when Osterlad headed home.

  No such luck. At the end of the work day, Lobo was sporting a new logo and we were flying with a new tour group, but nothing else had changed. Our position was good, but as
evening fell I had to accept that the man was either working late or lived at his headquarters. Given his business, I feared the latter.

  The tourist trade died with the setting sun, so we returned to the shuttle base with the rest of the pack.

  "What's next?" Lobo asked.

  "How closely can you monitor his headquarters from low orbit?" I said.

  "I can track Osterlad if he emerges from the structure," Lobo said, "but without attracting a lot of attention I can't get to him in time to do anything useful."

  "At this stage, data is good enough. All we've learned so far is that he's appropriately careful during the daytime. If he lives at his office, as I now assume, then we'll confirm that tonight and start searching for an acceptable way to take him there." I settled into the launch couch; once we were in orbit, I'd do some exercises and work out the kinks of the day's surveillance. "Take us up, and put us in a reasonably crowded geosync orbit," I said.

  "Thank you for telling me the plan this time," Lobo said. "Having even that little bit of information is so much better than sitting alone in a storage shed, only the barely sentient loaders for company. Have I mentioned—"

  I tuned out Lobo's chatter as best I could. It was going to be a long night.

  * * *

  By morning, I had persuaded Lobo to forgive me, or at least to stop badgering me. Osterlad hadn't left his headquarters all night, so the odds were good that he did indeed live there.

  Over the next day and a half he did nothing to change that belief, leaving the building only once for another lunch at a restaurant a few more klicks down the coast from the first. I filled the time with reading, exercising, watching samples of the local entertainment broadcasts—heavy this season on mysteries of the jump-gate masters and conspiracy-theory semi-reality offerings in which crackpots elevated to temporary deity status explained how the entire web of space-time was a plot to force us all to consume processed artificial dairy products—and trying not to obsess over what would happen when Johns failed to check in and Osterlad took the offensive.

  The first break in Osterlad's routine came midway through the afternoon of what had until then been an unpromising day. He exited with the usual portal of guards, but this time he was dressed casually, in shorts and a loose shirt, and no cars were waiting. He walked quickly to the VTOL and climbed in. As soon as he was settled, the pilot headed the craft out over the ocean. About three kilometers offshore, the cliff-built corporate structures too far away to see from ocean level in the gently rolling waters, the VTOL touched down on a ship I assumed was Osterlad's sailboat. Four guards and a pair of young women greeted him, the former staying back and each of the latter working hard to earn his attention.

  The ship was enormous, bigger than anything I'd ever seen with sails. A bit over a hundred and fifty meters in length and about a third that wide at its broadest point, with three enormous masts sporting sails each of which could completely cover Lobo, the boat rode the water with the effortless grace of seabirds easing up thermals on a breezy day. At first I thought Osterlad had constructed the vessel of the same active camo material as Lobo, but upon closer inspection I realized what Lobo's scans confirmed:It was composed of timbers from native sadwood trees, buffed to the deep blue of the water around it. I was surprised at the lack of antennas or other visible electronics, until Lobo's broadcast scans traced their outlines in the masts and the upper hull of the ship. I'd never seen a lovelier boat, and for a few minutes I enjoyed the images of it in Lobo's monitors as Osterlad took a slow tour of the deck, chatting with various crew members and pausing occasionally to appreciate the view.

  The wood construction was a break, because it offered little protection from Lobo's deep scans. I counted eight crew members in sight, plus Osterlad, the guards, and the girls. Lobo found no traces of any other people on board, so unless the ship had specially shielded sections, the opposition count was fifteen. I had to assume most of the crew members also doubled as bodyguards, because the craft could certainly sail itself. The body count was higher than I would have liked, but though this group constituted a larger force than the normal guard team, it was also one far more isolated than anything we'd face onshore. Some collateral damage was likely—the girls moved more like providers than protectors—but on balance the situation was far better than the one at the restaurant.

  The VTOL helped us by taking up a guard position a couple hundred meters behind and above the ship, farther back than its land station, probably so it didn't mess up the sailing or Osterlad's view in any direction.

  Osterlad finished his tour of the deck at the center of the boat, where he took the helm, a classic big-spoked wheel that perched in the middle of a console bristling with displays for the processors that did the real work. He headed the ship out to sea. The guards and crew busied themselves at discreet distances from Osterlad, and the girls stayed close, but not so close that they'd interfere with his control of the vessel. Lobo's aerial view showed the seven people arranged in a "V" with Osterlad at its point; I gave the guards credit for making the formation look effortless and natural.

  Time was running out. This was the best chance at him we'd seen. "Let's take him now," I said to Lobo.

  "Destroy or capture?" he asked.

  "Capture," I said. "I need information. What do you have that can take out the crew?"

  "Both energy and projectile weapons, of course," Lobo said. "If I come in behind the VTOL in my tourist shuttle guise, I can shoot it down, remove the ship's crew, and leave Osterlad for you."

  "I don't want to kill anyone if I can avoid it," I said.

  "That would be a tactical error," Lobo said, "as I'm sure you know. Surgical removal is the least error-prone approach possible in this situation, and it provides the added benefit of preventing large classes of later issues."

  "We're not killing anyone if we can avoid it," I said. "We'll keep the comm link open, and you hover close. If the action turns random, you come in hard and sort it out. Got it?"

  "Understood."

  "Good. Let me clarify my earlier question. I'd like your opinion about which of your nonlethal capabilities you think will prove most effective against the ship and the VTOL."

  Nine minutes later, we screamed down from the sky, flame camo mingling with the shuttle logo, a low-frequency targeted emergency beacon bathing the ship to buy us time. Occasional bursts from flamethrower portals enhanced the burning effect, and Lobo ramped the camo up the red spectrum as we raced lower. From Osterlad's perspective, we should read as a crashing shuttle combusting into a blazing meteor.

  Lobo's monitors showed the ship's crew juicing the radios, Osterlad in the center of the guard team, the VTOL moving closer to the ship, everyone preparing to deal with the disaster we appeared to be.

  At two thousand meters and closing fast, Lobo launched three missiles. Each hit its targets seconds after launch.

  The first, a standard small-vehicle striker, exploded on impact and wiped out the entire engine and electronics front section of the VTOL. The craft immediately split in half, the destroyed portion falling seaward to distract any additional missiles as the ejector pod, its insulating cover scrambling to protect the pilot and its emergency beacon already broadcasting, took the pilot upward and away from the action. Lobo powered over the emergency beacon with a counterwavelength disruption broadcast and a false-alarm apology, then used directed microwaves to fry the barely shielded electronics in the ejector pod. I hadn't liked the risk of hurting the pilot, but I also hadn't been able to offer a better option.

  I saw none of the action around the VTOL, correctly taking for granted that Lobo would either execute his part of the plan or alert me in the event of problems, because I was focused on the ship, the target of the other two missiles. They struck the deck at the same time and at the same shallow angle, burrowing into the wood, each having already discharged its payload on the way in. The first spread a trail of high-potency gas, enough to take out everyone on board in two to three seconds. The
people would feel bad later, their mucous membranes paying the price for the rapid attack, and they would probably lose some skin in any places that collected heavy dustings, but they would survive with no damage a decent med facility couldn't repair. The second missile scattered concussive microgrenades along the length of the ship. Small enough that they probably wouldn't kill anyone, but strong enough to knock out any humans within twenty-five meters either side of their trajectory, the grenades were the best option we had at hand; Lobo's weapons understandably tended toward the lethal.