Glory Boy

by Rick Partlow

  "Less than three hours till we come out," Deke said, looking at the display on the wall. "I think I'm gonna plug into a ViRdrama or watch a movie. God knows when we'll have any free time once we get there."

  He bumped forearms with me---that was some Earth thing I'd never heard of before the Academy---did the same with Holly and then slid out of the booth and headed back down the corridor. Holly looked at me, then got out of the chair and offered me her hand.

  "What?" I said with a smile, taking it and standing, still holding it as I faced her.

  "We have three hours," she said, raising up to kiss me. "And like Deke said, God knows how much free time we'll have once we land." She took a step toward our cabin, tugging me along with her.

  I followed willingly. It occurred to me that she was losing herself in the physical closeness because she was afraid. That was okay, though, because so was I.

  ***

  Maybe we were on Hermes and maybe we weren't. You couldn't have proven it by me, except the gravity felt higher than Mars and lower than Earth. We'd boarded the windowless, enclosed passenger compartment of the shuttle through an opaque airlock; and after a tense descent and an abrupt and bumpy vertical landing, we could feel the pad beneath the lander descending on an elevator. We emerged into a bare, dimly-lit, underground hangar, and were escorted off the shuttle's ramp by armored guards in visored, faceless helmets.

  "They must really not want anyone to talk to us," Deke muttered to me as we walked out of the hangar and into a broad corridor. The walls were bare buildfoam and the whole place had the air of being under construction.

  "I get the impression," I said back to him in a low tone, "that it's us they don't want talking to anyone else."

  Either way, none of the guards said a word to us, and apart from them and us, the corridors we passed through were empty. We were escorted to tiny, individual rooms with a cot, a sink and a closet of a bathroom; and this time, when I stepped inside mine and the door closed behind me, it was locked from the outside.

  No friendly light blue here; everything was sterile, unfinished white. There was no 'link, no terminal, no entertainment center, nothing but a bed and a windowless room. No, I saw that I was wrong. There was a flex tablet on the bed, one of the cheap ones they give away in the big cities. I picked it up, the material light and flimsy in my hand, and the screen turned on.

  PLEASE TRY TO SLEEP, the text scrolled across it. THE PROCEDURE WILL BEGIN IN A FEW HOURS.

  "Yeah," I muttered to myself. "I'll get right on that."

  I kicked off the soft-soled sandals they'd left for us on the ship and laid down on the bed, expecting to be bored out of my mind for however long they left us stuck here. Instead, I fell asleep immediately.

  In retrospect, I'm fairly certain they used something to knock me out, though I don't know what it could have been and I didn't ask. All I knew is that, one second I was shutting my eyes and the next I was opening them and I was somewhere else.

  The walls weren't white and they weren't buildfoam; they were the gunmetal grey of bare biphase carbide, though still windowless, and it was just as small. I was still dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, and I was lying on a gurney rather than a bed; its frame was also biphase carbide, as tough as the hull of a starship. So were the restraints that were wrapped around my forearms and ankles, securing me quite thoroughly to the gurney.

  Where the fuck am I? I wondered. And how long was I out?

  And then I knew. It wasn't as if someone had told me or I'd read it from a display or heard it in my ear, or even thought it. I just knew, the same way I knew my name and birthday; I just remembered it. I was on Hermes all right, on the southwestern continent that the locals called Terra Australis, in a small, isolated valley within the Edge Mountains. I'd landed a week ago---A week ago? Holy shit!---and I'd been here the whole time. I also instantly knew the status of everything they'd implanted in me during that time.

  They'd done it all, everything Murdock had talked about, and more. Besides what he'd shown us in his little animation---the bone laminates, the muscle augments, the subdermal armor, the extra organs, and all that---there was more. All of my vital organs were enlarged with cloned tissue and enhanced mechanically as well, there were pressure equalization devices in my sinuses, and some sort of system in my ear canals that enhanced my ability to hear sounds beyond the limits of human hearing. And of course, there was the headcomp. It was hooked up to everything via the neurolink. I was connected with the base's local net, and through it to the satellite connection to the Instell ComSats and I instantly knew the latest news. Apparently, the Corporate Council wasn't too happy with Admiral Sato's new strategy, since there was more money in capital ships, and there was a huge point shaving scandal in the Commonwealth Cyberball League.

  Holy shit, I thought. This was going to take some getting used to. The sheer data was almost overwhelming and I had to work hard to shut it out, to close off my thoughts from the flood of information that was just instantly available to me.

  Wait a second. If we all had neurolinks...

  Deke, I called out inside my head, searching for him, can you hear me?

  At first, I wasn't sure I was doing it right, but then I instantly knew I was.

  Cal? I got a reply and even though it was in my head, it somehow "sounded" like Deke. I guess we really hear things with our brain more than our ears anyway. Is that you?

  You know it's me, I replied, grinning despite everything. The same way I know it's you. And the same way we both know a lot of other shit we didn't a few hours ago.

  Why the hell do they have us locked down? he asked me plaintively. Did they think we were gonna' wake up and start trashing the place?

  Maybe, I said. Then I had another thought. Or maybe it's a test. Like that first day in the Academy...

  I reached out with the neurolink, through the base's local 'net and into the systems that controlled this building. I wasn't denied access to it, so I guessed that the systems running the computers implanted inside our skulls had been given the access codes to just about everything. I searched through the building for this room, using GPS coordinates to find it and then finding its computer designator and accessing its control systems. The cuffs around my ankles and wrists were electronically controlled. If they were a smart system and not isolated...

  And there it was. With a thought, they clicked open and I jumped to my feet...and wound up bouncing off the wall across the room. I stumbled to find my balance and wound up leaning against the door.

  "What the fuck?" I exclaimed, rubbing my shoulder and expecting it to hurt from where it had impacted. I stopped because it didn't.

  I looked at my hands, thinking of bone laminates and muscle augments and nanites that healed minor wounds in minutes. With a grin, I slammed a fist into the biphase carbide of the door as hard as I could. The door rang with the vibration and I felt a pressure that wasn't quite pain in my knuckles. I looked down at them. The skin over my knuckles was split and there were flecks of blood...but beneath the tiny bit of blood, beneath the split skin, something grey and almost liquid undulated with the tensing of my muscles. As I watched, I could almost see the splits in the skin beginning to very slowly knit. I knew that, in a few minutes, you wouldn't be able to tell they'd been there.

  "Wow," I muttered, still grinning.

  Are you out of your restraints yet? I asked Deke.

  Yeah, you?

  Uh-huh. Now I'm gonna' open this door.

  Another search through the base systems, back to the room, back to the security locks. There it was. I heard a click and the door slid aside with a pneumatic hiss. Standing there on the other side of it were Mat M'voba, who stood with his arms crossed, smiling close-mouthed, and beside him Colonel Murdock, his dress uniform still as spotless as ever. The officer nodded to me, hands clasped casually behind his back.

  "Well done," he told me, lip curling up ever so slightly with what might have been approval. "Let's go retrieve the others. We have work to
do."

  Chapter Eleven

  I felt the violent push of the quick-burnout retro-rocket subside abruptly and then we were back in microgravity and the padded walls of the tiny pod were closing in on me again.

  I tried closing my eyes and concentrating on my breathing, but I could still feel the constriction of the crash couch pushing against my shoulders, the restraints compressing my chest and stomach and the push of Deke's legs against my own as he sat across from me in a space too small for one person, much less two.

  A buffeting, increasing in turbulence as we bit the atmosphere, opened my eyes and I saw Deke staring at me, concerned. He was dressed as I was, in a bodysuit of the almost-liquid byomer, what Murdock had called Reflex armor. A small control unit at the waste connected it to our headcomps, using electrical currents to selectively harden it to increase our strength and better defend us from projectile weapons. It was fitted with chameleon camouflage, set to adjust its hue depending on the background light, and right now it was a dull grey in the dimness of the stealth drop pod.

  "You try using that biofeedback loop thingy in our headcomp?" he asked me.

  "No," I answered tautly. "I should be able to handle this on my own."

  "Don't be a backwoods doofus," he said, shaking his head. "This shit's part of us now and it's not going away. Use it, for Christ's sake."

  I sighed and gave in, even though it felt like the coward's way out. I let the biofeedback loop do its work, more of a matter of getting out of its way than having to tell it to do anything. My breathing slowed in seconds and so did my heartbeat, and with the reduction in physical stress came an almost simultaneous decrease in emotional stress. I was calm again, and didn't mind the incredibly cramped confines of the drop pod, but using the headcomp for that felt...unnatural. It felt like I'd drugged myself and I didn't like it.

  The whole pod was shaking violently now, tossing us against our restraints as the reentry heated us up and burned away the ablative material that kept the pod off the sensors. It would only be a few more seconds before... There was a powerful yank and only the padding kept my head from slamming against the interior of the pod as our main parachute opened and our descent slowed. We were still going down fast, though; you didn't want to spend too much time hanging in the air like a floating target.

  There were no windows in the pod, but my neurolink was hooked up with cameras and sensors on the exterior and I opened myself to their view for a moment. Absolute darkness enveloped us as we passed through the thick cloud layers that wreathed the night sky, and nothing was visible on infrared or thermal either. The only thing I could see was the dim fluttering of our black parachute above us. Somehow, I found that view even more claustrophobic than the one inside the pod, so I let it go.

  "And here's the part I don't like," Deke said with a sigh, bracing himself.

  We were coming out of the upper layer of clouds, into the part of the drop where a pod descending on a chute would be most likely to get spotted. So, the pod automatically cut the parachute loose and left it and our stomachs sitting there at around ten kilometers up, and what was left of us plummeted toward the surface at terminal velocity. Now I did use my biofeedback loop, this time to keep myself from throwing up.

  The fall seemed to go on forever, but I knew exactly when it was supposed to end. At five hundred meters, the main braking chutes exploded upward, propelled by compressed gas, and our feet-first plunge halted again. This time, the descent was slower than before but still not slow enough for a safe landing. At a hundred meters off the ground, jets of coldgas began bleeding off more speed and then expended their fuel load at less than fifty meters up. We hit on soft ground with a teeth-rattling thump, but we were intact.

  "Let's get out of this Goddamned thing," I said fervently, rattled enough by the drop to blaspheme without thought.

  We cut loose our restraints and then each of us pulled on the last piece of our Reflex armor, a face-covering hood with cameras built into it that linked up directly with our headcomps and gave us, theoretically, a 360-degree view; though processing all that information at once was beyond the vision receptors in our brains and the headcomp had to encode it in a way we could understand. This involved a sort of "instinct" that I can't adequately explain in words. I didn't see the things the cameras saw behind me; I just knew they were there.

  I grabbed my combat harness from behind the webbing next to my head and shrugged into it, then pulled out the pulse carbine from the same niche and turned to Deke. He was geared up as well, with his own harness and weapon and a small backpack, and he nodded to me.

  Let's pop the top on this fucker, he said in my head.

  I flipped up the protective cover behind my right shoulder, then grabbed the red switch there and pulled it hard. Explosive bolts popped along the sides of the egg-shaped pod and it split down the middle, three-meter slabs of biphase carbide falling away from each other and letting in the dark of the overcast night. We clambered out of the hollow frame that was all that was left of the vehicle, and I noted the parachutes fluttering in the breeze along the loamy ground.

  We were in a small clearing deep in a forest of what passed for trees on this world. They were close enough to what we had on Canaan and what I'd seen on Earth that I didn't note the differences. I could hear the solemn cries of the night hunters and their prey carrying far even in the heavy, humid air as I paused to get my bearings. No GPS signals here, but I had a dead-reckoning map in my headcomp, along with a built-in compass to follow it.

  We hadn't arranged it beforehand but I took the lead and Deke didn't complain. The dirt under my feet was damp and muddy, but the mud wasn't thick; it sucked at the sides of my boots, but they only sank in a centimeter or two. I tried to move silently, using what I'd learned in the last few weeks and what my headcomp knew and could make instinctive for me, but the squelching mud seemed as loud as cannon shots and there wasn't much I could do about it. We couldn't go any slower: we had twenty kilometers to cover and only two hours to do it.

  The ground firmed up a bit as we ascended higher into the hills along the rough game trail, settling into what felt like a jogging pace but was actually as fast as I could have run flat out on a slope like this before the treatments. I wasn't the slightest bit out of breath either; my lungs were working more efficiently than any human who'd ever lived. It had freaked me out at first. It was like when you're running in a dream and you never feel tired, and nothing quite feels real. You had to force yourself to concentrate on the task at hand instead of constantly thinking about how different everything was now.

  The infrared and thermal imaging filters implanted in my eyes were doing their work as well: my headcomp worked their input together with the sounds and echoes it picked up and even the scents it ran through my implant chemscanner to build a visual simulation that overlaid my natural vision almost seamlessly. I could see every rock and root in my way, every dip and rut and animal burrow, and my feet avoided them almost automatically. I could see the rustling in the fallen detritus as something snakelike but with a dozen short legs slithered out of our way, could see a flash of leathery wings as something darted across the trail in front of us at just above eye level.

  It all seemed to run together as we kept our pace over the rolling hills, skirting the low, weathered mountain range that they led into and following the trail down to where a river flowed downward out of those mountains and into a valley below. We had to slow our pace when we reached the river, as the path grew narrower and rougher, but we were close now. The river widened out as it descended and curved into the broad valley...and we saw our first signs of habitation.

  Pipes diverted part of the river through the cooling systems of a reactor complex, a dome a hundred meters across and half that high that stretched across the valley below us and fed power to the defense laser installation half-buried in the ground less than a kilometer away. Floodlights bathed the open ground around it with an ugly, harsh white glare. On the map loaded into my headcomp, I
could see the base's security net laid out like a series of red stars dotting the tree line, and one of them was flashing yellow to let us know the weak spot to exploit.

  Something splashed into the water downstream from us, but the audio signature told me it was an animal rather than a humanoid so I didn't pay it any mind. What did concern me was the surveillance drones that I knew would be flying over the security perimeter, but I was fairly confident that our Reflex armor and its camouflage coating would conceal us from them. The Tahni did use live patrols, but those would be easy to spot without any better chance of spotting us.

  Deke and I forded the river at the narrowest point we could find, where it was just under ten meters across; we were able to run out three meters on a fallen tree, then jumped the last seven. I felt like I could have made it all the way in one jump, but we were trying to play it safe. From there, we headed for the sensor pod marked in yellow; close up, we could barely see the rounded upper casing of the sensor suite where it stuck up from the low-cut blades of what passed for a grass analog here.

  Deke fished a small polymer ball out of his combat harness and I took a knee behind a dead tree that tilted crazily sideways with its roots splaying into the air like claws, and waited while he adjusted a control on its side. He looked up from it with a blank nothingness where his face should be and flashed me a thumbs-up. I gave back the "OK" sign and he sprang to his feet and threw the device like a baseball at the sensor pod nearly fifty meters away. He was dead-on, his aim guided by the cybernetic pitcher in his head, and the little polymer ball landed directly in front of it, then settled into the grass and split open hemispherically. I couldn't see the cloud of short-lived nanites that emerged from it like a puff of invisible dust, but I knew what they were doing: squeezing through the seams in the metal and rearranging the connections to accept the data the small processor inside the plastic ball was broadcasting.

  In seconds, the sensor pod was reporting the normal nightly activity around the base and would keep doing so until someone stumbled across the Spoof. I got the report from the Spoof that it was clear and we dashed forward along the clear path it had created through the sensor nets. I felt exposed running across the well-lit clearing, but I knew from glances at Deke that our camouflage was making us very difficult to see against the background, and that at least no mechanical eyes were pointed in this direction. Unless someone was awake and happened to be looking this way, we were golden.