Yes, I was wounded in the fire-fight. Wood-shrapnel from where a stray slug hit the door-frame. In my day, our doctors could have saved my leg. I wish you could see what you looked like when you took off just now. It was lovely. You jumped out the window and over the next house. You should see the Seven-League-Boots program in action; each jet-assisted leap was two hundred yards if it was an inch.
I’ve already called in the escape over Mrs. Hechler’s radio phone. The patrols are headed up north, into the swampland. In a minute, if I am strong enough, I’ll send in a report that you were sighted down south, in the hills. All their equipment still runs off the old, old programs. Old as me. And I know the magic words to open the trap-doors and make my voice whatever CO’s voice they need to hear.
I am a wizard, a warlock, a fraud, a gray old Prospero from a lost island, who never repented or burned his books or broke his wand. I have cast a spell on you, princess, and befuddled them.
They will not catch you. They will never catch you. I can just imagine the troopers on horseback, those of them who can afford horses, trying to catch you by lanternlight. I was the one who played hide-and-seek with my little friend Battery Bunny when I was eight, in that armor. One touch of the Mr. Frog button turns on the sneeky-peeky lowlight goggles, activates the aqualung, lets you to crawl along a river-bottom at night. The smart-metal is radar-invisible. If those barbarians still have any working radar sets. If they could get the bureaucrats in their organization to release them to the river patrol. Which I doubt. Which I doubt.
And Homer the Homing Pigeon who lives in the helmet is gyroscopically aligned and corrects himself by star-pattern recognition. So you cannot get lost or get turned around. I selected the map-program through the handset. It was the first thing I did before I started recording.
I do not mind going away. I was one of them, darling. An Unknown. That’s why my name is not on the records. Dad gave me trapdoors into the computer systems that survived the Netcrash. That’s why I was able to find my family. To find you. I am sorry for the things I did and I do not really mind dying. I’ve tried to make up for it.
What else do I need to say? I am getting sleepy now, and its hard to think.
I am the last of the Unknowns. I could make myself a fake ID. I could travel in the East on forged papers. I could give myself authorization to read the Child Safety and Domestication Bureau records, to unseal sealed files, and depart without a trace.
My magic. Left over from the old days. I wove a cloak of cunning mist and made myself invisible, while I was right in front of their eyes. Who looks at janitors? My papers were in order.
The job as a janitor at the Children’s Center I got by hard work and sweat; something rare here. Tricking Mrs. Hechler into violating regulations and going to loot a deserted house in a public-owned area was simply not difficult. All serfs ignore regulations when they can; it’s the only way they can live. There are just so many regulations, you see, no one can listen to them all.
Is there anything else I need to tell you, anything else I need to explain?
What they told you about the West is all lies too. We don’t shoot each other down in the streets, we don’t have gunfights in every bar. We do have bars, but not everyone drinks.
I do not know what went wrong with all the people back East, after the Diebacks. I do not know why they could not rebuild. The Western states are mostly empty desert. How come they got rich? I do not know. Maybe the Easterners did not have the will to resist when the People’s Green Church of Mother Life came along. They certainly did not have the means to resist. They did not have anything like Peter.
But those deserts are so beautiful under the starlight. You’ll see them soon.
Oh, God, let me stay awake long enough to tell you this.
Darling, I do not know the names of my contacts in the underground railroad. Re-member I told you about encryption? You just go to any public phone once you are across the Mississippi, in the wide Western places they’ve remembered finally what a free country is supposed to be. They’ve also remembered how to set up a working Net again.
Another Net. Are the bad old days coming back again? I don’t know. I’m very tired, and I just don’t know. Maybe you can grow up and stop those bad things from happening.
Don’t let me forget. Get to the phone. Push the button shaped like Puss-in-Boot. It’s the crypto cat. It will turn on the circuit and make the phone call for you. It will call the nice people.
Get to a phone. Peter will know what to do. Trust Peter. He’ll take care of you. Peter loves you; I love you.
Goodbye, God bless, and Godspeed.
You mother is waiting for you in Austin. Your real mother. We got her out of the camps months ago. Her name is Roselinde. She was very pretty when she was your age.
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WAYWARD CHILD
An Alliance Archives Adventure
Mike McPhail
THE YEAR WAS UC84 BY THE NEW CALENDAR—ULTRA CUNABULAM . . . BEYOND THE CRADLE, AS translated from Latin—now, only some eight decades after man first reached for the edge of space, fate gave them the key to trans-light travel. With it, he unlocked the gates to the heavens.
The towering canopy of Demeter’s ancient forests cast a perpetual shadow on the ground far below. Against this shadowy landscape, the mind’s eye easily imagined yet unseen creatures lying off in the nearby darkness; watching and waiting for that one pivotal moment when prey became victim.
As the brightness of Tau-Ceti’s day turned into the all-consuming black of perpetually moonless night, the monsters of imagination took form; alien to this world, they roamed the darkness in an ago-old struggle: survival.
Two of these horrors moved over the root-covered ground with a deft bouncing motion; they negotiated the natural obstacles as if the blinding darkness that encompassed them held no domain. Their appearance brought to mind classic movie images of hellishly huge insects, with smooth carapaces, heads, and protruding mandibles. Their shapes and movements, however, were unmistakably that of man. It became all too clear at the sight of their angular Maschinengawehr-style weapons that these were men of war.
“Negative, we ran into another patrol, but managed to break contact,” reported Sergeant Bauer, his tone grim; he looked briefly at his helmet’s compass display. “We’re moving along at one-ten from our initial contact point; with luck we’ll swing around them, and then head toward the landing zone,” he concluded with a burst of static.
“Acknowledged,” replied the disembodied voice; with that the unseen squad leader’s icon disappeared from the sergeant’s helmet display only to be replaced by the comm’s standby marker. As a team leader, Bauer was required to carrier an additional signal booster. Tonight he was more than thankful for the surrounding hillyterrain played havoc with all but their short-range communications.
Stopping, Bauer half turned to survey in the direction from which they had come; in the space of a few heartbeats he was satisfied that there was no sign of pursuit. Pivoting back, he could see on of his men up ahead. We’re not faceless ma-chines, thought Bauer at the sight of his fellow trooper; he understood the concept, but never truly felt it himself. Even if his suit wasn’t linked to the others via the pacscomp—the suit’s integrated computer/squad-level communications—he knew he would still be able to recognize his teammates.
Through his helmet’s display a bright green triangular icon topped with MGN was suspended ethereally near the other trooper; he didn’t need the electronic identifi-cation, to tell this was Morgan. There was just no mistaking the fact that under all that body-armor was a woman; with her wiry-build, she moved more like a dancer than a soldier.
“Maybe that’s the problem,” he thought, as a wave of anger pushed at him. “Morgan,” Bauer called.
“Sir,” Morgan replied, still transfixed on the undergrowth, scanning for possible threats. With a snap of her head she briefly looked back toward him; he was dou-ble-timing it to catch up. As he closed the dist
ance, he changed step to keep pace with her.
“What was your malfunction back there?” he demanded, getting up close until he practically loomed; only his discipline kept his emotions from coloring his words. The question gripped Morgan, an unseen force reaching out and engulfing her whole body. It drove the air from her lungs, making it hard to catch her breath. Within a few paces she stopped.
She flashed back to the Legionnaire; through a red haze, she saw the face of the young man. Armed with a bullpup assault rifle mounted with an underslung 30mm grenade launcher, he had been outfitted as a soldier, with ballistic-mesh and plate body-armor. He was no hardened warrior, that had been clear in his nervous and al-most confused actions; most likely a conscript, forced into service in this so-called war. His gaze had held terror as she eyed him over her own weapon’s targeting reticle.
With her fingers poised against her weapon’s electronic trigger group, she had depressed its safety; like a drumbeat, there was a sudden pounding in her head. She‘d tried to concentrate on making the shot, but as she struggled to depress the trigger the pounding threatened to overwhelm her; not until she withdrew her fingers from the trigger guard did the sensation subsided.
“Your inactions . . . ” the sound of Bauer’s voice snapped Morgan back to present, “ . . . put everyone at risk.” The sergeant was standing right in front of her; she tipped her head back so that her helmet’s side-mounted scopes could look up into his face-less visor.
Memories of her combat instructor, Major Stonebridge, push their way into her thoughts. The way he would scream in a put-on, typecast, British drill sergeant voice. “I don’t give a damn about your crisis of conscience; when you’re out there and some son-of-a-bitch is laying in fire on you and your men . . . ” He would then get up close and personal with one of those standing in the ranks; and in an almost pleasant voice, “ . . . you kill him, and keep killing him. You don’t stop killing him until he’s a pile of meat.” At which point he would rear back and demand that they all shout in the affirmative, then in an almost fatherly way, “After all, do you want to look into the eyes of your comrades, and know, that when the time came . . . that you . . . You!” he said pointing off into the ranks. “That you cared more for that son-of-a-bitch . . . ” he paused, “ . . . than you did for them?”
Damnú, she thought to herself in the Irish curse her mother used to use. I earned my chance to join the squads, and I’ve already screwed it up.
After scanning back the way they had come, Bauer turned back to Morgan. “You had him cold. What stopped you from putting a dart through him?” It was more of an accusation than a question.
Fighting back tears, all Morgan wanted to do was beg for Bauer’s forgiveness, but that would have put an end to her service in the ADF even faster than her screw up. “I have no excuse.” She said as calmly as possible.
The sergeant just stood there for a moment; it was obvious to Morgan that he was considering her answer, and that her future may very well be decided in the next few moments.
With a sharp nod of his head in the direction they were heading, Bauer turned and started to walk, “Get moving, we’ll de . . . ” was all he had a chance to say as time slip shifted into slow motion. She felt the shockwave of a fired round and knew there was nothing she could do. Trapped in the moment, Morgan watched as the faceplate on Sergeant Bauer’s helmet deformed around the point of penetration. Like a dis-charging strobe, the world around her disappeared with a brilliant flash of white light followed by intense darkness.
Within moments her vision returned. The return of sound was harsh in her ears as she stared in stunned horror at Bauer‘s body, collapsed to his knees, and only just starting to tip. The reality of the situation forced its way back into Morgan’s consciousness. Stepping back on her left leg, she turning and brought her gauss rifle to the ready position, aiming in the direction where the shot originate. The rifle’s targeting reticle hovered about in the ethereal space before her.
She saw nothing; in light-amp mode, her helmet-mounted imaging scopes could pick up enough trace light to turn the darkest night into false-color twilight. Despite that advantage, nothing . . . no one . . . was visible.
Her body was in motion before her mind officially gave the order; pivoting on her left foot, she drove herself back toward the massive tree trunk she had pass just moments before. With only a few paces until she reached cover, the air around her became populated by whizzing bits of glowing metal. They passed within inches of her faceplate each leaving a faint afterglow. Momentum took over and finished her bid to reach cover, but not soon enough.
She pressed her left forearm against the tree for stability and closed her eyes to help focus her senses; there was a smack to her right shoulder plate and a violent kick to the side of her helmet. She searched for the hot flow of blood pooling around her neck seal and found none; all she felt was a burning sensation to the side of her head. Static screamed in her ear. It was loud, almost loud enough to drown out the cracks and thumps as more bullets smacked into the tree, ricocheting off the ground around her.
Her heart pounded in her throat as she turned to look. Bauer was on his back, his knees bent and pointing up and away at odd angles; his head had rolled to the left as if looking to Morgan for help. His superimposed identification icon was now red and bordered by a time-stamp, indicating that his suit’s pacscomp had declared him dead and beyond reviving. In response, it then fulfilled its priority-one programming and burned itself out, leaving only the recovery signal operational.
“Bauer . . . ” She tried to speak, but her jaw was numb and apparently swollen beyond use; she felt isolated, and with a renewed burst of enemy fire, trapped. Panic pushed at her.
“When shite happens . . . ” screamed Stonebridge out of the past, “ . . . don’t stand around mourning your fallen comrades. That is, unless you intend to join them.” His face loomed large in her mind, his eyes burning with hatred. “Go and make those sons-of-bitches pay; and pay dearly.”
“Cac,” Morgan sub-vocalized in Gaelic. “Suit Mode, SIcom,” she said through her inner-monolog; literally reaching out via the nano-scale wires in her brain that formed the lattice work that was the Synaptic Interface antenna.
As always, the suit’s pacscomp AI picked up on the standardized keywords she used. “SIcom engaged,” reported the all-too-relaxed voice of the computer. Taking a deep breath, she held it, and then let out a long exhale; it helped—a little. The stress was still there, but now more defined, rather than all-encompassing.
“Brennen from Morgan,” she SIcommed, and waited as her pacscomp made con-tact and communed with her squad leader’s. In the span of just a few heartbeats nothing happened; no burst of static over her comhood’s headset, no surface thoughts, not even a confirmation icon on her display. Morgan suddenly felt like a small child who had just discovered that her parents were no were to be seen.
Pushing back against the growing stress, she tried again. “Bospher Comraden.” She thought, using the new open-frequency code words; even if the enemy could intercept this message, they would have no immediate way of knowing its meaning. This from their pseudo-language Ty’Linqua; it meant “Greetings (to my fellow) troopers.” In this case, it was a very polite way of calling for help from anyone who could both hear and understand; still nothing.
“Remember the difference between a Trooper and a warrior,” she recalled from one of the Major’s many lessons. But why this one? It only added to her confusion. Out of her memory, her instructor continued, “You fight as a member of a team, using all the skills and equipment your fellow troopers carry to the fight. A warrior fights alone, relying only on his own abilities and strength of arms.”
“What are you trying to tell me?” she thought, “What warning are you . . . am I giving myself? Yes, I’m alone.” That realization almost panicked her, but then she remembered “ . . . fellow troopers and their equipment!” She looked at her team leader, “The signal-booster!”
“Gun, Auto
,” she SIcommed, and watched as the targeting reticle’s quantifier-icon changed, confirming her instructions. Now on automatic, her weapon was capable of putting out some twelve hundred darts per minute—only about a fifth of the weapon’s maximum potential—but still fast enough to consume a 90-round magazine in little over four seconds. Her gauss rifle was up and at the ready as she lowered herself to her right knee, its traction pad biting into the ground.
By definition, Morgan was left-handed, but long ago she realized there was very little difference in her abilities with either hand. With a practiced right hand, she reached across her abdomen and withdrew a smoke grenade.
Gripping the beverage-size can against her palm, she depressed the safety bar that ran parallel to its side; a green icon appeared on her helmet’s display. Seating her thumb on the arming button on top, she drew back and shifted her body for the throw. She pressed down on the button. Click. The icon changed to red; in an overhand style that any soldier of Earth’s wars would have recognized, she lobbed the two-pound cylinder just past the side of her tree, off toward the shooters. Quickly, she stood up and made ready for a second throw.
Some ten yards away the first one landed with a thump, setting off its impact sensor. The grenade deployed three spring-loaded legs that seemingly popped into existence, kicking the cylinder up on end. With a pop, a jet of white spray shot up, filling the air over the canister with a dense plume of slowly falling particles; the cloud ignited, and expanded a hundred-fold in volume.
As the icon changed to confirm the grenade’s detonated, Morgan reared back for the long throw, trading accuracy for distance. The second canister arced toward the low-hanging branches, disappearing into the growing smoke screen.
Breach the Hull Page 5