He spoke to the voice control of the holographic reader. The image paused, then expanded.
The face of the woman who’d escaped was slightly distorted by the faceshield of her helmet, and she was considerably younger—
But the features were beyond doubt the same as those lowering down from the portrait of Vice Admiral Teitelbaum on the wall behind.
SPACE IS BIG. That is a gross understatement. No better description has been given. This is such because there are no words for a concept incapable of being grasped by the human mind. Picture three items, red balls perhaps. Now five. Okay seven. Now try for a million. Not the number, but the image of a million individual balls. There are millions of stars in the spiral arm of our galaxy that housed the Alliance, and the Syndicate. At top speed these average about a week apart. Nor are they evenly spaced. Some clusters contain hundreds of stars. In the emptier areas a ship could cruise for weeks and not pass within sensing range of a planetary system. Even if they had the luxury of time, there was no way the Fleet could simply find the Syndicate home worlds. With small fleets of Syndicate ships already ranging into Khalian space, there was no time at all.
Somewhere among the hundreds of thousands of stars bordering Alliance and Khalian space, maybe, could be found the worlds of the Syndicate. The secret of their location in an otherwise nondescript cluster of fifty thousand stars was the most vital piece of information needed for the Fleet to act. No effort was too desperate. Until then the Fleet was no better than a blind man flailing wildly to defend himself against an unknown number of club-carrying assailants.
The hidden military facilities prepared by the Syndicate were often interspersed among the Khalian worlds. Many of these were bases prepared for future action, now only lightly manned by a few family members and their guards. Since the Syndicate technicians completely controlled the Khalia’s ability to travel between worlds, it was a simple matter to lock out any areas they did not wish to have visited. Even after they had sworn allegiance to the Alliance, no Khalian was capable of alerting the Fleet to this threat in their very midst.
When such a world was discovered, it was necessary to act swiftly. Only on them were men who knew the vital information of the whereabouts of the cluster containing the Syndicate home worlds. No information could be gained from slag and rubble. Even the most poorly defended had to be taken by assault. Such attacks tended to high casualty rates, but when the alternative was certain defeat in a defensive war, the Syndicate’s location, or even just clues, were worth any price.
THE MESSAGE that English left with the MAC/ASD receptionist said, “Gone to Electro Research Station for therapy—Capt. Tolliver English, 92nd RMC, SERPA/J36/ TACOPS.”
Being on ice for forty-five days behind the lines didn’t mean you were cooled out; Toby English was living proof of that. Ever since his outfit, the 92nd Marine Reaction Company (Redhorse), had carried X-class weapons into battle for Eight Ball Command, they’d been getting more and more “special.” And English had been getting into more and more trouble.
“Special,” out here at Military Assistance Command/ ASD, meant trouble. Special Electromagnetic Research Projects Agency (SERPA) had its own huge, privileged station at the MAC/ ASD facility, orbiting a gas giant that the command-and-control facility was using as a power plant.
The first time that English had seen the space base, he’d known he’d be lucky if he ever got Redhorse out of there alive. The 92nd was coming off a sterilization mission for ISA, the Interservice Support Activity. You couldn’t blame the brass for wanting to segregate them: nobody in the regular Fleet was liking Redhorse real well these days; everybody they’d killed or arrested as enemy spies during the ISA mission had friends. But you could blame Eight Ball Command for handing you over to SERPA to spend your downtime as guinea pigs. Or maybe the rest of your lifetime.
There hadn’t been any choice that English could see. There still wasn’t. They were here until the Haig came to get them when the destroyer was finished with its purported retrofit. Or until they got killed in SERPA experiments.
After a month and a half of psychovers and various therapies, English still wasn’t sure which fate he preferred. His outfit wasn’t just a Marine Reaction Company any longer; SERPA had turned them into something euphemistically called “Electro Research.” And English didn’t like being the tactical operations arm of SERPA one bit.
He didn’t like the equipment. He didn’t like the implications of the kind of retraining they were being given. But nobody gave a damn what he liked except the sex therapists, who couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t take advantage of their services.
All the therapy Toby English needed was down here in the Virtual Prototyping bay of the Electromagnetic Research Station.
He pushed his hand against the palm-ID imprinter and peered into the retinal scanner. A sharp puff of air stung his eyeballs.
The door ending the short, featureless corridor said, “Please identify yourself by voice.”
“English, looking for a couple hours in the funhouse.” It didn’t matter what you said. The AI guardian just wanted to be sure that he wasn’t too spiked to go beyond this point.
It compared his voice with the template on file, and then considered his palmprint and galvanic skin response, the dilation and mapping of his pupils, the pressure in his eyeballs.
The door swung back, which meant that the Station AI had decided he wasn’t about to go berserk. Which, considering the weapons behind the heavy door of the ERS, was a real consideration when you were deciding whether to let somebody through.
It was sleep cycle for the command-and-control facility. English didn’t expect to run into any humans in here. So it was strange that the lights were lit in the halls.
Last time he’d come down to the funhouse this late, they hadn’t been. Still, he’d come to get some time in on his customized hardsuit and the Associate AI and APOT weaponry that went with it.
He didn’t need to disturb some clerk working here late. He knew where everything was. He’d been spending all of his waking hours “consulting” with the SERPA techs, tweaking this twitchy gear up to something like combat readiness, while he was waiting for his replacement personnel.
The tour refit specs were easier to meet than the personnel specs. They’d gotten three new guys. They’d fitted them to hardsuits and neurotyped them for the second-generation Associate electronics that powered the battle-management systems in the suit helmets. And then, two days ago, Greco, one of the new guys, had had a heart attack during a Difficulty Seven simulation.
Now SERPA wanted to tear everything down again and find out why. English turned a corner and a light above a doorway blinked on, scanned him, and opened the door to the locker room for him.
The door shut behind him. The lights all flicked red for a minute before they came back sunlight-spectrum. He hand-printed his locker and it opened. Greco, the dead guy, was simply ready to have a heart attack, English had tried to explain. He’d seen it before, during drop phase. Something always went wrong with special operations. When you got operations this special, things were going to go wrong during training.
That suited English fine. A corpse is lots less trouble when he’s in a nice clean research facility than when he’s in your com circuit and battle plan minutes before you jump into a hot landing.
Stripping down to his antistatic skivvies, English tried not to look at himself reflected in the mirror. He was looking at a coward: somebody who didn’t have the guts to make the fuss necessary to keep Redhorse out of this particular billet.
Funny, it didn’t show on any of his workups, not even his psychover. The psych therapists didn’t care about his dreams of dead guys, any more than the physical therapists cared about the weird little tics he’d developed in the wake of using the A-potential (APOT) electromagnetic beam weaponry, or the tan he’d gotten from spending so much time in the simulators’ m
ixed fields.
He was “well within the curve,” and looked healthier than he could ever remember. His muscle tone was great, optimized by the artificial gravity of the station and the cushy living conditions at MAC/ASD. His long-limbed frame had filled out; he was carrying about twelve percent fat; his rest pulse rate averaged sixty-five and his stressed pulse rate averaged eighty-five.
Only he felt like death warmed over, but you couldn’t put that in any report. He’d tried. He had a formless dread that everybody told him was just normal, considering that when the Khalian enemy had surrendered, the Alliance had found out there was a bigger, badder, higher-tech power behind the Khalia—enemies that humans might not be able to defeat.
The scuttlebutt had it that those Syndicate enemies were human. Toby English had grown up killing Weasels, furry Khalian enemies whose tails he collected until he had a coat and bedspread’s worth.
He wasn’t exactly unwilling to kill humans. But he was unwilling to get himself killed so that SERPA could report to OPSCOM through Eight Ball Command that, yes, indeed, there really was a humanoid threat out there.
He felt old and tired and he really did have a pathological hatred for APOT rifles. Never mind that SERPA was sure that the weird shit he saw when he fired one was just a backwash of excited electrons spinning through his skull from another universe—nothing to sweat.
As he got out his hardsuit and clamped the metalcomposite body armor over him, the sticker revealed in the back of his locker reminded him: STATIC IS THE ENEMY.
“Bullshit,” he told it. Human error was the enemy. He still wasn’t satisfied that he or any of his men really were neurotyped sufficiently for this customized equipment. Or, if they were, that field retrofits were possible, if you lost a soldier and had to cannibalize his equipment the way you could with regular gear.
He slung his ELVIS (Electromagnetic Vectored Integrated Scalar) pack onto his back, got the APOT rifle from its hook, and then fitted his helmet and gloves into the system.
Snapping his visor down, he brought up his displays and went through his self-test. Then he said, “Bay One, Conflict Scenario,” and started down the hall, waiting for his Associate AI to tell him what was playing in the funhouse tonight.
His Associate said, “Scenario in progress.”
Shit, he hadn’t meant that he wanted to walk in on a running game . . . “Reprogram. Display options.”
The heads-up showed him a complex, quadranted grid that was no different from a real battle plan, with blips of various colors and digital call signs beneath.
English’s sphincter muscles tightened. Things had been screwy with the simulator ever since Greco had had his heart attack. SERPA kept saying that it hadn’t impacted the AI sysop to monitor a human death, but SERPA said what served SERPA . . .
When he got to the holo bay, he realized that somebody was already in there. He relaxed. There was nothing wrong with the sysop for the funhouse. Even better, there was nothing really wrong with his Associate. He’d had trouble with the previous model in combat, when his Delta-One Associate had usurped his command prerogatives.
Now he had an override switch, in case that happened again, that allowed him to cold-voice-code the entire electro/transducer/battle-management system.
If he ever needed it, he was going to enjoy the hell out of the moment he got to pull the Associate’s plug. . . .
The simulator was running hot and heavy. English’s breathing and pulse rate were beginning to respond to the visual cues of conflict on his heads-up display, even though he’d been in the simulator countless times and knew that a Virtual Prototyping module was a big, empty bay with holographic and electro-imaging capabilities, and that was all.
English said to his Associate, “What’s the scenario?”
It came up on his screen: Syndicate Base Raid; Difficulty Level, Ten.
They’d had a guy die of fright at Difficulty Level Seven. Who the fuck was in there, anyway?
He asked the Associate for a patch to whoever was playing through. There were other teams training here, English knew—small, seven- to twelve-man assault units, nothing as big as his fifty-man demi-company. Maybe it was Sawyer. Sawyer, English’s line lieutenant, was crazy enough to test the limits of these systems just to make sure they were safe for his men to use. . . .
“Hey, Sawyer? That you?” The dual-com English voice-actuated would only come up in Sawyer’s helmet.
No answer.
English was punching his code into the combination lock, because he was damned if he was going to wait in line for what he rightly considered the 92nd’s funhouse, when he heard a voice:
(Static.) “ . . . fratricide between these systems, Incoming User. Sending 3.5 GHz; repeat, freq stabilizer F coming your way.”
Well, well. English punched the last combination number into the lock and the door opened. He’d see what this guy from some other unit had for stones, once their suits locked up.
A Ten Simulation didn’t scare English. He’d done the first field test of this equipment, in combat, without a familiarization run-through beforehand. And lived to be told not to talk about it.
As the door slid back and he stepped down into a chaos that came in through all his sensoring packages, making his head swim, he braced himself: you felt everything in this funhouse you’d feel if you were really discharging your weapons.
For all he knew, he really was punching a virtual hole in space-time every time he laid on his trigger in this test bay. His trigger finger always felt shocky, like it did with the real thing. The friendly fire problems of this equipment were pretty serious, though, and nobody was admitting to these practice rifles being the same as the real ones.
Still, you shot what you got on your display, you felt what you felt when you were shooting for your life.
Somebody else shot—either the other player, or the sysop. English hit the deck, his visor whiting out because he was taking fire point-blank.
Game in progress.
On his belly, he wriggled forward, talking his systems through a damage assessment, waiting for his visor to clear itself. When it didn’t, immediately, he was suddenly afraid that the simulator was going to tell him he was dead. So he asked for enemy targeting and positions of his “men.”
He got a quick visual of something like a football field with five black towers that he could see. Then his Associate showed him a putative field-of-fire grid, with twelve three-teams, a command-and-control vehicle, and three two-teams designated in various grid squares.
And he got the other player, live: a yellow bead lit on the left upper quadrant of his visor and a voice said, “You reading me, Eye-Cubed-Ell?”
“Delta Two,” habit took over, “to Yellow Shooter. What the hell’s Eye-Cubed-Ell?”
“Oh. Sorry. Thought you were someone else. I3L: Ingenuity, Innovation, Intelligence, and Luck. You almost bought it back there, Delta Two. Want to integrate me? You’ve added lots of synth shooters.”
“Yeah. Take Omega Leader, it’s close to where you are.” He toggled out, told his Associate that Omega was now a three-team with a live leader who had dual-com requirements, and then back in: “We’re running. What’s the target? You’ve been playing this longer than I have.”
“Target’s black tower, twelve o’clock, my plot point.”
“Right,” said English. It wasn’t a game any longer. At least, it didn’t feel like a game. There was enemy fire pinning down three of his synth teams, and his Associate wanted him to retreat to the C&C vehicle.
“Omega Leader, I’ll want point.”
“Come get it, hotshot—Delta Two.”
“On my way. We get there, touchdown, you buy the drinks.”
“Be the first time in synth history, but sure—you’re alive, you got it.”
English got off the dual-com and onto all-com. Sweat was pouring down into his
eyes. His suit turned its climate control up and he began to shiver.
It was a long way to Black Tower N and there were four enemy blip configurations headed straight toward him.
You could get killed doing this. Greco had. There was no such thing as not for real, especially with this equipment. He fired a burst at something that popped up on his far right, just as his Associate targeted it for him. They were synced better than ever. But that didn’t stop the weird-ass effects: his soul turned inside out. A hot wind blew through there. He saw strange clouds and funny flora and fauna.
Bullshit he wasn’t shooting real zero-point energy through his rifle. He felt the world rock under him.
It was now a matter of pride that he would run this simulation through without losing a single synth team, from the point, so that he could collect his drinks from the cocky son of a bitch who was with Omega. Never mind that Omega was a synth team.
Toby English was a bad loser.
He talked his synth teams into position. He brought up his C&C car and ported data to it so that it would clear a broadband swath to the target.
Then he ran like hell, dodging synth fire, talking his teams through in a shorthand that his Associate and he had developed, until he was up by Omega’s grid square and right below Black Tower N.
He asked for a head count. Not one casualty. Then the virtual reality program that had been showing him terrain in his heads-up whenever he asked for it showed him an actual person as opposed to a simulated person.
He could tell because the helmet turned toward him, black visor down, had “Cleary” stenciled on it, and the asshole wearing the helmet was pointing an APOT rifle at him.
In that moment he thought: ISA. Grant’s sent somebody to waste me, unattributably. And I walked right into it.
Then he thought, as sweat made his eyes sting and his suit hummed and aspirated, trying to cool him, Get the fucker, as his body lunged forward and he caught the barrel of the other rifle over his, and jerked up before he swatted sideways.
The Fleet05 Total War Page 18