by Lee Bond
Harredad looked at Salms, who nodded, saying, “I … I’d like to say it’s a possibility, Sa OverCommander, but … the power output reads like a God soldier, at least a Three, if not a Four. It’s definitive. There’s no way to discount this data. Unless the man is walking around with a power generator in his hands”
The assembled host chuckled at the notion. People were crazy, but they weren’t that crazy.
Just as crazy was the possibility that Bosch was a Sigma’d Three or Four who’d been through some kind of super high-tech upgrade. Where would someone find a facility like that in Latelyspace? Investigators had been all over Guillfoyle’s illegal experiments. To a one, they’d been designed with defeating God soldiers, not augmenting them further.
Vasily automatically discounted Trinity interference for one simple reason; if It was in the system fooling about, It wouldn’t waste time with a single massively augmented God soldier. It would have flattened them into paste long ago. There was only one entity in Latelyspace who could possibly be responsible for of Hieronymus Bosch's presence, and that was Garth Nickels. But he hadn’t had the time.
Vasily grunted and motioned for someone to speak.
U-Ito cleared her throat. “Whatever his origins, he does appear to be assisting us in his own way, though from what we’ve seen so far, it seems he is interested only in rendering the various threats non-functional. As we witnessed in the Tomb.”
“What I’d like to know is a) how he destroyed The Box, and b) why he destroyed it.” Harredad ignored the looks from his colleagues. “That in itself is an act of terrorism so vile, so heinous…”
Vasily inhaled slowly through his nose and then exhaled. It was sometimes easy to forget that Harredad was the youngest Colonel in the entire Army. At least until he opened his mouth. “Surely you realize, sa, that The Box in The Museums has always been a fake? That the original is kept in a secure storage facility beneath The Peak? Has been kept there for the past five hundred years?”
U-Ito and Salms snickered then drew straight faces as Vasily glared at them. Harredad blustered for a moment before recovering his footing. “As you say, Sa OverCommander, as you say. That fact does nothing to change the direction of my thoughts, merely the reasoning. It is undeniable that Bosch is interested in assisting us from the inside, but is it aid we truly want or even need? We are more than adequately prepared to deal with both the terrorists and this smaller splinter group. Actually, scenario avatars identify Bosch as a hindrance when we officially enter The Museum. Beyond that, we now have to contend with his knowledge that The Box inside was bogus. What if he tells someone that one of our major cultural icons is a fake? It would be disastrous.”
U-Ito nodded briefly. “I agree with some of what you said. Bosch will only get in the way. I –we- suggest that if he contacts you again, we force him to stay in one spot and wait for arrest. But as to The Box? Any fallout from what he says will affect the political arena, not the military one. In short, Harredad, it isn’t our concern.”
Harredad grunted, but accepted the clarification. Personally, he was shocked that The Box he’d gone to see as a child wasn’t the real one, but there were times and places to deal with terrible news and with U-Ito and Salms laughing at him, now was neither.
Salms wiped the table clean and uploaded the data on the terrorist weapons. “The first thing I’d like to address is these gun emplacements at the four central tier entrances to the Viewing Room. As near as we can tell, they’re Arbalest Series Two point Five, and they do come from the supposedly destroyed munitions base on the moon. Non-intelligent, but extremely capable all the same. I’m loading the specs to your personal protes. Pattern analysis shows both a clear shot to soldiers entering through the roof as well as being able to dispatch large numbers of hostages. If we do go in through the roof, I advise sending in two or three groups to ensure that we get at least a half-dozen soldiers through unscathed. The terrorists in the main staging area are all equipped with standard Marovsky automatic rifles and those mass-produced flash lasers used in close-quarters combat. Not strong enough to seriously hurt a Goddie, but they can burn the flesh right off their duronium undercoat. Long enough exposure and even a Goddie will think twice. The terrorists on the hunt for Bosch are similarly equipped, but are also carrying several dozen fragmentation, sonic, and flash grenades. He has them quite spooked. In the center of the Room there are six large containers,” the blueprint holo sketched out approximate sizes, “that could carry anything. They’re very well shielded.”
“Could they be holding more of the Trinity equipment? Like the seven-shot?” U-Ito asked.
Salms nodded after a moment. “Anything. Here is a list of the items from the moon base that could fit into those containers. As you can see, we’re looking at anything from deadly plasma gridades that can kill Goddies all the way up to a portable Longinus platform. They’ve had their hands on this stuff for three years. Who knows what they’ve figured out? And this splinter group?” Salms shook her head. The battle with the terrorists was going to be long, bloody and rough; the splinter group was a different matter. “They’re strictly non-issue. Beyond access to some very next-gen P2P encryption software and a minor hardware boost to increase the point-to-point ... they’re barely a blip. The automatic rifles are the pre-cursor to the Marovsky. They’re outfitted with standard duronium rounds. Absolutely non-lethal to Goddies and from activity in the Tomb, the zealots are only concerned with Gualf’s crew. I suggest we ignore them and focus on the terrorists.”
“What about these here?” Vasily drew the holomap to show the fifteen fuzzy spots on the wall.
Salms shrugged. “They barely show up on the mineral scans, Sa OverCommander. They could be some kind of enhancement for the Game. The curator is always trying to make his show the best one on the planet.”
Harredad laughed. “I remember one year he hired ex-contestants to…” he trailed off when the room grew quiet. “Yes, yes. Terrorists dead, leave the religious crazies for later, cajole Bosch into staying out of things.”
“Anything else?” Vasily asked, ready to call the meeting to an end.
“Other than they have those cheap cambots on the roof, nothing. All they’re doing is showing the fools inside just what we have planned. They can’t really put up much of a fight.” U-Ito replied.
Vasily nodded and shut the holoSheet off. “Excellent. I agree with your assessment of the situation. Before we send Goddies through the roof, I’d like to see the RailSniper in action. Let’s target Vilmos Gualf. If he’s the only one in charge of the operation, it might put an end to things before we need to start counting civilian deaths. That is all.”
xxx
According to the service manual, the Fully Automated RailSniper (Personnel Unit Version 1) was ‘unsafe for use within city limits’.
The shockwave kicked up by hyper-accelerated duronium slugs while on the ground was theoretically sufficient to cause anything from loss-of-service issues to destroying all the glass and other breakable objects in a three-mile radius. Avatars were only capable of determining that something might happen, not that it would, no matter how much data they were given.
Since the terrorists had started the job, it was the OverCommander’s sincere feeling that it was well within the army’s functional parameters to finish things off as quickly as possible. They’d blame the terrorists for any undue effects from firing the FARS-gun later.
The FARS-gun was a weapon engineer’s wet dream. Unlike ninety percent of the gear designed for God soldiers’ use on the battlefield, the RailSniper was -in addition to being a technical accomplishment in single-cast forging- a weapon of unique beauty and devastating power. Ten feet long from end to end –the generator and ammunition crates added another fifteen- the FARS-gun was intended to be used by Threesies of high enough intelligence and suitable marksmanship scores or by Foursies, who were of course able to use the high-tech weapon without fail. Assisted either by wEye distribution or through satellite imagery, t
he gun could see through walls and around a planet.
In the particular case of The Museum, it could see right through to the other side; people were ghosts and the walls of the structure, sometimes as thick as five solid feet of concrete and duronium, were as glass to the wielder.
The FARS-gun used electromagnetics to propel its payload up to lethal speeds but there was no accurate way to test the actual velocity of a round when it left the barrel. The equipment they had wasn’t sufficiently sensitive enough and the developers feared the only way to comprehend fully what they’d built was with the aid of artificial intelligence.
For the FARS-gun to be properly operated, the wielder was required to ‘jack in’ via their cybernetic implants. Onesies and Twoesies could never hope to understand the depth of technical information spilling into their cerebral cortexes. Any Three thusly capable would find himself or herself upgraded at the soonest possible convenience, but for this instance, they were going with the best choice.
Sa Gurant was a system-famous Four. He was the winner of the Last Game and was the system favorite to take home the prize again this year. He'd requested the honor of being present at The Museum for the takedown, and was deeply honored at being given the privilege of firing the FARS at the dirty terrorist buffoon. In a system where the Army meant little to anyone anymore, it was an unparalleled opportunity for both himself and the organization he lived and breathed to serve. Gurant was not about to waste that chance.
Gurant slotted the control mechs into his specialized prote and waited for the necessary augmentation buffers to come on line. Unlike a standard proteus, a Foursies’ linked directly into the skin through a series of increased-capacity nerve bundles that removed the necessity for ninety percent of manual data entry. From there, statistics received by the FARS-gun’s remote sensors, its own calculations and readings and/or telemetry reports from other sources were uploaded directly into the brain, where very advanced avatars, operating autonomously, calculated, plotted, and prepared the user. A vast majority of the information flooding through Gurant bypassed conscious absorption. In a flash, the Foursie simply knew how to operate the gun; until he disengaged from the control systems, he would always know.
Gurant bent down to the FARS-gun, hoisting it onto his shoulder in one smooth motion. Behind him, more than a thousand Onesies and a host of assorted military commanders watched as he fit the superfluous eyepiece over his targeting eye. He pushed both the grunts and the hats out of his mind. He had more important things to do.
Like becoming a hero to the people.
In his mind, Gurant watched the washed-out ghostly green-grey imagery of The Museum’s Viewing Room carefully. The audio was coming in at a three-milli delay, so he manually adjusted the feed until voices were synched. It didn’t really matter if the sounds meshed properly or not, but Gurant liked to have things neatly done; that attitude was one of the reasons he was both a Foursie and a Final Contestant. He shifted his stance minutely, correlating data flooding from the wEyes and Command’s own avatars until the FARS beeped. The ghostly figure centered in his mind’s eye was the target, Vilmos Gualf. “Target acquired, OverCommandersa!”
OverCommander Vasily’s orders came through loud and clear. “Fire at will, Sa Gurant.”
Gurant grinned. The EM couplings arranged down the barrel of the FARS-gun started whining the second he depressed the charge manifold. As more power from the generator -yet another bit of technical wizardry from the boys in the labs, this one thankfully unhampered by lack of AI- began coursing through the couplings, they started flashing sequentially. Glass shards from the buildings around Gurant and the gun started skittering across the pavement. A series of transitory avatars came and went on the edges of Gurant’s periphery until the gun declared itself ready to fire. He depressed the round manifold and grinned again when the heavy ‘shunk’ of a specially treated duronium slug slotted into place.
Gurant waited a moment until he was certain that Vilmos Gualf wasn’t going to move before pulling the trigger, not that it mattered; the ‘bullet’ would travel so quickly the man could be prepared to run and it would still hit him square in the heart.
Prepared for the massive shockwave, everyone assembled to watch the clinical test-fire suffered only mild bruising and temporary loss of hearing. As a Foursie, Sergeant Major Gurant was equipped with tools designed to filter out deleterious sounds: what point was there in a soldier being knocked to the ground by his own weapons? All he heard was a minor thump and the curses of men and women around him.
The shockwave was large enough to shatter glass across nine miles: as always, science geeks had forgotten to consider topography. The duronium slug, traveling at half the speed of c, went through the walls as if they didn’t exist.
xxx
Enforcer Griffin Jones shook his head and smiled. The FARS-gun was a wicked-awesome piece of equipment, no doubt about it.
For a backwater colony.
Griffin, who knew just what the terrorists had at their disposal, waited with baited breath to see how the Latelian God Army would respond to the shocking turn of events.
Xxx
One second, everything was as calm and stable as it possibly could be when a hundred angry terrorists held somewhere in the neighborhood of eight thousand people captive; by now, news of both the ‘other’ group of terrorists and this mysterious God soldier had begun trickling through the stands.
In true Stockholm fashion, a growing number of captives were beginning to see the wisdom of Vilmos’ words and were quietly deciding if they should offer their services to the Regimist ideologue.
The people who weren’t interested in anything the terrorists had to say were suffering from the kind of malaise that afflicts the terribly bored; beyond the occasional burst of terrifying, adrenalin-soaked panic at things like the gun towers or the random freak-outs of prisoners who couldn’t take things anymore, there wasn’t a lot going on.
The next second? Chaos.
The self-proclaimed pro-Regime Resurrectionist Vilmos Gualf was talking to his cohorts in one frame.
Then, the four terrorists he’d been addressing were blown upwards and away at impossible speeds, pulling a veritable blizzard of shattered and fractured equipment with them in their wake. A large chunk of equipment spiraled outwards to shatter against a support column for the upper balconies and then, darkness as whatever type of explosion bursting outwards from Vilmos’ location reached power distribution nodes.
A noise that was both an explosion and an implosion filled the Viewing Room, casting everyone into darkness. The column shattered from bottom to top, bringing down a section of the nosebleed seats. The sniper, sitting, idly playing Hangman on his prote until the incident, had to scramble frantically for a few minutes, perpetually on the edge of death until he got to safety.
The Museum filled with sounds of woe and dread mixed with barked, furious commands from terrorists trying to figure out what was going on.
Backup generators came on-line a few seconds later, flooding the place with light. Everyone stopped talking. Then everyone started looking around for the sound of the clapping echoing off the walls.
It was Vilmos!
Vilmos dragged himself agonizingly to his feet, looking much the worse for wear. Then he blinked, and the old fire was back in his eyes. He looked to the mangled remains of the first true victors in their drive to bring Doans back to her senses, a sense of deep satisfaction welling out of him. He turned.
All eyes were on him. Of course they were.
Vilmos smiled, his eyes burning like fire. You could hear a pin drop.
The terrorist rebel pulled off the shredded remains of his favorite red casual shirt and held it up for the assembled host to examine before tossing it aside. He did the same for last good pair of pants he’d ever own. Ignoring the bewildered looks glaring down at him, Vilmos tapped a button on his prote and the two remaining GigantiSheets flared to life, with him as the focus.
“I am wearing the la
test in Trinity protective gear, sis and sas.” Vilmos hawked up a gob of bloody spittle. “This suit was developed for … assets … that Trinity neither has the time nor the interest in directly protecting. Why that would be remains beyond me and possibly any sane human being in the entire Universe.” He straightened and smiled at the crowd.
“Known as ‘The Last Suit You’ll Need’, it is comprised of thousands and thousands of incredibly thin layers of foamed poly-cerametal. This particular ‘metal’ is one of the hardest substances known to Mankind. Yes,” He nodded at the cries of disbelief, “it is harder even than duronium. Duronium,” Vilmos added scathingly, “is barely a concern in Trinityspace, sis and sas.”
Vilmos turned to the audience, who –to a one- were captivated. He frowned apologetically at his rudeness before continuing. “Sandwiched between each of these layers is some sort of material that is capable of dispersing monumental amounts of kinetic energy through, if I am to believe what I am told, the very fabric of the cosmos itself. The Last Suit itself is smarter than some people you might know, and is capable of analyzing threats to its wearer in time slices smaller than any mind is able to experience. Analyzed, it then ‘orders’ the mechanisms to prepare for conflict, centering the bulk of its … resilience in the targeted area. As you can see,” he added wryly, stretching out again, amazed at how calm he was being; they’d tested the Suit against normal weapons, but the bullet that’d just shot at him was beyond anything he’d imagined.
“As you can see,” he started again, “the tech isn’t perfect. The poor warriors standing with me and a goodly amount of our equipment down here were not so lucky.” Vilmos gestured blithely towards the corpses of the four terrorists and let a grimace across his face. “A powerful tool in Trinityspace, where there are weapons and systems infinitely greater than our own miserable sciences, this Last Suit just protected me from a duronium slug traveling one hundred and forty-nine million meters per second. These Suits are easy to acquire and if, if Trinity deigns to send It’s troops here, every man and woman in It’s Army will be thusly clad.”