“I am not,” it said. “The Sentinel Complex is below Underhive. That is my objective.”
“The bombing is over,” the officer said. “There is an ongoing ground engagement. We think it’s somewhere above the south end of Underhive between the landing center and the main upper cross connect.”
Underhive is part of NHC. You can’t attack one without hitting the other, Derek thought, blinking as the deck officer’s words replayed in his mind. “I wasn’t talking to you.” he added aloud as he turned and walked away several steps, ignoring the confused expression on the officer’s face.
“That is partially true,” Odysseus said. “There will be collateral damage, however they are allies of FleetCom so you should be willing to accept this reality.”
No. You cannot attack innocent civilians because they are inconveniently in your way. Derek thought.
“I can.”
“They will blame me for that. You have to stop!” the director said, his voice almost pleading.
“We can’t stop it,” the officer said, shaking his head and checking the expression on the faces of the security escort to make sure he wasn’t the only one who thought Tomlinson sounded crazy. “We didn’t start it, and we don’t know where the orders came from.”
“Frag off, I’m not talking to you,” Derek snarled.
The man snapped off a quick salute, pivoted and walked away.
“Although it was a matter of convenient coincidence, I have made provisions so they will not blame you,” Odysseus said as an image of Paulson Lassiter sneaking along a corridor flashed through his mind.
FleetCom Military Operations Center: Lunar L-2 Shipyard:
The fight was on. Ylva Visser stood her ground defending her argument that they could not afford to engage the ships above Sinus Iridum. Quintana let her have her way in the debate, in part because he agreed with her, but also because he didn’t want to be the only one to say no to Mayor Pallassano.
“If we send the six multicruisers we have in there to engage an unknown force, we’re risking half the ships we’ve got in zone one. Half of them.”
“We can’t let Tomlinson pound these people into submission,” Hamid Roudini said, slapping the table to punctuate his comment. “There are a million residents in Underhive. A million. How many of them will be dead before he stops?”
“All of them, maybe,” she said, shaking her head. “Maybe. But we can’t stop them with fragging multicruisers. All we can do is get blood for blood. That’s not how you win a war!”
“Maybe this isn’t a war we can win either,” Ducat said. The OpsCom officer liked to be a peacemaker, but the admiral could tell instantly that he’d only thrown flammables on an already incendiary argument.
Visser pushed back from the table so hard she slammed herself into the wall behind her. “It’s the battle we can’t win,” She growled. “We sure as frak can win the damned war, but not if we throw assets uselessly into a pointless bloodbath.”
She clenched her jaw closed with enough force that Quintana could see the muscles of her face distorting under the strain. She let out a noisy sigh. “We don’t know how many ships they are moving into the field. How many multicruisers will you sacrifice just to appease your need for retribution?” She held her hands up and floated back to the table. “Let’s say we take all their ships out even without losing anything. Then what?”
“Then we cut off their retreat,” Roudini said.
“Who says they intend to retreat? We still don’t know what they’re doing there.”
“They are punishing NHC for joining our side,” Ducat said.
“No, they’re not,” she said. “Otherwise they’d be after the mayor and the leaders. They’d be looking to make a spectacle out of her to send a message to any other administrators thinking of rebelling. There’s something else happening here. We just don’t see it yet.”
“But we can’t sit around and wait for them to whip it out and wave it in our face,” Roudini said. “We’ve got to stop them.”
“We’ve got six multicruisers in the pool now,” she said. “And six more pinned inside the blockade here with us.”
“We’ve also got three more due into the Zone in thirty-six hours,” the admiral added.
“If we want to do this, then we need to wait for them to get here and focus our efforts on breaking the battle group that’s locked us in,” she said. “If we can do that, we’ll be bringing fifteen big-boys to the party.”
Quintana nodded. “Six multicruisers they might consider taking, maybe even nine. But fifteen multicruisers is a fair fight for all of what they’ve got in Zone One.”
“My point exactly,” she said. “We can kick them in the shins now, or we can bust their eggs in two days.”
“But how many will die in Underhive in two days?” Roudini asked, his face showing he wasn’t ready to give up to her logic.
“I’m sorry Hamid, but there’s no easy solution here,” Quintana said, shaking his head. “We need to let the mayor know she’s got to hang on for two days before we can get there.”
“I’ll handle that,” Visser said, her eyes telling him she‘d do her best to make sure it went down smooth.
“And I will get TFC to send everything but the toilet paper,” Quintana said. “It’s the best we can do.”
Jakob Waltz Medical Center: Gateway Colony: L-4 Prime:
They were expanding the MedBay to cover what had been the whole CrewDeck of the Jakob Waltz. It would be nice once they had the work done, but for now it was pure chaos. The only space that wasn’t half-disassembled was what had once been Anju’s quarters and even the front half of that was nothing more than a console and four chairs around a small worktable.
Tana had followed Anju like a woman on a mission.
“Before you start digging into the mystery, let me explain a few things and save you a lot of time,” Tana said as she pulled herself into the room and settled down onto a chair.
“Genetic engineering?” Anju asked. “I remember my mother talking about how humans should adapt themselves to Mars and not the other way around. It’s been a long time, but I still remember the debates she had before …”
“You were what, maybe nine when Burroughs happened?”
“Yah. Spent two years in the Twin Cities during the short times before we went back,” she said, bouncing over and settling across the table. Every time the memories came back, she felt like she was staring at a ghost. “I left for good the day after my eighteenth birthday. Haven’t heard or seen my mother since.” She shook her head.
“She’s considered a hero,” Tana said. “Almost legendary.”
“That would depend on who writes the books,” Anju said.
“I didn’t come here to drag up old feelings,” Tana said. “I wanted to answer the questions I’m sure you have about Kylla and the others.”
“Like I said, they’re genetically engineered. That much I already figured out. I’m sure given time I’ll get the rest worked out.”
“Everybody on the Katana except Edison and Tamir are engineered in some way,” Tana said.
“Even you?”
She nodded. “Mine is minor, but yes even me. Most of the modifications in the early program were simple. Things like a boost to senses. Hearing is easy. Eyes, too. Smell was a lot more challenging since the olfactory nerves are complex. Even physical strength and endurance are fairly straight forward.”
“Saffia called Seva an alpha, is that what she meant?”
“Yes. Seva was from the first program,” she said. “She got a reflex and strength tweak. I remember working on her myself, but she doesn’t know that.”
“Small solar system,” Anju said.
“Indeed.” Tana smiled. “Although in reality, not all coincidences are serendipitous. We helped nudge her onto this mission.”
Anju raised an eyebrow. “The same way I got nudged onto this mission?” She let a spark of anger flash for a moment, but she bit down and let her thought die
unspoken.
“Actually, your mother wanted you here,” she said.
“I suspected she was behind it,” she said, her tone dropping a block of ice on the table between them.
“Let me back up and start over,” Tana said. “It isn’t my intent to excise scar tissue. I’m willing to leave it alone, if that’s what you want.”
Anju nodded, but said nothing for several seconds. “You’re right,” she said. “My baggage is in my past, and it needs to stay there.”
“Let me tell you how the programs worked and what I brought with me,” she said. “The alpha tier was the genesis of all the work we do now. It started out as a research program to see how far we could manipulate the genetic code of already viable specimens.”
“Manipulating living creatures?” Anju said. “They used to call it gene-hacking.”
“That was a very dangerous practice, but essentially it’s what we did,” Tana said. “We never intended the alpha tier to be a long-term project, but some results were useful. We’ve been working on the simple upgrades for a couple decades and we’ve explored things as far as we can safely push the limits of viability.”
“What does that mean?”
“Kylla was a volunteer for the alpha tier program right toward the end of the research, and she has almost every upgrade we could pack into an already living human. She has the basic sensory kit and several other things, but she was the first to get a cognitive boost.”
“That’s why she absorbed the language as quickly as she did?” Anju asked.
“Probably so,” Tana said. “The modification rewired part of her Broca Region so that her logic centers connected more directly to each other.”
Anju leaned back in her chair and grinned. Turning to reach behind her she picked up a thinpad and thumbed through screens as she said. “Go on.”
“The redesign gave her an increase in cognitive processing, but it apparently worked to give her a language kick we hadn't tested for,” she said. “The One-Voice laws of the early Union, wiped out the need for multilingual skills, so we never even thought about it.”
“How did she do in mathematics?”
“I don’t remember off the top of my head, but I’d expect that would be high,” she said. “Why?”
“We’ll come back to that,” Anju said, setting the thinpad face down on the table and nodding.
“Ten years ago, we wound down the alpha work, but just before we did we began the next level of augmentation,” she said.
“Fetus modification?”
“Exactly,” she said. “There is only so much alteration we can do to a living subject before the collateral genetic effects cause a degradation of viability.”
“Isn’t that a euphemism for ‘we can only tweak the code so far before we screw things up?’”
“Pretty much,” Tana confirmed. “Kylla was the only alpha to get that particular cognitive alteration, and it didn’t come without a serious complication.”
“Failure of the buccal mucosa?” she asked. “That’s minor, and is an easy cosmetic fix. The dental aperture is stylish, but not all that useful to hide a deformation.”
“The tissue was weak, but she has a blood oxygenation issue when she concentrates,” Tana said. “It also comes with a temperature regulation problem, too.”
“So it’s to ventilate her brain?” She almost laughed.
“We solved the problem in the fourth generation of crèche augments, so now the only way to tell they are over working is to watch for capillary dilation,” she said. “Except for Saf, all the people we brought are gen-four or later.”
“Does Saf have an overheating problem too?”
“Yes, but not that way,” Tana said, winking. “That also brings me to something that might be important to consider living in a closed space with this many CA. You need to know that any gene modification we’ve ever done, since the earliest work in the alphas, has resulted in an unintended alteration in pheromone production. It can have some undesired effects on normals that aren’t used to it.”
“That explains so much about Seva,” she said. “The first year of our mission she bedded everybody on the ship. Except Jeph.”
“He wasn’t interested?” she asked.
“I think he was terrified of being broken,” she said, laughing.
“Switching gears,” Tana said. “Why did you ask about Kylla’s mathematic skills?”
“The Shan Takhu language uses a mathematical syntax, but mostly I’m just poking it to see what sticks,” she said, drumming her fingers on the back of the thinpad. After several seconds, she flipped it over and slid it across the table. “Is this the modification to the Broca Region you were talking about?”
“When did you scan Kylla?”
“It isn’t hers. This is Ian,” she said “Is he one of yours?”
“Who?”
“Dr. Ian Whitewind,” Anju said, realizing that he might not have come up from the Kanahto since they arrived.
Tana pulled the pad closer and shook her head as she studied it. “Is he one of the Armstrong crew? I pulled up your mission charter on the way out here and cross-matched it to our records to make sure I knew the topography on the deck. I don’t remember anyone by that name.”
“He wasn’t one of our crew. Dr. Whitewind was the chief scientist on the Hector,” Anju said. “The Hector crashed here eleven years before we arrived.”
“If he’s been here that long, he couldn’t be,” she said. “We did Kylla’s modification nine years ago, and she was the first and only one to get that degree of work.”
“You’re sure he isn’t an Alpha?”
“I’m certain,” she said. “You’ve only got two people on your crew who are augments.”
“Two?”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Sub -27: Underhive: New Hope City: Luna:
Paulson sat in the small room that was not much bigger than the cell he occupied after his arrest, but at least the door locked from the inside. It was once a maintenance monitoring room, but someone had converted it into a rat hole for hiding. There was a small console and a chair, and a cot in a separate area that might have been a supply closet.
After his protector had dropped him here and told him to not come out until the storm was over, he’d tried to sleep. He’d chosen to doze upright in the chair since it smelled less of sweat and other bodily fluids than the bed. Every time he dropped off, he snapped back awake, with visions of the door bursting open and security units charging in to arrest him again. These flashes of nightmare fragments dragged claws through his conscious reality, leaving his chest pounding and his hands shaking.
It was hard not to expect his fear to manifest at any moment because he didn’t trust his keeper to not sell him out. Although he had no way of knowing, he expected the goody-bag with his name on it was overstuffed with papercred. That meant he was only as valuable to Demonica as what she perceived his potential profit margin to be above her available instant gratification.
When you relied on thieves and junkies for support, your foundation was never on stable ground. And the woman who took him in might have been a queen in the underworld, but the shifting sands of fortune left him very much aware of how dependent on her, his situation was.
An atmospheric breach claxon pulled him back to the world, and he gave up on his thoughts of empires in the wasteland. The single light in the overhead flickered once. Nothing serious and he almost wondered if he had imagined it. A second later the ground trembled. Something must have taken out a power relay, and the system had shunted to another trunk line.
What the hell? He cocked his head to the side and listened to the silence. The ventilator’s hiss was barely audible, and somewhere just below that, an ominous irregular rumble. Intermittent and only a little louder than the air moving around him. But it was there, like explosions far off in the distance.
There must be something bigger happening here.
Leaning forward he clicked on the newswave an
d flipped through several feeds before he found what he needed to see. Hard facts, not plastic avatar people with pasted on smiles and artificial personality.
A scroll marched across the screen and he stared at it. “At least a thousand military units are attacking Underhive and the loop services hub from there. Evacuations are in progress and civilians are advised not to engage.”
Another one announced, “Fighting is spreading in Underhive Sub-18. All levels above that are engaged in sporadic conflict and emergency recovery operations.”
Only nine levels above here. A lump of fear clogged his throat before he remembered that Underhive sprawled for hundreds of square kilometers, so nothing said it was near him. He swallowed hard and kept scanning the feed.
“Security reinforcements are arriving from TFC.”
From Tsiolkovskiy? “Has the war already started?” he asked the empty room.
In lock-up, he had no access to information about the outside world, but he hadn’t expected it could have changed this much. But if FleetCom is sending reinforcements, it has to be.
That meant the attack wasn’t an effort to recapture him. It had to be something else. Now that they’d stolen the unaligned fleet from him, he couldn’t be worth this much effort.
He flipped back to a regular feed and left the audio off. He watched the images and the headlines since they contained more factual data and less opinion. AI systems provided locations of fighting, casualty reports and damage assessment, without biasing them for sensationalism. The images from close to the front lines filled the center of the screen and the upper banner lines seldom caught his eye. At least not until his name appeared on one. He tapped the screen and called up the audio and video feed.
“These images are coming in from an undisclosed source and we’re trying to confirm where they were taken,” the commentator said as his face disappeared and one of the upper levels of NHC materialized.
“I think that looks like the upper concourse of the Underhive Cross Connect, but I might be wrong,” a second anchor said.
“The optic feed seems to be from a hand-held device, and whoever took it was behind the lines where the assault is happening,” the first one said. “The reason this is getting so much attention is right there.” The image zoomed in on a group of men and froze.
Shan Takhu Legacy Box Set - With an Extra Bonus Story Page 74