Transcendence (10 page)

She turned her attention back to the splice and sighed; nothing more could be done here for the next 1.4 hours, anyway. The hunters would take care of themselves. She flicked out of raw feed, her splice snapping shut before her eyes as if some invisible hand pulled out a visual piece of pie, and her natural pov merged back into one seamless piece. She blinked. Shen-lin’s arm reattached to his round shoulder.

A storm outside the station buffeted the fuselage, hissing against the polymetal hull behind her and tossing the station’s equilibrium slightly. She pictured the wingshape rising a few centimeters above baseline, as if trying to launch into space. Shen-lin’s knees jerked ungracefully in response to the tilting floor.

“
Why do you interrupt important work?” she asked in English, knowing it would irritate the conservative little man. Knowing that his superiority was technical only, she felt brave. He could pass no dictums against her division now.

“
Apologies, Coordinator,” Shen-lin replied in Mandarin, his eyes clearly not focused on her but on her electronic representation—her 3VRD. “The stations are growing anxious for information about the threatening EarthCo craft. It brought much destruction to the Phobos facility, and—”

“
Tell them their Coordinator of Protection has the threat well under control.” Still, she frowned at a nagging fear and decided to dedicate a sixth hunter to intercept the advancing warship. Should she initialize the
Sigwa
, Neptunekaisha’s only destroyer? No, it would be foolish to place such a perfect craft in danger.

These new hunters would suffice. Each, the hunters and their armaments and support systems, had cost nearly half a million credits—fifty times an average NKK citizen-shareholder’s income. However, each of Neptunekaisha’s stations were appraised at a quarter billion, and each produced as much as twenty million in net profit Earth-yearly. Her responsibility lay in protecting the stations from just such dangers, not in concerning herself about the finances of the company or their parent corporation, NKK. Besides, expending the hunters would accomplish two additional goals: The weapons would be tested and data gathered about their performance; and then more, possibly better, equipment would need to be purchased.

“
Tell them I’m sending out enough interceptors to stop three such spaceships. Also tell them I’ll monitor the defenses myself, continually. That is all.”

His face tight, Shen-lin bowed curtly, turned, and left the little cabin. Clarisse laced her fingers together behind her head and leaned back in her chair. When the door clicked shut behind the man, she smiled.

Finally, she was needed. No longer could Shen-lin insist that her salary and procurements were wastes of capital. After this incident, he would have no rationale to balk at her purchase orders. She remembered how he had fumed and threatened as the last Ganymedean cargoship had unloaded, having brought nothing but her new shipment of hunters, their supplies, weapons and fuel.

“
There would be no Neptunekaisha without my Sotoi Guntai forces!” she had shouted at Shen-lin and his 3VRD minions; no one faced her intheflesh except Shen-lin. She had no lovers: Don’t need them, she often told herself.

“
You are not here to earn profits,” she had lectured the politician. “Profits are meager. They won’t pay off the initial costs of Neptunekaisha for a generation, what with maintenance and salaries. NKK would never have built the stations except to enforce NKK military dominance over the Outer Solar System. So go to hell!”

Shen-lin hadn’t reacted, except to stand in her way at every opportunity. He had even changed the access codes to Station Kiken’s countless mini servers: To those of this, her, station! But she had held back the blood-hate, knowing a time would come to repay him. It seemed to have arrived.

Clarisse’s smile widened, her eyelids drooped, and her thoughts sailed into the future.

She flicked back on her headfeed and switched to her first hunter’s pov. The wall and doorway before her seemed to split open as the 3VRD splice pushed aside most of her physical pov.

I’ll get Neptunekaisha Protection a fleet yet, she thought, watching the EarthCo craft grow steadily larger and thinking of her pitiful fleet of armed personal craft. With magnification at its greatest, her hunter pov showed the adversary’s glossy hull the size of a mylar balloon held at arm’s length. She noticed that a long tube extended straight toward her, its black mouth swallowing the distance between them. Otherwise, she could discern no details, no ports, no visible antennae, only a few blackened spots that told of the battle it had fought against her fellow Sotoi Guntai—NKK’s top soldiers—near Mars. No doubt: This tiger would be her liberation.

Without warning, the ship’s mouth blazed orange, then white, faster than her headcard’s dampers could compensate. The craft was decelerating. A dull throb began at the back of her skull. This was the danger of splicing full-sensory in to machine povs. Her nerve-ends fizzled.

She felt her fists ball and unball. The familiar old rage welled up within her. Threat. She directed the hatred at the faceless sphere riding a plume of white hydrogen toward her. She sensed no contradiction in hating that which gave her strength. The hate fed her, empowered her even more than Shen-lin’s obeisance. Clarisse gloried in the hot flush of this hate, at last finding a legitimate focus for it.

She would prove her value to little Neptunekaisha, to NKK, and to the Sotoi Guntai brass, guaranteeing her future. The stations would look to her for safety and leadership, and soon Uranikaisha and Saturnkaisha would follow. She would lead the Outer Planets. But she would have to keep herself from reacting purely out of hate. She had to be rational. Pure hate, without reason, had cost her more than once, and she would never let that happen again.

“
I’m ready, EarthCo
Bounty
,” she said, her claws extended from the hunter.

Less than a hundred thousand kilometers from Neptune and closing fast, EarthCo’s fighter/bomber
Bounty
flung through black space. The ship was mace-shaped, a glistening metallic sphere eight meters in diameter with a handle four times that long, housing hydrogen fuel and tipped with an atomic rocket. At the moment, all was relatively calm. The stars pricked the blackness in silence, muted by light-years; even their furious roars couldn’t be heard across the vast distances. Neptune, too, looked serene from this distance, a blue and white marble slightly squashed at the poles. Its moons glared much brighter than stars at this range, spinning lazy circuits around their captor—the greatest light source so far from Sol—like lonely moths.

Inside the ship, a computer program cycled through to a critical point; messages flicked from the main server, a mid-sized artificial intelligence incapable of making its own decisions; contacts closed.

A warning-whistle pierced the stagnant air. Pehr Jackson, ship’s Captain, straightened in his zero-g netting. His face grew animated, as if he had just come alive. He was pleased to shut off the emotionless 3VRD letter from his wife that he’d been watching.

Pehr pocketed the child’s bandanna he had been absently toying with, dreaming of some day having a miniature version of himself accompany him on long interplanetary missions. For now, the boy he had glimpsed years ago in the cloth was still his only true partner.

He automatically pushed his bare toes against the walls to align the netting parallel with the floor. Enough fantasizing about another life, he told himself, about children he would never have, about a fabric child. Sorry, boy. This is life. The fight, the show.

“
Showtime,” he told the cramped, windowless cabin. Just beyond his feet, he noticed dust gathered in the white corners, carpeting the room’s staticky ventilation intakes. It clung in zero-g, smooth tenuous slopes rising from the floor, descending from the ceiling. Old cells clinging to the only available energy. A pair of discarded pants, upset by his sudden movements, disturbed one of the slopes, scattering it in slow motion.

Details leaped out at him now, things he hadn’t noticed a few seconds prior: the stowage locker door hanging open, the empty green bottle hovering precariously at the cabinet’s lip, the stench of close humanity, the dull glow of fiber-routed sunlight so distant from native Earth, the itch of stubble beneath his chin rubbing against an oily leather vest.

“
Three, two, one. . .” he counted down, not needing to access Feedcontrol’s script; he knew the routine. The sudden pressure of 0.3
g
acceleration swallowed him into the mesh a moment after a muffled roar tunneled through the steel walls. The hovering bottle fell and smashed against plastic floorplates. The dust hills transformed to clouds, then collapsed against the porous walls, disappearing into the air-scrubbers. The room completely changed character, as Pehr was about to do.

Pehr sat up for the first time in more days than he cared count and, using an unfamiliar brainsort technique, flicked through his headcard’s option box until he found access to raw feed. Not one who liked spliced frames, he closed his eyes.

Flicker of cold, rarely used receptors, then the scene snapped into focus.

Neptune rushed headlong toward the ship from the forward pov of camera P1. The pale world, smeared randomly with white streaks and streamers in the vast atmosphere, appeared as full and huge as Earth’s Moon rising at sunset, perceptibly larger every second against a background of sharp pricks of light. He remembered a night with Susahn, when they were still warmed by the flush of early love, watching the Moon rise orange over St. Louis. But had it been love at all? Had the Moon really been rising, or had it been setting? Everything had seemed new at the time.

Pehr yanked himself from the quagmire of nostalgia and swung his legs over the netting. He smiled when his feet slapped against the deck, the first smile his face had felt since the last show, nearly 40 Earthdays prior. He switched off the headfeed, dousing Neptune, and opened his eyes.

In a private pre-performance ritual, he stood, took two uncertain steps across the cabin, reached into the open locker, and drew out a new bottle of mulberry wine. It always worked to wash out old memories and deaden dreams, yet still energize his acting. He remembered his first taste of this stuff; it had been soon after his Crusades, as he called them, in his youth. A street-vendor, an old man with deep red skin and grey hair, sat on a wooden stool at the corner of Hennepin Avenue and a cross street, in Minneapolis. He didn’t look to have had a customer in years, but he called out in a hoarse voice, “Good wine, good trade,” as if he sold all the time. Pehr gave the man a pair of leather gloves in trade for an unlabelled bottle, since such unlicensed businessmen could not receive credit transfers. The vendor was a retro farmer who lived two hours away by aircar; his worn machine was parked beside him on the street. He smiled at the gloves and then reached into the back seat, where he brought out a bottle. The cloudy, purplish liquid had done wonders for Pehr’s sagging morale at a time when he desperately needed it. It helped obscure images of a boy in an alley, bloody and stiff. . . .

Pehr grumbled for remembering too much.
The show
, he told himself,
the show
.

He cracked the wax seal with a fingernail, yanked out the cork in his teeth and spat it out, then wrapped his lips around the bottle and swallowed deeply three times. Pehr sighed, wiped his mouth on a slightly flabby but still-muscular forearm, then withdrew a crystal glass from a foam cushion inside the locker. He filled the glass and used a free hand to open the door leading to a tight corridor.

“
Here’s to adventure!” he shouted, holding the glass out toward the bridge. A woman muttered something quietly in reply. He set the glass on an empty shelf beside the door.

Another few gulps and the bottle was empty. Pehr tossed it at the waste chute in a corner beneath the netting, watching it shatter and fall into the opening, where it would be purged to space. A few fragments gleamed wetly on the wool rug he had smuggled from Earth to furnish the spare, antiseptic spacecraft.

He smiled at the memory of Susahn handing him the rug—so unusual for her to do something intheflesh. The
Bounty
had launched from high Earth orbit 54 days before the encounter near Mars. So much time had passed since last he saw Susahn, his wife—or legal partner, which was the current term.

In the locker, beside several other bottles for which he had traded the old man’s son a fine plasma welder, sat a case of makeup and grooming tools. He grabbed these and looked in the mirror fastened to the inside of the door.

A strong face stared back, broad in forehead and high in cheeks, with a sharp nose and a heavy jaw. Perhaps too-soft eyes were deepest green, hair curly brown. A grinning mouth sagged, and suddenly he caught himself staring at the loneliest man in the universe.