Transcendence (17 page)

Aren’t they taking you seriously? Oh, it’s been too long since anyone has taken you seriously.

The last time was in Boston. That cocksucker only took you seriously after you taught him about the razor’s edge between sensation and pain. He had thought it would be charming to seduce intheflesh a man feeling the fires of loneliness after having nerve-enhancement surgery. Surgery plays with a man’s mind. It makes him vulnerable. Daddy was a surgeon. . . .

You had met in a chembar for those who liked to go places intheflesh. He had lapped up the scent of your vulnerability and led you to his apartment, 112 stories above the cracked pavement of Boston. He had shown you a real window that looked out over the city. He had held you in his warm, strong arms. He had asked you to tell him all about your feelings. Then he had spliced into your mind and shoved his 3VRD individ inside. He had laughed at your protests. He had climbed in with his individ, the two of them plucking freshly implanted circuits like piano wires, laughing every time you said no, you screamed no. At first, you had been too weak from the surgery to resist. Then, when they had your insides splayed open and were rubbing their sandy fingers across your grey matter, you had found the strength to trap them.

You had remembered your father, almost more than you should remember. You had located that germ of pain at your core and used it to seize them in a 3VRD fist inside your head. The individ had shattered almost immediately, its female likeness crumbling to splinters of silicon, sparkling at your feet in the red light of rage. He had looked down at the fragments and stopped laughing.

That afternoon, you learned an encyclopedia of things about your new skills. Over the years, you haven’t forgotten; no, you’ve practiced since then.

The bridge of the
Bounty
is quiet. You hear every servo whirr, every electronic hum, the hush of ventilation, every breath from your crewmates. Smoke and sweat tickle your nostrils with the metallic scent of panic. Bitch puts a hand on the back of her seat and swings her legs slowly over it so she’s almost sitting. Cap’n rises from his and slips his hand around the grip of his pistol.

“
You don’t take me seriously, do you,” you say, incredulous. You automatically flick on your cardbusting feedback program and swim through
Bounty
’s server until you find an open channel into Cap’n’s head. There, you see the tiny 3VRD self-representation every man stores in his mind. It stands erect in a valley surrounded by towering mounds of memory piled so thick you can’t get clear resolution of any of them. Of course—no one can see another man’s memories. You back out and overlay the puny image atop his natural one; it fits in a wrinkle on his forehead.

“
Tell me how this feels,” you say to him, extending a metalslick probe into the miniature Cap’n’s midsection.

Bitch looks at Cap’n. Grimacing, he nods and pulls himself into his seat. They’re up to something. You place your other hand on the subgun’s front grip and—

Victory smelled like the smoke of her enemy’s ruined spaceship. Revenge tasted like fire: blood on the tongue, blisters on the gums.

Clarisse had fooled
Bounty
’s computers and crew. She had disabled their ship. But they had gotten off an escape pod or cruiser-class torpedo. She punched up magnification of the new launch.

When she isolated its brightest emission, her heart froze. It was a virtual beacon of gamma rays.

“
They fired a nuclear missile at us,” she said aloud. Unbelievable. Nukes were outlawed nearly a century prior. Of course, most sovereignties and worlds maintained a few for defensive purposes, but this was an offensive missile.

She called up a battery of obsolete hunters and sent them after the nuke. It was still accelerating. None of the hunters within striking distance could possibly intercept it at that speed if it had any brain at all for maneuvering, but she had to use the resources at hand. She also polarized the mines lying like a spherical fence in a thin veneer around Neptune. They would detonate even if the missile were barely in damage radius, with enough advance timing so their shockwaves of ionized plasma would stand like a wall of fire before the missile. She sent orders to each station to charge up their tube cannons. She transferred dual control of most AI defenses to herself. She initialized the destroyer,
Sigwa
, in case.

Tapping into a calculus program, she concluded that none of the stations would be destroyed by the missile. But it might explode close enough to one for its EM pulse to burn out the station’s entire net. It might even destroy a power station.

She cursed herself for not preparing a greater defensive array against the intruder. Hadn’t EarthCo Feedcontrol told her this renegade was a war-tattered wreck? Hadn’t they said it was armed with only two magazines of torpedoes? That it fired only one particle cannon? They had transmitted a dense file of data on its offensive batteries, but they had omitted a high-g nuclear missile. Oh, yes, that must have been an oversight. Lovely EarthCo, always my dear friend.

The answer was tediously clear: EarthCo had once again stabbed her with its barbed tongue. I was a fool to trust them - even though the only trust she offered was accepting their data.

Deeply enmeshed with dozens of servers and halfwit systems, Clarisse felt a snarl curl her physical lips.

Breathe, Clarisse. Don’t let anger destroy you; breathe
.

Hope sprang up: This might not be the disaster it appeared to be. Much data was now being gathered. Nikolai had taught Clarisse that she must contain her anger and think.

She thought. No, this would not be a disaster at all. Clarisse would prove that EarthCo had intentionally misinformed Neptunekaisha Security and NKK itself so they could send in a warship fitted with a nuclear weapon. They had intended to attack and destroy extremely valuable NKK property for some undefined military advantage. Nuclear weapons could not be picked up just anywhere; it had to have been in the initial inventory.

EarthCo was attempting to gain a foothold on NKK property.

This attack would be the end of the long peace between NKK and EarthCo. The Sotoi Guntai forces aboard Neptunekaisha’s flying stations would join forces with her without hesitation; the military had long been anxious to free itself from civilian rule. They knew the true purpose of Neptunekaisha, as military outpost. News would spread to other units of the Sotoi Guntai on other worlds, all the way back to Moonbase and Earth. They would strike as one against EarthCo, a whip cracking across the entire Solar System.

The bad hate dissipated and the good hate gave her power. Clarisse imagined a glorious new period of war, where she could tear out EarthCo’s organs one by one for murdering her family on Makkau, the Pacific Rim isle where she had lived for ten years. Clarisse would finally have her revenge on the corp that had then forced her into a foster family, a vulgarly sweet EarthCo household on the Russian steppes where her siblings had hated her and beat her mercilessly intheflesh and in VR games. Oh, dear Ivan, how you have destroyed EarthCo.

She had grown lightning-fast and strong, always nurturing a coal of hatred in her heart that had given her the strength to defeat, one by one, those who had hurt her. Ivan slowly became nothing more than a bully who knew he stood no chance against her in his games. His slapping palms felt like nothing. Clarisse felt no pain any longer.

On one cool morning of her sixteenth year, she had realized that she had freed herself. She burned the family’s server and several of the siblings’ cards. Ivan’s last moments had been pure writhing pleasure. After that she fought her way for five cold, bloody weeks across the plains and mountains to Bangkok. There she had joined the most powerful aggressive force she could imagine: the NKK Sotoi Guntai. At boot camp in the marshes of Cambodia, she had earned top ratings. At graduation from suit camp in the Earth orbital facility of Shuki, she wore the platinum helmet-strip of series honorman.

Now she would write history. Her name would be scribed indelibly on the tablet of human flesh, in blood. The Sotoi Guntai had for decades been searching for a legitimate excuse to strike against EarthCo. Their private motto was “Push limits, break through.” They had been massing their might in the atmospheres and on the moons of the Outer Planets, and had attempted to build up Phobos Base, which this very intruder had debilitated.

Clarisse would provide the excuse. The evidence against EarthCo would knock a hole through the levee that had been holding back all-out war. The destruction that was about to befall Neptunekaisha’s property would be that first break, which would soon spread wide, allowing the flood of war to surge through.

Her mind returned to
Bounty
. “Live,” she said, and predetonated the final hunter just close enough to send a shockwave of hot gas and debris against their hull. To remind them of her. They would be a lovely first target for her followers, who would need something at which to strike right away.

A winking light attracted her attention. She flicked on the feed for that BW.

So, another nuclear missile had been fired, this one at Triton. The first had been a decoy, most likely never expected to make it through Neptunekaisha’s defenses. The second . . . well, TritonCo was just a protectorate, after all. EarthCo might be daring enough to attack one of NKK’s protectorates; they had done it often enough before, as on Phobos.

Clarisse scanned the access channels to this BW and dropped dams at each entry. The missile would reach its target. Then she erased record of having tracked the second rocket, then erased record of the erasure.

Next, she pulled out of the pack of hunters she had sent after the first nuclear missile. Let them do their work without her help. She called one of them out of formation and flicked inside its pov. At the proper moment—preferably at the last possible moment—she would make sure the nuclear bomb’s damage was limited. Because, if she failed completely as Coordinator of Protection, her master plan would never see the red of blood. She must maintain their respect.

She had to play each move just right. Timing would be everything. Then shatter the peace, set free the flood of revenge.

The nuclear missile emerged undamaged through the net of stationary mines. Good; that means it is protected against plasma, and will survive the first few blasts from tube cannons. Her little hunter would rendezvous with it just before it struck home. She would be credited with personally saving a station.

Good, good; only a hero could press forward plans such as hers.

Clarisse’s mind sizzled with activity, running half a dozen programs at once. She danced in her element, energized by the inhuman fierceness of laser-like focus, driving her hate rather than being driven by it.

“
I’m stepping inside the object’s apparent entryway,” Miru stated. Within, the impression of organic motion increased.

He took a deep breath and strode forward. The corner of his eye caught a brightening in one part of the melted horizon.

“
That would be our attackers,” he said, sadly. He almost stopped and turned back—he felt a foolish sort of guilt for abandoning his brothers and sisters during their time of danger, especially Pang—but the inside of the object would be the safest place to wait out the storm, anyway. They would need someone unhurt who could assist them in whatever emergency relief they might need. By himself, he could do nothing against the energies released in a nuclear reaction. I am sorry, dear Pang. I will return to you as soon as I am able.

He took another step. One boot crossed beyond the edge of the wall. A tingling sensation ran up his leg. A final step. His body moved within the confines of the archway. The brown tunnel around him constricted and stretched infinitely long, hissing with the sound of a jet streaking away.

He felt himself shatter, disperse. He began to scream in rising wavelengths of light and other radiations. No one answered.

Nadir leaped from the car while it was still decelerating, rifle across his chest. His boots sank ankle-deep into the cool sand. A few seconds later, he was running behind the car, using it as a shield while he got his bearings and sized up the tall stone fortress. Almost unconsciously, Nadir ordered his three grenadiers to launch sonic grenades inside the walls, to soften up the opposition.

The fort rose like a computer button silhouetted against the bright horizon, a trigger ready to be depressed. It looked ancient in form—various blocky rooftops were just visible beyond the girdle wall, mud-brick archways joining them—but modern in condition. None of the stone blocks were chipped, the corners were sharp where walls joined, the crenellation was crisply defined like peg-teeth biting the sky. The only visible openings were peaked windows shaped like Medieval arrow-slits.