Transcendence (73 page)

He looked back at the feedcontrol building and its ring of rats blazing like a medieval moat. An NKK Tora tank poured a column of black soot toward the sky, its long accelerator barrel pointed at the ground. Hundreds of soldiers wearing the light blue of NKK regulars, hundreds more in the tan of EarthCo Warriors, and occasional close-ranked men in the dark blue of NKK’s Sotoi Guntai tramped at a jog toward the north. Countless personnel cars hummed past the jogging men who had lost their transports.

This is still an army
, Nadir assured himself. He felt the sharp edges of the medal cutting into his palm and opened his hand. The little triangle of titanium meant nothing to him now—its only value lay in ridding himself of it.

Nadir hurled the bit of a lie-filled past as far as he could, and he let out a single sound that enunciated all the frustration and hurt and betrayal still thrashing around within him.

As the whirlyjet’s engine accelerated and Nadir’s audio program filled his head with a string section’s rising pitch, Nadir clung to the craft’s door and felt his face relax as he watched the death and destruction fall away beneath him. Today, thousands had finally lived and died. They hadn’t fought a battle for the faceless, sinister war command at EarthCo’s nor NKK’s core, no; these boys had battled for what they knew was right.
That’s why they still obey my orders
, even though things hadn’t gone as planned.

The whirlyjet banked, so Nadir had to step inside the cabin and slide the door shut. Four EarthCo Warriors and an NKK regular nodded as he glanced at them. Paolo was among them; he gave a stiff salute.

They were on track.
Crash the war
, Nadir thought;
What a joke. It’s probably all just a subscription drive. There won’t be a war by the time we get through with War Command
.

“
Live well today, Boss,” Paolo commed.

Nadir had to smile. The ocean, green and speckled with vessels about to take to the air, stretched out before them. He could hear its song.

Janus’ aircar dropped toward the midday rush of lunch-goers in Downtown Minneapolis, near the banks of the Mississippi. The rotor spun down as the car settled on the sidewalk. A few pedestrians noticed the obstruction and hurried past. Closer to the river, another aircar sat with its canopy open.

“
What are we doing here?” Pehr asked of Nooa while he tied two ends of the travel-blanket around his waist. The girl looked concerned.

“
I seem to have used poor judgment in choosing a friend,” she said. Pehr began to laugh, which only deepened Nooa’s frown. “Why is that funny?”

“
Welcome to the real world,” he said as their own canopy began to rise. Janus sent him a nasty look. “You’ll have to go through the artifact before you know what I mean. There you’ll find true friends.”

“
Jonathan is a true friend,” Nooa said. “However, he is about to—”

“
Say no more,” Pehr said. He climbed out onto the ground and took a deep breath of river-stench, a virtually unchanged perfume from his youth. “He’s causing more trouble, right?”

“
Please do not underestimate the seriousness of what I tell you,” Nooa said. The Brain had the girl-construct clamber over the hull of the aircar as if she were real. “He is currently initiating a violent attack against those who have assaulted him recently. You must—”

But before Nooa had a chance to finish, Pehr was running down the slope, avoiding rusted masses he couldn’t identify and heaps of trash. He saw the boy sitting in the sand beside the parked aircar, a dark smudge against the sooty beach. When Pehr was ten meters from Jonathan, something slammed him in the head.

He fell sideways onto loose gravel. Fireworks sparked before his eyes.

Jonathan opens his eyes, pauses the program, and jumps to his feet. His Captain lays sprawled out on the ground where he hit him.

“
Ah, fuck. Fuck!” Jonathan runs toward Captain Jackson. While shifting his landscape controls, he pulls up the standard commline.

“
You okay, Captain?” he 3-verds. “Captain, answer me!”

“
What happened?” comes a faint reply, voice-only.

Jonathan steals amp power from the program he was writing to his Citizen card and sends out an ID trace into the Captain’s card. Nothing in there is burned out, he finds, and finally exhales.

“
Are you okay?” Jonathan repeats. Now he’s standing right beside the fallen man. “I’m sorry.”

“
Sorry? Blast!” The Captain sits up and only then does Jonathan realize the guy is wearing only a jacket and blanket. “What did you do to me? What’s this the Brain says you’re up to?”

Captain Jackson rises to his full height, rubbing his temples. His gut and chest are saggier than Jonathan had thought, but he feels okay about that:
This is reality
, he tells himself.
No fucking romance overlays here
. He notices a woman in ratty clothes running down the riverbank, accompanied by a girl.

Nooa.
Ha
, he thinks.
The team’s getting together
.

“
I was just working on something,” Jonathan tells the man. “I set up a circle of defense so I could concentrate. You should’ve commed ahead.”

“
Thanks a lot,” the Captain says. “Good to see you again, too.”

The woman arrives, and she looks vaguely familiar.

“
What’s going on here?” she asks. Nooa looks from face to face.

“
Jonathan,” Nooa says, “this is Janus Librarse. You know her as pilot of the EarthCo
Bounty
.”

“
Oh, man,” Jonathan says, unable to fight off a moment of elation. She’s as pretty as in the show, only more relaxed looking. “You’re good! And you feed really clean stuff, you know, from the ship’s telescope.

“
Wait a minute. How’d you get here, to Earth, I mean?”

“
Same as Jack,” she says, nodding to the Captain.

“
They were describing the alien object found on Triton,” Nooa tells him. “It’s amazing, Jonathan. Perhaps Pilot Librarse or Captain Jackson will show you.” She looks from one to the other.

“
Let’s go someplace and get some rest,” the Captain says, looking at Jonathan. “You’ve got to be tired from all you’ve done. I sure as hell am. And hungry.”

“
But. . .” Jonathan says, looking back toward the aircar whose server he was hacking into, toward the river slithering with the feces and trash of millions of people. He smells the rot, and that reminds him of Lucas and Blackjack, filthy Blackjack who sold Jonathan’s meat to a pervert. “I’m not
. . .
done yet.”

“
It can wait,” the Captain says in a tone that makes Jonathan want to listen. No one can do that, no one except this man. Jonathan feels his heart beating fast at the base of his throat.

“
Yeah, I guess so,” he says. He takes a moment to gather the overlays and landscapes in front of him, switching off one trigger after another, saving half-written programs, cutting out of the aircar’s server without damaging anything. Last he shuts down his blackcard and stands before two of his heroes near the banks of the mighty Mississippi. It hits him that he walked with Charity—the innocent girl—not far from here, only a day ago.
Bitch
, he thinks. But he can’t hate her. There are plenty of others to hate, to take out his hate upon.

“
Nooa,” Jonathan says. The girl-construct, no taller than he—a head shorter than Pilot Librarse—gives him her full attention. “Book us the nicest rooms at the Uptown Hilton, okay?”

“
Okay, Jonathan,” she says. She seems to have changed. . . .
Her face seems even more dynamic, mischievous, even. “Take Pilot Librarse’s aircar; I’ll return yours—”

“
No,” Jonathan says. “Keep it around for me, in case I need it.”

The two adults walk beside Jonathan past garbage and junk he barely noticed an hour ago; but he feels guilty now, leading them through his world, as if everything here is his responsibility.
Great introduction
, he thinks.
When they think of you, they’ll think of trash. Nice
.

They all step inside a real retro heap, at least as old as Jonathan. But it’s like paradise to Jonathan. He settles into the back seat with Nooa and feels all warm and weird inside as the adults—real show heroes!—drive him to the best room at the Uptown Hilton.

The car launches up and south. Jonathan glances back and sees that the Brain is letting him keep the aircar, which is trailing them in synchrony. He catches her staring at him and sees an odd look on her face. Then he knows.

“
Knock it off,” he whispers feed-only, on a BW the Pilot and Captain aren’t feeding. “It’s my life. I’ll do what I want.”

He turns away from her and studies the massive shoulders of Captain Jackson, spilling to both sides of the seatback. The Pilot keeps looking at Jackson. Jonathan knows that look. He feels jealous for a moment, then stupid for feeling jealous.
Clean
, he thinks. Cool and clean. He smiles. If something’s happening between them, it’s what he’d been hoping for all during the show.

They land within a minute on a platform jutting out from the ruby-glassed Hilton, a gleaming tetrahedron forty stories tall with a base two blocks square. A spiraling pair of chrome rails borders a spiraling row of luxury aircars on the platform, which is fenced in by gold-plated Celtic knotting. No one greets them or even contacts them as they land; in fact, the city is weirdly empty—
Where are all the cars?
—and quiet.

The Pilot’s car looks tough among the gleaming luxoliners, and Jonathan has to laugh as he steps out onto the windy roof.

The four of them—
Three
, Pehr corrected himself, and an AI—halted before a door that looked like real wood. He knew it couldn’t be, because this hotel had to have thousands of such rooms and no way would the government have allowed cutting down that many actual trees to make doors. Pressed stalks, he guessed, then recognized that he’d been debating the composition of stupid doors.
Damn, I’m tired
. He hardly noticed that his lower half was covered only by a blanket tied around his waist.

“
Whose room is this?” he asked Nooa.

“
Yours, of course,” the construct said.

“
Oh, man,” Jonathan said. “You didn’t book us separate rooms? These guys’ll want a room to themselves. You’ve got to learn a few things about people.”

“
Okay, Jonathan,” the girl said. “Now you have room 27308, right over there.” She pointed.

“
Well,” the boy said, yawning and stretching in an exaggerated fashion. “I’ve got to get some rest, too, I guess. See you guys, what, tomorrow morning?”

Pehr knew what he had to do, but it wasn’t what he wanted to do. His life was becoming more and more complicated every minute, and he was being forced to be responsible. He took a deep breath.
No, I’m not being forced. This is part of my real Crusades. I’ve been given a gift, and now it’s time to share
.

“
Janus,” he said, “you settle in. I want to talk with Jonathan for a little bit.”

She smiled at him so warmly that he would have fallen into her arms if he didn’t have this to do. She nodded and opened the door, which the Brain had keyed to their headcards at no charge to them. Pehr watched her go inside before he faced Jonathan.

“
Let’s talk,” he said, and waved toward the boy’s room.

Jonathan’s eyes narrowed a little more than usual, but he nodded and led the way. “C’mon, Nooa,” he told the construct.

Pehr noticed how the boy had a tendency to look at people only rarely, and then mostly out of the corners of his eyes. He looked like so many kids Pehr had encountered in this very city, a decade ago.

They entered the room and Pehr closed the door behind him. Nooa stood off to one side.

“
Does she need to follow us everywhere?” Pehr asked.

“
Why?” The boy sounded so defensive.

“
I guess it doesn’t matter.” Pehr studied the room for a moment and noticed the holos on the walls were so dusty that it was difficult to see them. Then he recognized that they were actually old-school projectors—the holo images were only decoration for when the guests’ cards were shut down. He saw a thickly padded chair and sat, realizing he would seem less imposing when seated. Warmth washed through his body, hinting at his fatigue.