War Games (5 page)

Did you forget I wore a timestone on my finger? It was a useful little gadget. Each of the tiny optical fibers in the column represented around five hundred accounts. Laser light modulated the activity of those accounts. Each beam of laser light was only a photon across. Once they got in an optical fiber, they stayed there. The comsat was aligned very precisely to achieve this. But a photon wasn’t very big. It was just the right size for my timestone to manipulate. I could change probability a little with it—twist the wires of coherent light a little, and make a few photons hit a few wires of my choosing.

One of the fibers was mine, representing my account. It was child’s play to pad my balance out a little. There was no way to trace it or to even know it was being done. Digits flashed from the chargering on my other hand, marking my steadily increasing bank balance. The bank would know that they had been swindled—more had gone out than had come in. They would know they’d been robbed, but they wouldn’t know how. They would know who had done it—I’d told them I would. Only they didn’t know who I was. Pretty clever, no?

Like I said, child’s play. Photons were easy to move about. In just a few minutes, I’d siphoned off several million credits. My chargering’s digits changed so fast, its register glowed a solid green.

All the time I kept up an inane conversation with the woman standing beside me, setting her up for some night games afterward. I didn’t notice the way she also watched my chargering. But I did notice the hand signal she made.

Too late an image flashed in my mind: me with a set of sonicuffs around my wrists. I looked about in alarm. A couple of varks guarded each exit. The rest were unobtrusively moving toward me. The woman Michele had fingered me. She wasn’t a vark. I could smell varks. I didn’t have time to figure out what she was. I had to get away.

I slipped into the crowd, making my way to the far wall. There wasn’t a door there, so there were no varks, either. They took their time following me, sure I couldn’t escape. They thought they had me this time.

I wasn’t so sure about that. I’d made a few contingency plans myself.

As I worked my way through the crowd, I got ready. I tried not to think too much about what I was going to do. I had no other choice, so there was no point worrying about it. I knelt briefly and fastened each corner of my cape to my slippers at the ankle. I slipped the shoulder clasps over each wrist. Then I pulled out a flat piece of plastique from its hiding place under my corset and worked it into a round ball.

The varks were holding back, waiting until they were all in position. Michele seemed to be directing things. They were in no hurry, figuring they had me trapped. Indeed, they did. The transparent wall of Club Ionosphere had no doors or windows. Besides, beyond the wall was two thousand meters of sheer drop. I felt like the proverbial cornered rat.

So I did what I had to do.

I threw the ball of plastique impact explosive at the wall, at the same time dropping to the floor and covering my head. A deafening explosion sounded. Flame tickled the hairs on my neck. As soon as the tickling stopped, I jumped to my feet and ran forward. A meter-wide hole gaped in the wall. Cold wind, roared in through it. Without looking back, I dove headfirst through the opening. Once beyond the edges of the wall, I spread my arms and legs into a skydiver’s frog. Air billowed under my cape, ballooning it into a parawing that both slowed my fall and provided forward thrust. I could steer by moving my arms and legs. Although I didn’t have as good a glide coefficient as I would with a real hang glider, I could still go a long way with a two-thousand-meter start. At least as far as Ophir, where my skimmer was hidden.

I spilled air out of one side of my cape and began circling around the tower. Wind streamed past, chilling bare skin. Snow rustled against taut fabric. The lights of Telluride glowed far below, colder than the stars overhead. Brighter light blazed through the crystal pyramid of Club Ionosphere. Figures appeared in the hole I’d blasted. Faces peered out into darkness.

I stared into the timestone I still wore on my left hand, letting its warmth fill my mind. I was going to need its help. Eventually the varks would spot me.

I twisted to the right. A pulsar beam cracked the air where I’d been a moment before, just as the timestone had warned me it would. More beams flashed past, barely missing me. Even with the timestone’s help, it was hard to dodge the beams of six hand pulsars taking target practice at me. But without the timestone, it would not have been possible.

I think I could have made it if the stone had not betrayed me. I was almost out of range of their handguns. In a few more seconds, I would have been. Then an image came unbidden to my mind, I tried to push it back to the depths of the timestone and found I could not. A face filled my mind’s eye—my face, frozen solid, eyes bursting from ice inside them, teeth shattered from the cold, skin covered with frost as delicate as white fungus. I could not look away. The death mask pushed away the images of pulsar beams I should have been concentrating on.

Pulsar quanta came closer. The air cracked with their ionization energy. Then there was a different sound—a splattering sound, like a red-hot brand drenched in water. Only I had my left hand around that brand. I could not let go.

Suddenly the face in my mind was gone. But so were all the other images. Cold vacuum sucked at my mind.

I looked at my left hand. It wasn’t there. All I could see was the fading contrail of a pulsar beam and a puff of vapor already dissipating into the wind. A sphere of white smoke was all that remained of my hand. And of the timestone. It also was vapor.

My cape had fallen off my wrist and flapped free. I couldn’t grab it with a bloody stump. Damn annoying. With only three anchors, the wing had lost considerable lift and was uncontrollable. I fell to earth in a tight spiral. Below me were ski runs winding down through dark forest like lava flows. I tried to maneuver myself over one of the slopes. I was going to hit hard. Maybe the snow would soften my impact.

Then I remembered my death mask. I was destined to freeze to death. I would die in ice. That grim, unwanted knowledge was now mine. I wondered if I should head for the trees instead.

Glowing snow neared. Would it be here, now? Would I freeze on the ski slope before the varks found me, buried in synthetic snow? Maybe, But there wasn’t much I could do. If I went into the trees I’d be killed for sure. I didn’t need a timestone to know that. A steep, snow-covered slope was close beneath. I bent my legs and turned upright in the air. Dogs, I was going fast. This was going to hurt.

As I hit, I rolIed forward. Snow exploded around me. I almost chuckled from a wry thought. I knew I would survive the impact. The timestone had told me as much. The only question was whether or not I would freeze to death in the snow afterward.

I felt a sharp crack on my head. Darkness closed over me. I might not ever know that answer.

* * *

I didn’t freeze to death. You knew that I woke in a hospital bed, sore all over. There was no serious damage. In a few days, I was transferred to jail. A few more days, and my trial began. You probably remember it. The holos had a lot of fun with me: scion son of nobility, playboy gambler, daring master thief. The networks went out of their way to show all the robberies I’d committed that had completely baffled the varks. They loved making the authorities out to be buffoons. The public loved watching it. I became a media event for the few days of my trial.

Of course I was found guilty. But only for one count of fraud against the Bank of Telluride. They couldn’t prove anything else. And they didn’t know how I’d siphoned off millions from the bank. The prosecution’s star witness was Major Michele Kramr, on loan to the varks from the Intelligence Corps. I almost crapped when I found that out, remembering that I’d once snuffed a spook. Apparently they failed to make the connection. But so did I. I’m sure you have. Michele testified about me standing next to the fiber column and watching my chargering registering. The bank could verify that my account got fatter as others got leaner. They didn’t need to prove how I did it, only that I had. They did. Which made me guilty.

Not that I put up a spirited defense. It didn’t seem to matter. Nothing mattered anymore. My timestone was gone. I was going to die, and there was nothing I could do about it. I even figured out where it would be. I was destined to freeze to death. I knew that the punishment for fraud would be a year or two at a prison farm. Big deal, you say. Well, get this—the prison farms are located in Antarctica. You know, the icebox of the world.

So naturally I was found guilty. Just as certainly I would be sent to a prison farm. There I would most definitely die. Fate must be consummated. There was nothing I could do about it. Only a timestone could manipulate the time matrix. My timestone was gone.

So I was in a rather grim mood as I lay in my cell on the eve of my sentencing. I knew a hand-slap punishment would be a death sentence for me. I wasn’t even cheered up by watching the coverage of my trial on the halo. I was
that
depressed.

The war news came on next. I didn’t bother to turn it off. Tonight the coverage came from Titan, where the elves had launched another offensive against Chronus. They showed footage of the “bombardment.” None of the elven pulsar beams even made it through the city’s force-field. Life there went on as notoriously as usual. Patrons still frequented the famed mindcasinos.

Suddenly I remembered something. I could have kicked myself for not thinking of it earlier. The sailor had told me it as he died. I’d forgotten about the miner, Nels. And the other timestone. The holo scenes from Chronus reminded me. There was another timestone. Nels knew where it was hidden. He could be found among the mindriders of Chronus. Maybe I could cheat fate if I could locate the other timestone. I had done that once before. It might work again. But how was I going to get to Titan? I was going to be sent to Antarctica. As I watched elves eluding Terran combrids in forests of glass, the solution came to me. Quite simple, really. There was only one way, I had no other choice.

The next day, before the judge could sentence me, I asked him to let me volunteer for the Combrid Corps. The request was a formality, He couldn’t refuse me. Any citizen had the right to go to the Combrid Corps in lieu of any other criminal penalty. Normally, joining the Corps was the alternative to capital punishment. But it could be substituted for lesser punishments as well.

I can still remember the surprised look on the Lord Judge’s face when he granted my request. He must have thought me mad to trade a year or two on a prison farm for six years in the Corps. Less than one percent of combrids survived their tour of duty. The average life span was closer to two months. But I knew going to a prison farm in Antarctica was the same as a death sentence for me. There was only one way for me to cheat that destiny. I had no other choice.

But still, I had to smirk every time I saw myself reflected from the inside wall of my hybridization tank. My plan was clever, no doubt about it. Even if I couldn’t find the other timestone, I might thwart the time matrix. By becoming a combat hybrid, I was changing myself into another creature entirely. More than just superficial appearance. Even my genes were different. I was not the same being as I had been; I was no longer the same as the dead face the timestone had planted in my mind.

So now you know the whole plan. Pretty smart, eh?

Now I just had to get out of the Corps before I got my new self killed. And I had to come up with some way to get that dead face out of my thoughts. It was giving me the creeps.

AS I STOOD
at
ease with my fellow combrids, I shivered, although I wasn’t cold. A thrill, then. A childhood fantasy realized. For I had never forgotten the Ghost Cavalry of my dreams. Then I wanted to join the Corps to escape my parents’ cruelty. Now I’d joined for another reason entirely. No matter. The thrill was still there.

A gravtug appeared on the horizon and slowly neared, until finally it nudged into a berthing tower. The long string of pods it was towing gently settled to ground.

The Gunny pointed toward them. “Come on, meat!” He laughed. “We got to unload some other meat, to make room for you.”

We formed a long line, stretching ourselves between the pods and the hybridization tanks we’d just left. Inside every pod were eight cells, each of which held a body bag with a wounded combrid who was too severely injured to be treated at a field hospital. They had been brought back to Luna for complete regeneration. In hybridization tanks, they could be stimulated to grow back an arm or a leg or a new set of intestines.

The Gunny opened the pods’ hatches. I pulled each body bag out of its cylindrical cell and passed it to another combrid who passed it down the line to the tanks. There, the wounded combrid was placed in a hybridization cell whose lid was then closed.

We went down the line of pods. I tried not to look too closely at the bodies in the bags—they were depressingly similar, anyway, with mangled limbs, gaping wounds, seared flesh. A human would have died from such trauma. Combrids were a little tougher. Lucky us.

We eventually came to the last pod. The Gunny opened its hatch and stood back. I grabbed the first bag and pulled. The body inside was stiff. Right away, I knew something was wrong. I looked at the cell. Its wall was cracked right through a heating coil. A body bag was only good against cold and vacuum for a few hours. The nearest garrison was ten days out. I tugged the body out. I wished I had not.

It was frozen solid, of course. As the eyes froze, they ruptured, despite nictitating membranes. Teeth became brittle and snapped off. Water sublimated, then recondensed as frost, which covered the face like blue fur. You couldn’t tell by looking that it was the face of a combrid. It could have been anybody’s face. Get the picture. It could just as easily be the face in my own dreams.

* * *

All the wounded had been placed in hybridization cells. It was time to go. Each of us climbed into one of the cells in the transport pods. The Corps used the same pods to transport fresh troops out and bring wounded in. Quite efficient, that way.

The Gunny went down the line of pods, closing each hatch. I waited for him with seven other combrids. I knew the timestone had been playing with me. I’d been tricked. I couldn’t fool the time matrix by becoming a combrid. Death waited for me, wanted me. In death, my face would look the same as it had before. All my plots and schemes had been in vain. Somewhere, ice waited. Not in Antarctica now. In space? On Titan? What difference did it make?

Still, I didn’t know when it would be. Maybe on the trip out. A little crack. A vacuum leak. The failure of a heating coil. There was no way to know. Maybe soon. Maybe later. The only way to be sure would be to find the other timestone. Before ice found me. And maybe the other timestone would lie to me, play me for its pawn. I couldn’t be sure it would not. The time matrix seemed very convoluted. Fate could be devious in achieving its ends.

The Gunny closed our hatch. Warmth began to radiate from the walls of my cell. For how long?

Singing filled my mind. The other combrids sang. I knew the words; they’d been given to me by hypnotraining. I sang along, blending my voice to a chorus of other voices. It was a marching song, the kind that had been sung by troops for millennia. The words were quaint, the meaning simple. We were off on a silly adventure. War was frivolous brutality. There was nothing noble about it. But glory could be found. We would all die eventually; that was inevitable. Only the nature of our end could be of our choosing.

But maybe that was enough. Maybe that was all there ever was to life.

Another song was sung; the words changed but the meaning stayed the same. I found comfort in the camaraderie of singing with other combrids as we sailed off to war. Childhood fantasies of glory rose in my mind. They no longer seemed silly at all. I knew I would be brave.

For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t scared.