Cyborg Strike (3 page)

“Respect?” He kissed only her forehead, so
that she could respond.

“A home. A family. A place to belong.” She
turned her face to nuzzle his chest.

“Yes…for people like us…”
It’s a family of
tigers…but even tigers mate, and refrain from killing each other,
usually. Perhaps…
He wondered whether this was the one woman in
all the world whom he could trust…or was it all just a deep and
clever stratagem to get rid of him?

He shook briefly, like a dog, trying to rid
himself of that idea. Such thoughts could become self-fulfilling
prophecies.

“I’ve lost you again, haven’t I?”

“Never,” he replied. “Just can’t stop my mind
from running.”

Ann sighed wistfully. “I’m glad we have a
thousand years. I’ll wait that long if I have to.”

He didn’t ask “for what.” Maybe someday he
would be able to give her what she craved. Until then…he’d give her
what he could.

Spooky took the seaplane after all, not
because he was impatient – not entirely. It was more because he
felt increasingly vulnerable sailing along the south coast of
Australia. One missile, one torpedo, one remote-controlled suicide
speedboat and both the current and former heads of Direct Action
would be out of the way.

For the same reason he ordered Ann to stay on
the yacht, at least until the seaplane’s next sortie. He hadn’t
thought much beyond Earth’s temporary salvation, and now he was
filled with a feeling of important thing undone, of political
undercurrents he no longer had a sense of. Months had elapsed since
Orion’s liftoff; a lot could happen in the small shark-pool of the
Committee of Nine.

Approaching Sydney, he diverted unscheduled
to land on Lake Burragorang, where a wad of cash from a startled
local bought him a ride into the town of Penrith. There he slipped
into one of the directorate’s safe houses and logged on to a
waiting secure terminal.

His codes were still good, another indication
that Alkina was either loyal, or very subtle. Spooky allowed
himself to be nearly certain of the former.

Spending the evening in seclusion, he trolled
through his own information systems and those of his rivals, using
backdoors he had had installed. While no computer wiz himself, he
had some extremely competent people working for him. He learned
many interesting things, but nothing so fascinating as a piece of
virtual paper waiting in the intelligence report bin titled
Daniel Markis
, a subfile of his people’s spying on the other
Free Communities and its council.

Marked
Most Secret
, it began with the
words, “Dear Spooky,” and ended with “Your friend, DJ.” Between the
greeting and closing was an invitation to meet, either at
Carletonville or some neutral place of his choosing.

At what game are you playing, Daniel?
A secure channel should be good enough, with modern encryption. On
the other hand, Direct Action’s people had discovered this message
in Markis’ computers, or perhaps it had been slipped into his own
heavily defended system. Either answer demonstrated that nothing
was uncrackable.

I need time to make sure of the situation
here
, he thought. Ariadne had tried to blackmail MacAdam into a
shipboard coup, and Ann had rescued his family to remove that lever
from her grip, but the fencing match between Direct Action and
Smythe’s Central Authority undoubtedly continued.

A nice name, that, he’d always thought.
Spooky mentally tipped his hat. It subtly reinforced her legitimacy
even in its nomenclature. Direct Action, on the other hand,
conjured up an unsubtle brutality that served him well, since its
actual operations were normally executed with perfect finesse.

Usually.

After shooting off a note to Ann, he reviewed
her actions in his absence and was pleasantly surprised. Oh, he
might have tweaked something here, improved something there, but by
and large he was satisfied. He went to sleep with as much peace of
mind as he ever had.

The machine beeped early with a reply from
Alkina, and an hour later he hopped into a nondescript Japanese
sedan indistinguishable from a million others on the road. This
time Ann had dressed in her Australian Army uniform.

“Brigadier now?”

“I thought as your proxy on the Committee it
was appropriate.”

Spooky chuckled. “Soon you will outrank
me.”

“Perhaps you should dispense with ranks and
just be yourself.”

“I am myself. I like the rank. As a young
Army sergeant I used to dream of putting on the godlike rank of
Master Sergeant. That’s all the higher I expected to go, as a
foreign-born Green Beret with no degree. Look at me now.”

Alkina laughed. “As you wish, my lord.” She
gestured at a package in the back seat. “Speaking of uniforms, I
brought yours.”

Spooky glanced back at it. “Later. For now,
just get me in to DA HQ unobserved. By the way…did you see the
Markis message?”

“Of course.”

“Thoughts?”

“He’s your friend. I wouldn’t presume. I
don’t think he’s setting you up, if that’s what you’re asking. At
least, not physically. Politically, perhaps, but politicians are
all the same backstabbing lot.”

“Not Markis,” popped from Spooky’s mouth
before he could stop it. “Funny, that’s the least cynical thing
I’ve said in some time, but it’s true. He’s a good man, and he
wouldn’t screw me over, politically or otherwise…unless he thought
I deserved it. As I see it, he owes me on every level, from the
return of his children to the role I played in getting certain
countries on board with the Orion project, to going along on it
myself.”

“So what are you asking?” She turned down an
unmarked but well-traveled road leading into the green
almost-mountains.

“I suppose just your opinion of the
logistics. Where should we meet?”

“Antarctica would be the safest. It’s an FC
stronghold, very hard to infiltrate for the Russians or the Chinese
or any rogue elements. Either that or South Africa itself.”

“I agree. Do me a favor and get in touch with
Cassandra Johnstone. Set it up for their remote facility. The day
after tomorrow, if you can.” Spooky turned to snake over the seat
into the back. Popping a catch, he folded down the central armrest
and slowly, with careful nanite-assisted strength, pulled it loose
from its fittings. A few more moments work opened a pass-through to
the sedan’s trunk.

“I also brought a commando skinsuit,” she
called. “It’s in the bag there.”

“Excellent. I’ll put it on in the boot.”

Once he had squirmed through the small
opening, he turned around to fit the armrest back into its space,
leaving nothing to show what he had done. A few minutes later he
heard them pass through security, where Brigadier Alkina overrode
her own protocols to decline a search.

Once parked deep underground, she opened the
back and a figure, black-clad head to toe including full face
shield, accompanied her to her office, hiding Spooky’s return from
even his own people. One more day working, and a night together in
the attached contingency quarters, and they were ready.

Invisible to as many spectra as Direct
Action’s technology could make it, the stealthy insertion drone
hummed low over the Antarctic snowscape. It had taken off from an
underground launch-catapult and supercruised through the
stratosphere most of the way from Australia before dropping to its
terminal nap-of-the-Earth profile. Normally used to clandestinely
drop or land specialized items, this time its cargo was unusual,
even experimental.

A human being.

Crammed into the container, Spooky responded
to the alarm and gentle hiss of extra oxygen with a sneeze and two
blinks. The latter activated the HUD of his nanocommando skinsuit,
which gave him the ETA to time over target: five minutes.

Plenty of time to clear his head and get
ready.

He could have come in overtly, on a transport
plane perhaps, but that would open him up to two improbable but
disastrous possibilities: unexpected treachery on the part of the
Free Communities, or more likely, a third party trying to
counterfeit such a backstab. Either way, this method was much
safer.

That is, assuming he survived the
insertion.

His landing zone was a snow-covered plateau
ten kilometers from the FC facility. The curve of low hills kept
the drone – essentially a weaponless cruise missile – invisible to
the air traffic control radar of the complex’s runway, even if its
stealth coating was not enough. The deep drifts below would give
him an extra margin of safety if the landing did not come off as
expected.

Packed tight inside an inert cloth-covered
silicone gel akin to the more prosaic stuff of computer mouse-pads,
he could do nothing except count the seconds to landing. His final
warning was the drone’s ramjet engine shutting off and air brakes
deploying to bring the robot aircraft down to a preset speed.

At this point, powerful compressed nitrogen
charges blew the landing package out the back and a parachute
opened with a brutal shock. Its canopy deployed perfectly, and the
shell swung once, twice, then ground gently into the deep white
snow.

Another pop split the cargo casing, and
Spooky’s surrounding gel inserts fell from him like dead white
tribbles. Standing up, he surveyed the Antarctic horizon, feeling
the bitter cold as a gentle cooling through his insulated oversuit
and skinsuit.

The drone was made to carry and soft-land
four hundred kilos of gear. Spooky weighed no more than
seventy-five, suit and all. The rest was taken up with supplies –
food, fuel, water, drugs, weapons, inflatable tent…everything he
might need to survive for a few days in an emergency. He didn’t
think he would need most of it, but he hadn’t lives this long by
being unprepared.

First he activated a hot-pack meal and downed
its semi-liquid contents – a stewlike sludge meant to provide
maximum nutrition in minimum time. Thus fortified, he strapped on
specialized cross-country skis and his preloaded backpack, and
began to shush toward the base. His chameleon oversuit turned dirty
white within moments, to match the snow.

The edge of the plateau presented his first
challenge, especially with the twenty-knot wind cutting crossways
to the slope. Several hundred meters of broken rock and ice made
for a nasty route.

Taking an air-powered launcher off his pack,
he fired a grapnel down into a crevice, then pulled up on its
attached cord until its barbs seated firmly. Rearranging the lines,
he then launched another in a parabolic arc toward the complex in
the distance. It reached nearly to the far edge of the ice field,
and he drew and pulled until the hooks caught on something and did
not budge.

Drawing the two cords toward one another, he
tied them firmly and then clipped the resulting safety line into a
carabiner, allowing it to run freely. After fitting spiked
overshoes and similarly equipped overgloves, he broke his
collapsible skis into their component pieces for storage in his
pack.

Then he set out.

An ordinary man, if very well prepared, might
have made the crossing. Spooky was far from ordinary. His body
hardened by years of physical training, perfected by the Eden
Plague, then boosted by nanites modified in Direct Action’s own
laboratories, he leaped from rock to floe to snowbank.

Occasionally he slipped downward, only to
catch himself with his spiked extremities, leaping upward even as
frozen slush crumbled beneath him like a video-game figure.
Eventually he made his way to the other edge, unclipping himself
from his safety line and marking its location with a low-power
beacon in case he needed it later.

Reassembling his skis, he skirted rightward
into a shallow depression in the rolling plain, staying out of
sight of the sprawling complex of shelters on the ground and
buildings on stilts. Obviously the base had been growing rapidly
this last year.

Cassandra has been busy.

Finally there was no more landscape to put
between himself and the nearest building, so he buried his gear,
making sure he could find it again, and set out to crawl.

His chameleon-suit should reduce his
detectable heat and visible signature to near zero, and radar was
unlikely to pick up the small amount of metal he carried. Motion
detectors were his only worry, especially the kind strewn on the
ground around, listening and looking with sensitive sonics for the
traces of a man’s movement.

Because this was not a life-or-death mission,
Spooky allowed himself one further risk. Had it been necessary, he
would have crept across the intervening two hundred meters at a
steady rate below four centimeters per second –standard trigger
speed for motion detectors. Below that, most sensors would ignore
everything, for the simple reason that excessive sensitivity
brought too many false positives that needed to be checked out. No
setup was perfect; any system could be beat.

But going so slow would have delayed him by
over an hour, and despite his high-tech suit, might endanger him
from frostbite and hypothermia. He was already getting hungry
again; cold-weather work burned calories at several times the
normal rate.

Besides, he might as well give the lady a
chance.

It only took him twelve minutes to crawl
across the bare field at a pace he deemed correct to fool any
merely human eyeballs: a slow, steady creep below the brain’s usual
motion sensitivity, like molasses flowing.

Finally, he rolled beneath one of the
structures, set on stilts above the frozen ground to minimize heat
loss. This was not only to save energy, but also to limit the
thawing and instability that inevitably accompanied too much warmth
applied to an Antarctic foundation. Much of the ground was layered
with ice, and melting it was asking to lose a building in a surface
collapse.