The A.I. War, Book One: The Big Boost (Tales of the Continuing Time) (22 page)

24

A VEHICLE OF some sort was chasing him.

The sled Trent had taken from the
Unity
was a two seater. It had plenty of boost for his purposes; he’d reached turnover not long after losing touch with Jason Lucas. Since then he’d been decelerating.

The sled had no instruments other than short radar. It showed a vehicle several klicks back of Trent, and gaining on him. All the radar told him was that it was bigger than a sled. Trent merely hoped that whatever it was, it was from the
Unity
– vehicles aboard the
Unity
hadn’t had their missiles mounted yet.

Further behind the near vehicle, Trent knew there were other vehicles: he saw stars being eclipsed. It made him grateful for the nearer chase ship – Trent was pretty sure the further vehicles were PKF corvettes, and the only reason he hadn’t been fired upon was the ship in between him and them.

Francis Xavier Chandler’s house was less than a kilometer away.

THE ANGER BURNED in Mohammed Vance, the worst anger he’d felt in his fifty years. Sitting alone in the pilot’s chair of the small shuttle he’d taken from the
Unity
, his pulse pounded in his ears and the stink from his uniform, soaked with Adrian’s blood, was so vile he couldn’t think clearly.

He was so angry that his combat computer refused to turn off.

He’d known Adrian Hilè since they’d been teenagers together, at the PKF Academy in Marseille. Thirty-two years ago. Vance had introduced Adrian to his wife – dead now, Adrian’s wife had died not long after the TriCentennial, Vance couldn’t recall what the cause was.

Melissa had betrayed him.

Trent had stolen,
was stealing
his ship. The acceleration aboard the
Unity
had reached one gravity and was still increasing, as the ship boosted directly toward the sun. Vance had left officers aboard, but they were trapped – doors wouldn’t open for them, those who made the mistake of entering the transport capsules weren’t let back out again. Monitor was evacuating the air from the ship, clearing the ship of PKF a deck at a time. None of the PKF Vance had had aboard the ship were wearing pressure suits, though most of them had left their suits at various airlocks. Vance had ships preparing to chase
Unity
sunward, but they were taking
time
to get equipped with gear to burn through decks and bulkheads once they’d caught up with
Unity
and matched velocities, all assuming Monitor didn’t use
Unity
’s lasers to shoot down any chase ships that came too close –

Certainly Vance knew as well as anyone that nothing short of nuclear weapons was going to disable the
Unity
itself.

Very soon now Vance was going to have to give the order to abandon the
Unity
. Only the few Elite left aboard would have a shot of reaching Monitor’s core systems, or the rockets – when
Unity
reached two gravities acceleration, no one but the Elite would be functional.

He was going to have to call Adrian’s parents, and tell them how their son had died.

Melissa du Bois’ father had passed but her mother was still alive. Someone else could be given the job of informing her that her daughter had turned traitor. No one would need to tell her that he, Vance, had intentionally put Melissa in a position where she might fail –

Melissa had betrayed him. Mohammed Vance’s oldest friend had just forced Mohammed to kill him – had tried very hard to kill Mohammed.

Who else has he turned?

F.X. CHANDLER’S HOUSE was a long cylinder, large enough to hold 800 separate rooms. Once, Chandler had run Chandler industries from here – nearly five hundred people had lived aboard it at various times.

During the TriCentennial, a detachment of Johnny Rebs had attacked it. The surface of the house was still scarred from laser fire and the impact of missiles; Chandler had abandoned it after the attack, had fled Earth and the Unification, and no one had ever invested the substantial time and Credit necessary to repair the house and repressurize it.

Trent docked the sled at one end of the house. He could see a PKF shuttle decelerating toward the house, only a few hundred meters away now. Vance, he assumed. The PKF corvettes following along behind Vance were close enough to be visible –

The house was unpowered and Trent had to cycle the airlock manually. He stepped through and into the house, and took the time to dog the airlock door again behind him.

VANCE BROUGHT THE shuttle to a halt beside the sled Trent had abandoned. He knew he was not thinking well, couldn’t control his breathing or his heart rate, knew he should wait for backup before following Trent –

He snapped his helmet in place and cycled through the shuttle’s airlock.

He was not even controlling his own body directly; his battle computer took instructions and moved him like a machine.

At the airlock leading into the Chandler house, he hesitated. He could see a shinier spot on the wheel that Trent had turned to manually open the lock – had Trent boobytrapped the lock?

He hesitated a moment – felt the pain in his neck where Adrian had tried to strangle him, before Vance had torn Adrian’s head from his shoulders – spun the wheel, opened the airlock, and when he found himself still alive a moment later, threw himself into the darkness after Trent.

VANCE COULD SEE the residue of Trent’s heat. Stepped up by his cyborg eyes, it was the dullest possible scarlet glow, floating down the center of the corridor for about fifty meters –

He flipped on his helmet’s headlamps. Fifty meters away, the corridor dead ended. He removed the glove on his right hand, exposing it to vacuum as the suit automatically clamped tight at his wrist, made a fist to activate the laser buried within it, and kicked forward, right fist out in front of him, left arm down at his side, looking, had he known it, like Superman in flight.

At the corridor’s end he turned his headlamps off and waited again. The corridor branched off in six directions, four corridors leading away from the center of the house, straight downward toward the outer edge of the house, what would have been the high-G portions of the house back when it had still been spinning around its axis. Two more split off and went forward-up, and forward-down. It took a moment for his brain to correctly interpret the signals from his eyes: the red heat trail went
that
way....

Forward-down.

Closer now. Vance flashed his headlamps to see ahead, down a long and wide corridor that looked made for twenty people to traverse at a time, then went back to infrared; the heat signature was stronger, a steady red glow hanging along what was, in Vance’s current vertical orientation, the corridor’s bottom.

He kicked off after Trent, lights dimmed, flying down the long corridor, guiding himself with flicks of his hands and feet, using training he hadn’t had cause to recall in two decades. He felt it coming back to him, the old free fall reflexes, still there after all the passage of all those years, when he’d been assigned to Halfway as a new Elite, back in the days before the Castanaveras telepaths had come into his life –

– back when he and Adrian last served together with the same rank, a pair of young Elite corporals, before Vance had begun the climb that had taken him to a position as the commander of the Unification’s Peace Keeping Force, the second most powerful person in the System behind the Secretary General himself –

Vance rounded a corner. The flare of infrared was so bright it dazzled. Trent himself, thirty meters away, struggling with a doorway, looking back over his shoulder at Vance –

Vance shot at him with his fist laser, raked the laser across his pressure suit, looking to open it to the death pressure surrounding them.

Trent got the door open, ducked through into a brighter room, and Vance followed him, firing as he flew, toward the doorway, the doorway wasn’t closing, hadn’t closed, and Vance charged through and into –

Dim lights came up around him. Vance blinked, tried to turn his head – he couldn’t move. He was stuck, stretched out with his fist before him, still firing into one of the room’s walls.

He was in a small dark room with two chairs, before a control panel with a brightly glowing holofield showing a collection of gadgets whose purpose he could not immediately discern.

Just beyond the control panel was a curved, faintly reflective surface – the brightest thing in the room was the laser firing from his fist, and he could see its reflection on the curved surface.

Trent’s voice occurred in his earphone. “You should turn that laser off,” it said. “This’ll hurt if you don’t.”

A hand came around from behind Vance, wrapped a dark cloth around Vance’s exposed hand. The beam winked out and a scorched smell wafted up from the direction of the hand, and abruptly Vance’s hand grew very hot, even with the superconductor network moving the heat away at high speed.

“Turn if off,” Trent said again. “You’re going to burn yourself if you don’t. Really,
now.
”

Vance overrode his battle computer and shut down the laser. He still couldn’t move and didn’t know why. Trent came around into his field of view, and strapped himself into one of the two chairs.

Vance subvocalized,
Can you hear me?

Trent’s voice in his earphone. “I can. In a few minutes we’ll have pressure again. We lost the air when we came through that door.”

Why can’t I move?

“Impact field. Strongest impact field Credit can buy, turned all the way up. On the upside, you’ll probably survive the bombing when your guys start shooting at us. On the other upside, you can’t come kill me, because you can’t move.”

My troops will board this house. They won’t fire upon us.

“Oh, they will,” Trent said. “They’ll be mad in a minute. Well, scared. Are PKF allowed to get scared? Mad, I guess, scared but sublimated into productive-shooting-at-people. The house is about to fire on them.” He glanced at the control panel. “Right about …
now
.” He touched one of the glowing spots inside the holofield. Nothing happened, so far as Vance could tell. “Lasers first. We’ve got some missiles as well, but I’m saving those for when the situation becomes dire. Isn’t that a great word?
Dire
. OK, I think that’s about right.”

Trent leaned forward, reached up and cracked his helmet. He hesitated a moment, apparently unsure of the air – and then lifted the helmet from his head. “No worse than Martian air,” he said. “That’s not an endorsement.” He unstrapped, came over and stood behind Vance – Vance felt his helmet crack open, felt his helmet being removed. “There we go,” and this time Vance heard Trent via his ears rather than his earphone – not a big difference in the sound; his ears, like his earphone, were mechanisms.

“If you promise not to shoot me,” said Trent, “I’ll soften the field around your arm enough for you to lower it.”

“I won’t make that promise.”

Trent sighed. “I appreciate that. I probably wouldn’t have believed you if you had. I know you’re not a casual sort of liar like me, but you might think it honorable to lie to someone holding you prisoner. I wouldn’t bet one way or the other. Jesus and Harry, that
smell
– whose blood is that?”

“Not mine.”

“Right. Can you breathe OK?”

“I am having no problem breathing.”

“You were breathing pretty hard just now.”

“I was preparing to kill you.”

“Ah,” said Trent wisely, “that would explain it. Hang a sec, I need to shoot at your ships again, they keep coming around on us as if they’re thinking about docking. And … yep. I think I disabled that one.
Six
corvettes? What did you think you were chasing, a bunch of psycho SpaceFarer troops?”

“You turned Adrian Hilè.”

“I did.”

“How?”

Trent shook his head. “You’ll figure it out, but I’m going to make you go to the trouble. You owe him that.”

“Who else?”

“Oh, hell, most of them.” Trent smiled at Vance. “OK, sure, even
you
know that’s a lie. Really? Just members of your personal staff. Plus family, friends – high value targets.”

“Is this amusing you?”

“You standing there, covered in another man’s blood? No. I like my metaphors to be more, you know,
metaphorical
.”

“An impact field capable of controlling an Elite. You were prepared.”

“I didn’t know it was going to be you,” Trent admitted. “I thought likelier Melissa. What did you figure the odds were that I’d get to her? Even Credit?” Trent glanced at Vance’s frozen features. “Higher, huh? That’s rough.”

“She might not have failed.”

“But you’re the one who put her in the spot where it was likeliest she would.” Trent shook his head. “Surprised me when I found her at Halfway. I didn’t think you’d be that hard with people you loved.” Trent studied him. “Are you really that awful an excuse for a human being? Are you telling me you
don’t
love her? A woman like Melissa? She’s worth ten of either of us.”

“Twenty of you,” said Vance. “I’ll still execute her when I catch her.”

“Yes,” said Trent. “There’s that. Trapped in who you are, aren’t you? You let her go, you’re weak. Worlds tremble at the thought. Me,” he shrugged, “I’m a lucky man. I don’t really have to care what anyone thinks.”

“You’re irresponsible.”

“Responsible to something else,” Trent suggested.

Vance studied him a moment, then looked away.

The room shook around them.

“Ah, there we go,” said Trent. “Missiles. I had explosives mounted all around the entry you and I used – your missiles just set them off. Feel that? We’re tumbling – you’re going to feel some acceleration in a minute when the –”

THE HOUSE, WITH six PKF corvettes clustered about it, shuddered visibly and then one end of it blossomed into light.

The house
moved.

MOHAMMED VANCE FELT as though he’d been slapped in the face. Even through the impact field the force was enough to rattle him to the bone.