The A.I. War, Book One: The Big Boost (Tales of the Continuing Time) (4 page)

Two areas, high up on the man’s back, glowed red with heat. And Mansion was shaking himself free of Quinette’s grasp, still alive, still functional; in a certain degree of discomfort, but clearly not in terrible pain.

The heat exchanges, installed after the ’76 rebellion, obviously worked, and worked well. Trent had been reasonably sure they would, both from the specs and from reports he’d received of Elite surviving direct blasts with “Elite killers,” the pumped lasers developed during the rebellion. The maser blast Trent had hit Mansion with would not have killed him even had the man’s heat exchanges malfunctioned, but neither would the cyborg have been heading down the corridor once more less than ten seconds later, with a patch on his upper back glowing a dull red, looking Wicked Pissed.

TRENT LEFT HIS gloves unlocked and waited for the transfer lights on the infochips to go clear. Four of them had already, but the fifth light had yet to go clear –

TRENT HESITATED, RELUCTANT to let go of the last infochip. Field information on the PKF was rare – this was easily the best field observation he’d had of Elite since the rebellion – but that was not the source of his reluctance. Everything that he experienced and thought in these last moments was spooling into the last infochip; the moment he let go of the chip would be the moment of his death.

He decided to give himself one last treat before disconnecting; the next one was a classic.

THE ELITE WERE three quarters of the way down the long corridor, only forty meters left to the end, when the glowing holo of the pink bunny appeared, banging away on a drum, walking toward them along the corridor’s “ceiling.” Quinette and Mansion flew toward it, heading down the corridor at a good clip, each of them forcibly overriding their combat programming; neither wanted to be seen shooting like panicked rookies at the holo of a pink bunny sent at them by Trent the Uncatchable, a man who everyone knew wouldn’t try to really hurt them – when the bunny froze in place. The Elite had time for just a moment of uncertainty when the bunny threw away the drum sticks and performed a two-handed fast draw from the holsters that had abruptly appeared hanging from the bunny’s waist.

It shot them both, of course.

Mansion took the shot of liquid fadeaway all over his upper body. Janelle Quinette did better; the stream of liquid splashed against her shirt, caught the side of her cheek as she twisted frantically in mid-air, the burning hot lasers in her fingertips coming around to blast at the squirt guns, the squirt guns that had been hidden inside the holo of the bunny. She retained consciousness long enough to snarl, over the PKF comm band,
Merde!

THIS WAS THE hard part.

Replicant AIs have, in general, no evolved desire for self-preservation. Over the years most replicants had invested themselves with such an imperative, but in every case Trent knew of the imperative lacked the urgency, and replicants the fear, associated with the human desire to continue living.

Trent did not lack it.

He finished decoding Janelle Quinette’s last subverbalization, fed her comment on the state of the universe into the fifth infochip, and terminated the archive. There was no significant portion of himself that would fit within the nerve net inside his biological component’s skull, to say nothing of the protein media; the portions of himself inside those infochips was the only complete copy of him anywhere in the System –

His biological component pulled free the final infochip, and put all five chips into his scalesuit’s carry pouch. Trent watched him enter the airlock and cycle through, watching at the same time as the Elite finally found a way down the corridor that worked.

The empty combat suits had their own servomechanisms, and the Elite used them. While Quinette and Mansion were still bouncing around unconscious at the far end of the corridor, the two Elite at the other end of the corridor put autoshots into the hands of the combat suits and sent the suits on down the corridor, to the place where the induction coils were mounted. With an Elite inside the suit Trent could not have taken them over, but empty, as they now were, being run by remote command, it was possible: Trent thought longingly about taking control of the suits and doing something amusing with them – simulated sixty-nine, perhaps – but doing that would tell the PKF that he had broken their comm encryption. Not worth it, for a cheap joke.

The suits grew hotter and hotter as they approached the induction coils; they were close enough to Trent’s holocams that Trent could see the paint on their breasts, the Elite logo, peeling and cracking with the heat. Trent had wondered how they would locate the coils, or if they would just start shooting when it got too hot; they did the sensible thing, had one of the suits start shooting at the corridor walls about halfway down the corridor, sent the other suit on until it began to cool, turned it around and sent it back to the hottest spot in the corridor; and had it open fire as well.

The autoshots boomed hugely in the small space, shot pellets ricocheting around the two combat suits, denting and scarring them, pitting the glassite in the helmets. The stone chipped and fragmented, cracking apart; Trent waited a few seconds and then turned off the induction coils, in the hopes that the PKF would think that they’d killed the coils; he might get the last two down the corridor that way.

No such luck; the combat suits kept firing until the thin layer of rock over the induction coils had been shattered, and the coils themselves exposed to the combined fire of the combat suits.

The two suited Elite came flying down the corridor toward their comrades, toward Trent. Trent had nothing left to delay them with; everything else that he’d come up with, Gandhi CityState had rejected. In particular, right about now, Trent wished they’d allowed him to mount a few small explosives in the corridor; he might have trapped the Elite in a cave-in, kept them from reaching him before the
Vatsayama
reached Ceres.

Trent watched calmly as the third Elite stayed with the two unconscious Elite, and the fourth Elite cut through Trent’s doors with an X-laser. Trent did it while the Elite was still in the outer room; the hand grenades planted around the circumference of the Black Beast were quite strong, and if Trent waited until the Elite were any closer, the explosion might do more than shake him up.

This was the hard part, all right.

Trent detonated the grenades –

The wavefront of the explosion raced inward, shredding the Black Beast molecules at a time, moving so slowly that Trent the Uncatchable was aware of it as a dimming of his resources: his extremities went numb and ceased speaking to him, and Trent shrank and fell back before the great darkness advancing upon him. The wave of darkness came at last to the place where he awaited it, in the midst of the light:

– and died.

TRENT THE UNCATCHABLE, flying a meter above the pitted, rocky gray surface of Ceres Asteroid, beneath the light of the distant sun, shuddered with a wash of sympathetic pain. It was nothing physical, nothing like the broken bones that burned in his side.

“That was the hard part,” he said aloud.

It was the hard part: and it kept getting harder every time one of his Images was lost. Trent did not know if his own death would be as difficult to deal with, assuming he saw it coming. His Image was larger than he was in most ways, including emotionally. He
felt
more strongly as Image; and the pain Trent felt, linked to his Image when it was ended, was only an echo, small and distant, of the experience the Image itself was having.

And that was the scary part.

Trent moved across the surface of the asteroid, navigating with short bursts of his wrist and ankle rockets, considering his options. The
Vatsayama
was coming; Trent’s scalesuit gave out a radio microburst every thirty seconds, giving Trent’s current coordinates. It wouldn’t help the PKF; without the key to decode the burst the information was useless, and the radio signal itself was far too short to give the PKF time to lock in on it.

Assume the PKF troop transport had not been severely damaged when it touched down; the troop transport would be out there somewhere, looking for Trent. And that was assuming that the troop transport had come alone; unlikely. A PKF corvette was almost certainly nearby –

His radar detector pinged. Not loudly; they were looking for him, and were not certain where he was. It didn’t surprise Trent; the surface of his scalesuit was covered in polypaint that shaded the scalesuit into its environment in an eerie fashion. Optical sensors spread across the surface of the scalesuit; a masking algorithm built into the suit interpreted the information from the optics, tuning the polypaint as Trent moved. So it was unlikely that the PKF had a visual of him.

The radar detector pinged again. The suit responded as it had been designed; it kicked in with a vague, flickering radar signal of its own, a fuzzy signal that would generate ghost images everywhere within two hundred meters of Trent. The optical sensors built into Trent’s suit tracked motion, piped it directly to Trent’s inskin: black combat armor rose up over the surface of the asteroid, eclipsing the light from the distant stars behind it. A single Elite. Trent wondered briefly who it was. Trent knew his enemies; he’d met many of them over the course of the years, and had databases on the rest.

He scanned ahead, consulting the map he carried in his inskin of the surface of Ceres. It wasn’t good; there wasn’t another lock leading into pressure within several kilometers, and Trent wasn’t sure he wanted to try for one anyway. Certainly the PKF had maps of Ceres’ surface, including the location of locks leading to pressure. They’d be watching for Trent – and Trent could not bring PKF back into pressure, not while there were unarmed civilians inside, civilians the PKF would kill if they did not get out of the way quickly enough.

There were no locks nearby; but there was a ravine, a jagged gorge five meters deep, running across the asteroid’s surface. Two hundred and forty meters away
...
two hundred and twenty. In the view from his suit’s optics, Trent could see the black combat suit following along after him. The Elite did not have a visual lock on him yet, but he had to know roughly where Trent was, within the general radius of the interference signal Trent’s suit was generating –

A hundred and eighty meters until the ravine; and the Elite had his visual, all right. Trent could see the man’s rockets, lighting at full boost. No point in hiding any further; Trent lit his maneuvering rockets and
flew
.

Trent wondered briefly where the Elite’s backup was. Either the Elite had come in the transport – unlikely, but not impossible – or the ship in which they had come could not be too many kilometers off Ceres. It was possible the transport was no longer functional; it had come down hard. But the Peaceforcers were a cautious group; if they’d had enough time, they’d have sent backups.

Less than one hundred meters left to the gorge, and the Elite behind Trent was gaining on him. Purely a function of design; Elite combat suits were designed to boost longer and at higher velocities than the maneuvering rockets built into Trent’s scalesuit. The Elite would not catch Trent before Trent reached the gorge, though –

On a ball of rock 760 klicks in diameter, the horizon is very close.

The PKF corvette seemed to bounce up over the edge of the horizon, directly in front of Trent, coming up over the top of a jagged uprise not two hundred meters ahead of him: a smooth sloping wedge shape marred only slightly by its three laser cannon. Almost by reflex Trent cut his rockets, paralyzed for an instant: enemies ahead, an enemy behind, he might be able to hide from a single Elite in that gorge, but not from a ship armed with searchlights, the Elite coming up fast from behind, corvette approaching him from the front, go left, go right, go straight up, bad options all. Go back, attack the Elite,
worse
option –

Trent went for the ship at full boost.

The ship vectored toward Trent from one direction, the Elite from the other. The corvette’s front rockets cut in, blasting at full, perhaps two seconds gone now since Trent and the ship had first seen each other. The ship exploded into Trent’s sky; five seconds, four, three, two –

Superconducting magnets buried in the palms and soles of Trent’s scalesuit came alive at full capacity. Trent went through the exhaust from the nose rockets, hit the hull of the PKF corvette just below the Unification’s flag, the blue and white Earth against a background of stars. He grabbed wildly, got one hand flat against the hull before he bounced off, he and the ship going in opposite directions at what seemed high speed only on the human level, fifty or sixty klicks an hour, and slid down the length of the ship, palm of one hand holding him to the ship’s smooth hull, got the other hand around and connected to the hull, sliding backward down the ship –

It happened too quickly for his biological component to take more than a passing interest in it. His inskin made the decisions:

Optical feed shows laser cannon approaching. Ankle rockets on high, nose rockets on the corvette still boosting at max; drop boost on the left ankle rocket and I will slide laterally down the hull, just missing the cannon emplacement....

Trent’s right ankle rocket died and his suit went rigid in the same moment. Trent and his suit slewed around and struck the cannon emplacement at over forty kilometers an hour. The shock slammed up through the rigid suit, through Trent’s knees and into his ribs –

His right knee popped so loudly Trent could hear it even through his suit’s neck collar, his broken ribs collapsed and Trent screamed at the top of his lungs as the PKF Elite who had been chasing him sailed by, heading in the opposite direction.

Trent’s first coherent observation after the shock wore off was that the laser cannon’s focusing ring was white hot. He stared at it from ten centimeters away, abruptly aware that the vacuum immediately in front of his faceplate was filled with an invisible beam of coherent light that would vaporize him if he moved wrong, if he moved out of the small space between the laser and the ship’s hull.