Earth Strike (12 page)

If that mob down there turned on the dwindling number of remaining Marines, they could end up being just as deadly as the Turusch.

MEF HQ
Marine Sick Bay
Eta Boötis IV
1720 hours, TFT

For Gray, it was as though he were deep within the folds of a lucid dream.

He
knew
he was dreaming, but the reality of the scene was startlingly crisp and real, like being inside a VR threevee. There was nothing automatic or canned about it. He could
choose
to turn his head, looking north, toward the skeletal towers of Central Manhattan looming against the night. Or he could turn and look south, to the submerged and tumbled-down ruins of the ancient financial district projecting above the surf, the warning lights and buoys winking in the dark.

He was standing on a rooftop above something that had once been called East 32nd Street, just north of the drowned section of the old city. He could hear the gentle susurration of the surf fifty meters below.

A UT-84 utility hopper, with Periphery Authority markings showing in blue and white light against all three black wings, hovered overhead, eerily silent, faintly illuminated by the sky-glow of the New City, twenty kilometers to the northeast. Then a shaft of dazzling light speared down from the aircraft’s belly and he could not see anything at all. “Halt!” a sharp, neutrally inflected voice called, amplified and immense. “Stay where you are, in the open, your hands clearly visible! Authority peaceforcers will be there momentarily!”

The scene was a virtual reality, a near-perfect replay of events that had occurred five years earlier.

In fact, there were software programs available commercially that acted exactly like this—fed directly into the brain through a marginal AI. You closed your eyes…and could go anywhere, see anything, engage in any sport, have sex with any celebrity, and have it all be just like being there.

“What are you feeling right now?” a woman’s voice said in his mind. It was, he knew, the voice of Dr. Anna George, a psytherapist with the 1
^st
MEF. She was linked into the program with him, seeing everything he was seeing, experiencing his memories, and his decisions.

“I’m not sure,” he admitted. He spoke aloud, the voice sounding distant, somewhere off in his mind, somewhere behind the silently hovering hopper, the ruins of the old city. “Fear, I guess.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“
Them
. The peaceforcers.”

“But you know they’re there to help you.”

“No. I
don’t
. They’ve always been the enemy!”

“Who has been the enemy, Lieutenant?”

“The Authority. The peaceforcers. Watching us. Hassling us. Telling us what to do, what not to do. They call us
squatties
. Squatters and primitives. And ferals. To them, we’re not people. We’re just…pests. Problems to be
dealt with
.”

“But they got help for your wife.”

“And they turned her against me. She’s not my wife anymore.”

“You sound…bitter.”

“Am I?” He laughed. “Just because they swept me up, wrecked my life, turned my life-partner against me? Why the hell should I be
bitter
?”

“This will go a lot easier, Lieutenant, a lot
faster
, if you let go of the sarcasm.”

“So you keep telling me.”

“The hopper has you spotted on top of that building. What will you do now?”

“I don’t know. Do you mean what do I want to do now? Or what I did
then
?”

“Either one. This program lets you explore
all
possibilities. What happened. What
might
have happened. Good choices. Bad choices. It’s all up to you.”

In his dream, he looked away from the glare overhead, looked at the broom at his feet.

It wasn’t literally a broom, of course, but a Mitsubishi-Rockwell gravcycle. Three meters long and gleaming dull silver, it was mostly a straight, lightweight keel, with compact grav-impeller blocks front and back, braces for his feet, a long, narrow saddle for his torso, and a small virtual control suite. In street slang they were called gimps, pogo sticks, or brooms, and they were hard to come by on the Periphery. He’d found his eight years earlier in an abandoned, burned-out shop up in Old Harlem, somehow overlooked in a storage room for a century and a half, still in its manufactory-sealed packaging.

Okay. His choice? Well, he remembered what he
had
done that night.

The peaceforcers probably had weapons on him—stunners and a tangleweb, if nothing more. He had to do this fast….

He dropped to his belly, landing on the saddle full length, his legs stretched out behind, his feet slipping into the foot-brace stirrups, his hands grasping the handles to either side of the control suite. Gripping hard with hands and knees, he rolled hard to the left, throwing himself and the broom out of that hard, tightly focused circle of illumination, off the roof of the building, and into the darkness below.

For a giddy moment he was in free fall, the sudden blast of air triggering his helmet safety protocols and snapping down the visor. He felt the brush of something insubstantial across his leg…and then the sensation was gone, a near-miss by the hopper’s tangleweb projector.

“Citizen Gray, this is the Periphery Authority. Land your vehicle at once.”

But he’d already twisted on the handles, engaged the cycle’s grav-field, and brought the pogo around, pointing toward the southwest, out over the encroaching sea. Both feet moved, pointing his toes back and down, and the impellers caught with a sudden surge of acceleration.

“Where do you think you’re going, Lieutenant?” George’s voice asked. It wasn’t judgmental, not condemning. It was simply…curious.

“Anywhere,” he replied. “Nowhere. Away from
them
.”

He took the broom down to the deck, skimming now a scant meter and a half above the waters rolling between the steel and concrete cliffs of ruined skyscrapers to either side. Late in the twenty-first century, rising sea levels and the final insult of Hurricane Cynthia had battered through the Verrazano-Narrows Dam and sent the waters of the Atlantic Ocean surging past the Narrows into Upper New York Bay and across the lower half of Manhattan. The total mean rise in sea level across the island and nearby Brooklyn, Staten Island, and New Jersey had been over twelve meters—nearly forty feet. For decades after, there’d been plans to rebuild, even plans to transform lower Manhattan into an enormous artificial island rising above the intruding sea…but somehow the money had never been there. Eventually, the New City had arisen to the northeast, in the heights of Riverdale, Yonkers, and the Bronx.

Within a century, water damage, subsidence, erosion, and lack of maintenance had begun to bring the towering skyline of Old Manhattan’s downtown section down. Many of the buildings now were eerie mounds covered by kudzu, porcelain-berry, oriental bittersweet, and other ground cover that transformed them into steep-sided, fuzzy green islands. In places, skeletal towers still emerged from the water or from piles of vegetation-choked rubble. Elsewhere, some of the older stone buildings, as opposed to those of mere steel and concrete, stood still like solitary monoliths, monuments to the long-vanished city, windows long ago blown out, stone surfaces partly covered by vines and moss, slowly crumbling.

Those buildings and mounds lay just ahead of Gray now, a tangled maze of obstacles above the water. The broom’s radar and infrared optics were feeding images to his helmet display, highlighting the dangers—the cliffs, the walls, the mounds—in red, the safe passages between in green. He swerved left, then angled right, ducking past the tangled mounds of Soho Island and on toward the crumbling ruins of the old TriBeCa Tower.

Behind him, the hovering utility hopper dropped its nose and darted forward in pursuit. The Authority aircraft was highly maneuverable, more maneuverable, even, than the broom, and certainly faster. Gray held the advantage, though, because he knew Manhattan,
all
of it.

He nudged the broom even closer to the water; the slipstream of his passage roiled the surface behind him in a rooster tail of spray even though he wasn’t touching the water itself. He hurtled along the Broadway Canyon, pushing close to Mach 1, then braking sharply and swerving right up the Franklin Gap. Directly ahead, the TriBeCa Tower loomed vast against the darkness. Once a self-contained city in its own right, one of several arcologies to arise from central Manhattan during the mid-twenty-first century, it shrugged up into the sky nearly half a kilometer, mushroom-shaped, dome-topped, the vertical sides crenellated and textured by balconies, landing pads, overlooks, and walkways.

Accelerating again, he passed underneath the building’s massive overhang, deftly avoiding the outstretched claws of severed piping reaching from places where the concrete had fallen away and exposed the rotting and corroded infrastructure. He was home free now. The bastards couldn’t follow him under here.

And home was just up ahead.

He wasn’t going to go home, though. That was what he’d done wrong originally. There were peaceforcer officers waiting for him there…though how the hell they’d known where one anonymous squatter was living within all of this labyrinthine wreckage he didn’t know.

No…of
course
he knew. He hadn’t thought about it before, but he saw it now. Angela had told them.

But he wasn’t going to the suite of former apartments and shops that he called home. Slowing again, he scanned the surface of the overhang meters above his head, then spotted the place where, about a century ago, a hundred-meter chunk of reinforced concrete had dropped away, exposing a large and ragged hole in the floor of the tower’s amphitheater. Pulling back on the handgrips, he angled up and through the hole, emerging within a dark warren of passageways and rooms.

Slowing just enough to navigate those twisting hallways and corridors, he moved through the tower’s inner ruin, working his way higher, working back toward the north. There was a cluster of elevator shafts over there on the north side, empty now, with water below and empty sky above, where a part of the dome had collapsed. He would be able to rise through a shaft to a spot right at the surface of the main dome, a place where he could look for the pursuing Authority ship.

If the coast was clear, he could hightail it across the Hudson and the drowned expanse of Hoboken, and into the wilds of Jersey City Island.

“
Halt
, Citizen Gray!”

The voice, the sudden human shadow looming in front of him, brought him rearing back. His broom skidded out from beneath him and clattered along the wall, out of control. He hit the floor of the passageway, bounced, and rolled.

“
That’s not fair!
” he screamed. “
That’s not the way it happened!
”

But the Authority troops were already slapping the restraints on his wrists.

26 September 2404

MEF HQ
Marine Sick Bay
Eta Boötis IV
1732 hours, TFT

“Why do you think it wasn’t fair?” Dr. George asked him.

“You’re rigging the program,” he protested. “Making it so I can’t win!”

“Life isn’t fair, Lieutenant.”

“The bastards were waiting for me at my place,” he said. “So I didn’t go there. You had one of them just pop up in a corridor.”

“How would it have been different if you’d gotten away?”

“I’d have gotten across the river to New Jersey. Or I would’ve gotten down to Battery or over to Chintown. I have…I
had
friends there….”

“But Angela had given them your ID. They’d have caught up with you, sooner or later.”

“Yeah, but
why
? There must be thousands of squatters in the Ruins! Why bother with me?”

“Because you’d impressed them, of course.”

He snorted. “That stupid test? The three-D navigation thing? That wasn’t until later.”

“You seem to have attracted their attention early on.”

“All we wanted was to be left alone….”

“According to the records, it was you who approached the Authority. When your…when Angela had her stroke.”

“Yeah…”

That, of course, had been where it all had started going wrong.

They were called primitives. And they
were
, in a way, men and women with almost nothing in the way of a technical infrastructure or implants, picking out a precarious living in the Manhattan Ruins and Norport and Sunken Miami and Old London and a hundred other coastal cities half-swallowed by the encroaching oceans, the polar ice caps having melted away three centuries before.

Gray had been born in the Ruins, a part of the TriBeCa Tower community. His discovery of the gravcycle in an uptown shop had let him “be the man”—Prim slang for proving himself—at his coming-of-age by bringing in a load of food and food-nano from New Rochelle. Life within the ruins was only possible if you belonged to a “family”…meaning one of the hundreds of territorial gangs. Each mound-island had its own family, and while many cooperated with the others, a few lived by preying on weaker families. That gravcycle had seen the TriBeCa Family through a couple of tough wars and innumerable raids.

The Periphery Authority was a department of the Confederal Police charged with maintaining the law in the Ruins—an all but impossible task, when you thought about it. The inhabitants of the Periphery didn’t recognize Confederal control; they didn’t fight the Auths, usually, but they tended to fade back deeper into the warrens and labyrinths of the Ruins, and to have nothing whatsoever to do with the Confeds.

But when Angela had suffered a stroke that paralyzed her right arm and badly weakened her right leg, Gray had gone nearly mad with worry. With very little in the way of modern medical technology within the Periphery—few medicines, no nanomeds at all, no docbots or diagnostic software or, indeed, any Net access at all—Gray had taken his broom and flown north to Morningside Heights, the southernmost tip of the New City. A doctor at the Columbia Arcology had agreed to see her, though with no insurance and no cred-implants, of course, neither he nor his wife could pay for treatment. Gray had agreed to talk with someone with the Confederal Social Authority in order to get treatment for Angela.

He still remembered the snickers, the sidelong looks. A Prim, dressed in rags, pleading for help from the Confeds. And for a
wife
, of all things. In the Ruins, among the families, people tended to pair off, to form tight pair-bonds rather than the more typical looser social and sexual associations. Monogies, they were called, and if that Peripheral lifestyle wasn’t illegal, on the Mainland it was still widely believed to be possessive, dysfunctional, and just a bit dirty.

The soshies had taken him in and asked a lot of questions. They’d hooked him up to brain scans and thought monitors, and seemed fascinated by the fact that he could fly a broom without a direct neural interface. “That shouldn’t even be possible!” one caseworker had told him. “Have you ever thought of getting an implant?”

“Oh, sure,” he’d told her. “Absolutely! Just as soon as my insurance comes through!”

They claimed later he’d agreed to join the military, but he hadn’t. Well, not
really
, though he might have tried to give an impression of interest in the idea, just so they’d help Angela. Or maybe they’d taken his sarcasm as agreement. It was always tough to tell with the Authorities. They were a damned humorless bunch.

Join the military?
Hell
, no! All he knew was scavenging and Ruinrunning. He could barely read and write, and if the Authorities claimed that the squatters out in the Periphery were still Earth Confederation citizens, Gray and a few million other Prim squatters didn’t see it that way at all. They were free. The only law was what they themselves laid down and enforced. They didn’t receive any of the Authority’s protection, medical or financial services, education, clothing, Net access, entertainment, or food. They didn’t have Confed-recognized jobs or welfare status and they didn’t pay taxes. So how could anyone claim that they were
citizens
?

But then a Navy lieutenant commander had shown up in his black-and-golds and told him he was there to administer the Confederation oath. He’d bolted then, bolted and run. He’d found his broom where he’d parked it, on a landing balcony high above Harlem Bay, and launched himself into the night.

He’d been pursued by a hopper, but he’d eluded them.

They’d been waiting for him in the TriBeCa Tower apartments he’d shared with Angela.

The worst part of it all, the most awful revelation that had transformed his recruit training into a living nightmare, had been the discovery that Angela had…changed. They’d healed her. They’d grown class-three implants within the sulci of her brain, regrown sections of her organic nervous system, given her palm implants and an ID, even given her training as a compositer, whatever the hell that was, and assigned her to a job up in Haworth. The last he’d heard, she was living with some guy named Fred in an extended community.

She no longer loved Gray, and no longer wanted to see him.

The medtechs he’d talked to later had told him that that happened with strokes sometimes. Old neural pathways holding information on relationships, on emotional responses could be burned out by the neuron storm, lost even beyond the ability of neural prostheses to recapture them.

Gray wondered, though, how much was stroke and how much was reprogramming.
Reconditioning
. When they’d wired her to their machines and downloaded reading and writing, Cloud-Net skills and language training, social norms and Mainland mores, had they also told her what to believe? Who to love?
How
to love?

The last time he’d been able to talk with Angela, he’d asked if that had been what had happened. The simple question had made her angry, unreasonably so, he thought. “
Damn
you, Trev! Don’t you think I can think for myself?” she’d demanded.

Maybe she could. But…that hadn’t been Angela he’d been talking to. She was
different
now, and not just in her attitude or her use of language.

He’d known then that Angela,
his
Angela, was dead.

“You’re crying,” Dr. George said. She handed him a tissue and he accepted it, dragging it across his wet cheeks until the material evaporated and took the moisture with it as a microparticle aerosol. “We seem to have touched something.”

“Fuck you,” he said, but without much feeling. He felt dead inside, utterly wrung out and empty. “We’re done.
I’m
done. Get the hell out of my head….”

Hangar Deck
TC/USNA CVS
America
Haris Orbit, Eta Boötis System
1740 hours, TFT

Commander Marissa Allyn stood on the walkway overlooking the star carrier’s main hangar deck, a vast and cavernous compartment three stories tall and over 150 meters long, a noisy, banging, bustling nexus of activity as returning fighters trapped on the recovery deck above and were brought down through the mergedeck barriers and into the pressurized interior of the ship.

The last of the Dragonfires had recovered back on board the
America
hours ago. Allyn had been brought back much later as a tow, rather ignominiously hauled in by the Search and Rescue tug. She’d been unconscious through most of the process, but she’d begun to come out of it as the tug hauled her into the turkey bay…carrier slang for one of the utility bay entrances.

They’d whisked her off to
America
’s sick bay facilities, where she’d been stripped and deconned, probed by robotic diagnosticians, and shot full of more nanomed healer ’bots. They’d put her on light duty and discharged her just twenty minutes ago; she’d come down here to find out how many of the Dragonfires had actually made it back safely. The numbers hadn’t been posted yet in PriFly, weren’t available on AmericaNet, and the pilots themselves were off the radar—presumably up in God’s country going through the debrief.

Which was where she would be going soon as well, once they called for her. In the meantime, she could talk to some of the crew chiefs or recovery deck personnel to get the “straight eye,” meaning rumors, gossip, or shipboard intelligence that generally was more accurate than the official word of God.

She’d been proceeding along the elevated walkway toward the recovery officer’s suite when a new arrival on the deck below had captured her full attention.

Flashing red lights and a hooter had cleared one particular part of the busy hangar deck—surrounding an elevator column extending all the way from deck to overhead, an area marked off by painted stripes, no-go warnings, and holographic barriers. The elevator began to descend, and the black nanoseal of the deck hatch in the overhead began to bulge downward, taking on the curving shape of the lower surfaces of a returning shuttle. The arrival was unusual for two reasons. First off, shuttles, like the SAR tug, normally recovered through a utility docking bay, not the main hangar deck. Troops and other personnel, in particular, generally came aboard in either a troop bay or at the quarterdeck receiving facility forward.

And second, there were a hell of a lot of Marines down there, falling into a broad semicircle facing the shuttle’s starboard side.

Slowly, the shape continued to drop, the shuttle still coated by black nanometal that looked and acted like a viscous liquid, clinging tightly to the shuttle’s surface to keep separate the open-space hard vacuum of the recovery deck above and the Earth-normal atmosphere of the pressurized hangar deck. As the shuttle continued to drop, the nanoseal let go, parting along the ventral surface, oozing up the ship’s sides like tar, merging above the shuttle’s back, then returning to a flat, black rectangle in the overhead. Free now, the shuttle continued to descend until the elevator column had vanished entirely into the deck beneath the splayed landing legs, and the shuttle rested at hangar-deck level. A portion of the starboard fuselage irised open as a ramp extended to the deck beyond the solidifying nanometal pool, and the waiting Marines came sharply alert, weapons at the ready.

This, Allyn thought, must be the shuttle bringing up the Turusch prisoners she’d heard about in the pre-mission briefing. She leaned over against the railing, trying for a better look. There were plenty of rumors about Turusch biology and about their body shape, but nothing that had ever been confirmed.

Aglestch physiognomy was well known, of course. Humans had met them just less than a century before. They were spidery, hairy things that were not spiders at all—the only external skeleton they had on their sausage-shaped bodies sheathed their two-meter legs—and they lived in an oxidizing atmosphere not very different from Earth’s, so humans could meet them face-to…sense-organ cluster. The Turusch, however, were mysteries. There were rumors, conflicting and confusing, of things like dinosaurs, like whales, like sea slugs, but the things had never been visually recorded. Eye-witness reports at Arcturus Station and at Everdawn had mentioned their heavy combat armor, carballoy mecha the size of small trucks.

This just might be the moment when the mystery was finally ended, the reality revealed.

Humans, Marines in combat armor, were coming down the ramp now. One, an officer, conferred for a moment with the officer in charge of the section waiting on the Hangar Deck.

And then the first Turusch drifted into view.

Allyn felt a stab of disappointment. The thing was wearing what presumably was the alien equivalent of an e-suit, a three-meter-long cylinder floating on grav-lifters. The tank was rounded front and back, and there was nothing like windows or a canopy through which she could glimpse the creature inside.

An armored Marine combat walker stalked down the ramp beside it, a protective measure, no doubt. If that floating tube suddenly started smashing into bystanders or equipment, a single megajoule pulse from the walker’s main gun would puncture the Tushie’s protective shell and it would choke on oxygen. That, of course, was why the creature was in the e-suit; she’d heard speculation that the things lived in a reducing atmosphere, though she didn’t know what the gas mix was. Oxygen would be a deadly poison to them.

A second floater tank appeared, emerging onto the ramp, closely escorted by another Marine walker.

So…this seemed to confirm the scuttlebutt that said the Tushies were completely nonhuman, that they couldn’t even breathe a standard gas mix. That meant that humans and Tushies weren’t fighting over the same real estate…unless, of course, they breathed the witch’s brew of sulfur compounds that made up the Harisian atmosphere. According to Naval Intelligence, though, the Tushies were the front-line forces for the mysterious Sh’daar, fighting at their orders. Even less was known about the Sh’daar than was known about the Turusch.