Geosynchron (53 page)

"Nothing seems to be working on her," said Merri, wiping sweat
off her brow. "Can't Natch just use MultiReal to get past this one?"

Jara asked him.

No, answered Natch flatly in encrypted battle language. I told you,
I can't walk into a room with Brone if I'm exhausted from going through too
many choice cycles.

Jara couldn't argue with that. She felt guilty enough even asking;
it seemed like she had drastically overestimated what this One-on-One
Motivation Network advertising scheme could accomplish. Natch had
made it two-thirds of the way to the room where Brone had parleyed
with Merri and Petrucio, and avoided all of the Thasselian devotees
they had come across. But Jara couldn't help but feel like he had gotten
this far because of serendipity and the professionalism of Monck's team
more than anything else.

Regardless, Jara felt like this was still a bit too easy. Was the lure
of clever advertising enough to distract all of the Thasselians? Or was
this all just a feint to get Natch feeling overconfident?

She turned her attention back to Natch's attempts to get past
Paranella. Four separate advertisements in a row failed miserably, and
only Jorge Monck's quick thinking prevented her from getting a closer
look at Natch as he sidled past. The Council operative made a comic
slip of his own, falling onto his face and yelling out in surprise and
pain. The loud noise caused a quick turn of the head, which was
enough for Natch to slip around her unnoticed.

Jara decided to check in on how Magan's confrontation with Len
Borda was going. She fired off a quick scrambled message to the Blade.
"How's the battle going in Melbourne?" she asked.

Rey Gonerev's voice came back confident and clear. "Good news,"
she said. "Everything's going exactly as planned."

34

"They won't fool us again," said General Rosz, teeth gritted with determination. "Slow up the advance, double-check the ammunition mix."

Cheng nodded. "Affirmative."

Rosz stood and watched with approval as his legions held up and
took a moment to examine the dart canisters loaded on their dartguns
and the placement of their multi disruptors. Not for the first time,
Rosz wished that he lived in a simpler time, when ammunition was
ammunition and ordnance was ordnance, when conventional gunpowder could incapacitate any enemy if you used enough of it.

Nowadays, you could target the enemy with devastating accuracy
and still watch him walk away unscathed, because the enemy had been
inoculated against the black code in your dartguns-or because you
were firing at a ghostly multi projection instead of a human beingor because the soldier you were targeting was an unconnectible with
missing or deactivated OCHREs. Standard military strategy called for
an amalgam of firepower to be used in tandem. Stun programs, paralysis programs, multi disruptor fire, even old-fashioned beam weapon
blasts, all at the same time. Bombard the enemy position with enough
different types of ammunition, and chances were that something
would succeed in disabling or killing your foe.

"Mix is good," replied Cheng after several minutes that saw Magan
Kai Lee's main force marching farther down the plain. "Should be sufficient to knock out flesh and multi targets, if there are any hiding in
there."

Rosz nodded. Then waited, and watched.

The viewscreens told the tale of an intense battle taking place on
the plain outside the Melbourne base. Thousands of soldiers staking
out positions on a broad field of grass, mounting weaponry and firing broadly into the opposing mass of troops. The air was hazy with a
blanket of black code needles and multicolored beams of disruptor fire.

Cheng could not help but stare open-mouthed, never having witnessed such a spectacle. As for General Rosz, he had not seen a connectible-on-connectible battle of this magnitude since the Melbourne
riots when he was a young man. He had not remembered how eerily
quiet the battlefield was compared to the wars enacted on the dramas.
Thousands of dartguns firing simultaneously sounded strangely like a
chorus of clicking insects, while the noise of the disruptors crackling
seemed to merge into one muted drone. As for the soldiers themselves-what sounds would they make when communication took
place on silent encrypted channels, when paralysis and death from
black code struck before they had a chance to scream?

The soft susurration of boots rustling through grass. The masses of
men and women in white and yellow rising and falling in mesmerizing
patterns. The accumulation of spent darts on the ground like charcoalcolored snow.

Rosz wondered if he was an abomination for finding the modern
field of war to be strangely beautiful.

"Tell the front line to advance," he commanded Cheng.

Lieutenant Executive Magan Kai Lee surveyed the battlefield from the
safety of his private hoverbird kilometers away in Shepperton. Bodies
in the white robe and yellow star piled up all around the entrance to
the base. The bulk of Borda's troops advancing towards Magan's much
smaller force. "What do you think?" he said. "Now?"

"Now," agreed General Cheronna.

Cheng was flabbergasted. Their ammunition seemed to be having far
less of an effect on the enemy than the enemy's was having on them.
The line of Borda's troops had noticeably thinned from the hail of dart
fire, but Magan's forces seemed hardly diminished at all.

And then suddenly they began to take severe casualties-from
behind.

Rosz quickly found a vantage point where he could see what was
happening in the rear lines of the advancing force. He actually rubbed
his eyes to make sure that he was not hallucinating, something he
thought only happened in the dramas. The mass of troops that had
stormed the base-the ones Rosz had initially believed to be multi
projections-these troops were now spontaneously rising up en masse
and returning to the fight.

Len Borda's army was now surrounded.

"Fuck," cursed Cheng all of a sudden. "Fuck. Fuck."

"What's the matter?" snapped Rosz.

"The Islanders."

True to the commander's words, the Islanders had crossed the
unconnectible curtain in massive force some thirty minutes ago. Their
hoverbirds had quickly gained the Australian continent and now they
were advancing furiously on Melbourne.

Rosz could feel the frustration building up inside of him. The
Islanders, brave warriors though they might be, had never posed a
serious threat to Melbourne. They had never shown any interest in
expanding beyond their borders, and so had developed a mostly defensive air force. One incapable of penetrating through the Australian
continent, or so the Council had always believed. But Magan Kai Lee
must have provided them some kind of logistical or materiel support,
because they had cut through the continental defenses quite easily.
And now they were headed this way-hundreds upon hundreds of
hoverbirds' worth.

The war room began to feel cloistered and hot as Rosz and Cheng spent the next two hours wrestling with the problem of the ammunition mix. Magan's troops still seemed remarkably resistant to Borda's
black code. There were casualties, to be sure-and the loyalists still significantly outnumbered the rebels-but the trend was a worrisome one.
If they couldn't put down Magan's troops before the Islanders arrived,
how would they handle a joint connectible-unconnectible force?

"We've got to keep them separated," said Cheng, pinching the flesh
on the bridge of his nose. "Once the two forces mingle, we're done for."

Rosz nodded. Unconnectible and connectible enemies required
vastly different breeds of black code. The toxins and poisons that
would send an Islander swimming in the Null Current were easily
metabolized by connectible OCHREs, while the advanced code that
deactivated OCHREs or put them in a lethal frenzy was useless on an
Islander.

But as two hours turned into three and the Islander hoverbird force
drew ever closer, Rosz began to despair. When the first hoverbirds
appeared on the horizon and the Islanders started pouring onto the
plain, the general knew that the jig was up.

Islanders with shock batons streamed over the hillside and joined
the fray at close quarters. Rosz and Cheng watched in despair as
Borda's force dwindled by the minute. The general buried his face in
his hands. It wasn't that he bore any great love for Len Borda; what he
fought for was the rule of law and order, and by taking up arms against
the high executive, Magan Kai Lee had violated that rule. A number
of his colleagues had argued with him in secret that it was Borda who
had violated that rule in the Tul Jabbor Complex, if not far earlier.
Rosz could not even entirely say that he disagreed. But firm lines had
to be drawn and adhered to somewhere, even if the innocent sometimes
found themselves on the wrong side of that line.

And it was then that a realization sparked in Rosz's mind.

"The Islanders, Cheng," he said, slumping down into his chair.
"We've been fighting them the whole time."

The commander eyed his superior officer warily. "What do you
mean?"

"I mean the entire diplomatic catastrophe in Manila-the refusal
to fight with Magan Kai Lee-General Cheronna and Triggendala
making demands to the parliament-it was all staged. The army in the
white robes and yellow stars that marched against us, those were
unconnectibles."

"How could they manage that?" protested Cheng. "We've had
Cheronna's army under surveillance the whole time-even in the
Islands."

It was a clever subterfuge, Rosz realized. Of course they had
Cheronna's army under surveillance. That was exactly what Magan had
been counting on. They could see Magan's and Cheronna's armies side
by side in the warehouse district-but they couldn't see what was happening in those warehouses. Soldiers suiting up in unfamiliar uniforms. Mechanics painting hoverbirds. Connectibles picking up shock
batons and Islanders picking up dartrifles.

Rosz surveyed the battlefield once again. Now that the subterfuge
had been uncovered, Len Borda's army was finally firing the correct
ammunition at the correct enemy. But they were horribly outnumbered now, and surrounded, and scattered. The tide had already turned,
and victory had already been swept out to sea.