On My Way to Paradise (17 page)

He said the last words with a tone of heaviness,
signifying that the speech was over. "So, we hire you to protect
our cities. However, if we exterminated all eighty thousand
Yabajin, we would not repay one-tenth the damage they have done to
us."

I did not believe Sakura’s description of the
political climate on Baker. I’m sure the Yabajin would have
described it differently. It was clear that Sakura’s people were a
race of megalomaniacs—a problem typically encountered when
visionaries become isolated, as shown time and again by the
festering settlements from LaGrange to Barnard’s star. Sakura
called his enemies
Yabajin
, barbarians, yet all the Japanese
I’d seen were half naked and carried swords.

When I’d signed on ship, it had been to escape Earth.
I’d known Motoki wanted a soldier, but I’d imagined running a
cybernet defense system, not scorching women with lasers and
killing their children. The idea of committing genocide sickened
me. Clearly this was not a job for me.

The big man, Kaigo, spoke in a rumbling voice, and
his microspeaker translated, "We start with weapons."

Sakura left. Kaigo instructed Mavro and Perfecto to
take stations at the plasma turrets while the rest of us picked up
laser rifles. For the next hour and a half he acquainted us with
the weapons. The laser was similar to the one I’d shot Arish with,
using the same chemical clip for power, but it had a much longer
barrel and delivered 8000 degrees over an area four centimeters in
diameter. With so much heat, the lenses and focusing mirrors needed
much cooling, so the barrel was wrapped in insulation and cooled
with liquid nitrogen. At 100 meters it could deliver a burst that
the body armor could withstand for a just over a second, but on the
moving hovercraft it was difficult to hold aim so long. For this
reason, each laser was provided with a targeting computer connected
to a focusing mirror that corrected for jostling after the trigger
was squeezed. In other words, once you pulled the trigger, you hit
what you last aimed at—whether it was empty sky, the head of a
nail, or a man—and you couldn’t shoot again for two seconds.

The plasma turrets mounted to the hovercraft used the
hovercraft’s solid fuel to superheat metal balls and explode
metallic gases toward the enemy in great bursts. The turrets were
more effective than lasers, since at close range the heavy gases
could gouge armor in a fraction of a second. Since the turrets were
so effective, the gunners became the enemy’s primary target.

After Kaigo discoursed on the strengths and
weaknesses of the weapons, he made us practice reloading and
targeting until we tired. "Tell me when you are ready for a
battle," he said. His tone held a note of warning.

Abriara shrugged and said, "Let’s do it."

We got on the hovercraft.

Zavala, with the decreased sensitivity in his metal
arm, seemed least capable of handling a weapon, so we put him in
the driver’s seat. Perfecto and Mavro took the turrets while
Abriara and I held rifles and took seats on either side of the
turrets, ready to replace any fallen turret gunner.

Kaigo went to each seat and pulled out the cords that
ran from the computer terminal to our cranial jacks. He plugged us
in. A message flashed before my eyes:

And then we were bouncing across a red desert at full
speed, the hovercraft droning like a dragonfly. It would hit small
dips and rises, and its whole undercarriage would shudder, making
my teeth feel as if they’d rattle from their sockets.

The sky was a hazy, indistinct violet with bands of
earthy yellow and green clouds that twisted from horizon to horizon
like rivers in the sky. These were not gaseous clouds, but it took
several moments before I realized they were animals—flocks of birds
high in the atmosphere.

In the battle room my armor had smelled fresh and
resinous. But the simulator supplied the nauseating odor of stale
sweat, as if I’d lived in armor for months without a bath.

"Slow down!" Abriara screamed. The speakers in my
helmet made her voice sound like a command from god, coming from
all directions at once and filling my head.

"I don’t know how!" Zavala yelled in return.

He was fumbling with a lever when we came over a rise
to a forest of giant trees unlike any I had ever seen. Each tree
looked like a huge, leafless piece of coral, hundreds of meters in
diameter. Yet the tree lacked a trunk, so that many limbs actually
just ran over the ground.

The great limbs, as thick around as a horse, were
covered with strands of moss and dark hanging vines. In places, the
moss had pulled away from the tree—its branches were misshapen and
white as bone. The ground around the tree was clean and windswept,
but under the tree, desiccated leaves covered the ground and the
vines hung in great curtains so that each "coral tree" looked like
a miniature jungle in itself.

Zavala had to keep his attention on steering so he
wouldn’t hit the coralwood. Abriara held railing on the side of the
hovercraft and worked her way to the cockpit. We curved around a
line of branches and surprised a small herd of imported peccaries.
They squealed and ran under the coralwood.

We passed the coralwood and came into an open desert.
Off to our left were seven large brown rocks, three to four meters
long and a meter tall. They were all of a regular length and oval
shape, and as we got closer I saw that they moved slowly across the
sand like giant armadillos without heads or feet or tails. Their
only visible sensory organs were antennae as long as whips at the
front end of their bodies. They waved these around, smelling the
air, as they inched across the desert toward the coralwood. Mavro
fired his plasma gun into one experimentally, and the creature’s
side exploded into steam while the creature flipped up on its back.
We went by so fast I couldn’t see if it had any legs. But I knew it
wasn’t anything created by geneticists from Earth.

"I thought they said this planet was terraformed," I
yelled over the helmet speaker.

"It is," Perfecto shouted back. "They brought the
oxygen levels up to standard. Fulfilled the minimum
requirements."

I asked, "What about the local flora and fauna?"

"They’re on their way out," Perfecto shouted,
shooting into another giant armadillo.

Since the armadillos were just computer-generated
images, I decided the target practice was a good idea, and started
shooting at them. The hovercraft jostled so much it was hard to
hold a creature in my sights long enough to squeeze the trigger.
The red dot of the targeting laser jumped all around. So rather
than try to take a good shot after careful aim, I had to take
snapshots. We came over another hill to a flood plain where a large
river spilled its banks. Low reddish-blue plants with bulbs shaped
like clear yellow pineapples filled most of the flood plain, though
there were also groves of fernlike trees, and tall stalks of
cotton.

We speeded over the river and began climbing a hill.
The ground cleared and we entered a stand of great coralwoods and
surprised a whole herd of small, gray, spade-shaped lizards. Each
had a single eye on the back of its head, and each lizard trained
its single eye on us as the group hopped in unison, two meters to
the hop, like waves moving away from a rock thrown in a pond.

As I watched the gray lizards, a piece of red plastic
fell from the sky and wrapped itself around one of the largest
lizards.

"Hey, that was a manta ray!" Zavala shouted, pointing
at the red plastic.

It was indeed shaped like a ray, and I realized this
piece of plastic was some type of avian preying on the lizard. As
we passed I stood up in my seat to try to get a better look at the
struggle.

A siren made a "beep, beep," and I suspected the
hovercraft’s computer was warning me to get back in my seat. A line
of vines hung from a coralwood limb in front of us, and I spotted a
hovercraft behind them just as jets of white-hot plasma spattered
across my neck.

The concussion spilled me backward over the
hovercraft and my gun flew into the air. I hit the ground with a
thwack, cracking the armor on my chest.

The plasma melted through my neckband, onto my
throat, and my helmet filled with steam. I tried to breath, but the
smell of charred flesh and smoke made me cough. I began to wretch,
struggling to breathe. I curled into a ball and tried to pull my
helmet free.

Our hovercraft exploded in a ball of blue.

I lay on the ground pulling at my helmet’s magnetic
latches. Oxygen deprivation disoriented me, making me miss. The
plasma burned into my neck, and the melted armor soaked down my
skin. I vomited and blacked out.

The big Japanese, Kaigo, jacked us out of the
simulator. My heart was hammering, and the sockets behind my
eyeballs ached. My teeth felt as if someone had drilled a hole into
each individual nerve. The vomit in my helmet was seeping down my
neck. I ripped off my face-plate and leaned over. Kaigo threw me a
rag. I was surprised to find my armor in one piece—moments before
it had seemed to be crumbling in my hands. Zavala slumped over his
chair and vomited into his helmet. He was rolling his eyes and
appeared to be in shock. The others in our group were limp and
panting, trying to shake off the simulator’s effects.

Kaigo gave us two minutes to clean up, and then said
a word in Japanese; a hologram appeared in the air at his feet. It
showed a hovercraft in miniature, darting over the landscape.
"These you," he said, pointing at the hovercraft. In a distant
corner of the room was the enemy craft approaching through the
coralwoods. "These Yabajin samurai," he said, pointing at the
enemy.

"Are those real samurai, or computer simulations?"
Mavro asked.

"Those real samurai," Kaigo said.

Zavala looked around the room. "Where are they?"

Kaigo glared at him as if he were an idiot, but
answered. "Upstairs, in battle room three."

I watched myself in simulation. I was like a tourist,
forever turning my head to look up in the sky or down at the
ground.

Kaigo pointed to the holo of me. "Ohhh, very bad! You
must learn to concentrate—ignore surroundings. Achieve
one-pointedness. You’re here to kill Yabajin, not study
xenobiology."

He watched until I stood up to look at the plastic
manta ray. He spoke two words in Japanese; the picture slowed and
enlarged so we could see ourselves and our enemies clearly. He
pointed to the image of me standing up. "Where you go? Did you need
to take a pee? You should sit down and concentrate. Relax."

The combat teams met. Abruptly the action slowed. As
one, the enemy raised their weapons and fired. Each had picked a
target, and their lasers scored on Mavro and Perfecto with pinpoint
accuracy while both plasma turrets washed across our hovercraft,
blowing me over the back end. Zavala was washed in a plasma storm;
a great stream shot across his chest, chewing wormholes in his
armor. Among us, only Mavro managed to fire, and his shot went high
over the heads of his targets. I noticed that, as in Tamara’s dream
world, the simulator didn’t correct for my infrared vision, and
this put me at a disadvantage since I can normally see a platinum
shimmer in the air when a laser is fired. The beams from these guns
didn’t show at all.

Kaigo pointed at Mavro’s shot. "Good! Quick reflexes.
You almost got some." Then he pointed to the rest of the team
members, each trying to aim. Our hovercraft skidded into a giant
coralwood and exploded. "You move too slow. Weapon must be part of
you, like hand and eye. Concentrate on being one with your weapon.
When it comes time to shoot, there must not be the breadth of a
hair between the thought and the act. All of you, practice aiming
before you go back into simulator." We sat a moment and he waved
his hands, "Now! Now! You practice now!"

We practiced lowering our weapons from resting
position and snapping off shots. I shook through the entire
session. The thought of returning to the simulator caused a wave of
nausea to wash over me. Kaigo ordered us back to our seats.

Kaigo said, "Think of nothing. Be one with your
weapon. Shoot fast. Kill Yabajin."

Mavro reached down and patted my shoulder. He said,
"Let’s step on these punks."

Kaigo flipped the simulator on, and we jacked in.

Scenario 2: Mid Patrol

We entered the forest of coralwood again, floating
down corridors between trees at full speed, twisting along a narrow
trail that flowed like a river. The skies were dark and gray. A
slate-gray rain fell, and the road of wet amber pebbles gleamed
dully as if a fire burned within. Among the trees were some of the
giant armadillos, and they’d wrapped their huge bodies around the
branches to feed on pale orange fungi that clung to the bonelike
limbs. The armadillo creatures now looked like giant slugs feeding
in a garden. Almost immediately a warning beep sounded. I swung my
gun forward as we swerved around a wide bend. A hovercraft came
head on. I took aim at the driver. He wore armor with the same
insect design as mine—only it was copper colored instead of green.
White plasma streams flew over my head and whistled past my ears.
Perfecto and Mavro were blown from the turrets. I squeezed off a
shot, hitting a turret gunner in the thigh. He responded by sending
a burst of plasma to spatter over Zavala’s hands. The hovercrafts
were bearing down on one another, so Zavala swerved to his right
and hit a limb of coralwood. The branch ran parallel to the ground
at chest level. I tried to duck, but I dropped just enough for a
branch harder than stone to decapitate me.

I came out of it sweating. My teeth chattered.

Zavala held up his hands, "They’re burning," he said.
"They’re burning."