Only Superhuman (10 page)

“We know why us,” said Tor Thorssen, a gene-modded man-mountain who’d been a pro wrestler before joining the Corps. Most T-shooters didn’t use their code names in everyday life, but only Tor’s mother called him Ranulf. “But why you?”

“Because the Cerean States is the only Belt nation with the resources and infrastructure necessary to build up the TSC into the potent, systemwide peacekeeping organization it needs to become.”

“So, what, we get a passel o’ new Sheaver Troubleshooters?” That was Cowboy Bhattacharyya, one of those who stood (or in his case, swaggered) to express their suspicion.

“Naturally the Corps will need to bring in new recruits, but as always, they will be drawn from throughout the system. And they’ll still have to pass your training, and Ceres won’t interfere with your procedures or standards.

“But there’s more we can offer. The consortium can exert political influence on your behalf, work with you to coordinate systemwide peacekeeping efforts. We can bring in Cerean and Terran expertise to improve your technology and your techniques.”

“Ain’t nothin’ wrong with our techniques,” Cowboy shot back in that inane Bollywood-Western accent of his.

“But couldn’t you do better? Certainly you do the best you can in response to the crises that arise out here. But that’s just it—you
respond
. You wait for something to go wrong and try to minimize the damage.

“But with the destructive power that’s now available to even a small fringe group or gang, the magnitude of that damage is just too great. If you wait until an attack comes, then you’re already too late. Too many people will be lost before you get the chance to save them. And too many innocents will be endangered in the crossfire between you and the bad guys.” Emry stopped eating and began listening much more intently.

“So what are you proposing?” Vijay challenged. “Can you offer us psychics?” A few people laughed. Emry wasn’t one of them.

“We don’t need them. These days, earthquakes, hurricanes, solar flares can be predicted so preventative measures can be taken. We can monitor buildings, spacecraft, or habitats, anticipate when they’re about to fail, and calculate what it takes to preserve them. All it takes is enough data and a good computer model.

“Now, the social sciences may not be as precise as the physical, but it’s still possible to extrapolate trends, anticipate patterns, see trouble building before it breaks. This is part of what keeps Earth, and increasingly the Sheaf, united and peaceful. We’re all interconnected, linked into one vast conversation whose trends can be documented, sensed, and analyzed. To put it simply, we
listen
to each other, so we can know when people are discontented or frustrated, understand the root causes, and deduce the most effective resolution. I know, I know,” he said in response to the grumbling that ensued. “I’m not here to lecture you on the benefits of an interconnected existence. I know how much you cherish your independence out here.

“But it’s that same independence, taken to an extreme, that makes it easier for things to go wrong. For mobsters, fanatics, and rogue states to operate unimpeded, for people to suffer without anyone coming to their rescue.

“I think there’s a way to have the best of both worlds. Being independent doesn’t have to mean being isolated or out of touch with your surroundings. If astrobiologists can monitor life in other star systems, how hard can it be for the Troubleshooters to gather the information you need to see trouble coming before it happens?”

“So you propose to enhance our intelligence-gathering capabilities,” Lydia said.

“For a start. Also, the consortium would assist you in using advanced pattern recognition, data mining, and evolutionary models to dig up warning signs, so we can head off trouble before it happens.”

“Head off how?” Emry asked. “We can’t exactly, say, invade Neogaia before they strike again. There’s only seventy-three of us.”

“Force is a last resort,” Tai said. “That’s something I know Sensei Villareal has taught you all.” Bhattacharyya scoffed. “But that means there must be other options available before force becomes necessary. All too often, you have to use force because it’s too late for alternatives. But if we can anticipate problem areas, home in on the political or economic or social factors driving people toward conflict, then that allows us to try other tactics before it’s too late. Ceres, with cooperation from other Belt powers, of course, can bring diplomacy to bear on dangerous fringe habitats, exert humanitarian and educational efforts to treat the causes of their aggression, and bring them into the fold.”

“What, an’ put us out of a job?” Cowboy drawled. Emry glared in his direction. In her view, his tendency to take the second half of “Troubleshooter” too literally made him unworthy of the name. But part of why Sensei had founded the TSC was to bring rogue vigilantes like him into check, encouraging them to follow the rules and tone down their methods. Which sounded very much like what Tai was proposing on a systemwide scale.

“I don’t see that happening for a long time. The Troubleshooters are the linchpins of the whole project. You’re not only fighters, you’re trained negotiators, relief workers—not to mention having the skills and insight necessary to gather and process the information we’d need. And certainly your cyber partners can play a key role there as well. Being experts in everything, being able to mine and analyze vast amounts of data creatively when no global network is available to give advice, is the whole reason they exist. And the TSC represents one of the largest concentrations of cyber minds in Solsys—probably the largest one whose members are treated as free and equal beings and truly encouraged to live up to their full potential.”

Zephyr said in Emry’s head.

“All of you—Troubleshooters and cybers—are a resource capable of even greater potential than you’ve achieved so far. I’m just here to help you achieve it. To help you save more lives, prevent more tragedies by acting sooner and more effectively.

“And … that’s my spiel. I’ll be happy to answer any questions now.”

Emry listened absently to the questions and answers, but mostly she was mulling over what she’d already heard. The details didn’t concern her as much as the big picture.
Stopping tragedies before they happen. Saving lives before they’re lost.

Vijay caught her introspection and stroked her chin, gently turning her face toward him.

he sent subvocally.

Her answer came promptly.

She glared at him. If Vijay thought it was just a platitude, then he didn’t know her as well as he thought.

This time it was Zephyr.

Emry returned.

5

Looking for Trouble

September 2107
Jupiter Trojan asteroids, L5 group

Emry’s prodigious yawn echoed inside her helmet, unremarked by the rest of the universe. She was going crazy cooped up in her space suit for all these hours with nothing to do but drift. She was forced to wonder if maybe Vijay had been right six weeks back about her tolerance for the quiet life.

True, there were four other Troubleshooters out here with her, tethered together in a quincunx formation, and she could talk to them through the tethers if she wanted. Unfortunately, their stealth approach precluded any nonessential power use. She could barely even see the others except as dark areas occulting the stars, since their suits were in full stealth mode, lights off, all surfaces tuned to wide-spectrum black, helmet visors polarized to block heat radiation. Kilometers-long superconducting nanofilaments trailed behind them to dissipate their body heat as diffusely as possible. Still, she was getting hot and sweaty in this thing. She’d slowed her metabolism as much as she could during the long approach—another effective damper on conversation—but now the target was in sight and they had to warm up their muscles for the fight that was coming.

And it would be a doozy. This was the largest TSC team op Emry had ever been on, not counting training exercises: five ’Shooters, nearly all chosen for their combat skills. Kari was here, as was Cowboy, unfortunately. Along with Emry, they provided finesse, firepower, and raw strength. Then there was Elise “Tin Lizzy” Pasteris, her slender Martian frame encased in a sleek battle symbot a generation beyond Arkady’s old jalopy, and Juan “Jackknife” Lopez, who had done the key intelligence work leading up to this raid. Since their target was a small, milligee stroid only a few kilometers across, Jackknife had opted to go with a multidirectional thruster unit rather than any of his interchangeable pairs of specialized prosthetic legs.

Juan could’ve easily enough had new legs grown after his childhood accident, but had decided that being stuck with a single, limited pair of natural legs was too great a handicap. His subsequent replacement of his arms with prosthetics had been voluntary. With that kind of history, Juan had been a natural recruitment target for the Michani, and at Greg Tai’s urging, he’d begun responding to their advances, pretending to have been convinced at last that the Singularity was truly nigh (this time for sure!), that mechanical life was destined to rise to godhood and cleanse the universe of putrid flesh. Never mind that nobody had ever been able to create a consciousness, AI or human, that substantially exceeded the intellect of the greatest human geniuses. You could make a cyber that thought faster than Einstein and had access to a greater range of knowledge, but try to make its mind more complex and you soon passed a point of diminishing returns, the same as if you tried to pile too much muscle or too many extra limbs on a human body and ended up with a form too cumbersome to function. Attempts to create metasapience had resulted only in madness or total cognitive collapse. Emry had experienced the results firsthand on one of her first field missions as Arkady’s apprentice, the Iwakura incident. She still had nightmares about it.

But the Michani didn’t care about the facts. They worshipped such a mad superbrain as their god, obeying its ravings as Delphic pronouncements. They were so blindly certain of their beliefs that they didn’t question Jackknife’s swift conversion. It had enabled him to get close enough to crack the cult’s files and discover their master plan to accelerate Armageddon. Quite a payoff for a policy that had only been in effect for a few weeks.

But then, it wasn’t the first. A number of extremist groups had launched copycat attacks in the months since Chakra City—some targeting Earth, others Mars, others their neighbors in the Belt. Many had been ill-conceived, abortive, or easily foiled. But others had been disturbingly feasible, the Michani’s scheme among them. The Corps’s new policy of trying to head off crises before they broke had been instituted not a moment too soon.

Emry wished Jackknife could’ve uncovered this scheme a week or two earlier, though. As the target stroid drew closer, Emry peered at it in infrared. It was chilly out here in the Trojans, far from Sol, but the stroid’s surface swarmed with hundreds of heat signatures. A few were Michani cultists. The rest—the bigger ones—were pure robots, all identical, all heavily armed and armored. And they were making more of themselves. They were auxons, designed to replicate themselves from available materials, oh, and kill all humans while they were at it. The process had only been set in motion a week ago, and already there were hundreds of them. A couple more weeks and there could be millions.

Diplomacy was useless; the Michani were fanatics. Luckily, they were also idiots, believing that they could hide their operation simply by being far away from civilization. There were no horizons in space and plenty of good telescopes, so once Jackknife had found what to look for, the stroid base had been easy to locate. Taking it out was not so easy, however. A large strike force or a missile would set off their defense systems or give them time to escape; even one surviving auxon would be too many. And at least some Michani had to be taken alive for interrogation to ensure the rest could be tracked down, and auxon remains would have to be recovered and studied to develop countermeasures. (Even if every copy of the plans could be tracked down and wiped, it wouldn’t be that hard for any roboticist to design an equivalent. The fact that these psychotic losers had pulled it off was proof of that. Greg Tai had been right—these were scary times.)

So a surgical strike was the best option. Plan A had been to send in a squad of combat drones under Jackknife’s supervision. Tai’s consortium had donated a large contingent of the drones to the TSC, giving it the means to contend with large-scale combat situations just like this. But Juan had pointed out that the drones’ software protocols were fairly standardized and that Michani crackers had subverted similar models in the past.

So that left old-school combat, with live humans putting themselves in harm’s way and hoping their plan was good enough to keep them living. The five of them had been dropped off by a Cerean vessel passing by on an innocuous-looking course (not easy to find out here, with so few inhabited bodies to head for), accelerated by a spinning tether onto a rendezvous trajectory, and then left to drift for eighteen hours as their course converged with the stroid. Of course, the strike team couldn’t hide in open space any better than the Michani could; even with all their attempts at cooling and camouflage, their bodies still radiated at 310K and that energy had to go somewhere. The most they could hope for was to make their heat signature small and dim enough to be hard to spot against the thermal clutter of the Belt and Inner System behind them. Five bits of self-aware jetsam were all that stood in the way of a systemwide invasion, and their success depended on their ability to hide in plain sight.