Reality 36 (5 page)

  Around her, lights and wall terminals flickered and died. Up the corridor, a robot cleaner slid gently into the wall, brushes spinning to a halt. All machine activity stopped. It became so quiet all she could hear was the building's passive aircon whispering away.

  "Veronique, I am blind! I am deaf!"

  "Local grid's gone down with the Six, that's all," she whispered, half her attention on what was behind her. The corridor was dim, lit faintly by emergency bioluminescent panels. Her sentence ticked upwards in her mind as she walked through the building. Somewhere an alarm lazily sounded.

  "Will he be all right?" asked Chloe.

  "Probably," said Veronique. "His pride will be dented though."

  Chloe sniffed. "I never liked him," she said.

  Veronique pushed the firedoor. It had unhitched itself; they probably all had.

  She looked outside cautiously. A couple of technicians cycling into work, nobody else, it was early still. No VIA men.
Technology makes them lazy,
she thought.
They should be watching all the exits
. She walked quickly to the car racks.

  With the Six offline she had to get Chloe to hijack the parking subsystem to call down the car. She couldn't open it. Archimedes had pulled the plug on that too.

  Chloe soon had her in. More illegal software, more time in the freezer.

  She was getting jumpy. When she climbed in and told the car to change colour, and it asked her to specify which, she shouted at it.

  The car's screens were white with electronic snow, the windscreen alive with static. Where the car's Gridsig should have been displayed in the lower left of the glass was a constantly changing stream of numbers, Chloe running fake masking sigs. More time in the freezer for that.

  "Go!" she shouted.

  "Please provide a destination," said the car.

  "Get out of here! Go!" Veronique kicked at the car.

  "Home," said Chloe. The car complied.

  By the time they had reached the apartment, Veronique was beginning to think – many things, but mainly
What if I was wrong?
She double-checked Qifang's data to reassure herself.

  Her life had just got very dangerous. Somehow, that made her calm.

  A big, ugly aircar squatted outside her duplex complex. It could have been anyone's, but it could have been the VIA's. She did not want to find out. Her heart hammered as the car drove carefully down the road. The aircar remained still. They reached the end of the street, turned left and accelerated towards the interstate. Where she was going, she had no idea. All she had was the boxed v-jack, Chloe and the clothes she was in.

  "What the hell am I doing?" she said.

  "Travelling," said the car's literal personality.

  "Idiot," said Chloe. To whom, Veronique did not know.

Chapter 3

Otto

They were times of fire, famine and blood. There was little out of the ordinary in that.

  Leutnant Otto Klein of the EU Deutsche Kybernetisch Spezielkraft leapt off the back of the copter onto the forest floor, feet pounding. To say he enjoyed war would be untrue – his modifications numbed enjoyment along with much else – but Mankind had made times such as these, and men had made Otto to be the man suitable for them. He took a certain Teutonic satisfaction at the neatness of that.

  Otto took up station in cover at the edge of the landing zone. The copter's turbofans sucked up the forest floor as it turned, weaving dust into spirals with its interference smoke. The smoke was a sophisticated concoction of programmable baffle motes; the activity at the landing zone would appear to anyone watching to be nothing more significant than a dust devil.

  The landing was professionally brief. The fourth member of Otto's squad leapt from the ramp as it began to close. The turbocopter rose into the air, dropping further counter-measures. Images of bare branches shimmered across lamellar camo as fan pods slid back into the copter's body and it turned. At the same time, air-breathing jets extended and whined into life. For a moment the copter hung in the air, then it shot off back towards the distant coast in the east and the EU mission there, a glimmer quickly lost amid the crowns of the dead forest trees. The shush of a suppressed sonic boom spoke of its passing, then it was gone.

  The dust dispersed and the landing zone fell eerily quiet. There were no animal sounds in this part of the jungle, not any more. Otto leant against the buttress root of a tree. It had been a giant; fifty metres of wood soared above him, bleached and barkless. All the trees were dead, painted white by the sun. The ground was red dirt where it was not grey ash or black charcoal, naked but for a few splashes of green where the hardiest of plants clung to life. This part of Brazil was among the most degraded of areas in a country fast becoming nothing but. Otto wondered why anyone thought it worth fighting over, but fight over it was what they had been told to do.

  Otto did what he was told.

  He snapped off the safety on his assault rifle, had his near-I adjutant check for faults, and ran a full-frequency scan until he was satisfied they had not been noticed, that no missile with tiny mind aflame with hate and suicide was burning its way toward them. He cleared the dust from his mouth and spat, spat again. The dust was cloying, his saliva thick with it. The dust was in his hair, in his clothes, in his food, it choked him while he slept. He thought:
I am going to die with the taste of it in my mouth.

  His eyes slid shut, his adjutant helping him drop into a semitrance. He cycled his breath, clearing his mind. The forest retreated until he was alone in endless black, the adjutant discreetly waiting at the edge of his perception.

  Five seconds of peace, then the world rushed back. He was ready.

  He thought out over the unit's closed machine telepathy comnet.
Squad sound off
.

  The names of his men came out from the dead forest, each delivered directly into his mind by the mentaug in his skull:

Buchwald, check.

Muller, check.

Lehmann, check.

  Their voices were distorted. The machine telepathy they employed stripped everything away from the words bar their literal meaning, rendering it in an emotionless monotone. It had to be that way; the near-I that translated their neurological impulses got confused otherwise.

  Kaplinski was slow to respond.
I'm not dead yet,
he said eventually.

Less of the cynicism, Kaplinski. Use standard responses. When you
get sloppy is when you get dead. Do you hear me?

  Silence.

Kaplinksi!

Yes, sir.

Visual check,
Otto ordered. He stared at the positions where each of his men hid. His near-I told him the others were doing the same. His internal heads-up display overlaid the life-signs of his men on to his sight, sketching outlines of them amongst the bones of the trees. On a map to the top right of his visual field their locations pulsed red, but his eyes could not see them. He switched his vision from deep infrared to high ultraviolet. He pinged each location with microwaves. The others remained invisible. Wave sweeper units bent the electromagnetic spectrum around each man, cutting-edge tech, barely past prototype. If the sweepers failed, adaptive camouflage lamellae as fine as the scales on butterfly wings covered their skin and every item of kit from their weapons to their cap badges. Sound was baffled by a reactive acoustic shield each soldier carried. They would not be seen. They would not be heard. They were Ghosts.

  All top of the range. They were all top of the range. Once, Otto had been proud of that.

I see nothing, sir,
said Buchwald. The others followed suit.

Camolam and associated stealthtech functioning correctly sir,
said Muller. As communications specialist, he carried other, more specific surveillance gear both integral to his augmentations and externally. If Muller couldn't see the squad, they were as close to invisible as they could get.
Wave sweepers are operating near peak efficiency, excellent conditions – no moisture.

  Kaplinski:
Damn right. I need a drink
.

Shut up, Kaplinski,
thought out Otto, his irritation stolen by the MT.
There's water in your canteen. Drink it while we move. It's twenty klicks to the trail. We'll hold comms silence until then. That includes MT, there's intel suggests the reds are on to the carrier waves. Safeties on all weapons. No shooting without a direct order from me, understand? Do not engage the enemy until I say. That goes double for you, Kaplinksi. Keep that flame unit shouldered.
There was no reply.
Kaplinksi, respond
.

  Again Kaplinski was slow to reply.
Yes, sir,
said the other. Using MT was an effort, like shouting at a deaf man in a nightclub. Otto caught Kaplinski's resentment nevertheless.

Kaplinski's psychoconditioning is coming apart,
thought Otto
, he has
to come off active duty now
. He was careful to keep his thoughtstream off the MT – in spite of the damn thing's recalcitrance at broadcasting simple orders it was perfectly capable of picking up what he didn't want them to hear. They were all in bad shape. Otto and Buchwald had problems with their imaging systems; all of them were fatigued. They'd been fighting straight through two tours, eight months. A fight, patched up, sent back in, none of the long-term rebuild and assessment they were supposed to undergo, victims of their own success, too effective to stand down. This was their fifth engagement in a week. Machine-enhanced they might be, but they were still men, and men had limits.

  The conflict was going nowhere. The government could not bring the full force of their army to bear on the rebels, who melted in and out of the forests. Endless tit-for-tat engagements wore both sides down.

  The country was in chaos, crops were failing from Mato Grosso to the south central provinces, refugees from dead states flooded those that were dying. Maybe, the people were beginning to say, the New Bolivarians were not so bad. Maybe, they said, it is time for a change. Government was collapsing, and the rich had far too much on their hands making sure they stayed rich to fight what they saw as inevitable. That mostly involved taking their money out of the country, and that made matters worse. Brazil was giving up on itself.

  But the EU and USNA could afford no more refugees. They had not given up on Brazil, not yet. If Brazil fell, the New Bolivarian Confederacy would stretch from Patagonia to the Panamian wetline, so they waged their quiet, dirty war.

  The dead jungle blurred past, Otto and his men keeping up a steady thirty kilometres per hour. Otto enjoyed the sensation of his augmentations, the glide of supplementary polymer muscle fibres, the power of his retrovirally modified heart and lungs, the whir of their beatless bioplastic back-ups. His flesh bulked out with machinery, Otto was heavier than a normal man his size, but his breath came swift and easy. Some said cyborgs were less than human. They were wrong; they were more.

  Within forty minutes the unit reached the ambush point, a bluff overlooking the pale scar of a rebel trail cut across the red dirt.

  Silently they spread out, Muller and Kaplinski heading over the trail to the trees beyond. Otto reactivated the MT. The vital signs of his men and a direct feed blinked up one by one on Otto's internal HUD. He waited until they were in position before thinking out to them, having the men pan this way as he watched through their eyes.

Lehmann, get that cannon five metres higher up the hill,
he said.
I want the road blocked with the first two shots.

Yes, sir,
replied Lehmann.

  Otto made minor adjustments to the men's placement. He wouldn't do so ordinarily. Second-guessing his men undermined their respect in him. If he did not show respect to their judgement, how could he expect any in return? But they were battle-fatigued and getting careless. He licked his lips; the bitterness of ash filled his mouth. He checked the sights of his rifle.

This is a terror strike. Make sure enough live so word spreads the
Ghosts are working this part of the range.

And not so many that they think we let them get away,
added Kaplinski. Smiley icons flashed across the men's feeds, graphical shorthand to supplement the MT.

  Otto cut them off.
If a single Son in this province does not think twice before going into the trees for a piss, we fail. Get your blades ready, I want this finished close in.

  A tense round of
yes, sirs
came back. Their fighting urge swelled within them, anger and aggression amped up, pity and fear stymied. The Ky-Tech's adjutants manipulated their augmentations. Amygdalas crackled with directed EM fields, brains were flooded with synthetic neuromodulators. They became unlike other men.

Keep communication to a minimum,
thought out Otto. Leakage from the bands their machine telepathy used could give away their presence. As could the movements of the dead vegetation or a warp in the wave sweepers' patterns or the plumes of dust that followed in their wake, no hiding that…

  Otto cleared his mouth with water from his canteen. The dust was closing his throat. He was going to make a speech, then thought better of it. Let the guns do the talking, he thought, his men knew that language well enough.

  They waited, utterly still, for a long time.

Otto's adjutant woke him as the sun headed towards the western horizon. The sunset was on the high side of spectacular, rays fractured by the smog of the burning forests in the interior, streaking the sky with purples, reds, golds and ambers. Heaven bled light, the sun's final warning flag to humanity.

  MT tightbeams uplinked Otto and Muller to spysats. The rebels were close. He sent out a signal pulse to his men. Minutes passed. The Ghosts heard engines, then the rebel convoy came into view. At the fore was a General Motors-Mitsubishi pick-up with an AA gun bolted to the flatbed. Both gun and truck were antique, the truck an internal combustion engine, sugar-cane ethanol job. A more modern vehicle followed, steam belching from a cracked fuel cell. Half a dozen men perched on the back, heads wobbling like parcel-shelf ornaments as the truck jerked along the rutted track. A line of scruffy infantry fanned out either side, eyes glinting as they watched the trees.