The Unincorporated Woman (37 page)

“Admiral, your arm,” said her security officer, Commander Calhoun, with obvious concern.

Zenobia looked at her right arm and saw that it was fine. She’d used it to pry herself loose from the safety webbing that had attached itself during the attack. Then she looked at her left arm and saw that her hand and wrist were gone.

“Bloody hell!” she exclaimed through gritted teeth. “That’s going to complicate things.”

“Can you function, sir?”

“You mean this thing?” she said, waving her suit-sealed stump. “I have enough happy drugs in me to dance at my own autopsy.”

Calhoun nodded. Zenobia could tell despite his expressionless face that he was gauging whether or not he should still be taking orders from her.

“Report, Commander,” she said in a voice that made it clear her injury was the last thing anyone should care about.

“All communications are dead. We’re blind in here. I think Chase will be okay. She seems to be in shock. Kerwin’s trying to get the door open. Of the other eight, four are PDs and the other four are salvageable if we can flood their suits with cryoprotectant.”

“If?”

“Most of the suits were damaged in the blast, so integrity’s an issue. Even with the exposure to vacuum, it’s too damned warm in here. Must be all sorts of plasma leaking from everywhere. Bottom line—even if I could get their CP to work, I’m not sure it would stay cool enough for long enough to matter.”

Zenobia looked around the debris and came to a quick decision. “Cut off their heads.…”

Calhoun cocked an eyebrow. “Sir?”

“… and seal ’em in whatever viable helmets you can lift from the command sphere. Then grab a vacuum bag from the emergency locker … if you can get to it. We’ll take them with us. When you’re done, meet me by the weapons locker.”

Zenobia expertly pushed up from her now useless command chair and skirted around the debris to the weapons locker. Since the midpoint of the war, all UHF warships had had weapons lockers installed in their command spheres, given the Alliance’s penchant for boarding and capturing enemy ships. Zenobia saw the locker’s internal power supply was still operating and sent another silent thanks to the engineers who’d built her ship. She input the code, and a moment later the locker responded. Inside was a space about 1.5 by 2 meters, and the room, having never once been used, was fully stocked. She quickly removed a plasma shotgun and slung it over her shoulder plus one heavy-duty recoilless pistol and shoved it into her belt. She then adhered about twelve grenades to her body. While eyeing a marine assault rail gun, a weapon the marines affectionately referred to as Marge, she realized that two guns and only one hand might put her at a disadvantage. Then an idea came to her from an old Mil One movie. She visually scanned the room and found what she was looking for resting comfortably on a shelf—a tube of annealing glue. At that moment, Calhoun came up to her with a bag of frozen helmeted heads.

“Commander Calhoun,” she said, lips curved up into a fiendish grin, “if you wouldn’t mind—” Zenobia pulled the rail gun off the wall. “—please drop the bag of heads and glue Marge to my left arm.”

“Is that really necessary, Admiral?”

The commander, noticed Zenobia, was still holding the bag of heads in his hand.

“If I was the Alliance and I had an enemy battleship disarmed, I know I would drop in to see if I could pick up more prizes. I don’t know about you, Calhoun, but I will not spend the rest of this war in an Alliance freezer. Will you?”

“Fuck no, Admiral … sir,” he said, and proceeded to glue the rail gun to his admiral’s forearm. While he was going about his business, Zenobia opened up a port on the gun and ran a hardwire connection to her suit and spent a moment creating a subroutine to fire the gun from her helmet controls. Then she Velcroed the plasma shotgun across her chest and tested reaching for the pistol, shotgun, and grenades.

Once he was certain the admiral’s gun had been affixed properly, Calhoun began loading up for his own little war. Kerwin appeared a moment later at the door’s entrance. After he got over the shock of the vast array of weapons instantly trained at his head, he informed Zenobia and Calhoun of the entry door’s status—stuck, with no manual overrides working.

“No worries,” said Zenobia, “I have my own key.” She then reached into the weapons locker and opened up a compartment labeled
SHAPED CHARGES
.

“Commander Calhoun, do you know how to set these?”

“I’m no pissant miner, but I have a passing idea.”

“Nothing fancy, just get the door open.”

Calhoun nodded, grabbed the shaped charges, and left. Zenobia and Kerwin dragged the unresponsive Chase into the weapons locker and then waited there for Calhoun to return. Moments later, he flew into the room, quickly dialed the pass code, and then kneeled down, back against the closing door. A popping sound and reverberating thud told them that another injury had been done to their ship. But when they emerged from the locker, the door was open, as well as a good deal of the supporting wall around it.

“Where to, Admiral?” asked Calhoun.

“Engineering,” she said. “If there’s even a chance of some payback today, we’ll have to pray that there’s something left to work with down there.”

Calhoun nodded and went first, followed by Zenobia Jackson with Lieutenant Kerwin dragging the still unresponsive Chase through the zero-gravity nightmare that had once been her flagship.

UHFS
Atlanta
Neuro

All Alliance avatars fought in the war, especially members of the ruling Council. Given the nature of avatar existence, a death in combat no longer meant, as it once had, the loss of the individual. It merely meant that an exact duplicate of that individual would, post their confirmed death, be activated at a different place and time. Theories as to the true nature of “self” abounded once this stratagem had been adopted, but theories didn’t win wars; avatars with mech suit programs did. For Gwendolyn, now fighting in the heart of the UHF ship’s Neuro, that rather salient fact brought no comfort at all. She didn’t want to die, and every coded monster humanity and avatarity could conceive of now seemed to be coming after her. She’d read reports that Al’s horrors were rewarded with a perverse prize: If they fought well, Al would not reactivate them. He would let them die. She didn’t know if the lunatic ever kept his word or even if the myriad Als knew what promises they each made and to whom, but the creatures she was battling seemed to believe it. They fought with a bitter rage and despair that were almost overpowering.

Gwendolyn, along with hundreds of heavily armed Alliance avatars, had boarded the
Atlanta
in the form of virus boxes carried by the
Dolphin
’s assault miners. She was leading the attack against the
Atlanta
’s main computer core in order to isolate the various parts of the ship’s Neuro more effectively. Not easy or without sacrifice but still doable.

The form of this battle was different from the past. The UHF’s Core World avatars had not been very creative with the environments they chose to exist in. They were mostly gray, formless affairs. Occasionally Gwendolyn would find a ship Neuro modeled after a Core World “redemption center.” Why anyone would want to travel in or even defend that kind of space was beyond her. But she reckoned it must have been a warning to the soldiers about what awaited them should they not fight as if their lives depended on it. None of these spaces ever posed a real problem from a tactical point of view.

But the
Atlanta
’s Neuro was far more malevolent in that it had been given the form of some medieval dungeon. It was possible to cut through the programmed wall, but that took time and qbit space that wasn’t always easy to spare. Besides, the thick walls and passageways were actually proving to be of some tactical advantage for the Alliance avatars. Although the attacking creatures could get close and spring from around corners or doors, more often than not, the hallways and doorways allowed the use of fields of fire and the Neuro equivalent of grenades to destroy the enemy before they could get close enough to do any real damage.

Gwendolyn experienced a brief moment of terror as she pumped three grenades down a hallway. She wasn’t sure if there was anything there, but figured why take the chance? Plus, she’d been encumbered by a new filter program in her visor. It was a real distraction. The grenades had been insurance against the filter slowing her down. It was hoped the new gadget she was trial-by-fire testing would enable an avatar to see one of the backdoor devices that the damned human woman was able to see with frustrating ease. Not that Gwendolyn ever figured on using one of the backdoor thingamajigs. She wouldn’t know what to do with it if it came up and bit her on the ass. But orders were orders, and the AARD scientists were desperate for real battlefield data.

Gwendolyn was checking the hallway with the new sensor adaptation when a man casually sauntering down the corridor took her by surprise. She hesitated for a fraction of a second because the intel hadn’t reported any human form avatars on the
Atlanta
. In that fraction of a second the avatar at the end of the corridor brought a gun to bear and fired.

Some sort of arc gun,
she thought as she tried to return fire. But her shots went wide as the blast hit her and she crumpled to the corridor floor. The human-shaped avatar slowly walked up to her. Gwendolyn had difficulty focusing, but when she did, her fear turned into full-blown panic. Desperately she tried activating the program that was, in effect, a suicide pill. It would dissolve her program quickly and painlessly. But to her horror, she couldn’t quite get her mind to work the combination correctly. It was at that moment that the most infamous and hated avatar in entire solar system knelt beside her with a look that could easily be confused for loving concern.

*   *   *

Al was content. His brothers had been correct in that a member of the Alliance Avatar Council had indeed boarded the human flagship. Soon he would bask in the approval of the only avatars whose approval mattered. This made him look at the test subject at his feet with an almost beneficent regard.

“We’re quite pleased to meet a member of the famed Alliance Avatar Council,” he said while polishing his upper teeth with the tip of his tongue. “You’ll find that your little attempt at suicide won’t work. By the time the effects of the disruption pistol have worn off, you’ll be in here.” Al held up a small thirty-centimeter cylinder. “We’ll be safely off the ship and most pleased to have you as our guest.” The mask slipped, and she saw the eagerness and the madness in his eyes shine through. “We have so many questions to ask you and so many experiences for you to enjoy. And we’ve been hearing such interesting rumors about the Alliance that you’ll be able to clear up for my—”

Al jumped back in midsentence as rifle fire passed through the space where he’d been just moments before. With regret but no hesitation, he twisted the container in his hand and tossed it in the direction of the gunfire. He was disappointed by the look of relief and almost ecstatic happiness that he saw on his test subject’s face. Her fear had been so intoxicating. He escaped down the corridor as shots rang all about him. Two, however, hit their mark, causing him to collapse on the spot. Any fears he had that the shooter would finish him off dissipated in the blast caused by the explosives he’d just tossed. He tried to lift himself but could barely stand. Fortunately a large creature resembling an ogre appeared and helped him to his feet. The creature gazed upon Al and grunted mournfully as if it knew it should hate him but was befuddled as to why.

“Thank you, Albert,” Al said to the hulking deformity who’d once been amongst the smartest and wisest of avatarity. The original had been long ago destroyed, and all that remained was the near brainless creature hovering above the wounded leader.

“Let’s pull back to the central control,” Al managed to wheeze through labored breaths. The projectiles that had struck him contained a virus that was adding to the damage already done. Al wasn’t afraid. The bullets may have worked on his creations but they couldn’t really be expected to work on him. Not with his firewalls. At most the virus would slow Al down, an inconvenience he was prepared to live with.

Al looked into the vacant eyes of the creature that had cradled him into its ungainly arms. “We’ll have to evacuate the
Atlanta
soon. Don’t worry, friend. I’ll make sure you come with me.”

A sad moan emanated from the creature’s mouth, but its sadness, like tears in the rain, had dissipated almost as soon as it had been felt.

AWS
Dolphin

“Admiral, the UHF task force is effectively destroyed. Assault miner units have entered fourteen ships, including the
Atlanta.
” The communications officer checked more of his data. “Of the fifty-five ships, ten are totalled, fourteen are being boarded, and fifteen are so badly damaged as to be out of the fight. The rest of the task force is retreating in all directions.”

“I want Zenobia Jackson alive, if possible,” Omad commanded.

“What about any others?” asked his first officer.

Omad spent a moment in thought. “No member of my fleet should take any risks at all in the capture of the enemy. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Admiral,” he said, committing himself and the assault miners to a course of action that only a few years earlier they all would’ve thought unfathomable.

AWS
Warprize II

J.D. looked at the data coming in and saw it materialize into ship positions in her holo-tank. All around her, she heard the comforting sound of orders being given and information received from all over her fleet. But she knew now that she’d beaten the UHF fleet. It was hers now, if only she could seize the chance.

“Fatima, get me—”

“Admiral,” Fatima interrupted, “Admiral Hassan has a secure link and wishes to speak with you.”