Jackers (17 page)

Her hands tightened on the ribbed foregrip of her rifle.

What’s wrong with me?
she asked herself again, then shook her head.
Delete that. You know why you couldn’t go with Vic. The question is why you can’t lick this. Damn it, girl, you’re as habit-hobbled as a brainburned twitchie. And you’ll be about as useful as one, too, if you don’t get your wetware jacked under control!

She’d carried this, this quirk of hers for a long time, ever since her starship days back before she’d joined the Hegemony Guard, in fact. She’d been jacking a ship, the
Kaibutsu Maru,
when a failure in the ship’s AI interface while she was linked had left her in sensory deprivation for a period of hours—a small eternity in subjective time.

Katya never talked about it, didn’t even like to admit it to herself, but to this day she had trouble with near or total darkness. The smothering, claustrophobic feelings darkness raised in her made her acutely uncomfortable in any closed-in space, and jacking into a ship’s navsim was now all but impossible for her.

She’d wrestled with the thing for a long time, now, long enough to begin thinking of it as her “beast,” as though it were an annoying and sometimes demanding pet. Vic was right. It didn’t make sense for her to dislike shut-in spaces, not when she had to shut herself into one every time she strapped on a warstrider. But in one way it was logical. As a striderjack, she could grit her teeth as she lay down in the war machine’s slot and felt the hatch seal shut over her, could bear the second or two of smothering closeness until her hand touched the interface and the darkness vanished, replaced by the limitless panorama of her AI’s sensory feed to her brain.

Linked in, the warstrider serving as her body, its sensors more sensitive and more discerning by far than her own eyes and ears, she was no longer crippled by her beast. It was her
mind
that was claustrophobic, she often told herself, not her body; it didn’t matter that her body was shut up, blind and catatonic, so long as she had a feed from the outside world, so long as her real self was jacked in, free and unrestrained. For some few individuals, linking with a warstrider was a kind of recreational drug, inducing a technomegalornania that robbed them of judgment and rational discernment as efficiently as alcohol. For Katya, linking to a strider was a drug of an entirely different kind, providing, if not a cure, then at least a temporary healing that banished the darkness that always seemed to be pressing in around the borders of her mind.

What Katya couldn’t understand, though, was why she hadn’t been able to overcome the beast a long time ago. On Alya B-V she’d forced herself to descend a pitch-black well plunging far beneath the surface of a dead and alien city, confronting the nightmare that was never far beneath the surface of her mind. On Eridu she’d experienced far worse; swallowed by a Xenophobe traveler, she’d been carried to a cavern so far underground she’d been convinced that she would never see the world’s sun again. Surely, if anything could get her over her irrational fears, those experiences should have done it.

But they hadn’t, and she was beginning to think the beast would always be with her, would be as inseparably a part of her as the interface circuitry woven into the palm of her left hand. When Vic had suggested it, the mere thought of squeezing into the close, dark coffin of a linkslot, of riding there unlinked, unable to see out, able only to feel the warstrider’s rocking gait and hear the wheeze and whine of its drivers, had filled her with a dread colder and more personally threatening than any mere fear of death in battle.

She tried to tell herself that it was more than her own weakness that had made her order Vic to leave her behind. There’d been no time after
Mission Link
had materialized out of the smoke to stow both Francine and herself safely away in separate slots.

But a good five minutes had passed between the time Vic appeared and the attack next to the warehouse.
Face it,
she told herself, hoping for amusement in the thought and finding bitterness instead.
You’re norking goked-up in the head.

Outside, the sounds of heavy shelling and rocket fire rose to a crescendo. She could feel the hard, diaplas floor vibrating beneath her feet and buttocks with the concussions, and the loudest shocks were preceded by a flicker through the window, like summer’s lightning. Someone was doing some heavy-duty bombardment, and fairly close by from the sound of it. Was she hearing the Imperial warstriders? Or were the Impies potshotting the Confederation lines from orbit? She supposed it didn’t matter. One way or the other, she was going to have her work cut out for her sneaking back through the lines tonight.

She checked her cephlink’s time readout; it was well past forty-two hours, late enough that she could probably make her move pretty soon now. Gripping Francine’s rifle, she stood up, then reached for her helmet and gloves, which were lying on the floor beside her.

A sound from the next room, beyond the dark and open archway leading to the restaurant area, made her start. The rifle came up, her finger on the trigger. No time to hide… no place to seek cover.… “Who’s there?”

What had she heard? It had sounded like the scuff of a boot on the floor, but she couldn’t be sure. Heart pounding, she edged toward the doorway.

A gasp—she was sure it had been a gasp, sure it had been a
human
sound—came from the darkness beyond the archway, and then she heard the clatter of someone stumbling over one of the pieces of wrecked and overturned furniture. The sound actually emboldened her a bit; no Imperial Marine, no adept of
Kokorodo
would have made so much noise trying to watch her from hiding—and he damn sure wouldn’t have tripped over a table while trying to run away. Rifle at the ready, Katya leaped to the wall next to the open archway, braced herself with a quick breath, then rolled around into the next room.

Enough light spilled in from the room at her back for her to see dim shapes among the shadows. She didn’t have enhanced eyes, but her cephlink included software that processed visual input somewhat more efficiently than her natural wetware. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, her linkware took over, sharpening contrasts and enriching her natural night vision to bring some definition to the shapes. The dining area of
The Newamie’s Down
had been fairly luxurious for what she thought of as a lower-class food and booze joint. Those were holo screens curved along the far walls that must once have projected views of the city or other, less realistic illusions, though they were dead and empty now. Eating booths lined the walls of the circular room, while tumbled-over chairs and tables were scattered about the center. She’d already searched the place carefully, but there were several entrances. Slowly, she scanned the wreckage, looking for movement, for anything out of place.…

There!
Golden eyes, large and luminous in the gloom, blinked back at her from behind a table… then, with a flash of movement, something man-sized bounded toward the left, toward the door leading to the mealprep areas. The building’s automatic doors were out, along with everything else requiring grid electricity, but these were partly open, wide enough at least for the… whatever it was to scrabble through.

Katya stood still for a long moment, rifle still raised. What had she just seen? Not a human, certainly. Not with
those
eyes, though they could have been artificial implants. It had certainly not been an animal. Though New America boasted its own native ecology, evolution—at least on land—had not progressed nearly as far here as it had on Earth. Land-dwelling animal life tended to be small, airy, and airborne, like morninglories, or sluggish, like treewalkers, and nothing on this world had evolved anything like eyes. Plenty of Earth species had been imported, of course, but mostly as pets, since bioengineering allowed the creation of food animals that neither moved nor sensed the world around them in any save the most vague and imbecilic ways.

Those eyes had blinked back at her with intelligence and with purpose. She was pretty sure she’d just seen a genie.

But what kind?

“Hello!” she called, still facing the door to the mealprep area. “Come out! I won’t hurt you!” There was no reply, save something that might have been a soft stirring beyond the half-closed door. “Please! I’m a friend!”

“That remains to be seen, don’t it?” a voice, male, but high-pitched, almost a child’s, answered from the dark. “You came with the stilters.”

Stilters.Warstriders?

“My name is Katya. I’m from right here on New America. Who are you?”

“You’re Newamie?”

Katya jumped. That voice, female this time, had come from just behind her.

She whirled, staring. The speaker was a woman, a delicate, extraordinarily lovely woman with fine-boned features and large dark eyes. Her hair was mingled gold and silver and hung to her waist; she wore sandals and a wisp of translucent, holographic smoke that did almost nothing to conceal her anatomy.

She also held a Colt-Mitsubishi 4mm FMP-60, a very real and nonholographic flechette autopistol, centered squarely between Katya’s breasts.

Carefully, Katya lowered the muzzle of her rifle until it was no longer pointed at the woman. “I, I’m Newamie, yes,” she said. She jerked her head toward a wall, indicating the rumble of battle audible beyond. “I’m with the Confederation military forces out there.”

“Confed, Impie,” the male voice said, emerging from the wall behind her. “None of that means much, do it?”

“I’d say it does,” she replied. “The Impies are invading our world. I was trying to stop them.”

“All by yourself, girl? Heh! Must be more t’you than meets the eye.”

Slowly, she turned to face the man. He was small, shorter than she was, with long, slender arms, short legs, and a hairless head that gave him a childlike look despite the crow’s-feet and worry lines. His eyes were large and golden, almost catlike, though the irises were round rather than slit. He wore an orange worksuit with the emblem of Dow-Mitsubishi Nanochemical on the sleeve, and he, too, held a pistol in his hand, a Japanese Type 36 with suppressor hood and integral laser sight-tracker beneath the barrel.

“I’m Tharby,” he said. He gestured with the pistol. “I haven’t quite got the hang of this thing, but I’m pretty sure all I need to do is put the red light where I want it and pull the trigger. Why don’t you give Sonya your gun?”

The woman stepped closer, hand out. Briefly, the thought flitted through Katya’s mind that Sonya had just made a serious tactical mistake; she was too close to Katya and had moved partway between Tharby and her captive, a rank newbie’s blunder. A sudden thrust-and-spin, and Katya would have the woman pinned from behind, using her as a shield as she cut Tharby in half with a burst from her PCR.

No. These were genies and they were New Americans. Better to learn about them, about what they wanted, than to kill them out of hand. Clicking on the safety, she handed her rifle to the woman, then stood there, staring at the man, her hands raised.

“Aw, gok it,” a third voice rumbled. “Kill ’er an’ let’s gokin’ get outta here.”

The ruby-glowing tip of the tracker flashed brilliant in Katya’s eyes as the pistol’s aim shifted slightly, and she imagined the blood red target spot wavering unfelt against the skin of her forehead.

“I’m with ya, mannie,” Tharby said, and Katya watched those golden eyes harden.

Chapter 12

Where then lies the difference, if a thinking, knowing, feeling creature was created by nature, by man, or by God? Surely it cannot be the creator that sets the creature’s true worth.

—
Intellectus

Juan Delacruz

C.E.
2215

“Don’t shoot!” Katya cried. “Please! I’m on your side!”

“
Our
side?” Tharby grimaced… or had that been a smile? Katya was finding it difficult to read his facial expressions. There were subtle differences in the musculature of his face from that of full humans. “Yer with the army, right? Armies an’ killin’. Yer all the gokin’ same, an’ we don’t have no use fer any of you. Right, mannies?”

That last had been addressed to the others in the room. Katya could see them with her enhanced vision, man and manlike shapes emerging from hiding behind toppled furniture and from various doors. Some, like the woman with the FMP-60, looked completely human but had the exquisite, elfin loveliness of
ningyo,
of genegineered sexual toygirls. The rest were males, low-level workers, she thought, from the nearby nanofactories and spaceport warehouse complex. Most were A-techies, bald and spindly armed but still fairly close to human, like Tharby. A few, though, had somotypes considerably altered from that expressed by the original human DNA; there was one blunt-faced, hairless, naked giant, muscled for heavy labor and lacking any sign of external genitalia, and several were crossmuted B-techies, with body fur like spun silver and fingers and brains tailored to trace and repair damaged electronic circuits.

Mannies.
At first, she’d thought it was someone’s name. Now she remembered that speech-capable genies referred to themselves as mannies when they were with each other. The word, she understood, had come from
gene-manipulated.

“You don’t want to kill me,” she said, trying hard to keep her voice level, calm, and matter-of-fact. “I’m not your enemy. And I might be able to help you.”

“Eh?” Tharby’s golden eyes narrowed. “How?”

Genies were bred with very specific limits to their intelligence—there was no sense, after all, in bestowing genius on something that would spend its entire life tracing circuits or loading specialized cargo into spacecraft holds. The brightest were likely to be the female
ningyos,
since some of their clients liked sex partners that could carry on a decent conversation, but even they wouldn’t be able to follow complex or convoluted arguments.

Best to keep it simple and to the point.