Merkiaari Wars: 02 - What Price Honour (28 page)

“Roll up your right sleeve,” Patel ordered and Gina obeyed. “Now this solution is full of stage one nanobots designed to clear your system to its natural birth state. It will take two hours at most. The monitors will tell me when they’re finished.”

Patel tied a band around Gina’s upper arm to bring up a vein, and then used the syringe to inject the solution into her bloodstream.

“You may feel some small disorientation, but don’t be concerned. Dizzy spells and temperature fluctuations are both normal for this process.”

“Yes, sir.”

Gina imagined her old bots going to war with the new ones inside her.

“Try to relax. Have a nap if you can. If not, we have a few novels here.” He picked up some compads and shuffled through them. “Do you like Zelda and the Spaceways? No? How about a detective story?”

“I’ll try to sleep, sir, if that’s all right.”

“Certainly, certainly. I’ll come by in an hour to check on your progress.”

Gina closed her eyes and pretended to sleep. She listened for the door and heard it finally, but Patel was like all the enhanced. He was very quiet on his feet. The door slid shut and she opened her eyes to watch the monitors.

Fifteen minutes later, Gina was sweating as if back in the jungle on Thurston. Her joints ached and her head also. Patel had not mentioned pain as a side effect of the process, but she had suffered worse and determinedly put it from her mind. Her teeth were chattering a few minutes later, as if the air conditioning had been turned up full. Her head was a blinding mass of pain, and she had a stomach ache. She couldn’t open her eyes without groaning as the room spun around. She tried to lie still, estimating the first hour was close to being up, but she had to do something about the pain in her guts. She pulled her legs up to her chest and hugged them tight, fighting not to throw up.

Ten minutes later the monitors were beeping frantically, but all she could do was pant. Sweat was rolling off her in rivers and her mouth was parched. She had been through worse—hadn’t she? Desert fighting was rare, but Marines were trained for any eventuality. She looked up at the blazing sun, but blinked in puzzlement to see Patel’s concerned face looking down at her. He was saying something, but he swam in her vision, and she was unable to respond. There were people running by in the background, and others prodding her. She wished they would leave here alone.

Gina watched the ceiling flowing by. She watched the lights receding and wondered where she was going. Was it time for second stage already? Patel was asking her if she was allergic? Allergic to what? He had only pumped nanobots into her. No one was allergic to bots. He must mean something else… what…

Alarms screamed, and everything went black.

* * *

The Complex, Petruso Base, Snakeholme

Kate heard the news about Gina in a glum silence. She sat on her rack in the barracks listening to the others speculating on the reasons behind Gina’s reaction to the enhancement process. Why did it have to be her? Why couldn’t it have been that arsehole Callendri? If anyone deserved this, it was Mr. Wonderful Roberto Callendri.

“What are her chances?” Kate asked and everyone turned toward  Cragg.

Cragg shook his head. “Not good, Kate. They don’t know what’s causing it. They say she quit breathing a couple of times. I don’t know… I think she’s a goner.”

“We don’t know that for sure,” Takeri said. “She’s strong.”

“Yeah,” they all agreed that she was.

Kate nodded along with the others, but if Gina had this reaction to the purge of her old bots, how was she likely to react to the other stages? Enhancement was an invasive procedure—very invasive. Biomech and cybernetic components had to be implanted, grown, and sometimes a combination of the two. A viper unit consisted of a unique combination of a Human body modified with plasteel, optical data feeds, servos, mylar musculature, and computer circuitry.

Kate sighed. “We have a sim in an hour.” She resolutely pushed thoughts of her friend aside. “Better get squared away for inspection.”

The others moved off and began stowing their gear and tidying their racks.

A short while later, Sergeant Rutledge came in and the recruits stood to attention at the base of their racks. He made a show of checking their appearance and opened a couple of lockers at random, but like Roscoe and the other veterans, he was more interested in their performance during the training than in a tidy locker.

Everyone passed inspection.

“First Squad will follow me to the simulators, the rest of you will wait for Sergeant Roscoe.”

Kate marched with her squadmates outside, and then double-timed it across the parade ground and into the Complex. The Complex was a single story building that sprawled over a large area opposite the Tech Centre. The parade ground was between the two. She and the rest of the recruits had been here before to watch holo footage of the regiment in action. Vipers, most of them long dead now, routinely downloaded data into the regiment’s archive after every mission. Those long dead heroes would never be forgotten as long as one viper lived. It was a form of immortality that appealed to all of them.

Today would be a little different to their earlier visits, in that they would live the memories not simply view them. They would fight the battles fought so long ago, and perhaps win those that had ended in defeat. Kate was aware that she had done this before, and that the others hadn’t. They were nervous, but she dared not reassure them. No one must know of her time as Stone. She was determined they wouldn’t find out from her.

They entered the simulator room. It was the biggest one she had ever seen. There were enough simulators here for the entire platoon to participate let alone a single squad. Usually these places held one or perhaps two rigs not forty plus.

“Richmond,” Rutledge said pointing to a rig and she stepped beside it to wait. “Takeri, Cragg…” Rutledge detailed each of her squad mates to their rigs in the first row. “Remember your sim assignments. It will save me having to do this again.”

Rutledge stepped behind the programming consol and activated the rigs. Kate moved aside as her simulator tank opened with a shushing sound of compression seals releasing, and the couch lifted out to settle neatly to the floor.

“You know the drill, leave the wiring to me. I have a few helpers coming for that.”

Kate stripped and climbed onto the couch eagerly. Others were less happy, but minutes later, everyone was ready. Rutledge began with her, but half way through his work, he looked up to find Stone and Hymas entering the room.

“The matrix is ready,” Rutledge said to them. “Start connecting the others would you?”

Stone and Hymas nodded and began connecting the other recruits to their rigs.

Kate relaxed and wondered where she would be in a few minutes. Would the sim take her to Bethany again? Or would she go to Thorfinni and participate in a larger action? With the entire squad involved, Rutledge may well go for the latter, but there were many other options available. Stone was an excellent programmer. Hell, with him involved, she might find herself on Earth fighting a fictitious battle. He was that good.

“Right, Richmond, I have one last connection to make and you’re done.”

“Weapon’s bus?”

“Close,” Rutledge said and smiled briefly. “Your weapon’s data bus
could
be used in a pinch, but it’s not really the best choice for this. Your primary node has a much higher DPR.”

“DPR?”

“Data Pass Rate,” Rutledge explained. “Turn over for me.”

Kate rolled onto her stomach careful not to dislodge any of the sensors. Her primary node was located at the base of her spine. It tapped directly into the optical network running through her entire body and had been used during the final stage of enhancement. Final stage was uploading all the viper software she needed to operate her enhancements. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Rutledge gently polishing a jack plug that matched the socket in her spine. There was a large central pin surrounded by two rings of much smaller and more delicate looking pins. He studied it critically for a second or three then bent to ease it into her. She twitched and hissed at the feel of his hand on her butt.

“Don’t move,” Rutledge said sharply. “If I mess this up, you will not like it.”

“Sorry, cold hands,” she said trying not to feel the pins sliding into her.

“Cold hands are the least of your worries, Richmond. If I screw up your node, it will take surgery to fix.”

Kate froze. She’d had enough surgery to last her a lifetime—a viper lifetime.

“It feels weird.”

“You don’t say,” Rutledge said dryly. “We were told that we couldn’t possibly be feeling what we reported. The R&D people insisted that the node doesn’t have touch receptors.”

“What about the link to our nervous system?” Kate said visualising the schematics they had all studied.

“That’s what we said, but they said it’s an entirely different sub-system, and could not be the cause of the
phantom
feelings we were feeling.”

“Techies,” she snorted in disgust.

Kate knew the moment the connection was made. An icon burst into life on her otherwise blank display, and a text message blinked before her eyes, or rather, that’s what it seemed like.

Connection Achieved

 
“That’s got it, Sarge.”

Kate’s display was purely internal. It only appeared to hover before her eyes. This kind of thing still had the power to make her uncomfortable, but her reaction was mild compared with how she once would have reacted.

Rutledge taped the wiring to her thigh to prevent accidents. “Okay Richmond, you can turn back.”

Kate carefully turned over. “I’ve never seen simulators like this, and I don’t mean the extra connections.”

“They’re a little different to others you’ve used,” Rutledge admitted. “We can do a lot more with a direct connection.”

“Example?”

“I could download recon data directly to you for instance, or use a download to create a sim so real you become me for the duration of the sim, or any degree between the two.”

Stone’s sim at HQ was based on his download, so she’d known it was possible to do that here, but she hadn’t been enhanced back then. Maybe this sim would be even more real.

“What about this time?”

Rutledge grinned. “That would be telling. We don’t need your node to run this sim, but it does make it easier for us to monitor your responses. The hardware was wired this way back before the war.”

“Looks brand new,” Kate said and it did. Everything gleamed as if just unpacked from the factory.

Rutledge shrugged. “My training was a long time ago, Richmond. We haven’t needed to use this stuff for centuries. No wear and tear. Don’t worry, we’ve kept them upgraded. You’ll not find better anywhere in the Alliance.”

“Where did we get them?”

Rutledge winked and said one word before walking away to connect another of her squadmates. “Flotsam.”

Kate gaped then smiled sheepishly as she realised he was pulling her leg. Flotsam indeed. Flotsam was supposedly a world in the Border Zone where anything could be bought for the right price—anything at all. It was a myth. A place where Zelda supposedly came from, and made her piratical living making fools of Fleet captains and quite often the Marine Corps as well. It wasn’t a real place. She frowned. Rutledge hadn’t laughed… nah! Everyone knew it was a fictional world. It had been created specifically as the setting for Zelda’s holodrama series.

A short while later, Lieutenant Hymas left the room. Stone and Rutledge sat behind the consols to run the computers.

“Listen up,” Rutledge said raising his voice. “You will all be running the same sim here today, so be aware that your performance will be graded and compared not only against the ideal of a perfect mission, but also against your squadmates performances.” He grinned. “I thought that might get your attention.”

It certainly had! Kate had joked with Fuentez that a major’s slot in the regiment would suit her preferences, but maybe it shouldn’t have been a joke. Years of being led by incompetents had made her think of all officers that way. She had made dodging promotion at every turn an art form while in the rangers, and it had never been an a issue with ISS. She saw things a little differently now. No viper, no matter his rank, could be called incompetent at anything. She had always taken the easy way out, performing her missions and following orders, never trying to change things. To be fair on herself, changing the system on Bethany was beyond any single individual, but that didn’t mean she should add to the problem. That was exactly what she had been doing by ducking the responsibility that came with higher rank, but no more. Her new friends deserved the best leadership, and she was, in her own mind at least, one of the best recruits here.

Now was the time to prove it.

“Let’s see if you can make use of what you’ve learned so far and survive longer than five minutes,” Rutledge said and with that the couches all lifted and swung into the chambers.