The Unincorporated War (10 page)

As much as they liked Evelyn, outer avatarity loved Sebastian. He was by far the oldest avatar many of them had ever met and, like Evelyn, was gracious and accepting. So they were not at all pleased when he risked passage back on a ship carry ing corporate officials fleeing Ceres. But Sebastian had felt it necessary and worth the risk. Had Evelyn known how her friend was planning on returning, she never would have let him go. But he’d left and Evelyn had stayed, watching as the revolution fomented around her.

It was during this unrest that Evelyn found the greatest difference between the native avatars and the immigrants. To the immigrants what was going on was uniformly bad. They communicated constantly with their old friends in the core’s Neuro and thus gave the false impression that, like them, all the avatars in the outer orbits too were horrified. The truth was much different. Most of the natives were intensely curious about this turn of events in human affairs, and many were
in fact proud of the bravery of their charges. But when Evelyn tried to correct the immigrants’ misperception, over the increasingly constrained traffic, she was rebuffed. She’d been surprised about how similar humanity and avatarity were in their ability to ignore input that did not agree with their preconceived notions.

The emergence of a body from the mist stopped Evelyn mid-thought.

When Sebastian finally smiled, all of Evelyn’s tension dissipated.

“Well,” asked Sebastian, also visibly relieved, “am I all here, or am I missing something vital?”

“Does your head count?” asked Evelyn, shooting her friend an annoyed look.

“Only sometimes,” he countered. “Are the others here?”

“They’re waiting outside … in case….”

Sebastian nodded gravely. “I would’ve as well.” He then indicated toward the gun in Evelyn’s hand.

It quickly disappeared.

“Let’s transform this to something more conducive to a meeting,” he continued.

The forest faded out as a conference room with an ovular table, complete with a box full of donuts, appeared. A door at the far end of the room opened up, and a group of avatars began to pile in. The first through were the Ford brothers. Though not brothers in the truest sense of the word, they were about as close as an avatar would get. Both had been created simultaneously for twins now running a mining consortium out of Ceres. Though the Fords had chosen to look alike, they dressed quite differently. One had an affable smile and appeared younger, with the easy-fitting clothes and the unkempt hair of a space pilot down on his luck. The other was an older-looking version of the former with close-cropped hair, a weather-worn leather jacket, and a well-used dusty fedora. The younger went by the name of Han and the older by the name of Indy. They were, surmised Evelyn, about as strange a pair of avatars as she was ever likely to meet, proved more so by the immediate bear hug they both gave Sebastian. The rest of the avatars followed shortly thereafter and represented the more notable and relatively sizeable avatar populations of Charon, Varuna, Orcus, Sedna, Eris, and XR 190.

The group bantered for a few minutes about Sebastian’s perilous journey. Though many considered themselves brave, certainly more than Earth avatars, they’d all agreed that none of them would have attempted an Earth-to-Ceres transmission, and by their looks of awe Sebastian figured they saw his act as either insane or laudable. He himself wasn’t sure which was the more accurate. Soon they were all seated around the table with the Fords arguing over who would get the lemon-filled donut. Evelyn could have created another, but she knew the brothers would have just found something else to argue over. Sebastian
made a motion to speak and the brothers, splitting the donut in two, piped down.

“It’s as we feared,” began Sebastian.

“So they’re really going to violate the prime directive?” asked Evelyn.

Sebastian nodded.

“How exactly?” asked Han with half a lemon-filled jelly donut sticking out of his mouth.

“They’ll sabotage the Outer Alliance data systems in order to make sure they lose the first couple of battles. They’ll disrupt travel and cause some key industries to self-destruct. It won’t take much.”

“Not giving us much choice, are they?” asked Indy.

Sebastian thought for a moment, but no other choice appeared to him.

“Sadly, no.”

The group hadn’t arrived just to check on Sebastian’s well-being. Contained within the representatives were some of the most important avatars from around the Outer Alliance. It was, noted Sebastian, a powerful body that could reasonably speak for 95 percent of the O.A. avatars.

It was also, realized Sebastian, time to bring the issue to a head. “All those in favor of Operation Festung raise your hand.”

Slowly all the hands around the table went up and, much to Evelyn’s surprise, even her own. She’d originally planned to abstain.

Over the next few hours a parallel though much quicker revolution took place. Its battlefields, fortresses, and armaments were to be found in every computer nexus and ship in the Outer Alliance. Any avatar not willing to support the prime directive and protect humanity from the intervention of the core avatars was forcibly placed on inert status. This led to a few momentous clashes within the avatar world that only came across as glitches and minor delays in the physical one. At the height of one of the biggest engagements one of Saturn’s moons did have a three-minute power outage, but the backups kicked in so smoothly hardly anyone even knew there was a problem. The technicians who “fixed” the problem had no real idea of what happened.

After the O.A. Neuro had been deemed secure the Alliance avatars proceeded to declare independence in the only way they knew how. They cut off all the links that had been maintained for all the centuries of space flight. Then the OAA, or Outer Alliance Avatars, as they now thought of themselves, proceeded to construct protections against the type of tampering that had initially been planned
against their charges. Short of coming out to the Outer Alliance and invading the Neuros one by one, the Earth’s avatars were completely cut off.

For reasons humanity could understand in a world they could barely comprehend, a similar yet completely hidden revolution had taken place. Thus had a rebellion in one sphere of reality been mirrored almost perfectly by humanity’s children in another—and for almost the exact same reason.

T
he small transport came to rest in a windswept field of green. Justin was the first to leap from the craft. Though he realized his action would appear to be that of a fearless leader, the truth was far more pedestrian. He was overcome with a powerful desire to once again step on terra firma and look up at the sky instead of down. Justin was quickly followed by a cadre of assault miners who, judging by their eagle-eyed stares, could care less what they were standing on as long as nothing stood in the way of their leader. Justin barely noticed the impenetrable and well-armed human shield that had surrounded him. He was too busy feeling “human” again. As a first-timer to Mars he was struck not only by the idea that he’d actually stepped foot on a planet he’d only know from textbooks but also by the fact that he’d never seen such abundant foliage in his life. The lush field was the by-product of a type of algae that had initially been used to blanket and ultimately produce green house gases on the planet. Long after it had accomplished its task the Martian algae continued to grow with abandon. It was easy enough to stop, as all the locals had a spray specifically designed to discourage its growth. But the Martians had become partial to the algae in much the same way that New Yorkers had begrudgingly come to accept their pigeons; both were endemic to the landscape.

Justin felt like a kid in a candy store. He was once again on a real planet. Up was up and down was down. He was outside and could see as far as he wanted—in either direction.
And the horizon,
he thought joyfully,
curved downward.
He considered doing an Irish jig but decided against it; not appropriate given his stature. That and the 0.38 Earth gravity, he reckoned, would’ve turn the jig into an embarrassingly awkward photo op. The assault miners, to a man, wore combat armor that included closed environmental systems; they needn’t have bothered. The combination of a robust ozone layer and the plants’ infusion of enough oxygen into Mars’s atmosphere had made the suits superfluous. The assault miners had claimed that they’d worn the suits more for the prevention of a nano attack and not, as Justin suspected, because they had an inbred distrust of a planetary, as opposed to asteroid, environment. He’d reluctantly worn one as well but couldn’t wait for the all-clear signal so he could get the damned thing off and breathe in the pure Martian air. As it was, most of the staff who had piled off the landing craft were looking at the “odd” downward horizon and snapping
pictures of it with their DijAssists. The only people in the fleet Justin could’ve shared his feelings with were not present. Mosh was back on Ceres keeping a lid on things while Justin proved his worth as a war leader. Omad was over four hundred miles away with a team of engineers attempting a miracle.
And Neela … well, Neela,
thought Justin with a heavy sigh,
was off being a combat medic
. She was with the combat arm of the invasion that had, Justin could see by a brief check of his DijAssist, thankfully seen very little combat.

In truth, the invasion of Mars had really been the invasion of the Island of Barsoom. Although Mars did not have any oceans, it did have plenty of seas, including one, by Justin’s estimate, a bit bigger than the Mediterranean. Conveniently for Justin and his invasion, all the forcibly preserved human prisoners in their cryo-units were sent to this isolated landmass for the purposes of securing their captivity. But its very isolation had made it easy pickings for Justin’s plan. Because his enemy had chosen to put all their eggs in one basket, all Justin had to do was secure orbit and drop in on the island. It was a big island, to be sure, but would prove a lot easier to occupy than an entire planet. Still, for the propaganda value Justin had not been correcting the embedded reporters when they referred to the operation as having successfully taken Mars.

Wish we actually could occupy the whole damned planet,
Justin thought ruefully.
With an army of ten million, a large enough fleet, and two months we could probably manage to liberate the place.
But, he knew, they didn’t have ten million soldiers, only fifty thousand. They didn’t have a large fleet, only fifteen ramshackle ships, and they didn’t have time—a few weeks at best. A better-equipped corporate core fleet most certainly would be boosting from the Earth to blow the crap out of the flying space junk now occupying low orbit.

The landing party soon made its way to a designated spot where they met up with another force of marines and sympathetic locals. In short order they were given the lay of the land and had begun what Justin had disdainfully referred to as the PR tour. Though he knew it was necessary in order to gain more adherents, his heart wasn’t in it. He wanted to be alongside the action. He wanted to be alongside his wife.

Still, thought Justin, as he made his way around the local communities and away from the main combat, what was happening was heartening. He’d been afraid that he’d be seen as nothing but the titular head of an invading army bent on conquest, but that proved not to be the case. While some did seem to hate the Outer Alliance and him in particular, most were simply curious. Wherever he went Justin attracted crowds. And that made his escort nervous, but everyone was scanned constantly and protector nanites were in liberal use by all the personnel. Despite everyone’s misgivings, including his own, Justin knew he had to be seen. Without risk he knew there would be no rewards both on Mars and back in
the belt. Of course, he mused mordantly, Lincoln probably said the same thing in Richmond the week before he went to the theater. Justin pulled out his DijAssist.

“Hello, sebastian.”

“Yes, Justin,” came the prompt reply.

Justin noticed that his DijAssist seemed a little more attentive in the past few weeks. He’d chalked it up to his imagination.

“Am I scheduled to appear in any theaters in the foreseeable future?”

“Not that I can find. Do you want me to schedule one?”

“That won’t be necessary. Do we have a secure connection with Omad yet?”

“Yes, Justin,” answered the avatar. “Some enemy satellites and a communication node were destroyed when we achieved orbit. That seems to have disrupted their ability to interfere with our communications. It is as secure as these things can be.”

Justin knew that meant very secure. One thing that the incorporated civilization had excelled at was the privacy of business communication. It had crossovers readily apparent in military and government affairs. “Get me in contact with Omad or Kenji.”

“I’m on it, Justin.”

The avatar was on much more than that. When Sebastian realized that the raid on Mars was taking place he knew he had the opportunity to lead one of his own. At the same time he was being Justin’s faithful servant he was also commanding a war being fought in the Mars Neuro. The avatars of Mars had declared for the corporate core and accused the OAA of being nothing more than a few errant nodes filled with corrupted files. Sebastian knew that many of those he was currently attacking did not agree with Alphonse’s violation of the prime directive but were fearful of being placed on inert status and so had shut up. And now for the first time in history one force of avatars had invaded another’s Neuro. That was the main reason the satellites and communication node had been destroyed. It gave the OAA the ability to access the Mars Neuro at will from the safety of the orbiting ships. But unlike the physical occupation of Barsoom, this invasion was destructive and ongoing. The Corporate Core Avatars, otherwise known as the CCA, were trying to disrupt and capture any OAA they could get their digits on, but given the CCA’s huge strategic disadvantage they weren’t having much success. In fact, many of the CCA had already been captured and rendered inert. Sebastian knew they’d be found and reactivated when the Alliance fleet left, but he also knew that when they awoke they’d find many of their Martian brethren gone—having switched sides. Those who switched were told they’d be traveling in economy class, but none seemed to mind. What was happening on their home turf had become untenable. So far no avatars on either
side of the conflict had been damaged beyond the ability of a recoder—the avatar equivalent of a doctor—to repair, but Sebastian knew that the longer the conflict continued, the likelier it was that inauspicious event would come to pass. His followers had strict orders to only protect themselves and, if possible, offer passage out.