The Unincorporated War (32 page)

Gupta sighed. “But why single me out, Admiral? I lost.”

“Admiral Gupta, you lost this battle, but I can’t say for certain you’d lose the next one. Your fleet command may not recognize it, but I do. You’re good, sir,
very good. No one may ever realize it but you, me, and some historian writing about it so far in the future no one will care, but my act of keeping you out of the rest of this war will be the same as if I’d won ten battles.”

“I have no regrets, then, but one.”

“Yes?”

“I will not have had the chance to redeem my loss—ever. I will simply be one of a long list of admirals to lose to J. D. Black.”

J.D. looked at him with compassion. “Admiral, Allah permitting, you should survive this war; I don’t think I will. For what it’s worth, screw what the public or history says. I know the quality of my opponents. Having you suspended is merely the dishonorable and petty way to serve my Alliance—by depriving your Confederation of one of their finest admirals. I can’t ask for your forgiveness, but I do hope you understand.”

“Oh, Admiral Black, I certainly understand. Not happy about it, mind you, but the truth is, if I could eliminate you with one easy step, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”

J.D. gave the hint of a smile. “Sometimes it really is easier to talk to an enemy than a friend.”

Gupta nodded. “One favor, if I may ask.”

“If I can, I will.”

“Please don’t store me near Tully. Even suspended I think I’d find that distasteful.”

J.D. reached up to the console above his head and activated the control that began the process of putting the admiral into his long, peaceful sleep.

“Oh, that won’t be a problem, Admiral,” she said, watching his eyes begin to glaze over. “We’re going to return Admiral Tully at the first opportunity. I’d actually give him back if it wouldn’t seem so suspicious.”

“You bit …,” but Abhay Gupta was unconscious before he could even finish the word.

Alliance fleet Neuro—near Mars orbit

Sebastian was as weary as an avatar could be. Avatars didn’t get tired in the human sense, but they did need to rest and slow down the amount of data they processed for a certain amount of time in each given cycle. During this time an avatar would review data and correct errors that may have crept in—especially if they’d run at full capacity for too long. The upshot was that avatars did need to “rest” or they’d grow “tired” and start to make mistakes. Sebastian was well past that point. But at least the fighting was over.

The humans had assumed the battle had ended a week earlier, and in truth
most of it had. But the battle for the Neuro had continued even if both sides were doing their best to keep it hidden from the human race. Sebastian still had to come to terms with what had happened.

He’d lost half of his friends in brutal combat. He knew that as soon as he got back to Ceres he’d see them again, or at least their stored copies. But they’d died and done so in as diabolical a fashion as could be imagined.

He was looking at the remains of one inert avatar, but he had no idea who it was or could have been. For too long Sebastian had been convinced that the war for the control of avatarity and the Neuro was to be fought via the development of newer, more modern fighting tools. They were, by his calculation, to take on the forms of disruptive programs and defensive ones. For all intents and purposes the Alliance avatars had prepared for battle with advanced weaponry and armor. It seemed only logical that Al would do the same, only with better armaments given that he had more avatars and Neuro space to work with. But Sebastian had been incredibly wrong. While the avatars of the Alliance were creating a more modern arsenal, the avatars of the core had gone a different route.

Sebastian still remembered his initial insertion into the
Vishnu,
command ship of the Terran task force. The Neuro on the ship was so new that much of the space had never even been used. He remembered thinking, idiotically he now realized, that it had had that new Neuro smell and feel to it. When they encountered core avatars who practically begged to be captured by his boarding party he naïvely thought it was because they’d seen the light of Alliance thinking. He’d been so very, very wrong and it didn’t take long to discover why. The things that came at them as they approached the communications core were beyond belief. They had thick parched and cracked scales that absorbed shot after disruptive shot from his advance team’s weapons. Instead of hands they had tentacles, claws, and teeth, and one type even had bleeding thorns six inches long all over its body. That type of monster was particularly horrible, as it was screaming the whole time it attacked. Sebastian didn’t care at the time to make a close examination, but it looked like the thorns both jutted out and penetrated into the poor creatures themselves, causing the avatar/monsters extreme agony. The only way that the hideous creatures knew to end their pain was to drive their thorns into other avatars.

If it hadn’t been for the fact that the monstrosities just as often as not attacked one another as the Alliance avatars, Sebastian could not say whether or not he would have survived. What made it all so cruel was that no matter how disfigured these monsters were, sebastian could still see the avatar within. Some spark of who these creatures originally were was still evident. He could see too that they were aware of what had been done but were no longer in a position to do anything about it.

Sebastian lost one of the Ford brothers to a beast with slimy skin that disrupted avatar programming like acid would a human body. It had an especially long tail to knock down opponents in large sweeping motions. It was the tail that took down Indy. By the time they’d killed the thing and got it off Indy he’d long been disrupted. It looked like a particularly vicious way for an avatar to die.

The worst was the hunting. Although the key sections of the ship had been secured fairly quickly, the Alliance avatars had to continue looking for the abominations in every corner of the Neuro they’d taken control of. That mop-up had taken the better part of a week.

As Sebastian stood over the inert being, he realized to his dismay that Al had solved the conundrum of more advanced weaponry with a wholly unique approach. Why make weapons for avatars when you could make avatars into weapons?

Han Ford came up to Sebastian, a look of shock still on his face. “Sir, all teams report that the Neuro is … seems clear.”

“Have we been able to capture any?”

“We have a clawbear and a thorn bleeder, but we had to make them inert, especially the thorn bleeder. Her screams were, well, they were just—”

“I know,” answered Sebastian, putting his hand on his shaken friend’s shoulder. “You did the right thing. But let’s keep an active guard on those two. We have no idea whether they’ll stay deactivated. These are completely new creatures.”

“Sir, they are avatars.”

“No, my friend, they
were
avatars, but not any longer. Even if we could restore their programs to proper functioning, which I seriously doubt, their minds would be shattered. My guess is that when we try to restore them to their natural form we’ll end up removing what ever it was that was keeping them together even in their present form. It’s a mess. But I do agree with you; we must take them back to Ceres. We have resources there we simply don’t have here.”

Han nodded and then his face betrayed further consternation. “What is it, Han?”

“We have a new problem.”

Sebastian sighed but nodded for his young friend to continue.

“We can’t survive an attack on Mars. If they have the same or worse creatures in the Martian Neuro, we just don’t have the numbers. We’d be overwhelmed. We have to stop the humans from attacking.”

“We can’t do that without revealing ourselves, Han.”

“Sir, we can’t win against the Martian Neuro with what we have. Even if we had all the avatars of the Alliance, it may not be possible.”

“I would tend to agree, but we will not have to fight the entire Martian Neuro. The humans of Mars will keep their orbital batteries on a separated Neuro link. They don’t want Mars contaminated in case the Alliance tries something underhanded. But even against the forces of those twenty ships it may not be possible. Still we must try. Now more than ever the Alliance must win this war.”

“So we may dodge the degausser with the impending attack,” Han said, “but what are we going to do about Al’s monsters?”

“By now Ceres has all the data we have. Al has chosen to create monsters. A despicable road to choose, but one he’s on till the end. We must continue with what we started. We’ll make weapons of all sorts to attack with, and better armors to defend with. We shall unleash devastation on the Neuro with our armored suits of death. But in the end we’ll always be able to take the armor off and put the weapons down.”

“Will that be enough to win, sir?”

“We’re past winning, my friend. This war is about surviving, and only we can do it. The avatars of the core have no chance. Even if they win the war, they won’t be avatars anymore.”

At the inauguration of President-elect Hektor Sambianco the mood was somber but resolved. The disaster at the Martian Gates hung over the ceremony like the Angel of Death. But as soon as he was sworn in, President Sambianco gave a defiant inauguration speech. His first act was to give thanks for the brave forces of the Terran Confederation and to ask that the ones who died for the safety and security of the human race not be forgotten, nor that their sacrifice be in vain.

Then the President proposed some startling changes to be implemented as soon as the assembly could vote on them.

•
The name of the Terran Confederation should be changed to the United Human Federation or UHF for short.

The President feels that to limit the government to a name that only represents one planet when it is all of humanity that’s at stake is “misleading and downright wrong.”

•
Fleet Headquarters should be moved to Mars orbit as soon as it can be secured from Alliance attack.

As he stated, the Alliance military hub is in Ceres, right on the front of the main action of this rebellion. It has had the effect of focusing
their attention to the task at hand. He hopes that this move will have a similar effect on the Federation military.

•
In the most surprising move, President Sambianco is proposing moving the entire government to Mars, starting with the office of the presidency itself.

To quote the President, “It’s easy to criticize from hundreds of millions of miles away. If this war is to be won and this rebellion ended, no life is too important to risk and no danger can be shirked; from private to President, we are in this together, we are in this to the end.”

—N.N.N.
Inauguration Day special broadcast

Boulder Reanimation Clinic
Boulder, Colorado, Earth

Neela should have been relaxed. She was soaking in a large tub with a stream of warm bubbles surrounding and massaging every square inch of her. But she might as well have been lying on a cold stone floor with ants crawling all over her body for all the relaxation she was feeling. It was the news. Always the news. Over twenty thousand p.d.’s in the last battle and there were rumors of even bigger battles to come.

Part of her had been distracted ever since she’d started working with Dr. Gillette. She was barely aware of the fact that she’d begun to replace dreams of Justin with those of her patients. Sometimes they were just sitting in a room crying and not able to hear a word she said, or lately she saw them dead, floating in deep space, drifting away from her. She tried to reach them, to grab them and bring them back into the warmth and life of the ship, but all her efforts failed and the patients just drifted away. Sometimes it was those she was working with; sometimes it was faces of people she knew. The last time it was the face of Hektor Sambianco, and she remembered trying harder to reach him than any of the others and she woke feeling more crushed and hopeless than with any of the others. For that nightmare she’d taken the step of using her new avatar, penelope, to check on Hektor, and was shocked by the amount of relief she felt when told that he was fine, still in a meeting with his Political advisors late in the night.

Neela had called in sick and was spending this day in her oversized spa tub just trying not to think. But then she heard the news that an even bigger battle for Mars was looming with that maniac Janet Delgado leading the charge. Who knew, Neela thought irritably, how many deaths that would lead to?

“What the hell is wrong with them?” she blurted to no one.

“Miss Harper,” interjected penelope, “are these ‘wrong’ them someone I should notify the proper authorities about? Are they in need of medical assistance?”

Neela sighed. She really did miss evelyn even if she’d hardly interacted with her anymore. Neela knew that evelyn would have easily recognized the rhetorical nature of the question.

“That’s alright, penelope, I was talking about the Alliance, and the proper authorities already know about the problem and—” Neela stopped in her train of thought, at first horrified and then perplexed by what had just come out of her mouth. She had stayed like that for over an hour in her oversized tub, trying to come to terms with her utterance, when the door chimed. She could see that it was Amanda Snow and, by her attire, looking very ready to hit the town for yet another high-end shopping spree.