Rocket Boy laughed. “You
The bullet was close to Rocket Boy’s head now. He watched it for a long moment, then reached out and plucked it from the air.
“No. We will go on and on, you and I. Look!”
A brilliant point of light flared amongst the launch pits of the spaceport. The yacht of some trillionaire fleeing the war. Rocket Boy watched as its bright star arced away into the night.
“We’re something new,” Rocket Boy said. The assassin bullet vibrated warmly between his thumb and forefinger. “We haven’t yet found our limits. Perhaps we never will.”
The voice in his head was silent.
“Switch the information grid back on. I will make a broadcast announcing that I am taking control of the city.”
Rocket Boy tried out different smiles, studying his ghostly reflection. “Which sounds better? Prime Minister Vigo, or Emperor Vigo the First?”
JADE ANGEL
“You’re always a child till your last parent dies, then suddenly you’re old.”
Xandri scanned the terrain through her retinal camera, frowning at the readouts scrolling down her peripheral field of vision. She wasn’t seeing the Chimese dragon, so either Intel had been wrong about the attack alert, or the Chimese had shifted operations.
Whatever the reason, she had no target. Just a cracked plateau, fogged by the perennial summer dust storm, that ran until it hit the white-hatted Coprates massif.
“Chill,” she said.
“What is it, Flamer?” The voice of her team leader, Captain Charles Scrill, was loud and clear.
The last few missions, her com system had taken to randomly distorting sounds, but the tiny stirp of duct jammed into the earpiece seemed to have done the trick.
“I’m bringing my eagle round. TheChimese aren’t coming.”
There was a brief pause. “Flamer? Target is four o’clock, five klicks, coming off the massif.
You should have visual.” The worry in Chill’s voice came through too clearly—she decided maybe she’d take the duct tape out.
“Incoming,” her eagle announced happily. Its cheerful tones had been programmed on Earth by some idiot of a psych with a military contract to reduce combat stress. The sound broke whatever spell Xandri was under and she saw the Chimese dragon in the distance, ejecting Mars Terrain Vehicles—baby spiders—from its belly. Once they landed, they’d sprout legs and speed across the plateau to engage the American mama spiders guarding the Kennebunk Elevator, while the dragon turned back to its base on the massif. Now that the Chinese had lost the war with America on Earth, their Martian colony was starved for replacement parts for both systems and mechs. So they were focusing their dwindling resources on USAM’s two most vulnerable points. The Chimese cannibalized the spiders they couldn’t keep running, and dropped the hulks down USAM mining, infrastructure and terraforming shafts. And they targeted USAM’s cargo elevators every time supply ships arrived from Earth.
“Move in,” Chill ordered. “Clear the little bastards out. Flamer, take the fly.”
Chill and the other two eagles in alpha strike team swooped down and across the plateau after the baby spiders, while Xandri peeled off to pursue the dragon. She almost had a lock when—this was the only way she could describe it—everything twisted inside her and out, and bounced back into shape like a flexiband. The dragon had vanished again. Only this time there was another dragon, a green one, heading towards the massif, at 10 o’clock, and herphysical position seemed to have changed she was somewhere else along the massif.
Even in her shock, her training kept her focused. “Chill!” she shouted. “Target has changed. I have visual on a second fly. Repeat, targeting another enemy craft!” She locked and fired. She missed.
Unbelievable. Could the summer dust have compromised her twitchy targeting system? The Chimese weren’t the only ones with parts problems. She was still absorbing her inexplicable failure and sequencing another lock and load, when the world twisted again, this time accompanied by a horrendous bolt of pain. When she pried her eyes open again, the second dragon was gone and she was back chasing the first dragon, which was now in range. She blinked her eyes furiously to clear them.
She was hyperventilating, and the med readouts projected by her retinal camera were spiking right off the screen.
“…girl! Respond!” Chill was shouting.
Her mind was still frozen, but her fingers were already busy, automatically keying in the firing sequence. “I have visual!” she shouted back. “Locking NOW!”
The eagles long range lasers discharged, and the dragon exploded. Chunks flew into the massif it had almost reached. The fog spread the orange color of destruction across the whole Martian sky, making a beacon of defeat that would shine as far away as New Beijing.
The other three eagles had blown up most of the baby spiders, and the Kennebunk garrison had sent out beetlebots to sweep up the last of them. The baby spiders clearly got off their mechviruses before they died, though, because now the beetlebots were just spinning in circles. Still, the elevator hadn’t been hit, and the Chimese had lost a costly gamble here. With a tip of their wings to the human mech crew already heading out to the stranded beetlebots, alpha team turned homeward to the Burroughs Eyrie overlooking USAM. Xandri debated how much to tell chill about what had just happened. She was already skirling a medical suspension to defrag all the biotech viruses she’d absorbed in a year-long combat rotation, and this was clearly way beyond a simple virus.
After they docked the eagles, Xandri headed quickly for the lockers where the flight suits were stored, sloughing hers off as she walked. She was very aware that Chill was right behind her—she felt him at her back but ignored him, hoping to discourage him from the conversation she knew they were about to have.
“Lieutenant Kantu!”
She made a face but stopped and turned to face him.
“What in Chimese hell happened out there?” he asked. “What were you shooting at?”
“My eagle got hit by a tech virus,” she guessed. “Took me a few seconds to purge.”
“But you lost visual twice. And no one else in the unit got hit. Maybe I should be ordering you in for a medscan.”
“It was a tech virus, not a bio,” she insisted. “Obviously the hit was a local with a repeat code.
Hey, there’s nothing wrong.” She looked around and saw they were attracting attention from two senior officers on the catwalk that ran round the hangar deck. “And I don’t need you putting ideas in anyone’s head,” she nodded her chin toward the brass. She turned and kept walking. Chill walked with her but lowered his voice.
“You’re a real magnet for locals, aren’t you? Third since the start of Gemini.”
She made no answer. The other two incidents had genuinely been the result of tech virus hits.
This one smacked of a psych problem, which was definitely a career-ender. No Kantu had ever been medically decommissioned. They died on the field or went on to glory as leaders of their people.
