Earth Strike: Star Carrier: Book One

“Why do you think it wasn’t fair?” Dr. George asked him.

“You’re rigging the program,” he protested. “Making it so I can’t win!”

“Life isn’t fair, Lieutenant.”

“The bastards were waiting for me at my place,” he said. “So I didn’t go there. You had one of them just pop up in a corridor.”

“How would it have been different if you’d gotten away?”

“I’d have gotten across the river to New Jersey. Or I would’ve gotten down to Battery or over to Chintown. I have…I had friends there….”

“But Angela had given them your ID. They’d have caught up with you, sooner or later.”

“Yeah, but why? There must be thousands of squatters in the Ruins! Why bother with me?”

“Because you’d impressed them, of course.”

He snorted. “That stupid test? The three-D navigation thing? That wasn’t until later.”

“You seem to have attracted their attention early on.”

“All we wanted was to be left alone….”

“According to the records, it was you who approached the Authority. When your…when Angela had her stroke.”

“Yeah…”

That, of course, had been where it all had started going wrong.

They were called primitives. And they were, in a way, men and women with almost nothing in the way of a technical infrastructure or implants, picking out a precarious living in the Manhattan Ruins and Norport and Sunken Miami and Old London and a hundred other coastal cities half-swallowed by the encroaching oceans, the polar ice caps having melted away three centuries before.

Gray had been born in the Ruins, a part of the TriBeCa Tower community. His discovery of the gravcycle in an uptown shop had let him “be the man”-Prim slang for proving himself-at his coming-of-age by bringing in a load of food and food-nano from New Rochelle. Life within the ruins was only possible if you belonged to a “family”… meaning one of the hundreds of territorial gangs. Each mound-island had its own family, and while many cooperated with the others, a few lived by preying on weaker families. That gravcycle had seen the TriBeCa Family through a couple of tough wars and innumerable raids.

The Periphery Authority was a department of the Confederal Police charged with maintaining the law in the Ruins-an all but impossible task, when you thought about it. The inhabitants of the Periphery didn’t recognize Confederal control; they didn’t fight the Auths, usually, but they tended to fade back deeper into the warrens and labyrinths of the Ruins, and to have nothing whatsoever to do with the Confeds.

But when Angela had suffered a stroke that paralyzed her right arm and badly weakened her right leg, Gray had gone nearly mad with worry. With very little in the way of modern medical technology within the Periphery-few medicines, no nanomeds at all, no docbots or diagnostic software or, indeed, any Net access at all-Gray had taken his broom and flown north to Morningside Heights, the southernmost tip of the New City. A doctor at the Columbia Arcology had agreed to see her, though with no insurance and no cred-implants, of course, neither he nor his wife could pay for treatment. Gray had agreed to talk with someone with the Confederal Social Authority in order to get treatment for Angela.

He still remembered the snickers, the sidelong looks. A Prim, dressed in rags, pleading for help from the Confeds. And for a wife, of all things. In the Ruins, among the families, people tended to pair off, to form tight pair-bonds rather than the more typical looser social and sexual associations. Monogies, they were called, and if that Peripheral lifestyle wasn’t illegal, on the Mainland it was still widely believed to be possessive, dysfunctional, and just a bit dirty.

The soshies had taken him in and asked a lot of questions. They’d hooked him up to brain scans and thought monitors, and seemed fascinated by the fact that he could fly a broom without a direct neural interface. “That shouldn’t even be possible!” one caseworker had told him. “Have you ever thought of getting an implant?”

“Oh, sure,” he’d told her. “Absolutely! Just as soon as my insurance comes through!”

They claimed later he’d agreed to join the military, but he hadn’t. Well, not really, though he might have tried to give an impression of interest in the idea, just so they’d help Angela. Or maybe they’d taken his sarcasm as agreement. It was always tough to tell with the Authorities. They were a damned humorless bunch.

Join the military? Hell, no! All he knew was scavenging and Ruinrunning. He could barely read and write, and if the Authorities claimed that the squatters out in the Periphery were still Earth Confederation citizens, Gray and a few million other Prim squatters didn’t see it that way at all. They were free. The only law was what they themselves laid down and enforced. They didn’t receive any of the Authority’s protection, medical or financial services, education, clothing, Net access, entertainment, or food. They didn’t have Confed- recognized jobs or welfare status and they didn’t pay taxes. So how could anyone claim that they were citizens?

But then a Navy lieutenant commander had shown up in his black-and-golds and told him he was there to administer the Confederation oath. He’d bolted then, bolted and run. He’d found his broom where he’d parked it, on a landing balcony high above Harlem Bay, and launched himself into the night.

He’d been pursued by a hopper, but he’d eluded them.

They’d been waiting for him in the TriBeCa Tower apartments he’d shared with Angela.

The worst part of it all, the most awful revelation that had transformed his recruit training into a living nightmare, had been the discovery that Angela had…changed. They’d healed her. They’d grown class-three implants within the sulci of her brain, regrown sections of her organic nervous system, given her palm implants and an ID, even given her training as a compositer, whatever the hell that was, and assigned her to a job up in Haworth. The last he’d heard, she was living with some guy named Fred in an extended community.

She no longer loved Gray, and no longer wanted to see him.

The medtechs he’d talked to later had told him that that happened with strokes sometimes. Old neural pathways holding information on relationships, on emotional responses could be burned out by the neuron storm, lost even beyond the ability of neural prostheses to recapture them.

Gray wondered, though, how much was stroke and how much was reprogramming. Reconditioning. When they’d wired her to their machines and downloaded reading and writing, Cloud-Net skills and language training, social norms and Mainland mores, had they also told her what to believe? Who to love? How to love?

The last time he’d been able to talk with Angela, he’d asked if that had been what had happened. The simple question had made her angry, unreasonably so, he thought. “Damn you, Trev! Don’t you think I can think for myself?” she’d demanded.

Maybe she could. But…that hadn’t been Angela he’d been talking to. She was different now, and not just in her attitude or her use of language.

He’d known then that Angela, his Angela, was dead.

“You’re crying,” Dr. George said. She handed him a tissue and he accepted it, dragging it across his wet cheeks until the material evaporated and took the moisture with it as a microparticle aerosol. “We seem to have touched something.”

“Fuck you,” he said, but without much feeling. He felt dead inside, utterly wrung out and empty. “We’re done. I’m done. Get the hell out of my head….”

Hangar Deck

TC/USNA CVS America

Haris Orbit, Eta Bootis System

1740 hours, TFT

Commander Marissa Allyn stood on the walkway overlooking the star carrier’s main hangar deck, a vast and cavernous compartment three stories tall and over 150 meters long, a noisy, banging, bustling nexus of activity as returning fighters trapped on the recovery deck above and were brought down through the mergedeck barriers and