“Luck,” Marten said.
The radio crackled, which startled Omi. Marten adjusted the controls, but there was too much static for the speakers. So he put on headphones and listened carefully.
“Mars defense is calling,” he soon told Omi. “They’re asking us to identify ourselves. I’d tell them, but then the SU ship might fire a missile as you’ve been suggesting.”
Marten tapped at the console as he studied the vidscreen and studied the satellites and habitats in near-Mars orbit. “It would be a shame to have escaped the Highborn only to have the Martian Rebels kill us.”
“Can you send them a tight-beam message?”
Instead of answering, Marten slapped a switch. The engines cut out, bringing weightlessness to the
“We’re going to drift in faster and decelerate harder nearer the planet,” Marten explained. “We’ll have to take to the couches for that. Hopefully, that will make whoever is scanning and calling us think we’re damaged. That seems like the best way to buy us an arrival without any missiles.”
“Will Social Unity warships be in range by that time?” Omi asked.
Marten studied the headings. “Frankly, I’m surprised the SU warships and Rebel moons aren’t trading missiles or laser fire.”
“Do you know why not?”
“It must have something to do with this being a three-way situation. It’s not just the Rebels verses Social Unity. The Highborn change everything. Why fight if you don’t have to?”
“You said before that the Highborn helped the Rebels.”
“They did,” Marten said, “but that doesn’t make them friends.”
“It should make them allies.”
“Temporary allies,” Marten said. “The Rebels aren’t fools, and they probably have long memories. The Highborn crushed the Martian Rebels and the Jupiter Confederation Fleet back in 2339.”
“Maybe if we’re lucky, we can slip in and slip out before the shooting starts.”
Marten grinned. “Now you’re talking.” He pushed out of the pilot’s chair.
“Where are you headed?”
“All this thinking is making me edgy. I’m going to do some rowing. See you in an hour.”
Omi nodded and then continued to stare out of the heavily polarized window.
-6-
The cyborg battle pods traveled silently through the stellar void. Each pod had begun its journey almost a year ago at the Neptune System. Neptune was 30 times the distance from the Sun as Earth or about 4,486,100,000 kilometers away. It took sunlight traveling 300,000 kilometers per second four hours and fifteen minutes to reach Neptune.
The pods had long ago accelerated and now decelerated much harder than anything a human could have survived. Each was an ultra-stealth pod, with a ceramic hull that gave the lowest sensor signature of any vessel in human space. Each pod was also crammed with the latest Onoshi ECM equipment and decoys.
All the pods were as black as night and spherical. Within all the pods but one lay a cyborg platoon in cryogenic stillness. The cyborg known as OD12 was in pod B3.
The designation OD12 referred to her lost humanity and machine code number. OD had once been Osadar Di, the female pilot with the perennial bad luck of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As the battle pods decelerated, an electrical impulse surged through OD12’s frozen body. At the same time, cryogenic heaters began the painful defrosting of the cyborg cargo.
OD12 awakened, but her mental facilities were kept offline. Instead, she was hooked into the Web-Mind. There, Osadar Di practiced a hundred combat evolutions. It was similar to a human playing intense hologames while wearing a virtual imaging suit. The difference was that her reflexes gained one hundred percent conditioning as if she physically participated in each action. These Web-Mind combat drops, bunker assaults, storm attacks and sniper targeting took place at an accelerated rate. She thus gained ‘years’ of practice.
There was a glitch, however, in six out of every one hundred simulations. The Web-Mind noted this malfunction in OD12. Accepted anomalies were one tenth of a percent, not six percent. Because of the extreme distance to the Master Web-Mind in the Neptune System, the Web-Mind in Toll Seven’s command pod initiated a phase two diagnostic.
In the simulator, OD12 bounded across a moon in the Saturn System. She wore a vacuum suit churning at full heat. She knelt in frozen ammonia, lifted her laser carbine and hesitated instead of firing the two-kilometer distance to pick off the retreating battleoids. OD12 glanced around her and then scooped a handful of the orange ammonia in her gloved hand.
The diagnostic program froze the image. Then it confronted OD12’s personality.
“The expanse of orange snow struck me as beautiful. I had to feel it.”
“The sight filled me with longing, with pleasant memories.”
“…I’d rather not.”
Something in OD12 clicked into life. It was the computer inserted into her and connected with her brain.
In battle pod B3, OD12’s online cyborg body jerked as she opened her mouth and screamed metallically.
A Web-Mind code caused the pain to cease and OD12’s body was taken offline with the others.
“…why did you do that?”
In a nanosecond, the Web-Mind ran through a possibility of options, the primary of which was to delete OD12. It decided on option two instead, as the supply of cyborgs for this campaign was limited.
The Web-Mind resumed running OD12’s combat simulations until it came to another anomaly. This time, OD12 used a thruster pack as white particles of hydrogen spray propelled her toward a slowly rotating torus. Behind her followed the rest of the cyborgs in vacuum suits. They assaulted a Jupiter Confederation Habitat, with the vast gas giant beyond the torus.
OD12 twisted her head and looked back at the other suited cyborgs. Each used white particles of hydrogen spray. Each had breach bombs and rocket carbines. Each fixated on its targeted landing location. The only cyborg body movement was the occasional twitch of their fingers as they adjusted their flight paths to perfection. Only OD12 looked back. Only she saw the awesome spectacle of individual cyborgs ‘jetting’ through cold space to the human habitat.
The Web-Mind froze the scene. It caused OD12’s dark visor to turn clear. Within the helmet, the solid black, metallic-seeming eyes stared with infinite sadness as tears streamed down the plastic cheeks.
OD12 answered with a blunt profanity.
This time, the Web-Mind issued level seven pain sensations.
OD12 thrashed in the eerily dark battle pod. Beside her lay the perfectly motionless cyborgs, each mentally engaged in combat simulations. None of the other cyborgs had experienced more than one tenth of one percent anomalies.
“…I remembered how we tried to escape the alien.”
The answered confused the Web-Mind for two seconds. Then it understood OD12 meant Toll Seven.
“We wanted to live.”
