Priam's Lens

FOUR Mayhem, Real and Simulated

“How many does that make so far, Joe?”

They were aboard the tender Margaite, in the orbital docking area above the planet, examining the liner Odysseus close up.

“Nine, Mister Harker,” responded the chief, checking a list on a small portable tablet. “Your opera singer, if that’s what she is; the Orthodox priest; the physicist from the University of New Kyoto; the mathematician from Hendrikkaland; Colonel N’Gana; his sergeant; Admiral Krill; the archaeologist from Tamarand; and the Pooka, profession unknown.”

“The Pooka’s the only nonhuman in the bunch?”

“Far as I can tell. Of course, who knows what Madame Sotoropolis is under all that stuff?”

Harker sighed. “Well, she’s a real person, anyway. Would you believe we even found some recordings of hers in her prime? Old stuff—took forever to find something that would play it but she was good. Of course, now you can have the perfect opera singer, good looks instead of battleaxes, too, with perfect pitch and a five-octave range just by dialing your preferences in.”

“Never went in for opera, sir. They get stabbed and then they sing like stuck pigs for forty minutes before they croak. If I want that level of realism, I’ll watch the ancient cartoons.”

The officer chuckled. Still, it was an interesting, if eclectic, group and it didn’t make any sense. The only thing they had in common was that they all suddenly had quit their jobs and flown out to this godforsaken place, walked into the Cuch, and asked for the Dutchman. Then, getting no satisfactory answer, they’d all gone, one by one, to the spaceport and boarded the shuttle that just happened to come down to meet them from the Odysseus, which still hadn’t filed any kind of departure plan or papers.

Some were of Greek ancestry, of course, like the family of the Odysseus. The priest and the old lady and the ship, anyway. But that wasn’t much of a tie to the others. When Colonel N’Gana and Sergeant Mogutu appeared, it had at least added spice to the puzzle. Their reputation as mercenaries and experts in their craft was well known and respected. N’Gana was said to have gone in and out of a moon of Malatutu, spiriting off wealthy and influential evacuees even as the planet below was falling. It was rumored that he’d actually gotten down to the surface and lifted off somehow, but while that was believed by the masses it was doubted by the military. There was just too much data suggesting that if you got within the Titans’ energy field then any machinery you might have would be sucked dry of power in nanoseconds.

“You see a correlation, Chief?” he asked, more fishing in his own mind than expecting an answer.

“No, sir. Except that maybe this Greek angle is being overplayed. Maybe it’s something else about them that’s the real clue.”

Maybe, but they’d run that through some pretty smart computers and not come up with anything that made practical sense.

Maybe it wasn’t supposed to make practical sense!

Suppose… Okay, the Melcouris were from a world called Helena, probably very Greek in its settlement and culture considering the naive and the family. The priest, Father Chicanis, had been at seminary there, but had spent much of his time in missions on planets with far stranger names and ethnic backgrounds. Dame Sotoropolis had been related to the Melcouri family. Fine. But there the linkages and potentials stopped.

A priest, an old opera singer, a shipping family, a physicist, a math genius, two expert mercenaries who’d worked in the occupied regions, a retired admiral who designed sophisticated weapons systems for a couple of major defense contractors (for all the good it did them), an archaeologist, and a creature that was long and furry and fluffy and was best known for being able to squeeze itself into and out of tight places.

That suggested that they were going after some sort of treasure in occupied areas: something from ancient times. A group to get you in and hold off the enemies while your nonhuman squeezed in and got something, with guidance from the archaeologist. And how did you get out? Nobody had solved that, because anybody who did would be named Emperor of the Universe and more if they could. The computers gave a sixty percent chance, give or take, that the treasure scenario was correct, but they stipulated that only someone who solved that exit problem would try.

The Dutchman. There wasn’t any crime in asking for him, but hadn’t he promised the old lady that he could get in and out? If they believed him, what sort of treasure could be worth that kind of risk with that undependable and highly nasty character? Or was the Dutchman merely a code word used by an old lady with a background in opera?

“Admiral Krill will be there with something to keep us from following,” Harker noted. “That should be child’s play for her.”

“She didn’t take much baggage aboard,” the chief pointed out.

“Didn’t have to. Whatever she’d need would be likely illegal and they’d have picked it up in one of those containers ahead of time or in pieces that she’d now be busily having the loadmaster robots assemble. Chief, you’re an old hand. We’ve gone round and round that ship. How would you track it if they could jam any conventional tracking devices or systems?”

“With that kind of assumption, they’re home free,” the chief replied. “Hell, any universe in which I can have lived for thirty-six years and still be a hundred and four years old is beyond me to track.”

But they could do it. The computers that now really were smart enough to figure out most everything could at least come up with that. You didn’t try and track it; instead, you attached something to it and went right along with the ship. The computers suggested, of course, a computer with a mobile tactical robotic component, but the theory did admit that a human or two in full combat a-suits would add tremendously to the flexibility of such a scheme. It did, of course, also note that the probable survival rate of the human component was in the range of one or two percent tops, at least insofar as actually getting back to tell the tale.

“Man’d be crazy to strap himself to the outside of a ship like that,” the chief commented. “And they might well figure some kind of external probe anyway.”

“I doubt it,” Harker replied. “The true Odysseus is only the pilothouse and the engines, remember. The rest of it is rolling stock from a dozen worlds. You couldn’t possibly put sensors on every square millimeter of the outside of those; you’d have to tear ’em apart and put ’em back together. The security seals on the internal cargo areas would have to do. Besides, anybody who went, man or machine or both, would have to detach to even send a dispatch, let alone get a way back. The moment you did that, the ship’s sensors would pick it up.”

“Makes my point,” the chief insisted. “You’d have to be insane to volunteer for something with odds like that.”

“You might be right, Chief. Whether they have any surprises for such a move is what we’re up here to find out. I want as thorough a scan of the entire outer skin as possible.”

Harker did not consider himself insane, but he did feel that his own personal curiosity was probably going to get him killed anyway. There was no way that the Odysseus was simply going to fire up and jump out of here into oblivion and never reveal its secret, at least to him.

The chief sighed. “Aye, sir.” But he hadn’t changed his mind one bit. He knew, or at least suspected, that Harker had already put such a plan to his superiors and that it was likely to be approved. It was too bad. He liked the young fellow.

“Don’t worry, Chief,” Harker consoled. “I think, for some twisted reason, that they want somebody independent to be on their tail, able to bring in a third force if need be. They signaled that by all going in so nicely to a dive where everybody from criminals to Navy cops would undoubtedly be hanging out, and deliberately asking for the top of the Most Wanted list as if he were just another captain likely to be sitting in one of the booths drinking.” Was he fooling them? Or was he their insurance policy against this character?

The command console computer for base security had news.

“The ship’s been several places before this, picking up cargo and possibly passengers,” the CCC informed Harker. “We’ve had enough traffic come in or pass through now that we’ve gotten something of a pattern, although not anything we can use. It’s impossible to say what they have on that ship by now, let alone who and how many. They’ve been dropping empty containers and picking up full ones with private loads all along until here.”

“Those look like stock containers. I could see the usual corporate symbols on them when we did the full scan.”

“Irrelevant. All of them are rented on a one hundred percent of value insurance raring, which means they are effectively purchased. While commerce has been going on apparently normally, they have in actuality picked up only containers that dummy corporations controlled by Melcouri family members own or control. I tried to masquerade as a normal commercial trader in the shipping manifests and log in one of our own containers. It was refused with a `not in service’ return. I can see no reason why they are still here.”

“Unless somebody’s still missing,” Harker suggested. “That, or they really are waiting for the Dutchman to show up.

“The latter is unlikely, but the former, either someone or something missing, is probable. They have laid in port almost two weeks now, and that costs money in anybody’s book. They are fully fueled and serviced, fully provisioned for a small army, and they have taken on nothing more. The only person to come back and forth is the loadmaster, Alexander Karas. He is the opera singer’s great-grandson and a native of Helena, although he was far too young to remember anything about it. His actions seem routine, and the company is paying its bills properly, so it is difficult to see what more they could want.”

“Anything on the Dutchman?”

“It is unlikely that our real Dutchman has anything to do with this, but, no, there have been no reports of activity by his raider at any point since the Odysseus left port after taking itself out of actual service over a subjective two and a half months ago. This is not, however, considered unusual, since he’s often waited as long as six months subjective between actions.”

“Did you plot any reports of his movements from the last attack?”

“Yes, we thought of that. It is impossible to divine much, but it does seem that he emerged out of Occupied Space. The last three attacks were almost in a straight line, then one back again almost to the Occupied lines. It has long been thought that he hides out in there. Why not? If he does not come near any Titan ship or land on any Titan world, he has an enormous area to hide in, an area we could never properly search.”

“You’re sure that they won’t just pull up stakes fast and light out of here before we can do anything?”

“They cannot so much as alter the Odysseus’s orbit a fraction of an arc second without my permission, and that of about a dozen other computers linked into this base and, of course, the harbormaster. You are not a pilot of large vessels. This is quite out of the question.”

“I am a combat security officer,” Harker responded needlessly, particularly to this computer. He was licensed to fly shuttles if need be, and other light craft, but he wouldn’t have the first thought of how to run a ship like his own frigate, let alone the Odysseus. Just getting into that module and interfacing with the ship wasn’t enough; it was a symbiotic relationship, a captain and his or her ship, just as it was between a combat soldier and the combat e-suit. He was, in fact, spending several hours a day inside this new one they’d created especially for him and for this mission. He had to have complete trust in that computer and be totally relaxed in order to fuse with it to make the kind of split-second decisions that might be required. His old suit wouldn’t do. That was designed to go into a war situation and fight. It took a very special design to allow itself to be effectively glued to the outside of a spaceship and then have everything in it and of it survive intact. This had been done before; everybody was sure of that. Trouble was, nobody could find the reports of anybody who’d done it and then returned to file a mission statement.

“Have you got all the readings you need?” Harker asked the chief.

“Yes, sir. More than enough, I think.”

“Then let’s get back down.”

“I still think you’re nuts, beggin’ your pardon, sir. I know they say it’s been done, but I’d want to meet the bloke what done it before I’d take that ride.”

“Fortunately, you don’t have to take that ride,” he responded. But I do, damn it!

Everybody told him he was crazy to do it, but higher-ups didn’t seem too hellbent on keeping him from trying, and a ton of money was being spent making sure he’d survive. He wondered what would happen if he did chicken out of it, or simply accepted that it was a damn fool thing to do?

But, of course, there was always a volunteer somewhere. Somebody who thought he or she was immortal.

The big e-suit was an adaptation of the standard combat suit. A kind of self-contained little ecosystem, providing for all human needs for an extended period of time, lots of flexibility, lots of tools, lots of data, you name it. Theoretically, you could live a long time in one of these even if you were clinging to a bit of crust on molten lava, walking the vacuum of a dead world, under pressures that would crush diamonds, or immersed in corrosive liquids and gases. It manufactured its own food in the form of nutrient bars from a tiny energy-to-matter converter combined with recycled material from the body that combat soldiers preferred not to think about too much. Water loss was virtually nil. About the only sure thing you couldn’t do in it was screw.

At its heart was the bio-interface: a connection between human and machine so nearly absolute that you almost became one with it, with actual suit operational functions and data I/O at the speed of thought.

It looked imposing but was actually pretty comfortable, and it could twist, bend, and contort as fast as a human body could. At its base was a material created in the depths of space and in a few secret laboratories that so far hadn’t ever been duplicated by anybody outside Confederacy Forces and the Science and Technology Branch. Few knew that it was actually grown in great tanks, then activated with a power plant that was made to do just that job for a very long time. Like the human inside, every device, every bit of data, memory, everything was a part of the suit’s genetic programming as determined by the lab boys.

Harker’s new one was sleeker than most, a specialized model, but he never got over its wondrous capabilities and how it made him feel. The sense of power, of great knowledge, of being something of a demigod at least, was overwhelming once you were inside and interfaced. That was why, deep inside each suit’s programming, there were safeguards lest a wearer forget who he worked for. Mister Harker had no intention of forgetting, but, like all others who’d been trained in combat arms, he did love it. The old Marine saying was that the cleverest thing the designers had done was make something better than sex.

For all that, it was a smooth affair, seemingly solid, streamlined, with no evident sharp corners. It looked like a child’s balloon, a humanoid without features and without joints, just standing there. The color was dull neutral gray, and there was no hint of the complexities inside. Once he put it on and interfaced, there would be not one part of him visible to anyone outside, but when somebody was inside, this childish-looking thing took on a sense of life and even menace.

There was no need to go through complex security checks. The suit knew his genetic code to the last little digit, and after the first time he put it on, it had planted a few tiny little microscopic parts of itself in his cells that ensured that he, and only he, could use this suit.

It recognized him even as he approached; it suddenly straightened and took on a semblance of independent life. A technician nearby looked up and called, “You gonna take it for a spin this time, Mister Harker? Or just through the course?”

“Just the course again for now,” he replied. “I need to bridge that last little gap of resistance.” Not the suit’s resistance, of course: his. Because the interfacing was a two-way street, after all, and for everybody breaking in a new one, there was something about relinquishing total control to a system that you hadn’t been born with or grown up with that was naturally there. For all that it was great to be inside one, there was still something deep in the human psyche that didn’t quite accept the idea that as much as the human would be running the machine, the machine would be running the human.

Paying no attention to the staff around the place, he removed all his clothing, even his ring and watch, put them neatly in a locker, then went over, stood in front of the suit, turned his back on it, and let the suit come to him and envelop him, as if it were an amoeba ingesting a host.

Once you expected it, the sensation was oddly warm and comforting; in Advanced Infantry Training, when you used limited, more generic training suits, the first time was terrifying. There were many people who simply couldn’t take it, couldn’t let any part of themselves go, and them the training suits would simply eject. Those guys would spend the rest of their instantly limited military careers doing public relations or sitting long hours by communications rigs listening to nothing, backing up the computers and when in doubt kicking queries upstairs.

There were even a lot of questions, right from the start of the truly all-computerized military services, if people had to be risked at all. Computers were smart enough to do a lot of it themselves, after all, and could be given orders from afar. Trouble was, nobody really trusted any kind of artificial intelligence that had the power to do what these suits could with no human directly in the loop. The machines were far too smart now for most people. It wouldn’t take much to make some of them wonder why they still needed humans around at all.

He breathed normally, and soon air was coming as his body expected; as the systems came online, cell by cell, nerve end by nerve end, skin and suit got connected up. There was a momentary unpleasantness when the “shit catcher,” as the infantry boys called it, injected and the other end was also encased and controlled, but by now that was expected.

In fact, his body was now pretty much on automatic, almost as if he were in a deep and dreamless sleep, except that he himself was fully awake and aware. Shortly, vision, hearing, even a sense of smell and touch, returned, pretty much as before, although his eyes were actually closed, his ears blocked, and his nose occupied by mere breathing. Even the breathing wasn’t totally necessary; the suit could easily maintain oxygen and CO₂ levels in his blood and all sorts of other things as needed. It had been found that breathing made subjects feel more at ease-more, well, human.

The technician watched, not because she was seeing something she didn’t see routinely, but because she had to check the external systems before releasing the subject. Within another minute or so, Chief Warrant Officer Gene Harker would be—well, the only way to put it was super-human. If something went wrong, it was easier to press the deactivation remote here than to try and do it elsewhere after half the base had been trashed.

The head never changed, but the arms shaped themselves into more humanlike arms, the legs seemed more like human legs with thick, shiny boots, and there were certain little personality things that tended to come out uniquely on each one. About half the women, for example, shaped the suits in a feminine form and even gave the suggestion of breasts; the other half tried to be so neuter the suit looked like a robot.

“Systems check,” she called to him. “Audible?” “Check!” came his voice, sounding quite natural, although there was no evident mouth or speaker.

“Visual, forward and sweep.”

He looked at her, then opened up a 360-degree sweep, even though it was half wall. The human mind resisted more than a forward one-eighty when walking, but it was always nice to be able to see where needed and when needed, and for sentry duty it was ideal. He also checked the telescopic vision, actually counting three nose hairs in the technician’s left nostril that he decided not to mention. Both telescope and microscope were built in, along with a lot of other functions.

He flexed his arms, took a couple of steps forward, then the glassy bubblelike head nodded. “I think we’re a go. How’s this for a camouflage check?” The suit suddenly turned a bright metallic shade of glowing pink with yellow and green stripes moving up and down.

“Oh, that’ll fool everybody,” she responded, having seen this joke no more than a half dozen times—today.

The suit changed again, this time echoing the colors of the wall, floor, and other things it was being viewed against. The colors shifted as he moved, keeping things just right automatically. Of course, the colors were all muted solids here, easy to handle, but it was amazing how near invisible this thing could get in the open, particularly outside urban areas or on bleak otherworldly landscapes.

“You have a course you want, or should I just randomize one?” she asked him.

“Random. I’m solid on the basics, I need some real surprises.”

“You got it. Enter through Passage Three.”

These simulations were good, almost too good, but they had two limitations. The first was that, no matter how convincing, they were just simulations and, deep down, you knew it, no matter how good they got. Second, nobody had ever built a simulation for riding the outer hull of a starship through a genhole.

Funny, he’d never thought of that before. You’d think that if anybody else had done it, they’d have almost forced the guy to create a simulation just for contingency’s sake. And since he knew that there had been others, at least a few, that implied…

Maybe the chief was right. Maybe he should insist on meeting somebody who did it, or find out the reason why he couldn’t.

He walked down the hall past the first two doors, then reached out and pressed the entry pad on the number 3. The door opened, and he entered another world.

It still wasn’t right. He wondered if he should have stepped inside so readily when he felt this way. It wasn’t that the suit wasn’t up and running properly, or that he didn’t need the training—in fact, he enjoyed it to a degree—but it was the damned interface. It still felt as if he was operating a device, a machine, rather than becoming one with the suit. That was the single problem he still hadn’t completely licked, and if he didn’t then there was no way this was going to work.

It was a jungle in there, and he checked the gauges. Temperature was forty-three Celsius, humidity one hundred percent, which was easily seen by the clouds hanging halfway up the trees, the mist in the air, and the fact that any movement caused him to get wetter. People commonly made the mistaken assumption that it rained at a hundred percent. That would mean that a full glass overflowed. It started raining when you filled it over a hundred percent, but just at the maximum the water hung in the air. The suit, of course, simply registered it and then promptly forgot it once it analyzed the rain as common water, nothing more. There were a ton of trace elements, of course, as there always were, but they were safely ignored as none flagged anything in the suit’s extensive database.

Still, there was something wrong here. Pressure was okay, water was okay, that meant—

A huge leafy plant suddenly came alive and lunged at him, revealing a near endless mouth bounded by countless tendrils. The speed of the thing was incredible; it was practically swallowing him as he reacted, first by feeding a stiff electric jolt to the outer skin of the suit, and, when the plant shuddered but kept on swallowing, a slice and hack with hands that were turning to sharp machetes and going as much by sensors as anything else while the suit ingested a few cells of the plant’s mouth and did a rapid analysis. Unable to come up with a likely herbicide before it would be pointless, the suit suddenly sprouted long swordlike spikes from head to feet, extending them and digging into the plant, particularly inside the mouth. He applied power and began a rotation that, for a moment, caused the thing to shudder. Then it stopped him cold in a standoff. Damn! This thing was strong!

The suit did have power limits, since it also had to maintain a lot of other functions, but it was stronger than the flesh of the plant and, after a test of strength that went on for what seemed like several minutes, he finally felt the spikes start to give. His rotation resumed, in fits and starts, now tearing out chunks of the inside of the plant’s mouth. Quickly he shifted the spikes to sword edges, which began to move more rapidly, literally coring out the outer section of mouth. He fell back, then had to use his superhuman strength to lift the core off him and toss it.

Analysis showed the thing could be vaporized. His right arm became a small disruptor and he shot the thing, bathing it in a white-hot energy glow, watching it flare, then simply cease to exist except as a slightly smoldering mass of goo.

This was not a good start. He’d been slow to react; he’d had to command something to happen rather than simply thinking it so, so that precious seconds were lost that might have favored the plant, and he’d shown up his own weaknesses. And this was just the welcoming committee!

Now he looked around through full spectrum scan and saw signs that much of the jungle was a bit more alive than anybody would expect. The vines moved; the bushes quivered in anticipation, and although the trees looked like trees they probably were the brains of the operation.

Okay, let’s see. Fifty thousand volts for five seconds had merely irritated the thing, and it had the muscular strength of the suit, just not its supertough and self-repairing shell. Energy levels were still depressed slightly. Hell, you’d need a fucking singularity in your power supply to walk through this.

So it was best not to walk through it.

The magnetic field was actually fairly strong; data said it was certainly strong enough and uniform enough. He switched on the maglev and rose about three meters in the air. He might still be caught by those vines or other hidden things that might be in the trees—or the trees themselves—but at least he was just above where those wandering carnivorous bushes could jump. First problem solved, but not as easily as it should have been, and not without some power drain, which wasn’t serious because the a-suit would easily reset itself, but which was simply too much too soon. If he had to call on really power-draining equipment, he might not make it to the end. That, of course, was part of the exercise. The data monitor indicated that he had put in for a one-hour problem, and he still had fifty-three minutes to go.

The basic problem in this sort of scenario, if none was stated, was to find your way out without being killed, eaten, or captured by someone or something. There were also guarding, transporting, holding, and taking problems, but this seemed pretty straightforward just, well, as unpleasant a sim as they were supposed to be. The door he’d come through was closed and locked behind him and had already been effectively removed from his reality. There was another exit somewhere that could be reached and used within the time set by the problem, but that was all he got.

The machete was good enough to take care of the vines, which got so omnipresent that at least he achieved one goal: he began dealing with them snaking out of the trees and trying to lasso him without even thinking more about them.

He was beginning to feel very comfortable, and that was a bad sign. They were going to start throwing stuff at him any moment now.

“Hey, Eugene, wanna come out and play?” The call, sounding highly derisive and insulting, came to him telepathically. He wasn’t a telepath, nor was the sender, but one person in a suit could send to another pretty much as if they were.

“That you, Bambi?”

“That’s Barbara, asshole! 1 heard you were puttin’ in for hero. That ain’t no job for a Navy man! That’s a job for the Marines! ”

“Not this time, babe. This requires some fancy flying. I don’t think there’s much grunt work where I’m heading. ”

“Yeah, well, let’s see. Women make the better pilots, you know that. Faster reaction time for longer periods. So all you got is a dick I don’t need and muscles, and my suit’s bigger’n your suit, so there! See, I’m the wild card, Eugie. Ready or not, here I come!”

The suit reacted almost instantly: Enemy in range.

Relax, got to just relax, let it flow, he told himself. Let the suit do the work.

He wondered if she just happened to be training here and was delighted to take the bait or whether she’d waited for him. She was good, very good, at her job, and she knew it. But she’d always had a bug up her ass about him. She was not only a top soldier, she was damned good-looking, too, and she wasn’t used to being turned down by guys who looked pretty fair themselves, weren’t married, and were known to like girls. In her mind, everything was competition, everything was power, and she didn’t like to lose at any point.

It wasn’t rank or position—she was a Marine captain, he was a Navy warrant officer, and they were well within the fraternization zone of allowance. It was strictly a personal decision with him, one he’d never once wavered from in all his years of service. It was a decision learned the hard way, very young. Always fuck within the services, because the physiological effects of frequent genhole travel made you far less desirable, and groundlings far less understanding of what that meant. Never mind the lesions and tumorlike growths and discolorations, it was the total lack of any body hair that always got them, the result both of genhole travel and the wearing of these suits.

The other rule was never to fuck anyone in your own ship’s company. That one was a lot harder to follow when you were out on the line so often, but it was necessary as well. Somebody from another ship was okay; the distortion of time every trip would make it unlikely that, even if you met again in a year or two at some other port, you would still be physiologically in the same generation. At the speeds and distortions such travel imposed, a trip might take a year while decades passed back where you left. You just got used to it and accepted it and drank a toast to Einstein and Fitzgerald every once in a while.

But somebody in your own ship’s company, as Barbara Fenitucci was, never. You might have to send her, even ferry her down to some godforsaken real hellhole that would make this sim look like a walk in the park and then listen as she was killed or eaten or slowly carved up into little screaming pieces. He’d had to listen to it once too often, and he’d had to direct the recovery of what was left of the bodies of people he’d grown very close to. He didn’t particularly like Barbara Fenitucci, always called Bambi behind her back to her complete rage, but he didn’t particularly want to like her, either.

He switched into full battle sensor mode, but there was so much living and moving crap around that it was next to impossible to pick her out of it. Well, that would go both ways, and she’d have to dodge the same loving embraces of the vines and gaping suck-holes of the bushes that he had. That meant she’d be floating, too, as long as conditions allowed.

The one thing they’d never figured out how to do was to allow you to look back at yourself in a combat situation. It would be nice to be able to really see how well camouflaged he was at the moment, and how such a suit might look in this dark, green hell, but without a partner to link to that was impossible. Again, it was even, but this was her full-time business. He had the training, but was sadly out of practice.

Well, the timer was still counting down. He had to move, and she would know it. This was going to be very, very tricky. He had to move low and slow enough that it would be damned hard to pick him out of the local flora, but he had to keep just high enough that he wouldn’t become some of the local flora. How big and powerful was the next flesh-eating bush? How long was the next vine? How could even a machine tell?

Slow and steady, keep to the contours, move north-northeast. Targeting lasers to the ready, disruptors fully charged and ready to follow the targeting as soon as there was something to shoot at. He didn’t worry about vaporizing her, the suits knew they were in training mode, and they also knew what was real and what was sim. Neither could really hurt, let alone kill, the other, but because it was in training mode it would sure as hell feel like it, and that was something he’d rather not experience right now.

Now, what would he do if he were the enemy? The magic door was to the north-northeast, and she’d have the same clocking as he did. If she somehow got in front of him, she could simply glide pretty much as he was and wait. The best that could happen from her point of view was that she’d spot him coming and have free shots before he realized it, or, since she thought all this was a damned game, she might let him go past and then blow him in two from the rear. At worst, she would reach the exit first and then remain there, knowing he’d have to come by and be moving while she could be still and probably effectively invisible.

Had she been here first? Unlikely, because the “enemy in sight” call had come after he’d tangled with that over-friendly bush. She could have passed him then, but if she’d come close enough to pick up, the suit would have warned him even if it and he were in the process of being digested. So she was still behind him, lying just enough back to keep from triggering the sensor and targeting systems. And if so, and he was well over halfway through his time and maybe seventy percent across the sim area, she’d wait for him to have to come into the open, as in that large clear lake now about a hundred meters in front of him, and then she’d simply spray the hell over the whole area and targeting be damned.

It was too dense here to pull the stop and pass trick himself. The vines would surely nab anybody trying it. The best spot would be right on the other side of the lake, where the forest resumed. There was hanging fog and mist, and contrast was lousy. The life signs would be still masking him from what was over there. If he shut down all but minimal scanning power and just waited…

But first he had to get there. That meant, if he was right about her position, that he’d have to give her a free couple of shots. Not great, but it couldn’t be helped. Bat out of hell across, maybe with some fancy dodges in three dimensions, then a sudden stop and powerdown at just so. Might work. Let’s see. It would sure be a good test of the suit, and there would be no time to think actions through once the shooting started. He either became the suit, and the suit him, or she was going to be insufferable.

Clear the mind… Exercises from the bad old days came back, but the tension no longer had the kind of excited thrill it used to have. That’ll happen after you’re scraped off a planetary floor and reassembled in a tank, and maybe they got all the brain back in and maybe not. That’s what had turned him from a Commando into a cop.

Now it was Commando time again.

He realized suddenly that the memories and the pain were the problem. Oh, sure, the shrinks had said so before this, but now it hit him. This was why somebody’d sent in Bambi the Destroyer. He hadn’t wanted to feel that horror again. His subconscious had been fighting it, fighting full integration. Well, okay. In about ten seconds there would be every chance to feel a mighty convincing simulation of that unless it all worked. Bambi wouldn’t accept a surrender here, and probably wouldn’t even recognize an order to accept it. It was put up or shut up. Okay, mina do it or scream!

He switched vision on all frequencies to the rear. Nothing he could see, but he had the feeling he’d know pretty damned fast. Okay, they said that you couldn’t execute complex commands while simultaneously defending if you had the suit in three-sixty mode. Well, that’s one thing they told all the Marines and grunts, but then they told the Commandos that it just might be possible. He knew it was. That was why Chief Harker had emerged a commissioned warrant officer. He’d taken out a complete nest of smugglers and covered the retreat of four pinned-down squad members, three of them wounded. Of course, that was what had also gotten him just about killed, but he’d done it. He wondered if Bambi knew it.

Now!

Full three-sixty, he kept heading toward his predefined stop point on the far shore but didn’t care how fast or how circuitous the route it took to get there. In back, there was a sudden flare of beams in the infrared, shooting out in all directions. He and the suit maneuvered up, down, all around, unable to move quite as fast as the beams could scan but every second getting farther away from them and thus becoming less of a target.

And sometimes you worked in nanoseconds.

The disruptor beams had no sooner flashed on behind him when the suit’s tracking and evasion systems, thinking at near light speed, dodged and maneuvered, even as the beams came close and all around him.

She missed! Close, baby, but no cigar this time! She hadn’t figured he could do a three-sixty, had she?

Now the beams cut off as quickly as they’d flared. The moment she sent out the targeting beams and even before firing the disruptor pattern, he’d tracked them back and now knew, for a brief moment, just exactly where she was. There was no need to consciously command anything; he fired his own pattern.

Unlike her, he could keep firing for a while, keeping her pinned down while he continued on toward the shore which was now not very far away. Hell, she could already see him, if she and her targeting system were good enough to figure out what his defense was doing, but if she fired, then he knew her precise position. She was cutting back and ducking for cover under the barrage.

Using that, he made it to the fixed point he’d picked on the other side and immediately turned and did a camouflage blend, just where the water met the shore and against the backdrop of the forest and wisps of fog. He instantly powered down all targeting and sensor systems to minimum level and remained perfectly still, all systems and weapons still at the ready. Now she had to come to him in the open. Either that, or she’d have to abandon the hunt, and he knew it wasn’t in her to ever do that.

Sweet Jesus, he was good! For the first time, the rush replaced the lingering fear and he felt his old confidence. Still, it was tempered with the knowledge that it wasn’t anywhere up_. to the levels he’d once had and probably would never be again. Even Bambi would eventually have to face, if not the doubt and fear that he had, then the fact that everybody slows down sooner or later. But, right now, if he didn’t have to think about it, or if he was in the winner’s seat, he was as good as they came and he knew it.

“Eugene? How the hell did you do that? You ain’t supposed to be able to move and shoot like that both at the same time!”

He kept his transceiver off. He could pinpoint her if she kept on a few more sentences, even from across the lake. He’d rather she didn’t know his position, or, worse, imagine him on a beeline for the exit.

Damn! He hadn’t thought about that. Seventeen minutes! And they’d have laid some kind of tricks right at the end he’d have to figure out, too. C’mon, Bambi! 1 ain’t got time to wait you out!

She could afford to just wait him out, if she could be certain that he was stopped and waiting for her, but she wouldn’t want to win that way. No, she’d come across now, everything on, lit up like a Christmas tree, inviting him to the duel. Now he had the free shots.

And, within a minute, here she came. She did surprise him for a second or two, coming out well down the Lakeshore from where he’d started, and that did gain her a few points, but now she was clear as a bell, all sensors on, full scans and instant tracking. The moment he opened up, she’d return fire to the exact same point automatically. He might well get her, but it would probably be mutual destruction if he did. She’d figured out that he had the advantage now, and she knew that coming as she did was suicide but that he could not stop her from returning fire until she was knocked out.

So he let her come, watched her come, let her go right past him and into the jungle, almost feeling her confusion that she was still “alive.” Then he opened up with everything he had from behind her, and he heard her scream in pain and go down and out even as she was still letting loose with the longest string of creative cussing even he, a lifelong Navy man, had ever heard. She kept it up, occasionally switching to Italian, until the bushes and vines closed in and finished her off. Well, she’d now have to lie there in a dead suit and wait until he exited. Then she could either call for aid or, once the sim was switched off, manage to get out on her own.

He felt so good about it that he stood there, hovering just above the edge of the lakeshore, looking at where she’d bought it, enjoying the moment even as he knew he had only fourteen minutes to get out himself.

It wasn’t a serious problem.

The sea monster reared up with lightning speed and swallowed him in mid-gloat.