Benny saw two plain-clothes policemen and a drone standing over the dead body of a woman. The front of her face had been smashed in with enough force to drive her jawbone through her neck. Benny was surprised; she'd expected the casualties to have been removed by now. Then the body flickered slightly and derezzed. It was only a crime-scene hologram, the detectives must have been using it to take ...
The pain was intense enough to blind her. She staggered and sensed movement towards her, attention turning in her direction, sympathy, concern, questions, paramedics, questions, just sit down here while I fetch someone who wants to ask you some questions.
She managed to pull herself upright by an act of will and walk on. The movement towards her stopped. The pain subsided to a dull throbbing over her left eye. Sight returned.
There were more police and emergency service teams working in clusters. The path of Zamina's flight across the concourse was marked by strings of black and yellow police tape. As she followed them she saw the burnt out shell of a police-drone smothered in foam. Beneath it the ersatz marble flooring had cracked and melted.
Zamina, thought Benny. Should have converted her when I had the chance, but the Doctor would have spotted it.
'These escalators are closed,' said a STS guard.
Benny peered over his shoulder. The escalators were frozen in place. More police and drones were working along them.
'I have to get to Olympus Mons,' she told the guard.
'You'll have to take the East Olympus Loop from Carver,' said the guard. 'Are you all right?'
'Sorry?'
'You're limping.'
'It's just a sprain,' said Benny. 'High G handball.'
'Carver station is just over there,' said the guard. 'Be careful with that ankle.'
Thanks,' said Benny.
She walked in the direction the guard had indicated, trying to stop her right leg from dragging. There was a washroom on the way and she ducked inside. She stared hard at her face in the mirrored wall above the washbasins. The right side of her face seemed slack looking. When she probed it with her fingertips it felt normal enough, the right eyelid drooping slightly. She carefully lifted the eyelid. The eye looked normal enough apart from the whites being a bit bloodshot.
Her nose was still painful to touch.
She opened the tap and splashed cold water on her face, blinking and widening her eyes until the drooping stopped. She took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. Trying to clear her mind with a mantra she'd picked up while digging on Proxima IV.
She didn't have time for distractions. She had a schedule to keep, people to see, power subsystems to sabotage.
Jacksonville
The computer that handled emergency services in the Olympus Mons administrative district was feeding contradictory reports into the Martian Police subsystem. Operators in the Olympus Mons West human response centre were jabbing HOSTILE ACTION icons as soon as they appeared on their screens Sixty-five per cent of responses indicated criminal activity, thirty-one per cent terrorism but four per cent were marked 'UNKNOWN'. Out on the concourse at Olympus Mons West a medical-drone ran a deep scan on a body and found significant variations from the human norm. As empirical sensor data the drone's report was given a weighted three per cent addition to the unknown total, pushing it past its five per cent response threshold.
Crossing the threshold activated a subroutine within the civil operating system that had lain dormant for twenty-five years In an EMP-shielded bunker under the military cantonment at Jacksonville a stand-alone mainframe with the code designation of JERUSALEM powered up. Acting on the long-forgotten assumption that the Martians had left 'stay behind' units in cryogenic storage, JERUSALEM put Jacksonville on a stage one alert.
JERUSALEM activated its surveillance net, calling in data from the chain of military satellites that should have been strung out in gee-stationary orbits. The satellites had long ago been decommissioned or switched over to the civil net. JERUSALEM, programmed by people who had just fought a long and bloody war, attributed the loss of the satellites to enemy action.
The alert was jacked up to stage two, with the possibility of a trans-orbital threat.
JERUSALEM had better luck with the static radar at the summit of Olympus Mons. It spotted a fast-moving trace from the south east, altitude five hundred metres. The target's transponder signal was absent from the IFF registry.
JERUSALEM cycled through its weapons options and found that all its ground-based energy weapons and close defence ordinance was disabled. There were surface-to-air missile sites still operational, an unfamiliar specification, but the front end instructions interfaced adequately with the computer's command structure. JERUSALEM assimilated the missile's operational envelope as it switched from assessment to response mode.
Target resolution gave JERUSALEM a window of attack of two seconds in ten seconds' time. JERUSALEM judged this too fast for human response and since Jacksonville was a possible target, it overrode the failsafe and cut the humans from the loop.
At the optimal moment within the window of opportunity JERUSALEM launched one battery of Vulture Surface to Air missiles at the fast moving inbound target.
The three missiles were in their sustainer stage before anyone at Jacksonville could re-engage the failsafe.
Tharsis Bulge
Francine's reflexes cut in before her conscious mind had registered the launch warning from the jet's look down threat radar. Pilot reflexes turned the jet and snapped the head round for an eyeball confirmation of the launch before the brain could remember it was blind.
Francine shut down the transponder, the radar, even the laser altimeter. Modem missiles could home in on any kind of emitter. She would have to rely on her passive sensors.
Without active radar and without sight, Francine became truly dependent on the augmented spatial awareness of her mind, encoded into wafer-thin silicon that was interlaced with her neurones was a complex topographical map of Mars, accurate down to one hundred metres. Her own inner ear provided the data for inertial guidance, backed up by direct feeds from the jet's avionics.
But the system wasn't perfect, it was based on a virtual representation of the real world and in any conflict, the real world always won.
Prancine was truly flying blind this time.
Passive sensors picked up the incoming bogeys by their active radar emissions. They were out of the sustainment stage and levelling off at two thousand metres. They deployed into a co-ordinated attack pattern that indicated a high intelligence interaction between the missiles.
Vultures for sure, thought Francine.
Francine in pre-flight training, fifteen and hot to rock. A room full of teenaged cadets with drug-retarded, pre-pubescent bodies, child faces and shaven heads. Gymnasts' bodies, with optimum G tolerance and vat-grown eyes.
'Human thoughts are not pictures,' said the instructor. 'There is no central Cartesian Theatre where they are displayed before the conscious mind.'
The law said that they had to be told, but the cadets weren't listening. Instead their augmented eyes were filled with silver shapes leaving contrails in the high stratosphere. Up there where the sunlight is white and pure.
'Instead the mind operates like an old-fashioned transputer, making editing decisions in parallel. We will teach you to make use of this facility.'
The air force divided up their brains with lacy wafers of silicon and hypoallergenic crystal. Taught them to fly from the inside out and let them play with the most expensive toys in human history.
In one of the separated sections of Francine's mind the thoughts coalesced into what would be an image of the Vultures in flight, if thoughts were pictures.
Two stubby cylinders with recessed pods for manoeuvring thrusters. In the tenuous atmosphere over the Martian highlands, control surfaces are useless. Their noses studded with both active and passive sensors. In their ballistic stage, now at two kilometres a second, describing an arc while the smart silicon in the nose calculated an i
ntercept.
Francine broke radio silence to warn her wingman. 'Flash, two hot ones, on ballistic and intercept.'
'Copy Angel,' answered Flash, 'I see them.'
Flash Harry in the second Honda Peacemaker, flying 'loose deuce', five hundred metres and thirty years behind her.
Francine must have taken hits because the Peacemaker was handling heavy and slow. More like a commercial jet than a fighter. Her weapon options showed zero ordinance, zero flares and chaff. Must have been a tough mission. Not remembering was frightening. You couldn't afford a lapse, not with the Greenies punching the air with pop-ups all down the canyon.
A curtain of darkness lifted and she could see the mountain, the big shield volcano rising sharply out of the Tharsis Bulge. Jacksonville a cluster of lights halfway up the south east slope.
Jesus Freak would be waiting there, a one-litre pitcher of non-alcoholic lager spiked with two milligrams of phencyclidine to give it kick. It would be sitting on the bar of the Ice Maiden, condensation forming on the cold glass. Dozy Joe behind the bar with the bottles of stolen vodka and the solid holograms of the KIA.
Francine pulled the nose up until her forward view was filled with the violet sky. There amongst the bright stars she saw sunlight glint on two small fast-moving objects. No chaff, no flares and no ECM gave her only one option. A forward quarter evasion.
Chicken at two klicks per second.
There would be one right moment to evade. Too early and the missiles had time to correct their course, too late and they went off in your face. There was no machine for this, no clever bit of hardware that could do the calculation for you. Head to head with a SAM was a hindbrain thing. You either had it or you were toast.
The Angel had it.
She fired the VTOL thrusters and the jet did a seven-G backflip. The missiles streaked past, hobbled by their own momentum.
Now the canopy was filled with the Martian landscape as Francine dived for the cluttered radar shadow of the ground. There was a strange silver sheen to the surface, as if it was lit by reflected light from an impossible moon. Francine wondered if this was a bleedover from some weird kind of Greenie ECM.
The sensors picked up heat signatures indicating a main engine bum by the two missiles as they fought to regain lost altitude. Francine was betting that they'd loop over before making another attack run.
She cut the turbines to make an IR lock just that little bit harder and used the gyros to lift the nose again. The jet picked up some chop falling tail first like that, even in the thin atmosphere. She sure hoped the missiles were using pattern recognition; if they were this should confuse the hell out of them.
They were coming round again, locked on to the jet and screaming down at full bum. Francine was aiming for as close to a right angle to the surface as possible.
It became another race, this one to see which hit her first, the missiles or the ground. Francine retired the turbines and put them on idle.
At two hundred metres altitude Francine redlined the turbines, pushing them all the way past safety. The world came down on top of her as the jet decelerated. The missiles screamed past, heading straight down. There were two brief splashes of light on the rear-facing look-down imager.
Smart weapons, thought Francine. Just another military oxymoron.
'Angel - break left.' Flash Harry yelling in her earphones.
Without thinking Francine threw the jet over. Sneak missile, a third Vulture running quiet, relying on the telemetry from the other two missiles. Making a leisurely loop to fly right up her tailpipe.
The radar-proximity fuse mounted in the missile's nose behind the avionics saw the jet in its kill radius and fired. A shaped charge of flaked Brazilian TNT exploded. Thirty-three marble-sized bomblets were blasted forward in an expanding cone.
The aft quarter thermal imager on the jet flared out with the explosion. Francine felt the airframe shudder as three of the bomblets ripped through its carbon-fibre skin. The starboard turbine rev rate shot up as fragments of its shattered blades spewed out the exhaust outlet. Francine shut it down with a mental impulse while another part of her mind assessed damage to the fuel tanks and tailplane servos.
Without the starboard engine Francine was looking at a glide landing in a near vacuum. She put the nose at twenty degrees above level and expanded the stubby wings to maximum. Trying to use the wedge-shaped airframe as a single aerofoil. She made a slow bank until the Jacksonville beacon was dead ahead. Easily enough altitude to get there and plenty of time to figure out what she was going to do when she did.
Francine keyed her radio. 'Hey Flash, thanks for the warning.'
Static answered her.
'Flash - this is Angel. Do you copy?'
Nothing. And Francine realized then that Flash Harry was gone, become just another pair of hologram eyes peering out between the bottles of PX beer and moonshine gin.
She got a visual fix on the Jacksonville beacon and corrected her glide path by two degrees.
Olympus Mons lay ahead, silver in the unreal moonlight.
STS Central - Olympus Mons
Ming had Dogface on one of the repeater screens in her office and two Yak Harrises on another. The big holograms above the control pit were showing a lot of weird activity at the far end of the Central Line.
To make things just that little bit more difficult, a drone had cleaned up the office and now she couldn't find anything. Especially the packet of Zap she kept stashed under the throw rug, in case of emergencies.
A third repeater screen was taking telemetry data from Jacksonville Base.
The two Yak Harrises were completely still as the subset personalities ran off on an 'errand'. Dogface didn't look good, his face was pale and strained. Ming reckoned that he couldn't override the medical computer for much longer without doing himself irreparable damage.
Ming never had understood the floozies. Without the engine of ambition they clung to a working-class ethic that had been out of fashion for centuries. Still, it was his funeral.
A fourth repeater screen was taking a security feed from Olympus Mons West. A police drone's fisheyed view of the clean-up operation, images selected according to machine priorities.
'What about the girl?' asked Dogface.
'She's on her way up,' said Ming. 'With an escort.'
'I heard she greased two of those creatures.'
'And half a train,' said Ming. 'Blondie's got a couple of drones trying to reopen the line.'
"And Francine?'
'Still approaching Jacksonville.'
'What are they saying?'
'That in about ten minutes the V Soc's going to be looking for a new godmother.'
'The Doctor, Kadiatu?'
'On board the jet as well,' said Ming.
'Francine's a good pilot ...'
'Forget it. Dogface,' said Ming. 'Jacksonville says she's coming down on manual with no exterior sensors and half a turbine. If she could see, maybe. Blind, no chance.'
Olympus Mons
The forward monitor was covered in static. The Doctor's faceplate had snapped down automatically as soon as the cabin filled with smoke. The HUD projected on the inside informed him that the surrounding atmosphere was almost pure halogen. He presumed it was a fire-suppression measure. That or the humans were getting creative with their materials technology again.
He risked a cautious glance over at Kadiatu. Turning his head could be fatal if Francine pulled another twelve-G turn. It was difficult to tell if she was all right with the faceplate down but the status lights on the suit were unchanged. She was lying still in the embrace of the ejection seat, possibly unconscious.
The Doctor settled his head back on to the headrest and tried to feel what was going on. That they'd been involved in a dogfight was obvious from the violent manoeuvres; that they'd been hit was also self-evident. Francine had remained ominously silent since the combat began and the Doctor didn't want to distract her.
Do not talk to driver while bus is movi
ng, thought the Doctor. Sound advice.
The smoke was clearing from the cabin. Judging from the subsonic vibrations he could feel through the headrest, they were missing an engine.
This cabin has a bad attitude, thought the Doctor. About twenty degrees nose up and we're descending. Definitely a glide landing.
'If I should die,' said the Doctor, 'think only this of me, that there is a corner of a foreign field that is forever Gallifrey.'
He calculated the probable impact velocity.
'All right then,' he said, 'a very large corner of a foreign field.'
To take his mind off the danger the Doctor started a mental list of the hardware he'd caused to be destroyed since he arrived. He used a weighted points system, since he was unsure of the exact monetary value. He wondered whether to include the wrecked dustkart. Normally companions only contributed half scores, but did the ersatz Bernice count?
He hummed something appropriate and calculated what he'd get for a really spectacular plane crash. He always gave himself bonus points for those.
'What's that noise?' asked Kadiatu.
'Edith Piaf,' said the Doctor. 'Born on a doorstep and sang the blues.'
'I'd sing the blues,' said Kadiatu, 'if I'd been born on a doorstep. What's the song about?'
'Regret.'
'What did she regret?'
'Absolutely nothing,' said the Doctor.
They hit the ground.
The crash unfolded with agonizing slowness, he could have done without that. They were slammed forward in the harness and the cabin slammed flat. There was the sharp rending sound that a sheet of carbon fibre makes when you rip it in half. There was a moment of weightlessness as the jet bounced and then went back to the serious business of tearing itself apart. Rents appeared in the cabin's port wall. Through the hole the Doctor watched in astonishment as sheets of spray rushed past. Torque forces shoved him sideways as the jet slewed to the right. The final impact with the crash barrier was almost gentle.