Fallen Dragon

  "Once again, Mozark returned to his ship, and left the First Church planet to continue his voyage. He rejected the Last Church's abstract spirituality just as firmly as he rejected The City's devotion to materialism."

  Denise looked round at her little audience. They weren't quite as enthusiastic as they had been when she'd told them about the wonders to be found in The City. Hardly surprising, she chided herself; they're too young to be preached at.

  "Sometime soon," she said in a low, awed voice that immediately gained their attention, "I'll tell you about the Mordiff planet and all of its terrible tragic history."

  The Mordiff planet was another of those legends of the Ring Empire that made the children shiver with chilly delight every time she mentioned it. Thanks to the vague hints she'd dropped, it had taken on the form of a particularly aggressive hell populated by well-armed monsters. Which wasn't quite a fair description, she thought, but for using as a bogeyman threat to get the garden tidied at the end of the day it was just about peerless.

  * * *

  After work Denise took a tram up to the Newmarket District of town. A twenty-minute ride, moving slowly away from the substantial buildings clustered around the marina and docks, out into the suburbs where the roads were broad, and the shops and apartment blocks had flat unembellished fronts. Long advertisement boards hugged the street corner buildings, no longer screen sheets but simple paper posters. Side roads showed long rows of nearly identical houses, whitewashed concrete walls scabbing and crumbling in the humid salty air, small gardens overflowing with ferns and palms.

  She got off a stop from the enclosed mart she wanted, and walked. There were no tourists here, just locals. She strolled casually, taking her time to look in shop windows. The bars that were open all had tables and chairs on the pavement outside; their patrons preferred the inside where the lighting was low and the music loud. A scent of marijuana and redshift lingered around the darkened doorways, thick and sweet enough for her to imagine it spilling over the step like a tide of dry ice.

  As she approached one, a triad stumbled out into the bright sunlight, blinking and shielding their eyes while their slim wingshades unfurled from gold nosebridges. They giggled with the profound scattiness that only the truly stoned can manage. Two men in their late twenties, large, manual workers of some kind judging by their overalls, and a woman. She was in the middle, with her arms slung around both of them. Not much of a figure, not terribly pretty, either. Her tongue glistened in the sunlight as she licked one man's ear, shrieking with delight. His hand closed on her rump, squeezing hotly.

  Denise stopped abruptly and turned away. Despite the sunlight and humidity, her skin was suddenly chilly. She cursed herself, her weakness. It was just the combination that had caught her off guard. From her angle: two men dragging the woman off. Incipient sex. Laughter indistinguishable from cries.

  Idiot, she raged against herself. There was a wild impulse to slap herself hard across the cheek. Knock some sense into you, girl. Would have done it, too, if this wasn't so public.

  It was crazy that her body could be so strong, while her mind was so feeble. Not for the first time, she wondered if Raymond and Josep had asked for subtle neurochemical alterations to be incorporated into their modifications. Human psychology was highly susceptible to chemical manipulation. Could you get a drug for cool?

  The triad wobbled away around a corner, and Denise started walking again. A couple of deep breaths and squaring her shoulders tautly returned her traitor body to equilibrium.

  A curving glass roof ran the length of the mart, branching out in a cruciform shape a third of the way down from the entrance. Inside, the air was conditioned, scrubbed of moisture and dust. Open-fronted shops had speakers blaring out music and amplifying the spiel that the owners shouted without pause. At the front, the majority of shops were protein knitting; taking raw protein cells from the city's food refineries and blending them with various hydrocarbons and baseline compounds to produce textual approximations of original terrestrial food. There were greengrocers with colored globes purporting to be fruits and vegetables, butchers with burger-steak approximations of every animal from sheep to ostriches, fishmongers with glistening white slivers of flesh on crushed ice; shops with fresh pasta, new-baked bread, rice, curry, cheeses, chocolate, speciality teas and coffees. The smells were enticing as she walked past. Plenty of people loitered, haggling over portions, testing their consistency.

  Denise made her way to the back of the mart where Like-side Bikes had their shop. Like every bicycle shop in the universe it had a small front area cluttered with bikes still in their wrappings, while a counter partitioned off a workshop full of tools and small boxes of spares. There were three main work areas, centered on elaborate clamps that held the bikes at chest height. All of them were occupied with machines in various states of assembly with mechanics working on them. Cycling was a popular mode of transport in Memu Bay, and business was brisk.

  The assistant manager, Mihir Sansome, looked up and immediately abandoned the child's bike he was working on.

  "Hi." Denise flashed him a bright smile. "Has my order come in yet?"

  "I believe so." Mihir glanced at his two colleagues and gave Denise a twitchy grin.

  She kept her gaze level: it was almost a rebuke.

  Mihir cleared his throat. "I'll check." He went back into the workshop and picked up a box from his work bench. "Here we go. Front suspension pins, five sets."

  "Thank you." She put cash down on the counter, separating the notes into two piles. Mihir made a show of swiping the box's strip into the till. Five notes went into the cashbox; the larger pile was deftly folded and slipped into his pocket without his colleagues' seeing. He put the box into a carrier bag and handed it to Denise.

  As she walked back down the mart, she allowed herself a small smile. Mihir wasn't the greatest actor, but the bicycle shop with its autoclaves and catalytic bonders was incredibly useful. The risk of his activities being noticed was tiny. And even if he was queried by his colleagues or the manager, they'd just assume it was some kind of illegal scam he'd got himself involved in. That was the beauty of every cell-structured underground group: outside of the command group, nobody knew anybody else.

  Even if the worst-case scenario came about and the authorities became aware of a cell, they'd only be able to close down that one unit. Taken by itself, the items Mihir had produced for them would mean nothing to the police. He'd probably be able to describe Denise, but as far as he knew she was just a courier. He'd been recruited by members of another cell, who had been given the information that his cousin had died during the last invasion. After skirting around his sympathies, they'd asked him if he could help out making life difficult for the next occupation force. It wouldn't even cost him anything; the movement would be happy to pay for his trouble. Once he'd agreed, the only contact he had was through encrypted packages containing the specifications of components. And Denise.

  Had it been a normal radical movement, then they would have used a low-level courier to collect the box. This was a little different Indigo data scrolled across her sight as the Prime in her pearl ring trawled the datapool for real-time police messages. There were hundreds of them, the majority simple routine contacts and location monitors. There were even some special investigation branch operations. None of it related to her.

  Even so, she kept an eye on her fellow pedestrians, noted the few cars and vans parked along the street, watched the cyclists. None of them seemed interested in her, except for a couple of lads. But then surveillance operatives wouldn't show an interest; it was recurring faces that she was hunting for.

  Only two people got on the tram with her. She switched trams twice before she finally arrived at the workshop, confident no one was following her. It was one of twelve identical workshops in a two-story block designed to accommodate light industry. The whole place had a fairly dilapidated appearance, with windows covered up with reflective shields or wood panels. A faint whine of ai
r-conditioning sounded along the narrow deserted street that led to the rear loading bays. Piles of discarded packaging were accumulating by several of the roll-up doors. She'd never seen anyone put rubbish out, or a city council crew collect any. But the size and position of the piles changed on a weekly basis, so someone else used the workshops.

  Denise asked her neural pearl to check the workshop's security network, which reported that the perimeter was secure. She waved her left hand over the lock sensor and pushed the door open. It was a large concrete-walled room inside, empty apart from a long wooden carpentry bench they'd set up in the center and a metal storage rack that took up half of the loading bay wall. Both windows and the roll-up door had been bricked up and reinforced with carbon webbing.

  Josep was already sitting at the bench, milling cylinders of stainless steel on a programmable electron beam lathe. "Did you get them?" he asked.

  "Hope so." She dropped the box on the bench and broke the seal. Two dozen black cylinders spilled out. They both started examining them.

  Mihir had produced slightly conical tubes of boron beryl-hum composite ten centimeters long. The narrower end was open, while the base was sealed with a small hole in the center and an outer ridge. Denise wondered if he knew he was producing bullet casings. The shape was obvious enough, though the high-strength composition could be misleading.

  "Not bad," Josep said. He was measuring his casing with calipers, the liquid crystal display blurring as they closed around the base. "Not bad at all. He's got the dimensions within spec."

  "I'll start filling them," she said. The casings were the last component. They already had the bullets, the caps and enhanced explosive. Combined with the rifle they'd assembled, a single shot would be able to punch clean through Skin from over two kilometers away.

  The rifle was just one of the weapons they planned on using. Other weapons and booby traps were being put together by cells across Memu Bay. Innocuous little components locking together into lethal combinations. This time when the invaders arrived, the resistance movement would be there and ready to make life hell for them.

  * * *

  Platoon 435NK9 had to wait in the base's transit lounge for five hours. Lawrence didn't mind that for himself—the lounge was air-conditioned, he had a memory chip loaded with a good multimedia library, the drinks machine was free, missiontime pay had begun that morning. Squaddie heaven. He stretched his legs out over three chairs and relaxed while the big departure sheet screen kept repeating the same messages about their scheduling delay and mechanical service requirements. Somewhere out across the hot runway, teams of mechanics were peering quizzically into the inspection hatches of their assigned spaceplane, trying to find which one of the fifty thousand subcomponents the AS pilot was bitching about. AS pilots monitored every component parameter constantly, running the results against International Civil Aerospace Agency performance requirements. Lawrence had heard that operating companies often rebooted their vehicle electronics with AS programs down-rated from the manufacturer's primary installation, allowing a degree more flexibility when it came to determining flight-worthiness. The letter of ICAA's law equaled huge maintenance costs.

  If a Z-B AS pilot wanted repairs before it would fly, Lawrence was very happy to have the procedure carried out. The spaceplane would definitely need it.

  The enforced hiatus didn't sit so well with the rest of his platoon. Worst hit was Hal Grabowski, the youngest member, just past nineteen years old. Hal's flight experience was limited to one subsonic transocean flight to Australia and five short helicopter trips during the last phase of their training. He'd never been on a spaceplane, let alone experienced freefall. Spaceflight was a novelty he was hungry for, prowling around the lounge in search of some sign that they could embark. A sure giveaway that he'd never seen active service before, either. The ancient armed forces maxim—never volunteer—had streaked over Hal's head at near-orbital altitude.

  "It's been three hours!" the kid complained. "Fuck this. Hey, Corp, if they don't fix it, will they give us another spaceplane soon?"

  "Yeah, I expect so," Corporal Amersy muttered. He didn't even glance up from the screen on his media player card.

  Hal's arms flapped about in disgust He stomped off to annoy someone else. Amersy looked up, watching the kid's back, then turned and smiled at Lawrence. The two of them shook their heads in unison. Amersy was a good ten years older than Lawrence, though his thinning hair was the only outward sign of aging. He was very careful to keep in shape, spending hours each week in the base gym. Good physical condition was a non-negotiable requirement Z-B placed on all its strategic security division squaddies. Amersy was never going to rise above corporal; he had neither the stake-holding nor the connections. It didn't bother him; the position meant he could take good care of his family, so he worked hard at maintaining it. That worked to Lawrence's advantage; Amersy was the most reliable corporal in the Third Fleet.

  Only his face betrayed the time he'd devoted to the front line of Z-B's asset-realization policy. A wide patch of skin at the rear of his left cheek was slightly chewed up where a Molotov cocktail had burned through his helmet fifteen years earlier in the Shuna campaign, before Skin reached anything like its current level of ability. Even that shouldn't have been too visible, not with the dark ebony color of Amersy's skin. But that day the Third Fleet field hospital had been inundated with casualties; at the end of a twenty-two-hour shift, the trauma doctor was too fast applying dermal regeneration virals. They'd done the job they were designed for, infiltrating the corium layer to implant new genetic material that would build his epidermal layer back over deep char ridges. Unfortunately the genes that the virals carried were tailored for a Caucasian. Half of Amersy's cheek was white, resembling some kind of flat tumor.

  Amersy allowed rookie squaddies to have one joke about it. Hal, naturally, had made a second. The kid was taller even than Lawrence, topping out over two meters, with muscles that could match a Skin suit's strength. It didn't make any difference; he'd limped for a week after landing badly. The kid had shown the corporal plenty of respect since then; it was about the only lesson he had ever learned properly in the whole nine weeks since he'd joined the platoon.

  "Are there going to be stewardesses?" Hal asked Edmond Orlov. "You know, some decent-looking pussy."

  "It's a fucking military flight, you dipshit," Edmond sneered at him. "Officers and management get freefall blow jobs. You get to fuck Karl."

  Karl Sheahan lifted his head, blinking his eyes open. Tiny colored silhouettes shivering over his optronic membranes shrank to nothing. He gave the pair of them the finger.

  "What about the starship?" Hal persisted. "Any chicks in the crew?"

  "I haven't got a fucking clue. And even if they were all female, it wouldn't make any goddamn difference to you. Crew only ever get the best, that means their fucking coffee machine is smarter and more attractive than you."

  "Aww man, that is such a waste. I mean, how many times does a guy have this kind of opportunity? The way I figure, I'll see six, maybe seven campaigns. That'll give me a total of fourteen spaceflights. I don't wanna waste none; that's criminal."

  "Waste them how?"

  "Boomeranging the padding, man. The big freefall freefor-all. A midair rodeo." He clenched his fists and held them up, pleading. "I wanna have sex in zero-gee, man! Every unnatural position you're not built for. Holy shit. I get hard just thinking about it."

  "Shut up, you arrested pervert. There's no such thing. The whole idea's a myth dreamed up by corporate publicity back when they started flying orbital sight-seeing tours. Get it? You even twist your head around fast in freefall and you throw up. You start tumbling around the way you're thinking of, and every orifice lets fly. And I mean every. Now forget about it and give the rest of us a break."

  Hal backed off, looking wounded. Edmond was the closest he had to a genuine buddy in the platoon. The two of them had broken base curfew enough nights to go cruising the Cairns Strip together. .
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  Lawrence waited silently, hoping the kid would finally shut up. There were ten other platoons waiting in the lounge with them, all of them hyped with the prospect of the flight It wouldn't take much to start a fight. He didn't want to start ordering the kid about before the mission had even taken off. None of the others were such a pain, but then they were older, half of them had families, too, which acted like a damping rod on wilder aspects of their behavior. And all of them had seen duty together.

  Hal walked over to one of the big picture windows, pressing his face against it to look eagerly out at the huge space-planes that were managing to take off. He took a swig from a Coke can.

  "Hal, stop drinking now," Amersy said. "You don't want any fluid in your stomach when we go into orbit. You'll throw up even if you don't twist your head."

  Hal glared at the can. He dropped it and kicked it in the direction of the nearest wastebasket. There was no other form of protest.

  The kid would do all right, Lawrence decided. He just needed guiding through the first few crowd encounters and he'd start to learn caution. Pity he didn't have a steady girlfriend; that was always a calming influence. But at nineteen he was only interested in screwing as many girls as he could impress by his muscles and his credit card.

  Four and a half hours into the wait, and the departure sheet screen changed their flight status to boarding. Hal let out a loud whoop and snatched up his small bag. The rest of Platoon 435NK9 lumbered up out of their chairs and made their way over to the designated gate. Their spaceplane was rolling slowly into the departure bay as they assembled at the clearance desk.

  The Xianti 5005h3 spaceplane was a well-proven commercial ground-to-orbit vehicle; the Beijing Astronautics Company had first flown the original 5005a mark in 2290. Since then there had been over forty variants produced as the manufacturer gradually expanded capacity and smoothed out early bugs. The 5005h3 was a stretched delta planform 120 meters long, with a wingspan of a hundred meters. Eighty percent of its volume was taken up by fuel tanks. Its carbon-lithium composite fuselage had a broad center section with graceful curves blending it cleanly into the wing section, a softness in sharp contrast to the knife-blade leading edges. A third of the way down the belly was a single oval scoop intake with an airspike protruding several meters from the rim.