Morton checked his display. The force field protecting the base began about a hundred fifty meters ahead of him. All the buildings in the intervening space had been completely flattened, leaving a broad expanse of smoldering blackened fragments, like an oil-slicked beach. Morton studied the gap critically for a few moments. There was no way to get across unseen. He told his e-butler to bring up a town map and highlight the utility tunnels. Sure enough, there were several he could use.
“I see them,” Rob said. “Two of them carrying weapons, heading for the base. They’re looking for you.”
“Can you take them?”
“No problem. Question is, how?”
“Minimum fuss. We don’t want to alert the rest that we’re here.”
“Okay. An electronic warfare drone to smother them, and follow up with a couple of focused energy missiles.”
“That’s too noticeable,” Morton said. “A kinetic shot should get through their suits.” He was busy examining the map. The larger utility tunnels must be wired for intruders. Of the smaller ones, a rain sewer was possibly wide enough for him to crawl down. He didn’t like confined spaces, but the suit and weapons he was carrying gave him the option of blasting his way out of any trouble pretty quickly.
“I’m not close enough to detect if they’ve got force fields,” Rob said.
“How fast are they moving? I need to get to a manhole cover before they see me.”
“They’ll be on you in two minutes. I can get some sneekbots close enough to check for force fields.”
“My guess is they’ll have them off. They’re creeping around just like we are. They don’t want to attract attention, and force fields are goddamn easy to detect.”
“So you reckon I should just use kinetics on them?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, boys,” a chirpy female voice said. “Let’s have some fun here. They gave us all these beautiful weapons to try, didn’t they? Let’s see now, what haven’t we used yet? Oh, I know.”
Morton checked his virtual vision to see where she was. “Cat, don’t…” Behind him, the town and sky turned incandescent white. The ground started to shake wildly, and the blast wave roared—
The environment dissolved into colorhash static. Strange tingles rippled up and down his skin. Then there was only his standby mode virtual vision, a row of blue line symbols glowing against a dark background. He heard his own breathing, amplified by his helmet. His arms and legs were stretched out spread-eagle style, held comfortably by plastic bands.
“Goddamnit,” Morton groaned.
The plyplastic around his arms expanded. He reached out and took the helmet off. Lights were coming on overhead, revealing the small nulsense chamber. The simulation team was staring in at him through a curving window, all looking pretty pissed off. Morton gave them a what-can-you-do shrug. He was standing at the center of a shiny gyrowheel, a meter off the ground, his feet held safely by plyplastic boots. They released his feet and he jumped down.
There were four other gyrowheels in the chamber, each with a squad member exiting the simulation. He walked over to face the Cat. A pretty heart-shaped face grinned down at him, white teeth emphasized by brown skin. Her appearance was late twenties. Seeing her for the first time, you’d assume she was a first-lifer; her outwardly frivolous attitude made it impossible to imagine her at any other age. While the rest of the squad were in standard dark purple sports shirts and black trousers, she’d found herself a Sonic Energy Authority T-shirt and punk jeans. He wasn’t sure how she managed that; squads were never issued with anything else than navy clothes. Presumably she just went up to the civilian training staff and told them to give her what they were wearing. Her raven hair had been cut short, like all of them, except she’d added purple feather streaks tipped with silver.
“That was more like it,” she said brightly, and hopped down. On the ground she was ten centimeters shorter than Morton.
“What the hell was the point of that?” he asked.
“We haven’t used the baby nukes before. We’re here to try out every possible combat scenario. Right?” She gave the simulation team a breezy wave. Nobody behind the glass actually dared scowl back, but they all looked sullen. “They were a real blast!” She laughed.
Morton wanted to give her a slap—except he didn’t dare. The Cat had been put into suspension before he’d been born, and wasn’t due out until about a thousand years after his own sentence was finished. He remembered the day she’d arrived at their barracks. No individual had ever been given a four-strong escort before, and they’d all looked nervous. “You can’t use nukes against individual soldiers, for fuck’s sake,” he raged. “Are you deliberately trying to screw this up for the rest of us? Because I’m not going back to suspension just because you fancy having a big joke. I’ll kick your warped little ass out of this training camp and into orbit before that happens.”
The rest of the squad froze, watching intently. One of the simulation team moved back from the glass.
The Cat puckered her lips up to blow Morton a fulsome kiss. “The mission was already screwed, tough guy. If one alien knows we’re there, they all do. You should read your intelligence briefings on that communal communications of theirs. You weren’t going to get inside the force field. Taking out the nest of them on the outside was the sensible option. Remember: Inflict as much damage as possible. Do not allow yourself to be captured.”
“It was not the only option. We could have got out of that. Rob and I were working on it.”
“Poor boy. So desperate to hang on to your body. It’s not that it’s remarkable in any measure.” The Cat gave him a playful slap on his cheek. It stung.
“Screw you!” Morton growled.
She headed for the chamber door. As it opened she batted her eyelashes at him. “See you in the shower, tough guy. Oh, and for the record, it’s not at all warped, it’s actually a very pretty bottom.” She wiggled it as she left.
Morton let out a long breath and unclenched his fists. He hadn’t realized he’d clenched them to start with.
“Okay, thank you, people,” the simulation team chief said. “That’s it for today. We’ll resume at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”
Morton stood where he was as the rest of the squad headed out. He was taking deep breaths, trying to calm down. Rob Tannie came over and put an arm around his shoulder. “That was impressive, man. You’re either insane, in love, or you’ve got a massive death wish. Do you actually know what she did to get suspension?”
“Yeah, but that’s not the point. It’s what we’ve got to do together in the future that’s important.”
Rob gave him a strange look. “You sound like them.” He jerked a thumb at the window.
“Oh, what the hell,” Morton said, suddenly very tired. “We’re all going to die the second we drop out of the wormhole anyway; we’ll never reach Elan itself.”
“That’s the spirit. But take it from me, as someone who’s already been through re-life: don’t mess with the cute demon. She’s seriously bad news.”
“Remind me to introduce you to my ex-wife someday,” Morton said as they walked out of the chamber.
Morton didn’t even know which planet their training camp, Kingsville, was on. He suspected a Big15 world: Kerensk, judging by the violet-tinged sun. If so, they were a long way from the megacity.
Kingsville was vast, sprawling over a region of low desert foothills. Northward from the camp, the gentle mounds gradually built up into a tall mountain range that stretched across the horizon, their distant peaks covered in snow. The desert spread out in every other direction, a rumpled plain of powdered yellow clay littered with crumbling boulders. Small, hardy native cacti bushes clustered together at the bottom of every slight depression, thick gray stems with a fur of spindly leaves no thicker than paper, and just as dry.