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Pook reached out his hand and put it on Ducky’s shoulder. It was a sign of understanding, and of peace, but it also was a symbol of steadfast obedience and loyalty to a superior. “So here’s the deal, friend. All of you. I love you all. We’ve fought together and we’ve been through some tough things. We’ve bled, and some of our people have died for this…” Ducky nodded, as did everyone else in the unit.

After a short pause, Pook continued. “So for now… Ducky… all of you… just shut the hell up. Just—respectfully—shut up. If you have a problem, bottle it up and keep your mouth zipped about it. I don’t want to hear one more word of negativity unless you have some grounds for it that’ll stand up to scrutiny, and even then, it’d better be something that helps us all. Am I understood?”

Ducky looked up at Pook, who was a full six inches taller. “Yes, sir.” There was still anger in his voice, but it was subdued, and he’d regained his composure.

“Yes, sir,” everyone else said.

Goa Eagles—swarthy, unkempt, and now overloaded with partial bits of clothing and coats he’d somehow conned from the quartermaster—chose this moment to walk up to the group. As always, he was chewing vigorously on a greenish mass. He spat a huge globule and smiled.

“Good speeching, Pook.” Eagles arched his neck and thrust out his arms in a cartoonish impersonation of Pook. He raised his voice an octave higher and began to pace back and forth, glowering at everyone. He spit out another big, nasty load of green slime and then wiped his mouth with his arm.

“Being shut! Words, wording, words! Shutting up!” Eagles looked over at Pook, who was trying hard not to laugh. “Looking at Eeguls! Eeguls being the Pook! Everyone shutting! Got it?” By this point, everyone in the unit was laughing, and Eagles took their laughter as further encouragement. He turned to Ducky. “You… you being shut!” He winked at Ducky, then looked the shorter fighter up and down. “Also being un-tall.” With that, Eagles threw out his chest and walked away, to the raucous laughter of everyone who had heard him.

(22

LIVING ON TULSA TIME

The Great Shelf was, for now, the new front in the war. This latest government attack—an air assault on TRACE reconnaissance forces patrolling on this side of the cliffs—was half-hearted, a token gesture. TRACE forces hadn’t yet attempted to penetrate past the Great Shelf to pursue the Transport-controlled assets that had retreated from the City. When the resistance launched their offensive, that’s when the real battle would begin.

The SOMA watched as two of his fighters took out a Transport attack craft, the defeated aircraft disintegrating and plummeting in parts and fire and smoke toward the earth. Thus far, it seemed like Transport was just doing their best to regroup and lick their wounds. For the most part they’d pulled in their horns. With the exception of the perfunctory action the SOMA was now observing, intelligence reported no evidence of a pending counterattack.

The view that the SOMA had on the big screens in his office constantly changed perspectives. Looking at the scenes on display, you’d think that dozens of camera ships or drones must be zipping around out there providing the coverage, but there were no actual cameras involved. Instead, the graphics were constructed very accurately based on data gathered by sensors on all of his ships—and by every other sensor within range of the battlefield. The new TRACE Optimal Battle System (TOBS) relied not only on TRACE-specific encrypted data, which provided real-time location and identification information, but also on other airborne information, including data that was never specifically intended for TRACE or battlefield use. In short, TOBS utilized all available wireless broadband data, because even if the data was from an email between two BICEs, or was part of a computer game, or the sharing of a salsa recipe, that bit of data still had to travel through the air from somewhere to somewhere else. And TOBS was able to use this data to more perfectly render the battlefield in real time, like an early twenty-first century Doppler radar could model a tornado based on wind direction, air pressure, the reflections from bits of sand and debris carried by the storm, temperature variations, and a variety of other sources.

Using TOBS in combination with the implanted TRACE Corinth chips, TRACE and enemy ships could be nearly perfectly rendered in 3-D space. As could lasers and other ordnance. Data was cross-referenced and processed, in real time, using information stored in multiple remote systems. This aggregated information then became the foundation of the rendering program.

And the beauty of TOBS was that the individual ships didn’t need to carry and support the computing power required to produce the finished visual product, although a rough version of the information was available on each ship captain’s BICE and support screens. The ships needed only to transmit the data for rendering off-vessel, and to have enough computing power to receive and display the final visual. And this off-vessel rendering wasn’t dependent on the functioning of any one part. Flexibility and redundancy were the hallmarks of TOBS. In fact, the system was intentionally fluid, utilizing an AI management system that altered the system’s architecture on the fly.

On each ship, one—or in some cases more than one—intelligence officer had been implanted with the Corinth chip. The Corinth was the heart and soul of the TOBS and was effectively the fourth-generation BICE chip, something beyond even what Transport could imagine in its utility and complexity. The Corinth was able to take the raw data stream and compress it, encrypt it, and hide it in regular or worthless bits of data always zipping around the planet in the air. The system had become so efficient and effective that it was now fully possible for battle commanders to do what gamers had been doing for a very long time: zoom around the battlefield and virtually see things that their forebears had only dreamed of seeing.

The TRACE rebel ships weren’t entirely dependent on this advanced TOBS technology, though. The ships could just as easily fly and fight without the lightning-fast rendering or the off-vessel intelligence support. If they had to. And they could fly and fight old-school if need be: dog-fighting, just as air forces had been doing for over two hundred years. But experience showed that when TRACE ships had access to TOBS, their forces were nearly impossible to defeat.

TRACE’s technological advantage—itself a fairly recent reality—was a product of the fact that tech-loving geeks and programmers almost invariably end up siding against any system that is anti-freedom. A fact that governments throughout time have had a tendency to forget… to their own detriment. And the slow brain drain of programmers and technicians from Transport to TRACE had turned into a tidal wave once it began to look very much like TRACE could actually win the war. Geniuses who’d been raised on Q had held off on giving the government their newest and best ideas and improvements, because foundationally they’d never really supported Transport’s imperial aims. Most of these technical personnel had applied for, or been recruited into, Transport jobs only because they were the only game in town, if you wanted to work with the best resources on the most advanced projects.