"Noted. Time limitations now apply to guest accounts. Fifty hours maximum."
Maj rolled her eyes. This was more than enough time to get anyone she could think of addicted to the game...which was doubtless the designers" intention. "Thank you," she said. "Ready?"
"Ready now. Preferred area of ingress?"
"Hangar one."
"Hangar one access ready."
She went over to the door in the wall, opened it. "Come on in."
Laurent followed her in. The other side of the door was now occupied by a huge empty s.p.a.ce with a shiny concrete floor. The walls were a long way off and were also painted concrete with large tool closets and metal equipment shelving pushed up against them. From the corrugated metal ceiling hung lights so bright they almost hurt to look at, and in the middle of it all sat Maj"s Arbalest fighter.
It was a long, sharp-nosed black shape somewhat reminiscent of the old SR-71 Blackbird, but stubbier, and not so "flattened" in cross-section, and it was shiny mirror-black, not matte, for protection against light-weapons. The wings were swept back much more acutely, and the wing-roots were much broader, partly to support the weight of the "Crossbow" pumped laser cannons that hung under them on each side.
"This is yours?" Laurent breathed.
"Yup," Maj said as they walked toward it. "Well, my group"s, anyway. The basic design, I mean. We"ve all made modifications to the design, here and there. But it"s not too bad." She paused and just took a moment to admire it.
Laurent was walking around it with his mouth very satisfyingly open. Maj was pleased. Whatever else might be going on inside this new visitor, he plainly had taste.
"Suit," she said to the air. Her s.p.a.ce suit appeared on her-again one of the game"s standard suits, but customized with the Group of Seven"s black eight-ball patch (though the numeral was a seven instead) on the shoulders. It was similar to gee suits being used today by those pilots who insisted on flying their fighters "genuinely" rather than virtually, but it had much more attention paid to the insulation. Even fighter pilots do not normally have to worry about being dumped out of their craft in deep s.p.a.ce, or having to wait there for pickup for prolonged periods.
"Games controller," Maj said.
"Yes, ma"am," said the game"s computer.
"Would you provide a suit for my guest, please?"
"Yes ma"am. Will he be partic.i.p.ating in flight?"
"Flight, yes. Not fighting, though."
"Control sequencing unchanged, then."
"That"s right."
"Next order."
"On hold."
"Yes, ma"am."
A sudden squeak came from Laurent as he was heading around from the other side of the fighter. "Suit too tight?" Maj said.
"Uh, no, it just surprised me."
She restrained herself from shaking her head and commenting on how much his home system plainly left to be desired. Costuming-changing body covering or, for that matter, body shape-was one of the most basic virtual utilities. If they won"t even let people dress up the way they want to-! If they won"t even let people dress up the way they want to-! "Well, no more serious surprises," she said. "Come on, let"s get up into the c.o.c.kpit. We"ve got a short jump to make before we take the long one." "Well, no more serious surprises," she said. "Come on, let"s get up into the c.o.c.kpit. We"ve got a short jump to make before we take the long one."
He hurried along beside here. "Where is this? I mean, where are we supposed to be?"
"It"s a hangar facility on Amrit, the third moon of the gas giant Dolorosa," Maj said. "I don"t know how much that helps you. Come on, get in. The aft ladder is on the other side-walk underneath."
She clambered up into the c.o.c.kpit. "Let me know if that seat suits you," she said. "The program should have fixed it."
There was some clunking and b.u.mping as Laurent wriggled himself into the number-two seat behind her. "It-is snug," he said.
"Partly for protection against those high-G turns," she said. "You"ll be glad of it later. Helmet," she said.
Maj"s helmet appeared, a perfectly transparent dome that faired into her suit apparently seamlessly. It was solid plex. Maj knew other players who trusted the new force field helmets, but herself, she preferred something that didn"t need a power source, no matter how "guaranteed" the power sources were.
"But this is, well, virtual," Laurent said, sounding a little dubious. "Do we really need these?"
Maj laughed. "You breathe a little vacuum, and you"ll find out whether you need it or not."
"But we couldn"t really suffocate, or-"
"Yes, I know, it"s a game, but isn"t it more fun to play a game and pretend it"s not not a game?" Maj said. "You ready? We should get going. Got yourself strapped in?" a game?" Maj said. "You ready? We should get going. Got yourself strapped in?"
It was the usual five-point harness, and as usual took a little doing for him to get all fastened in the first time. When Laurent was helmeted and secure, Maj said, "Hangar control..."
"Working," said a drier, tinnier voice than the game controller"s.
"Evacuate the hangar."
She powered up the Arbalest"s Morgenroth drivers while the air hissed out of the place. "I should warn you," Maj said. "The game designer has built high-G resistance into the human stress parameters. Some of the things we may do later can look pretty scary. And don"t freak out if you see me doing something that can normally break a ship like this in two. It won"t. It"ll just look look like it will." like it will."
"Oh, well, then, I am rea.s.sured," Laurent said. Maj was tempted to burst out laughing at his tone of voice, which suggested that rea.s.surance was thinner on the ground in his mental environment than he would have liked.
"Hangar evacuated," said the hangar control voice.
"Okay," Maj said. "Here we go."
She cut in the vectored locals and pushed the Arbalest up. The scream of the engines was perfectly audible. Looking in the mirrored canopy above her, Maj could see Laurent"s eyebrows go up, but he made no comment. "Crack the ceiling," she told the hangar.
The center sections of the ceiling started to roll away from the centerline, with a last hiss as a little pressure equalization happened. Outside was not a perfect vacuum by any means. Amrit was a large enough moon to have kept some of the heavier gases, and as Maj eased in the locals they bobbed up into a cloud of them, above which some light source was dimly visible, like the moon above cloud.
"You wouldn"t like it out there," Maj said to Laurent. "There"s a lot of swept-up methane in the atmosphere. Amrit is a "shepherd moon." Another good reason for a helmet, if something should go wrong with the ship. The stuff gets full of organic compounds after a while...and the stink! stink! You wouldn"t want to know...." You wouldn"t want to know...."
"I can do without stink," Laurent said, looking up and around with interest.
"Good. Here we go..."
She took the Arbalest straight up into the cloudy silvery dimness. Toward the zenith, that silveriness started to get stronger. "The moon?" Laurent said.
"Not quite..."
They burst up out of the cloud. Twelve degrees down from the zenith hung the source of the light. Laurent took a long, sudden breath and did not let it out.
Hanging there above the curve of Amrit"s atmosphere was the Cl.u.s.ter, in unimpeded view...and it was a view worth seeing. NGC 2057 was one of the so-called "Guardian Angel" globular star cl.u.s.ters soaring above and below the plane of the Milky Way galaxy-a gigantic spherical array of stars, radiating out like an explosion of multicolored jewels from a core where the stars were cl.u.s.tered together almost too tightly to make them out as separate ent.i.ties. Many of them, too, were short-period variables, so that they visibly swelled and shrank as you looked at them, like live things breathing, burning sedately in blinding fire.
"This is the Seraphim Cl.u.s.ter," Maj said. "A long time ago a very old, very wise species lived here-the Danir. They had science beyond anything we know...and they fought terrible wars with another species also native to the Cl.u.s.ter, an evil species that we know little about. They"re all gone, now. But an explorer found the Daniri science, and the living machines that were maintaining it, on the Heartworld of the cl.u.s.ter. The machines told the explorer to find others like him, the outcasts, the curious, the people who couldn"t leave well enough alone...the people who believed in standing up for the defenseless and trying to stop the bad things that happened all around them. They would be equipped with weapons that would make them invincible...if they used them properly. They would descend from the Cl.u.s.ter into the Galaxy with their new weapons and become the defenders of the right, facing down crime and evil wherever they found it. They would be hunted down by both the evildoers and by those who didn"t understand their mission...but if they persevered, they would triumph. They would become the Cl.u.s.ter Rangers." She grinned at him. "Or we we would. Some of us." would. Some of us."
"You mean, you pretend to be-"
Maj laughed softly, glanced up in the c.o.c.kpit mirror. "While you"re in it, "pretending" doesn"t describe it at all." she said. "Your part of the Net isn"t very virtual, is it?"
Laurent"s look was wry. "I think," he said, "the government doesn"t like the idea of people escaping from reality."
Maj thought briefly of an ancient recorded interview she had seen with a writer who lived in the middle of the last century. What kind of people do you think are most concerned about other people escaping from reality? What kind of people do you think are most concerned about other people escaping from reality? he had said. he had said. The jailers... The jailers...She made a face.
"Typical. But look."
They had been making steady progress up and away from the cloudtops of Amrit as Maj talked. Now they were making for the terminator; and the light of Dolorosa"s primary, red-golden Hekse, started to grow behind the edges of the atmosphere, lines of blue-dominated spectrum showing there, growing brighter all the time. Maj smiled slightly, and kicked the drivers in, making for the light at increased speed. All around them, a faint soft shrilling was audible, almost musical, like tiny bells being rung at a great distance-a shivering, shining sound. But then they came over the edge, over the terminator, up into the light...
...and s.p.a.ce was full of the sound. The system"s primary hung there, blazing, shining on the ship and on Amrit and on the huge peach-and-brick-banded curvature of Dolorosa, hanging at one o"clock; and the sound of the sun smote them full on, a huge profound booming sound, like a gong struck, but sounding many notes at once, all shivering, like the sound of the stars far away. It was of course the same sound, only made bearable here by immense distance-starsong, the game designer"s idea of the music of the spheres. Beyond the sun, and producing not that huge boom, but rather a much more tenuous, silvery sound, lay the galaxy. Much of it was obscured by interstellar dust, from this "height." But the nearest arm, lying right across a third of the visible sky, shone fierce and clear-not the tender, delicate light you got from the rest of the Milky Way as seen from Earth on a clear night, but bright, definite, and immense. Best of all, though, you could hear its stars shining, a multifarious and splendid harmony across the terrible distance, and all around, silent, you could feel empty s.p.a.ce listening.
"It is beautiful," Laurent said very softly behind Maj.
"You got that in one," Maj said. It was the sound, though, that had done it for her the first time-the game designer"s idea that, if you could hear explosions in s.p.a.ce, well, what was the shining of a star but a very large, controlled, prolonged explosion? It had given her the shivers then, and it did so now. But there was no time to waste. The others would be meeting on the bigger moon, Jorkas, in a matter of minutes.
"I wish my father could see this...." Laurent said, very quietly.
"He will," Maj said. "I"ll make sure of it." It was all she could find to say immediately that wouldn"t sound soppy or artificial. That image of a man, alone, in a little, harshly lighted room with no windows, while someone with a gun and a nasty expression stood over him, had recurred to her a few times since she"d spoken to her father. It was probably born of seeing too many old movies. But Maj knew that, though the details of that kind of intimidation might have changed over the years, the mind-set had not. There were still plenty of people who didn"t mind hurting other people to get what they wanted. The thought of Laurent"s father father being stuck in such a situation...or worse, her own...It made her shudder. being stuck in such a situation...or worse, her own...It made her shudder.
"Could I-is there any chance I could fly this?" Laurent said, in a very small voice.
Maj grinned at that, understanding the instant attraction. "Not tonight, Laurent. We"ve got business to take care of. For tonight, just sit still and enjoy the ride. But I have a sim built into my work s.p.a.ce to practice on. Tomorrow you can fly all day, if you want, and get the feel of it. Who knows? We might need a new pilot one of these days, and I can"t see why the squadron would refuse a talented one...."
She kicked in the Morgenroths at full and made her way around the other side of Dolorosa. Just the far side of the gas giant"s terminator Maj found Jorkas sailing along toward them, seeming leisurely as always in this system where its less ma.s.sive brothers and sisters mostly tore around their primary as if their tails were on fire. Maj made for the pole, where even at this distance she could see the big streetlight circle-and-7 that marked the Group"s base here.
Five minutes later they were settling into the "parking bay," a circular force-fielded area that was otherwise open to s.p.a.ce and the spectacular views of Dolorosa and the Cl.u.s.ter. Eight other Arbalests were there, the syncrete under them glowing softly in token that their engines were live and on standby; and their pilots stood in a small cl.u.s.ter, talking, occasionally waving an arm or two. A large spherical hologram hovered glowing over the "crete to one side, mostly being ignored. One of the pilots was pacing back and forth, back and forth, with metronomic regularity.
"Shih Chin," Maj said as she popped the canopy. "She always does that. She gets tense."
"Will they mind that I"m here?" Laurent said.
Maj opened her mouth to say "no," and then started to say "yes," and then said, "I don"t care if they do. But I doubt they will, once they understand you"re just along for the ride. Just be friendly, and leave them to me."
They walked across the syncrete toward the others. Heads turned as they came, and Kelly said, "Maj, who"s your copilot?"
"G.o.d," Maj said, laughing, "if anybody. This is a pa.s.senger...he"s a cousin of mine, just in from Hungary. Niko, this is the Group of Seven."
He did not make the response a lot of them would have expected, which Maj suspected pleased them. The name "Group of Seven" was as much of a joke about its members" wildly conflicting schedules as about anything else. If you could get as many as seven of them together in one place, it was an event, even when there were eleven of them total. Niko, though, just smiled at them. "h.e.l.lo," he said.
"This is Kelly," Maj said, indicating the tall freckly red-head. "Shih Chin-" She stopped pacing just long enough to smile. "Sander-" Dark-haired Sander waved. "Chel, and Mairead-" Mairead shook her blazing red curls out of her eyes, grinned a little at Laurent. Chel, looking taller and broader than usual in the s.p.a.ce suit, waved. "Bob-" He nodded to Laurent with a preoccupied look.
"And Robin and Del."
"Hi," Robin said, and Del bowed a little, idiosyncratically formal as always. Maj waggled her eyebrows at them, grinned, but didn"t say anything else, for she saw them a little more frequently than the others in the Group...since Robin and Del were also Net Force Explorers. Big, blocky Del was attached to the New York area, where his dad and mom both worked at a large law firm, and little slender Robin with her retropunk blue Mohawk was somewhere in one of the LA suburbs, living with a dad who worked for Rocketdyne. They had never met physically, but then lots of the Net Force Explorers hadn"t, their online meetings, by and large, being considered to be real enough to get by with. In any case, their status with Net Force wasn"t something that they went into a lot with the other members of the Group of Seven. Partly this was because having made it into the Net Force Explorers when so many people wanted to get in was something of a plum...and partly because it struck them all that bragging about it was not only unnecessary, but possibly unwise. Occasionally Net Force Explorers found themselves working together on projects which were not precisely public knowledge, and which were probably better staying that way. They preferred to keep the profile of that part of their involvement with the Explorers low. However, there was no rule that said they couldn"t have fun together "off duty"-if there was any such thing for three young people so thoroughly committed to the jobs they intended to have some day, and if there was any justice.
"Glad you could make it," Bob said. "We"ve been going over strat-tac again..."
"And we are completely screwed completely screwed," Shih Chin muttered.
"We are not," said Kelly. "Will you stop overreacting! stop overreacting!"
There was a brief silence. "Nerves," said Kelly, with some embarra.s.sment.
"Yeah. Look, forget it."
A mutter of agreement went round the group. "How long now?" Mairead said.
"Ten minutes to the positions filed with the master tactics computer."
"Oh, I hate this part," Del muttered. "Once we get up there and start shooting things, everything will be fine."
"a.s.suming we last that long," Kelly said.
"Hungarian, huh?" said Chel. "Well, Goulash, you"re in for a real show today...a.s.suming we survive the first ten minutes."
Maj opened her mouth to say something cutting to Chel, but Laurent grinned and said, "Goulash? I like goulash. And if you make it right, with the really hot paprika, it"s got a bite." He bounced a little in the light gravity, still smiling. "Separates the men from the boys."
"Paprika?" said Bob. "That"s right, it"s a kind of chile, isn"t it? My dad grows chiles, and he-"
"You can talk about your male macho chile-eating stuff later, for pity"s sake," Maj said. "Niko, better have a look at the diagram, you"ll see what"s cooking...."
They went over to it, the others following by ones and twos. The hologram was mostly filled with the planet Didion, where the Arbalests would be fighting down and dirty in the atmosphere with many, many others.
"It"s a "built" planet," Maj said as Laurent walked around the hologram, peering at it. "It may look green...but everything about Didion is artificial. It"s constructed, from the core out...there are thousands of levels. It was the library for all this part of s.p.a.ce once, until the Archon moved in and took things over. Now it"s been reamed out and stuffed full of weapons, killerbots, crawling code...you name it. Nasty place, and the nerve center for all the Archon"s operations in this part of s.p.a.ce. But there"s a way down inside, and if we can once fight our way down to the surface and get in there-"
"And there, of course, is the problem," Bob said. The "surface" of the planet on the hologram disappeared to reveal the way into the core-a complex and twisting path of conduits and tunnels.
"It"s a body, with a brain," Maj said. "What it needs...is a lobotomy."
"Icepicks R Us," said Bob. The others groaned.
"Bob," Shih Chin said with good-natured disgust, "you are so retro retro sometimes." sometimes."
"A lot of other groups are going to be trying to beat us to it," Mairead said. "We intend to be first...or at least real close behind first."
"First or nothing," Chel said. "Death or glory."
Laurent stood looking thoughtfully at the diagram-the globe, the involved way in to the heart of it, the "sensitive area" hidden at the heart. "This looks," he said, "kind of familiar."
There was a subdued chuckle from some of the others. "Yeah," Shih Chin said. "It"s a reworking of an old archetype. There have been some additions to it, though. Take a look-"
They spent the next few minutes going over the worst of the b.o.o.bytraps-as much to show them to Laurent as to remind themselves. "The worst things are the shipeaters," Del said, pointing at the two separate places where the "eaters" were known to have been positioned in the main accesses. "They"re nothing small that you could shoot up. They"re jaws that come out of the walls-they are are the walls, actually-and munch you up. Nasty." the walls, actually-and munch you up. Nasty."