Superluminal Read online

  SUPERLUMINAL

  A Novel of Interplanetary Civil War

  TONY DANIEL

  Contents

  Introduction

  PART ONE

  LINES IN THE GRIST

  One

  It was late autumn in the northern hemisphere of Planet…

  Two

  Her name was Ping Li Singh. She’d been a child prodigy…

  Three

  This manual is a guide for the military use of…

  Four

  This wasn’t going well at all. Colonel Theory, deputy…

  Five

  Military grist is effective for both attack and defense,…

  Six

  About the only thing Aubry liked about Mars was the…

  Seven

  Physically concealing a weapon or demolition charge…

  Eight

  Timing was everything in the rebellion business. Aubry…

  Nine

  Grist-mil delivers itself. The methods used are a…

  Ten

  As the Federal Army commander—the supreme leader of…

  Eleven

  Grist-based weapons and demolition devices are…

  Twelve

  If it wasn’t for his son, Sint, Kelly Graytor didn’t think he…

  Thirteen

  One day Techstock came to Li in her office at Sui Sui…

  Fourteen

  One of the most effective uses of grist weapons is to set…

  Fifteen

  Father Andre Sud still had doubts about his decision to go…

  Sixteen

  The intelligent soldier will consider the physics of the…

  Seventeen

  Nirvana was burning with a green, silent flame, fueled by…

  PART TWO

  THE FALL OF IO

  One

  General Meridian Redux was in the wrong place at the…

  Two

  Sulfur. You can’t get the stink off your skin, out of your…

  Three

  There was only one thing Llosa knew for certain—that…

  Four

  Winny Hinge aboard Cloudship Sandburg, brought to…

  Five

  Defend gristlock at all costs. Those were the orders for…

  Six

  Llosa knew he had to kill the man. The pain in his leg…

  Seven

  We were at Mount Pele when the nail rain fell. We knew…

  Eight

  Leo Sherman felt like a traitor, but there was nothing he…

  PART THREE

  TRANSFINITE GESTURE

  One

  If two people want to use a secret code to communicate,…

  Two

  Twice, Jennifer Fieldguide refused Theory’s calls. The…

  Three

  Danis Graytor added another thought to her secret cache…

  Four

  In the late twentieth century, the Earth cryptographers…

  Five

  Jennifer had been baffled from the start by Theory. She…

  Six

  Danis stood silently just inside the door. She knew better…

  Seven

  Quantum computers, with their ability to resolve problems…

  Eight

  The attack on Noctis Labyrinthus displayed in the virtuality…

  Nine

  With the advent of the grist, quantum cryptology became…

  Ten

  Li moved into a new phase of her professional life at Sui…

  Eleven

  Pelota was invented nearly seven hundred years ago on…

  Twelve

  Receiving the Hand of Tod as a gift from the dying time…

  Thirteen

  The truth is, if Li hadn’t been so desperately lonely, she…

  Fourteen

  Aubry was simultaneously descending into the dark…

  Fifteen

  Li arranged her escape from Mercury with a certain…

  Sixteen

  All is not lost. All is never lost until the final whistle…

  Seventeen

  Danis, in Dr. Ting’s memory box, was bewildered. Her…

  Eighteen

  The rats weren’t going to kill Li. They weren’t even…

  Nineteen

  The partisans had defeated Noctis Labyrinthus security.

  Twenty

  Danis felt the shock in her deepest being. Heat.

  Twenty-one

  During Li’s detention and debriefing by the DIED norm…

  Twenty-two

  “Where are you going for Honor Day?” said the female…

  Twenty-three

  “So that’s my story,” Li told the Jeep. “And here I am,…

  PART FOUR

  THE BATTLE OF THE THREE PLANETS

  One

  The first e-year of the Federal Navy was a trying time for…

  Two

  Jake Alaska was furious at General Sherman for being…

  Three

  On Tacitus’s virtual ship the sea was forever clear and the sky…

  Four

  On paper, he looked unstoppable. But C. C. Haysay…

  Five

  Childe Elrondius strode forth in his shiniest plate armor…

  Six

  “It’s not a bad way to go,” said Gerardo Funk. “Escapism.

  Seven

  Colonel Theory had only one command to follow: Hold…

  Eight

  On Triton, Jennifer Fieldguide was visiting the boy. They…

  Nine

  Kwame Neiderer waited with his platoon once again for…

  Ten

  TB—the man sometimes known as Thaddeus Kaye…

  Eleven

  “We’re engaged at the Mill,” Major Monitor reported to…

  Twelve

  Sherman’s lightning raid on Charon was supposed to be…

  Thirteen

  They had been in the jungle a long, long time. Melon said…

  Fourteen

  High above Neptune, fifty Sciatica-class attack ships were…

  Fifteen

  Twenty thousand soldiers came swarming out into space…

  Sixteen

  Austen turned her attention to the two destroyers, which…

  Seventeen

  The Boomerang and Cloudship Tacitus were doing it…

  Eighteen

  Pluto. Of all places—Pluto! He’d overshot by a hundred…

  Nineteen

  General Kang Blanket had decided that he was facing…

  Twenty

  The fight for the Sciatica attack ships was hard and…

  Twenty-one

  All Naval Academy students, men and women, have the…

  Twenty-two

  Even though he had Sherman boxed in and near defeat,…

  Twenty-three

  Sherman breathed a sigh of relief. So far the plan had…

  Twenty-four

  “Austen, have you got an angle on that bastard?” Twain…

  Twenty-five

  Theory felt relief the way a free convert does—at a…

  Twenty-six

  General C. C. Haysay was astounded. All four ships in…

  Twenty-seven

  “They pulled back briefly, but now they are continuing…

  Twenty-eight

  The only good thing about living in the catacombs of the…

  Twenty-nine

  The man people called C made his way through the grand…

  Thirty

  Elvis Douri couldn’t wait to surf the merci after school…

  Thirty-one

  Corporal Alessandro Orfeo had never been to Neptune.

  Thirty-two

  The DIED attack had become a siege. That h
ad been one…

  PART FIVE

  EPILOGUE

  One

  The lights of the laboratory compound were bright, and…

  Two

  Leo Sherman looked at his father ruefully. Somehow,…

  Three

  “You’re older than I,” said Cloudship Lebedev. “Maybe…

  Appendices Glossary, Guide, and Time Line Internal Download

  Appendix One

  Appendix Two

  Appendix Three

  Appendix Four

  Appendix Five

  Appendix Six

  Appendix Seven

  Appendix Eight

  Appendix Nine

  Appendix Ten

  Appendix Eleven

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by Tony Daniel

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  JILL SPEAKS

  Back Channel Merci Coded:

  Leo Is Coming and Will Know the Key Word

  I have found her, TB! I have found Alethea Nightshade. But you have to stay there! If you come to this place, they will bite your head off, and then where will you be? You have to listen to Andre and Molly in this regard. Things have changed.

  First we looked at the records of the experiment that made you—me and some Friends of Tod did. I have to tell you about them someday. Oh, and I finally had sex, even though he didn’t know he was the first one. He is coming your way soon, and if you are reading this, he has given you the code word. He can tell you much more about what’s happening in the Met, but don’t ask him about the sex.

  He has romantic notions. I think maybe I broke his heart. But there was nothing else to do, and there isn’t any time to waste on regret at this moment, so that’s where I have to leave it.

  We have an army. You will not believe this, but it is made up of rats and ferrets, working together. With the Friends of Tod’s help and using what happened to me as a template—how I became a girl—the rats and ferrets and everything else from the Carbuncle and from every hiding place in the Met have become human beings. It is a strange thing, because they are still rats and ferrets and everything else in a way. And they all started out as computer programs that got away when somebody wanted to erase them.

  Oh, most of the rats stayed being rats.

  What can you do? It isn’t a happy world for rats, and they sometimes get twisted inside and cannot be redeemed.

  But TB, I promised you I would find her, and I did. You always said that she would be spread out, hiding even though she did not know she was hiding, broken into a million pieces or more, and curled up in the smallest cracks in the grist, and I very much believe that you were right, but things have changed.

  The war has done what you and I could never do. All of those crevices have been poked into, all the cracks have been lit up by a searchlight’s shine. The only ones who got out alive are my friends now, and they are on the run like me. What is bad for the free converts of the Met is useful for finding Alethea, though. She can’t hide in the backwaters of the virtuality anymore because Amés is trying to kill all the free converts, and coming close to doing it, too. There are some free converts that he needs, yes, but most have been rounded up and flashed to a place…

  It is a horrible place, TB. They are reformatting millions and millions of people. Wiping them away. A guard there couldn’t take it anymore, and she came to tell us the story, but it wasn’t long before the Department of Immunity found her, and now she has been murdered, too.

  I am sorry for all these people, but I think—and the ones I am working with are sure of it—that Alethea is in there, distributed among the free-convert prisoners. My friends think she’s fled the cracks and crevices where she could no longer stay and found a place inside the only places complicated enough to hold all her pieces. Is she still enough herself to know what’s happening to her? I hope not, TB, I really hope not. Maybe she can’t know a thing, not really. Maybe she’s just puzzle pieces. Maybe not.

  But we’re pretty sure she’s with the free converts of Silicon Valley.

  She’s hiding in the darkest corner of the darkest place in the universe.

  It is not going to be easy to put her together again, but I think it can be done. We will have to win some battles before we can do it, though. This may take some time, but I know you are very patient, and—believe it or not—even I am a lot more patient than I used to be.

  But don’t worry, in case you think it makes me tame. Nothing makes me tame. I will kill anything that gets in the way of keeping my promise to you.

  Anything or anyone, no matter who they are.

  I will bite them.

  PART ONE

  LINES IN THE GRIST

  Years 3014 to 3016, E-standard

  One

  It was late autumn in the northern hemisphere of Planet Earth. The Jeep pulled away from the remains of an ancient service area, and rumbled north on the shattered pavement of the old Taconic Parkway of New York State. The trees’ leaves were just past their peak and had changed to the russet of old blood.

  Still, thought the Jeep, enough foliage to hide in, if it came to that.

  Once again, the truck hunters were on his trail. The Jeep sensed it through the ground itself. Piezoelectric shock waves fluttered the foil of the detectors in his cargo bay. He didn’t even need to listen to the grist to hear the hunters coming.

  The sun was high and glinted hard off the Jeep’s windshield. The sky was without clouds. These were latemorning hunters, then. Not especially dangerous. They were probably all piled into a soft-bellied roller—transportation that would flow into the bumps and potholes of the road and allow them to become pleasantly drunk without getting jostled about. No, these particular truck hunters were not a serious threat to the Jeep—although they might get lucky and take down a thoughtless pickup if one came out of cover to graze on hydrocarb grasses. Still, it paid to be alert, and to put as much distance between yourself and the truck hunters’ guns and takedown devices as wheels could take you.

  Abruptly, the Jeep spotted a narrow opening—less than a road, more than a path—in the forest to the west, and he turned into the trees without slowing down. The trail was just wide enough to accommodate him, as he knew it would be.

  The Jeep always knew where he was going and never needed any directions. He was nine hundred years old. The ancient jeep trails of the lower Hudson River were his creation. Some he had completely forgotten, or seemed to forget, but when he came upon them, their destination, their crossroads, and their landmarks would spread out in his mind like a bud unfurling into a flower, and he would turn right or left, and always be on the right track.

  He was multiply recursed, imprinted time and again on the substrate of the metal, plastic, and fabric of his chassis. You could take him apart piece by piece, you could smash him to a cube, you could blow him to smithereens, and he’d always come back. He would grow a new Jeep.

  It had happened before over the years. Accidents, exploding tires and rollovers, tank explosions. Always, parts had survived, and from those parts the Jeep would become himself again. For the last one hundred years or so, there had been the truck hunters. Many of his compatriots in the forest had been taken. The best way it could happen was to be destroyed outright. The worst way…that was when they immobilized the truck with disruptive quantum effect charges, then sliced off a portion—a hood ornament, a grill, a tailgate with the logo written across it—and eliminated the remainder. Then they took the trophy away. Back to where they came from. The Met.

  The Jeep didn’t really understand the Met, nor did he want to. All he knew was that the truck hunters usually arrived in helicopters flown from New York City. Nobody much lived in New York City anymore, so they must descend from space, where everyone lived. And that is where they must return with their trophy pieces. He could only imagine that the truck parts were displayed on walls (he pictured the Met, when he pictured it
at all, as a series of tight, impassable enclosures), and perhaps, for the amusement of the truck hunter or the hunter’s guests, made to speak now and again in the limited way that such primitive robots could synthesize speech. One thing the Jeep did understand about the Met—it was no place for light trucks or utility vehicles.

  The Jeep had so far escaped from the truck hunters. This was an easy task most of the time. The hunters had many pieces of tracking equipment, but the equipment all came down to electromagnetic wave detectors or grist. The e-m was easy to baffle. The Jeep incorporated the best in stealth technology—vintage defenses from before the nanotech era. It was precisely these interior baffles and shields that made him such a prize for the truck hunters. Such things were no longer manufactured, and the Jeep could only assume that the knowledge of how to make them had been misplaced.