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  Grist-based weapons and demolition devices are rapidly changing. To cover in detail all such weapons is beyond the scope of this manual. Forward Development releases all new weaponry with tutorial and dedicated teaching converts that can conduct classes or, in extreme situations, can provide step-by-step instruction in real time as the device or weapon is being deployed. Always keep in mind that, except in the case of very complex weaponry, individual teachers are merely semisentient programs and are not free converts. Common sense should prevail when acting on their recommendations.

  ASSAULT

  Grist Grenades and Rockets

  Grenades come in a variety of forms and are either thrown by individual soldiers or rifle-launched. Rockets are self-propelled, usually by means of a small Casimir drive engine. They can have a range of several meters to many thousands of kilometers. In ways other than propulsion, rockets are similar to grenades.

  Grenades consist of a hardened containment envelope and an inside swarming with grist-mil. Often they are combined with other explosives for maximum dissemination and a multiply devastating effect.

  1. Antipersonnel grenades

  These contain grist-mil that attempts to attack an enemy’s grist pellicle, gain access to the enemy’s aspect, and then destroy the enemy by a variety of chemical, biological, or physical means. The most common type of algorithm is a simple vibration loop for the grist within the enemy. This generates enormous heat extremely quickly, vaporizing the enemy in a flash. Most grenades contain a chemical and biological backup in case the first method of attack fails to kill.

  2. Antimatériel grenades

  These are designed to breach minor fortifications and physical defenses for egress by attacking forces. They contain demolition algorithms that physically disassemble a given target molecule by molecule. They can also be used effectively on humans.

  3. Bangalore torpedoes

  These are self-propelling devices used to breach larger fortifications and grist defenses. The algorithms they employ are “smarter” than those of simple antimatériel grenades. They are used for cutting through command- or theater-level defensive grist. They are also useful for cutting through complex swaths of molecular-diameter razor wire.

  DEFENSE

  Zip Wire

  This is molecular-diameter razor wire that can be deployed either as a single strand or in barbed-wire-like emplacements. It will cleanly slice through any material held together by normal chemical bonds. This includes flesh, bones, metal, and diamond. Septembrinni Coil is a special form of zip wire that is encoded with an algorithm that attempts to prevent reassembling of the sliced bodily portions by the enemy’s pellicle. Extreme care must be taken in setting up Septembrinni Coil, as mishandling could result in irreparable decapitation or worse.

  Mines

  Mines vary in size and intelligence. They deploy antipersonnel grist-mil when activated, often coupled with a physical explosion for greatest effect. They have a variety of sensors for activation—usually including constantly deployed grist “outrider” scouts that collect information in a given area. Most mines have an activation range about six feet in diameter.

  “Sticky mines” are devices designed not to kill instantly, but to creep into the enemy’s pellicle and be carried along with the enemy to create mayhem later. See “infiltration weapons” below.

  Minefields can consist of individual mines, individually triggered. More often, they are controlled by an overall “smart” algorithm. Larger minefields are controlled by a full free convert and a complementary key convert, a sentient program without a copy, residing in, and voluntarily confined to, the grist of command headquarters. Use of this key allows passage through the minefield.

  Complementary minefield keys always have the rank of captain or above.

  Twelve

  If it wasn’t for his son, Sint, Kelly Graytor didn’t think he would have survived his first year on Triton.

  His daughter, Aubry, was lost in the Met, and his wife, Danis, was in chains.

  Aubry’s ship never arrived in the outer system. The last spaceship full of half-convert children showed up not long after Kelly and Sint Graytor reached Triton. After desperate inquiries, Kelly learned that Aubry was to have been on the next one. But there wouldn’t be another run. The Friends of Tod had been shut down by the Department of Immunity, and the Friends of Tod leadership had been executed as subversives. The only hope Kelly had was that the man he’d entrusted his daughter to, Leo Sherman, had somehow kept her out of the clutches of the authorities.

  His wife, Danis, was definitely in those clutches. The more Kelly learned about the growing hate for free converts in the Met, the deeper his despair became. And, although the governmental merci reports on the “detention reservoirs” for free converts made them out to be unpleasant but humane virtual spaces, Kelly assumed that the truth was more sinister.

  He’d never believed that ordinary Met citizens could engage in genocide of an entire group of people. But he’d never before felt so much focused hate emanating from so many people.

  Genocide was thinkable. He rather suspected that it was going on in the grist detention reservoirs on Mars and elsewhere.

  Danis was in Noctis Labyrinthus. There was no proof, but Kelly felt it as a black and oozing wound in his soul.

  Even now, every night brought second-guessing for Kelly. Had he done everything possible to save Danis and Aubry? Of course he hadn’t. Other measures—obvious measures—he might have taken continually suggested themselves as Kelly struggled to fall asleep each night. He’d anticipated much, but the war had come on so fast—like a great wave in one of Earth’s oceans, it had broken on his family before they could make it to the shore.

  Sint, his son, on the other hand, was finally settling into his new home. He’d adapted much more quickly than his father, but Kelly knew there was still an ache in the boy’s heart, an innocence that should not be missing from a nine-year-old. Sint suffered terrible nightmares once or twice an e-month, and he always woke up from them crying for his mother.

  The only solution Kelly had found for his own emotional turmoil was to find new work and apply himself to it without mercy. When the transport he and Sint were traveling on was diverted to New Miranda’s port after Pluto had fallen to Met forces, Kelly had spent most of his traveling money on boardinghouse lodging for himself and his son. As Kelly had expected, the onset of war brought on terrible inflation in the outer system. The new Republic had voted to create a unit of currency, the Federal greenleaf, but had bungled the conversion from old, Interlocking Directorate greenleaves to the new form. The cloudships, who had served as traveling banks for all the worlds other than Jupiter, had withdrawn in fright to the Oorts, taking all the ready cash with them. They claimed that all of the money was still available in virtual form in the merci banks—but, as had been a problem for centuries, biologically based people tended not to believe in greenleaves when they couldn’t hold them in their hands. Free converts were more sensible people, in general. But the necessary encryption and key exchange that caused the more logical free-convert population to trust in virtual currency inevitably added to the cost of trade. Several of the merci banks (all controlled by the cloudships) responded by holding up transactions so that escrowed funds could earn back in interest the transaction cost of funneling money here and there. As a result, the outer-system economy slowed to pregrist growth levels.

  To add to the problem, several local governments in need of ready cash—notably the Callisto conglomerate of Jupiter and New Miranda’s Town Meet—had responded by going on minting sprees. Decades of value and trust were lost in an e-day, as these governments spent their new funny money on procurements. Within moments, the market was savvy to what was going down, and prices rose like mercury on Mercury. The next day, the currency was devalued by an astonishing half. By the end of an e-month, inflation was at 1,000 percent per week. It wasn’t just free fall—it was an accelerating plummet.

  When Kelly arrive
d on Triton, he took a job as a clerk in a shipping warehouse. He’d expected to live on Triton in relative obscurity, but Lloyd Njonjo, an old classmate of Kelly’s from business school, got wind of his presence on New Miranda. Njonjo was a conservative councilman in the local government, and a member of the Motoserra Club, the club of well-to-do “first families” that controlled most of the business interests on the moon. He had kept track of Kelly’s rise to partner status within the powerful Mercurian trading firm of Telman Milt over the years, and had hero-worshiped Kelly from a distance. He wasted no time offering Kelly a job as an officer in the newly formed Solarian Republic War Bank.

  Kelly, still in the midst of personal misery, had not wanted to take Njonjo up on the offer, but it was clear after only a few weeks on Triton that if Sint was going to fit in with the other children, he was going to have to become at least partially Triton-adapted. That cost green-leaves. Kelly had escaped the inner system with a small fortune, but by the time he arrived at Triton, it had been devalued to merely a nice stash. He discovered that he was legally restricted from investing it in real property until he’d become an official resident—and by that time, his savings had barely bought a small bungalow for himself and Sint and a secondhand transport hopper.

  Losing the money was another thing that Kelly blamed himself for. There were several strategies he might have employed to hang on to more of his leaves when he first arrived. After all, he was a supposed master of finance. But the truth was he’d been too depressed to think of them, and the opportunity had passed him by.

  Kelly reluctantly took up his new duties exactly one e-year to the e-day that he and Sint had arrived on Triton. It had not taken him long to realize that, as far as the work part of his life went, he was back in the world of finance, where he belonged.

  At first he was in charge of a small loan portfolio, and he enjoyed sinking his teeth into understanding the very tangible assets and liabilities of his various accounts. After getting his sea legs and doing a bit of research, he was able to make several suggestions on refinancing that led both the customer and the bank to make more money. After half an e-year, Kelly was put on the bond division team—the group responsible for creating a new series of Federal war bonds, to be issued in partnership with the Solarian government.

  The first series of bonds had been disastrous. They were so complicated that no one had been sure what it was they were buying. Patriotism led many to plunk down their greenleaves. They then discovered that the new bonds had legal selling restrictions placed on them—some were not allowed to change hands for a decade or more. The outer-system merci news channels had gone to town on this perceived inequity, and the market for the bonds had collapsed.

  The new series was supposed to sell ten times as much debt as the first series had. Furthermore, it would be the first in a long line of such instruments. The new government considered the bonds absolutely necessary to pay for the vastly enlarged Federal military.

  Kelly dived into the assignment. He’d started out his career in bonds, and he brought a decade of expertise to the task. Soon even the senior members of the group were looking to him for advice. Not only was Kelly able to put in place the standard trading agreements used in the Met, he adapted the contract language to fit the current situation—and, finally, he threw in a bunch of good ideas he’d had as a young man but could never in a million years have gotten into a Met financial instrument.

  The bonds were a big success, drawing money out of Jupiter, the Oorts, and Kuipers faster than anyone had expected. This was helped by an enthusiastic story (with the byline of the same Jake Alaska who had almost single-handedly doomed the first bond issue) on the Outer System Business Report that, in turn, drove people to a spiffy interactive trading space on the merci. His bonds had legs.

  But whenever Kelly wasn’t at work or attending to Sint, he immediately fell into the gloom he’d known since his arrival. Danis was in enemy hands. Aubry was missing.

  Another change in Kelly’s life was his becoming, in effect, a single father. Sint was going to a merci-based school nearby. They were uncommon on Mercury, especially among Kelly’s former set of acquaintances. Children were to grow up naturally, untainted by the virtual world in which most of their parents made a living.

  On Triton, nobody quibbled about such niceties. Furthermore, many of Sint’s teachers—not the teachers’ aides, and not the support staff, but the main teachers themselves—were free converts. This was against the law on Mercury and in vast areas of the Met. It was an unexpected and very good thing to find way out here. The boy enjoyed going to school in a way he never had before. His teachers, after all, were the same kind of people as his mother.

  Courses at Sint’s school were taught in virtual classrooms. The student body was actually spread out across the school district. Each sector—an area within a child’s walking distance from his or her home through connecting tunnels—had a local “playroom.” The children assembled there each morning before going onto the merci for classes. They then came out, or partially out, of the virtuality to have recess or to do material art projects and other activities that were best left in the physical world. The free-convert children—segregated into their own, poorly funded schools on Mercury—were provided with robot avatars in the sector playrooms of Triton, and thrived in the physical world almost as much as they did in the virtual.

  It was a vision of what an education system could be when free converts were given their full rights in the Met—something he and Danis had been supporting in the voting polls for years. Back in the Met, the poll indexes had never risen above three percent positive on the issue, and Kelly had never expected to see such a system in his lifetime, much less be able to enroll his kid in one.

  Kelly walked Sint to school every morning. He took an hour off every afternoon to pick the boy up and get him settled at home. If he’d tried to take so much time away from work when he’d been a partner at Teleman Milt, he’d have been out on his ass in seconds. Or maybe not. He’d never even thought to ask for it. Danis, with her multitasking abilities, had always handled such things, and, besides, the kid had gone to a boarding school.

  Kelly and Sint had gotten into the habit of stopping at a bakery on the way home from school to pick up a vanilla kipferl, the local specialty. New Mirandans had discovered that briefly exposing the dough to the < 391 degree Fahrenheit temperatures outside before baking gave the delicate cookies a gossamer consistency, but still left some crunch in them, as well. Sint loved the things, and Kelly was developing a taste for eating them while sipping a cup of coffee.

  One of the bakers in the shop paid particular attention to Sint whenever he came in, and she would often sit down with him and Kelly while they ate their afternoon snacks. The woman was far too young for him, had he been interested, and—outside of Sint’s hearing—Kelly mentioned his worry about his wife’s fate. There was no sexual tension, in any case. Kelly had not felt an ounce of desire for an amount of time that was by then stretching into e-years. Whenever he thought of sex, he missed Danis and became depressed.

  But Kelly did find a friend in Jennifer Fieldguide. After she found out that Sint was half free convert, she asked him many questions about Sint’s and Aubry’s up-bringing, and how Kelly and Danis had coped with prejudice and the different innate abilities his children possessed. For his part, Kelly was glad to reminisce—the past was practically all that he thought about when outside of work. Whenever Kelly spoke of Danis, Sint would sit quietly and listen carefully. It took her a while, but Jennifer eventually opened up and revealed something of her own situation.

  Jennifer had fallen romantically for a free convert. Kelly could tell that she was quite taken with the man, even though Jennifer was a tough-talking young woman and never overtly admitted to such strong feelings. Kelly was amused to see many of the same pangs, worries, and perplexities that he had experienced himself when he’d first fallen for Danis.

  And so, when she asked him for advice, he’d know
just what to tell her.

  They’re people, just like you and me.

  Yes, sex with them can be fantastic. They can do special things in the virtuality. Nice things.

  Falling in love with one can be even better.

  It was the second best thing that ever happened to me.

  Having two children with a free convert was the best thing I ever did in my life.

  Thirteen

  One day Techstock came to Li in her office at Sui Sui University and told her that he had amazing news. An old friend of his from his Merge days had been in contact with him just that morning, and the friend had asked Techstock to head the physics section of the Met’s Science Directorate. Old Hano Braun had unexpectedly stepped down after near two decades of service as the director. Techstock’s name as a possible successor had been put out in a merci poll—along with, of course, the marketing muscle of the Interlocking Directorate—and he’d drawn a 73 percent approval rating.

  It had all happened so fast. Li hadn’t even been aware of the poll. Although she wasn’t on the entertainment and general information channels of the merci very often, she always had the convert portion of her personality sifting through the headlines. She was very surprised she hadn’t been notified.

  In any case, it was a done deal. And did Li know who Techstock was referring to when he said “an old friend from the Merge”? Why, it was none other than Director Amés himself.

  The war against the outer system was known by various names during the first two e-years it was fought. While it began with a bang—and the fall of Ganymede to the Interlocking Directorate—the war took time to develop into a full-scale conflict, as lines were drawn (lines both real and in the virtuality) and tested. Public opinion finally settled with a hard 98 percent approval rating on “The War for Unity” as the official name for the conflict. Most people privately referred to the fighting, in the common language of Basis, at least, as “the Consolidation.” That was, after all, the frequently stated aim of the Interlocking Directorates—to consolidate for efficiency and prosperity. To create a New Hierarchy of order, where everyone had a place and everyone knew his place. The fremden—the ubiquitous term used to refer to outer-system forces—were, of course, calling it the “War for Republic” from the start.