"Forgot to mention!" the S.I. continued. "Tularemia season! Don't eat rabbit!" He pushed the rope into Murphy's hands and gave him the boot.

We waited just long enough to see if Murphy could get up and walk.

He did, so five minutes later we dropped Buchovsky due south of the lake, and another five minutes after that we were over the southeast drop point and I was gloved, at the hatch, holding line. Luger and Kao Vang were grinning like they'd finally settled who got drumstick and who got white meat, and the S.I. was chucking me under the chin and shouting, "Remember! Wimp switch!" when he tried to give me the boot, but I jumped out before his foot connected and he almost-almost, dammit- lost his balance and pitched out with me.

They didn't wait to see if I could walk, I noticed.

As the helo clattered away north, I tried to collect wits and toggle off my Immediate Compliance mindset. That's one of cyberpunking's permanent side effects, I guess; you start out putzing around with a153 computer for what you can do to it, and pretty soon it's filled your head with binary paradigms and thinks.p.a.ce part.i.tions.

This time, though, I was having lots of trouble switching off the military mode, and for one big hairy reason: Luger. All semester long I'd been praying he'd get detailed into someone else's ComSurEx. We'd been feeding an att.i.tude clash ever since the Peloponnesian Wars, and it'd grown up to be a True Hate.

Made good strategic from his viewpoint, I suppose. Objectification, again: The quick path to status is to find the outsidish geek in the group and add a new wrinkle to the usual geek-dumping that goes on. Roid Rogers did a real good job of flagging me as the designated cla.s.s dump.

By the time Luger came back to the Academy there was a comfy Torturer's a.s.sistant niche just waiting for an occupant, and when Rogers graduated at the end of my second Grade One year it was perfect CPO (Cake, Piece Of) for Luger to pick up his fallen banner and carry on.

But I for one was tired of gravel in my food, ants in my toothpaste, and flunking inspection because that zut-head had used my footlocker for a chamber pot. I was real tired of living full-time in tight-zipper jumpsuits so's to avoid a repeat of amateur proctoscopy night with Mengele Junior. Someday soon I needed to zero the account but good!

This started to damper the fear a bit. Maybe ComSurEx was a good time for settling up? Out here, in the woods, with no staffers between us and permission-orders, even-to do anything short of wasting the sucker?

Hmm, maybe. Kao Vang was along too, though. I'd gotten both Deke Luger and his best apprentice brownshirt, and it sounded like they were planning an epic geek-dump for me. Still, if I could separate them...

No plan on how to do that just yet, though. I pushed the issue on the stack, hoping an idea would pop off if I gave it enough time, and started checking out my gear.

My canteen was empty. The "basic survival kit" turned out to be a roll of sterile gauze, a tupperware of water decon pills, and the seriously154 wicked sheath knife all uppercla.s.smen carry. Uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the b.u.t.tcap of the knife, I found about a dozen matches and a compa.s.s that claimed the sun rose in the south. That's how you keep cadets from going walkaway, I suppose. Nothing in the BSK looked even remotely like food.

I cut off the negative think right there. No water, at least, I could do something about. Taking a rough bearing from the sun, I headed northwest to find the lake. Along the way, to pump my att.i.tude, I started prioritizing my positive situationals.

Positive: It was real ratty and I wouldn't step into air with it, but the thing in my parachute bag was definitely a squarechute. With work, I could have a decent tent.

Positive: Buchovsky had the drop point just to my west. I had a shade less than zero respect for Buchovsky; he'd won his Academy scholarship by pursuing advanced studies in recreational pharmacy, and I suspect he smoked a major slice of his headchips in the process. All us cadets lived and breathed the Colonel's Number One Rule ("Keep your head down"), but in the two years since he'd come to the Academy I'd never once seen Buchovsky put his head up.

I stopped walking for a mo, listened for the helo, and took a guess at elapsed realtime: Ten minutes. By now Buchovsky'd be gone to ground so hard they'd have to backhoe him out. He was no threat to me.

Murphy, then? No, Murphy was hostile, but stupid. More dangerous to himself than anyone else. I finished running my preliminary threat a.s.sessment and decided I only needed to worry about Luger and Kao Vang.

That's when I shut that line of thought off cold. I wanted to keep fixated on positives.

Positive: It didn't matter who had the drop point just north of me.

Doug Luger and Kao Vang would link up (Rules? What rules?) before they started hunting me. That bought me some extra time.

Positive: Because of some weird idea about fairness I was trying not to think about it too much, but I had a dozen G-ration bars zipped into my jumpsuit pockets. Hey, I never said Luger was wrong when he called155 me a smarta.s.s, did I?

Then I got the bottom of my positives list and the last item turned out to be something of a puzzler, even for me. So I found a fallen tree, kicked it to scare out the occupants (none found), and sat down to think it over. Unzipping my jumpsuit, I reached down to my deepest, most secure, hidden inside pocket and whipped out- My trusty old Starfire 600 microportable computer.

Whipped it out, and looked at it, and wondered why the h.e.l.l I'd packed it along. Oh sure, part of it was basic fear of my bunkies going on a find-'n'-trash mission while I was gone. I'd seen what they'd done to Buchovsky's stillvid camera and Murphy's a.n.a.log guitar. Real early on, I picked up on how the staffers looked the other way while your bunkies destroyed whatever it was made you different from a standardissue skinhead. That's their job, after all, turning normal kids into faceless guys in dangerous green. It'd been over two years since Lewellyn's successor booted me out of the library, and I didn't get much chance to use my Starfire anymore, but it was still in perfect operating condition and I considered that a victory, major.

I flipped up the waferscreen, opened the keyboard wings, and ran my fingers over the touchpads. The batteries were at full charge; the factory ROMware was intact and useful as ever. ("Take a memo, Miss Jones: Twelve six-hundred-calorie ration bars consumed over seven days yields an average daily caloric intake of 1028.5714, so Harris will lose weight this week, but how much? What if we pie-chart out a sweat coefficient of...") I took another few minutes to verify the bubbleware I'd written in myself. The curvilinear interpolations, polar equations, Poisson distribution, chi-square test--yep, still there. The wicked little crackersys and bandit commware that'd won me this scholarship to Auschwitz North? Of course. Didn't look like a promising place to find a network to plug into, though.

The battery charge indicator ticked down to 99%.

After a few minutes of keystroking I decided that sitting on the log was getting me two steps short of nowhere, so I closed up the Starfire,156 tucked it back inside, and continued my trudge to the lake.157

Chapter 14.

The lake was one of your standard shallow, rocky, weedy affairs.

The map back in the briefing shed showed a good-sized marsh along the east sh.o.r.e; when I got a look at it, I decided the marsh was even better than advertised. Luger and Kao Vang'd have to either cross it or circle it, and either way'd buy me considerable more time. Using some gauze to filter out the big bits, I kneeled down and started filling my canteen.

While the water blurped in, I flagged on some small fish-bluegills, I think-watching me from the reeds, which was another promising sign. The ration bars'd get me through the week, but it helped to have backup food located.

The last air bubbled out of the canteen. I stood up, popped in a decon tablet, capped the canteen, and started shaking it. Fish, huh? How did the S.I. say you catch fish?

He didn't. He spent all his time talking about neutralizing nonfriendlies, and never got around to fish. Maybe if the academy'd been built somewhere where the fish were well-armed and unrepentant Leninists...

So did the handbook say anything?

Yeah. It said if you were stupid enough to leave your rifle and fishing pole behind whenever you were "at risk of partic.i.p.ating in a survival experience" (i.e., when leaving your home/bunker to buy ammunition, food, krugerrands, or the latest issue of Soldier of Fortune), you could pry off the bra.s.s end cap of your military-style web belt, spin out a few feet of thread, and improvise a gorge lure from the bra.s.s.

I looked down at my belt, fondling the fused black plastic end.

Except for dress greens, n.o.body wears bra.s.s anymore. They say the ChiComms have a targeting radar that can lock in on a metal belt buckle at two klicks, stick an I-frag right in your belly b.u.t.ton. I spent a minute thinking about the updates I'd someday put in the handbook.158 Which was truly bad tactical. 'Cause while I was standing there shaking the canteen and thinking edits, concurrent with searching my head for something to help me outsmart those little fish with their teeny tiny little primitive brains, Luger came down to the opposite sh.o.r.e, spotted me, and got a fix on my position. The first I knew about it was when his voice came braying and echoing across the lake, "Ha-a-r-r-r-is!

I'm coming to ge-e-t-t y-o-o-u!"

Zutcakes! I dropped my canteen, scooped it up again, lit out into the trees; charged up the lake bank, through some scrub pine, plowing into a raspberry patch and through it, then diving into the high gra.s.s- A hundred yards later, face stinging from whipped branches, my hands scratched and bleeding from the raspberry thorns, I finally beat down my teeny tiny little primitive brain and pushed it back into its part.i.tion, then asked myself the big question: Why are you running?

'Cause I'm scared, is why! 'Cause two years of threats and bullying and rabbit punches in the dark have paid off. Luger has me programmed for scared p.i.s.sless and he has me programmed thorough!

That's when the little voice in my head started telling me I was an idiot for even thinking about taking Luger out. No staffers to buffer us was his advantage! The full-contact rules meant there was almost no limit on what he could do to me, especially with Kao Vang to perform for! My ComSurEx mission wasn't going to be zeroing Luger's account.

It was going to be true surviving.

Think, think, think! I beat the panic back down again and tried to fudge up some plans. First instinct was to do a fast fade west, into Buchovsky's territory, and keep moving. With luck and a head start, they'd just chase me around the lake for a week.

No, I ran it in my head and it didn't work. They'd stick to the sh.o.r.e; I'd take to the woods for cover, and my path'd be lots longer then theirs.

A flat-out run'd burn calories, too, and waste water. All they'd have to do's stay between me and the lake and pick me off when I came down to refill my canteen.

I kept trying to kickstart my cyberpunk mindset, but it just sputtered159 and died. The parachute? It'd have to go; I didn't need the extra weight, and no point making a camp without a palisade around it and an army to defend it. I hid the 'chute pack as best I could in the tall gra.s.s.

What next? I didn't know, dammit, I didn't know! I needed a process, a plan, a really good piece of strategic think! I needed something to stuff into the mouth of that voice that kept yelling, "Forget thinking, Harris! RUN!"

I needed more information, is what I needed. Kludging together a working set of nerves, I started hiking northeast, right into the mouth of the beast.

Block that thought, and fixate on the marsh. You need to learn more about the marsh. Never mind what's on the other side. Thinksing a drill chant to keep the feet moving.

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

By noon I'd scouted enough to know they'd have to be nuts to try crossing the marsh. Instead they'd circle it, go way east; this started to suggest the kernel of an idea to me. Maybe what I needed wasn't a regurge of my military strategies cla.s.ses, but some good ol' cyberpunky role-playing gamethink. How does Luger think my mind works?

Easy. Luger's paradigm of Harris is a frightened, wimpy, "invertebrate coward" (Luger wouldn't know the difference 'tween that and inveterate) who'd be scared irrational, run west. If Luger could just stay on his heels, keep him moving, run him down...

Inference: Luger'd worry about the time he lost to circling the marsh. He'd cut corners, beeline from the east end of the marsh to the last contact point on the south sh.o.r.e of the lake. If I tucked myself up near the edge of the marsh and went subtle for a day or two, he'd go right past me. If he was real good at tracking, he might get to the contact point and find I doubled back, but by that time I'd be behind him.

Which opened up a whole new range of interesting possibilities.

The rest of the day was a tense unevent. When the hungries got too160 bad, I took a bite of ration bar and munched it slow. Otherwise, I spent my time scouting for more food backups and an invisible place to sleep.

The food prospecting was a total waste. The berries weren't in season, and I didn't find anything else I wanted to stick in my mouth. The bed hunt went better, and towards dusk I carefully, tracklessly, worked my way back to a thick patch of ferns, burrowed deep into the middle, and settled down for a good night's sleep.

I should have known better.

Me and the deerflies had been having a running skirmish all day, but after dark the bugs. .h.i.t in battalion strength. Black flies, gnats, mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds-a few hours of futile swatting, and I pulled up my hood, zipped shut everything with a zipper, tried to internalize, and found my hungry tummy sitting there waiting to have a word with me. The stomach and I argued for a while about whether I should eat another ration bar, until the feel of little buggy feet on my skin got so bad I pulled out the Starfire, filled the display with 80 columns by 24 rows of 8 (you'd be amazed how much light that makes), and risked fifteen minutes' light picking wood ticks off.

By the time I was done debugging, sleep was truly unreachable.

Each twitching hair and flowing bead of sweat became a tick crawling up my back, and I drove myself so nuts trying to find the little b.a.s.t.a.r.ds that I finally started diddling with the computer, just to keep from thinking about the bugs getting fat on my blood.

I word-processed some changes for the survival handbook. I crunched some numbers to estimate how many mosquitoes I'd swat before ComSurEx was over (132,775). I wrote a little a.s.sembly program that did nothing in particular. Truth to tell, two years of only using the computer in secret had left my cyberskills a lot rustier than I liked. It started to annoy me that I couldn't think of anything fun to do with the Starfire, until I saw the charge indicator tick down to 85% and realized that even boring stuff would be impossible when the batteries croaked.

So I shut if off and lay there in the dark, wondering again why I'd brought it along.161 It had something to do with defiance. After a couple years of Sunday morning a.s.sembly, I'd flag that one of Colonel Ernst Von Schlager's favorite rags was technology. He could stand up there for hours tirading on some new weapon the Pentagon was buying and why it wouldn't work. (For reference, the only time I ever saw the Colonel look happy was when he was teaching hoplite shield-and-spear drill. In a dream once I saw him standing before Philip of Macedon saying, "Look, these iron swords rust, they're brittle, and on top of that we'll have a serious window of vulnerability while we retrain our troops. I say, stick with bronze.") After one of the colonel's recent rants, some poor Grade Five b.a.l.l.sed up enough to pop the question I'd been muttering ever since I arrived at the Academy. "Sir? The Real Army uses portable computers for tactical decision a.s.sist, sir," he'd said. "How come we aren't training on TactiComps, sir?"

The answer he got was cla.s.sic Von Schlager. The colonel said- bellowed, actually-"Computers? Soldiers don't need computers?

Soldiers need guns that don't jam at thirty below! Soldiers need bayonets that stay sharp when they hit bone! You want computers?

Those d.a.m.n boxes aren't half as useful as a good dry pair of socks!"

Then he knocked the cadet down a full grade for asking questions.

A sad case. Five years at the academy and the kid still hadn't learned the true meaning of Keep Your Head Down.

Anyway, that's when I decided to pack the Starfire, I guess.

Between it and my basic personal smarts, I got this idea that I'd cobble up something during ComSurEx that'd prove computers are useful in the field, win me campwide undying respect, and maybe even get me a grunt of admiration from the colonel. I mean, I was gonna stand him on his fritzin' ear!

As soon as I came up with a good idea.

Meantime...meantime...I fell asleep.

I thought it was a nightmare, but the voice stayed with me after I162 woke up. A cloudy dawn was just breaking, and I was cold, damp, stiff-and listening to the S.I. "Had enough yet, Harris?" he whispered, sibilant and close to my ear. "Ready to wimp out?" I blinked the sleep out of my eyes and looked around. How had that m.o.f.o found me?

"We both know you won't make it," he said, smug, "so why not yank the switch now? Just think of your d.i.c.k; I'm sure it'll seem familiar."

It was the d.a.m.ned collar! Not only did it have telemetry, it had a voice channel, too!

"Well, Harris? Aren't you man enough to even answer?"

Two-way voice? There had to be some way I could use that. But first, I worked up my most gutteral and said, "Listen, s.c.r.o.t.u.m-face. I'm gonna beat this d.a.m.n game, and then I'm gonna come back and stick this collar right up your-" The faint hiss of the carrier faded out. He'd had his jolly little torment; he wasn't listening anymore.

Still, he'd given me new data to chew on. The collar supported twoway voice and did it without an antenna, so it must bounce signal off NavSat. I already knew about the telemetry uplink; suppose it had a downlink they weren't using? Was this my answer? Was it time to open a new high frontier in cyberhacking?

I started feeling around my neck. The academy never bought electronics that weren't Military Specification. If the collar was simple enough for MilSpec, I could probably override the wimp switch and take it off without trouble. Then I'd get into the wiring and use the Starfire to tap NavSat for a precise locational on Luger.

Yeah, I could try it. But why bother? When Luger was close enough to be a threat, I'd be able to see him, hear him, smell him. If he was across the marsh, I didn't need to locate him any more precise than that.

The colonel's Number Two Rule was, "Never call a napalm strike for a one-bullet job." I stopped futzing with the collar, slithered out of my fern patch, and set off to do a brief morning scout.

By nightfall I was starting to feel safe. Except for two quick scouts163 that didn't turn up any sign of headhunters, I'd spent the whole day lying low and letting the deerflies teach me stoicism. The gamethink was going pretty good, I figured; by my reckoning Luger and Kao Vang were now klicks away and getting tired and hungry. I pictured the looks on their faces when they realized my trail was circling all over the place, and started to giggle.

Aw, h.e.l.l. Truth to h.e.l.l, I was feeling smug!

The only fly in my thick 'n' creamy gloat was I still couldn't get the good ideas to stop skulking around in the back of my mind and step into the light where I could see them. Best thought I'd had all day was a vague regret that it wasn't Luger who had the Starfire. Given the chips inside it, even with Cla.s.s-B shielding it'd radiate noise on the 32- megahertz band when it was working. If Luger had the computer and I had a truly decent radio direction finder...

Like I said, no really good ideas.

Still, my unaugmented brain wasn't doing too bad. Shutting off the Starfire-it was down to 70% charge now-I crawled out of my ferns and hiked down to the marsh to refill my canteen. Pushing through a clump of scrubby oak, I walked straight into Luger and Kao Vang.

For a few stretchy Salvador Dali clock ticks I froze, staring at those two standing there twenty yards away and half-covered with mud, not believing they'd actually been stupid enough to cross the marsh. Then they reacted, yelled, charged. And Luger, crazy Luger, drew his knife!

It worked! His fear program was still in my system; I broke, I ran.

Heart pounding, blood clanging in my ears, I ran. Dark was falling; I picked up a cloud of hungry gnats. Beating at the gnats, waving my arms like a spastic, I ran. What stopped me, finally, was catching my foot on something and skidding my face into the dry dirt and pine needles.

Blackout.164

Chapter 15.