Doctor Who_ Transit - Ben Aaronovitch [47]
'There's loads more,' said Credit Card. 'Old Sam's taking Blondie with him. Says he needs someone who knows the stop.'
'They know about the riots?'
'It's on TV, ain't it?'
'So why's he going?'
'I think he's got business but the way he's acting I don't know. It's like he's on a mission or something.'
'V Soc,' said Fu from behind the TV.
'What was that?' asked Credit Card.
'Nothing,' said Ming. 'What about the freesurfers that attacked you?'
'I didn't see them till they was dead and believe me that's the best way to see them. Scary stuff. The KGB scraped up the remains and took them away. I don't know where.'
'Probably the Nueva Lubyanka,' said Ming. With Dogface down and Old Sam going up the line with Blondie, Ming was down to just two Special Maintenance. 'There's been some more of those power drains you and Dogface found so fascinating.'
'Christ, Ming, I need a rest.'
You shouldn't have spent twenty years making yourself fucking indispensable then, should you?'
Credit Card terminated the link from his end.
'I may have married you,' said Fu, 'but I'm glad I don't work for you.'
'Management is a hierarchical process,' said Ming. 'You're never going to be comfortable with your boss, however nice she is. Better to give them a proper hate figure in the first place, that way they know where they are. Play your cards right and your employees do the work right just to spite you.'
'Does that mean that underneath that cold hard exterior you're really a warm lovable human being?'
'Fu,' said Ming, 'you never heard a rationalization before?'
She punched a call code into the phone.
A dancer dressed in abbreviated green armour appeared on the screen. It was a classy graphic for a hold signal but the illusion of reality was destroyed by the way the decoder spread random pixels over the image. The dancer was replaced by a joyboy's face that didn't look real even though it probably was.
'Ice Maiden,' said the face.
'I want to talk to Francine,' said Ming.
Stazione Centrale de Rhea
Have you ever used a Vicker's All-Body Combat System before?
The world had become a very simple place for Blondie, an abstract landscape leached of colour, simplified into friends and targets by the helmet's CPU. The data went straight into the auxiliary contact jack on his neck the images forming directly behind his eyes.
Please specify which weapon systems are activated.
The military software had been surprisingly polite, running down a pre-arm checklist before fine-tuning the system to his requirements. It gave him the simplest possible combat environment and divided up the world into discrete zones of evaluated danger. Moving around gave Blondie a profound feeling of unreality, as if he were playing an intricate VR game. Lambada said that the veterans had systems like this chipped into their cortex. Combat software directly integrated into the mind's eye.
Please specify current rules of engagement.
Blondie realised that this was the way Old Sam saw the world all the time.
'Can you hear me ?' asked Old Sam.
Old Sam was wearing his full rig from the war. It came out of the same bags as the helmet, piece by piece, smelling of grease and liquid Teflon. He must have maintained the equipment over all those years. Blondie had heard somewhere that it had over two thousand separate components. He had a vision of Old Sam, late at night, bent over a workbench. Tools and components laid out in neat rows around the workspace, squinting to hold a jeweller's eyeglass in place as he assembled some microscopic widget. Except he wouldn't be using an eyeglass, not with the eyes he already owned.
'Hey Blondie,' said Old Sam, louder. 'Can you hear me?' It was radio communication relayed into the helmet speakers.
'How come we're using radio ?' asked Blondie.
'ECM,' said Dogface. 'No direct neural input that can be accessed from outside. You don't want the enemy breaking into the net and scrambling your mind. How do you feel ?'
'Strange.'
'You'll get used to it. Has the CPU asked for rules of engagement yet?'
'Yes.'
'Tell it Melbourne