Chapter 8: Spraying off the Deck
Transfer of subject Navarro, J
Excerpt of mission debrief DT-312-3
Anthropometry – HM-Garda I
I woke in the medical bay. The mirror showed me a vaguely Asian face. I was alone onboard the ship, if you weren’t counting Saint Peter. I asked him how it went. The last I remembered, we were going out to needle targets. He sketched events for me, as I did familiarization kata with the new body.
The Cornucopia Research division had their guerrilla attacks. Twenty six casualties and a few just infected. Etienne had savaged Security administration, accounting for a dozen more targets and ten casualties. They were mostly taken by ambush. Once forces were scattered, looking for the guerrilla terrorists, he dropped by some of the Security offices to get the hideouts.
Rafe had rigged his EMP bomb into the car and set it up for drone delivery. The same parts the guerrillas used for their delivery van were used by Rafe’s stolen wheels. Whenever I was successful against the orbital computers, he would roll his toy through the gate and into the lobby of Cornucopia Medical offices to wipe their records clean. All other data mirrors would be deleted by Saint Peter’s hacking subroutines. Only if I was successful. No pressure.
I went to collect my kit. A new Combat skin molded to the new body. An armored pressure suit over the Skins made me look like an Orbitjack. The packs and pockets fit a variety of toys and upgrades. One held a small version of the EMP bomb. You don’t want to go too big on an orbital platform with those. Not if you want survivors.
While I familiarized myself with the new suit, Saint Peter related the political moves he had made with interrogation videos, stock tips and delivered samples of both Prion Nano cultures. All our players were in a turmoil of accusation and media statements. Shorting Cornucopia Co. stock could eventually pay off all mortgages in the Zone, when money was transferred to sympathizers by market cut-outs. The Belters used the opportunity to cripple the Bank Cartel with shrewd wedges from Fumiko. Cornucopia Directors were fully involved in damage control and finger pointing. Daimyo’s guerrillas were either patriots or devils, depending on the status of those asked. Freelance Journalists poured into the streets like ants at a picnic.
There was a political Kingmaker involved in the initial decision to attack the Christians. What they call a Kingume Ka locally. This one was called Ozawa. He was the stick, propping up Shacho Ishikawa. Our copy of the deceased Mr. Mushashi had been directed, indirectly by Ozawa minions, to proceed with the attack. The Prion nanotech had given them an opportunity to play the food markets to great advantage. When they heard the Universal Church of Christ was going to condemn Shacho Ishikawa’s policies in a few months, they were selected as targets of convenience. So arrogant of them.
Saint Peter had adjusted casualty totals to fit the head of this particular snake. Etienne would settle the account once I killed the orbital backups. Now everyone was waiting on me to finish this. Time to go spike the station.
Entry and exit to the station was closely monitored. All airlocks reported their occupants or sealed tight if they couldn’t be identified. The level of surveillance within pressure spaces was very high. Going inside would be another form of suicide. No thanks, just did that.
The outside of the station involved navigating one of the most lethal environments available. Orbitals attracted lots of moving junk, from ships and shuttles, to sharp little pieces of metal. Not to mention the ambient pressure and temperature. Geostationary satellites also generated powerful electrostatic forces over the surfaces. They fought this with small plasma torches flaring in random patterns to control the electron levels, another hazard. Sheeting radiation from the twin suns could flare to lethal ranges. Or just floating past a high power antenna would give you funny looking kids.
But things break. The more things, the more it happens. This orbital station displaced a million tons and was kludged together out of thirty years of uneven development. Something always needed fixed. The crazies that did that kind of work were called Orbitjacks. Teams of these acrobats would scoot around the hull all day like maintenance men with a death wish. They worked hard, played hard and lost a lot of friends. Obeying rigid orders had led to a few of those deaths, so Orbitjacks tended to be touchy about oversight. Station managers had to tolerate independence from the Orbitjacks, because no one else wanted or could do the job. Odds were a troublesome Orbitjack wasn’t going to be around long anyway.
The job was perfect for me, though. Once Saint Peter gave me a copied transponder and added some cosmetic changes to the suit, I looked like an Orbitjack named Svenson. He was offshift, but these guys tended to swap shifts or double up on a whim. Saint Peter would watch for any unusual activity regarding Svenson while I was out.
In the airlock, I strapped on the maneuver pack and went through the checklist. It had been three years since my last EVA qualifier and I wanted to get this right. When I was ready, the lock cycled and I glided out into space.
I oriented to a flight path Saint Peter gave on the inside of my helmet. It had me coasting along the dark underbelly with no lights or corrective thrusts for about five minutes. Cornucopia was thirty thousand kilometers below. I could pick out the continents and cloud cover. The colors were very bright. As I approached the sunward side, a new flight path flashed on the visor. I would pass near an airlock, the transponder would kick on and I would enter the Orbitjack equivalent of a Battlenet. It was necessary to get near the secure areas. Saint Peter thought there may be active defenses.
I felt very exposed when the first sun lit me up. The second sun was further away, but made strange shadows on the complex shapes of the orbital. It was disorienting, trying to determine what I was looking at before passing by. Once I cleared the airlock area, Saint Peter gave me a glide path closer to the surface. He was reducing my visibility to other Orbitjacks and changing directions to confuse traffic telemetry. He was also scaring me into using the catheter. I was shooting through narrow canyons of solid objects. Turns and elevation changes happened constantly. The shadows screwed up depth perception of the irregular construction on the skin of the station. Without the flight path on my visor, I would have died several times. Like a bug on a windshield.
I offered a brief prayer to Saint Christopher, the real Saint, not the daemon traffic controller. Saint Peter understood the implications and slowed my speed down a little. I keep trying to get a laugh out of him, but he still looks through jokes to causes. You have to accept your friend’s quirks.
There was a little radio chatter from another Orbitjack, some friend of Svenson’s trying to figure out his schedule. Saint Peter gave him replies in a high tenor voice with an odd accent, trying to put the talker off. They spoke in a lot of acronyms and capital letters I couldn’t follow. One of those bizarre Shinkuu Zoku orbital techspeaks that are used to obscure meaning to eavesdroppers. It must have been convincing, the talker quit calling. I was glad Saint Peter had picked it up, I would never convince any of these guys I was one of them. Especially not while dodging obstacles and planting bombs.
It seemed like an hour, but only eight minutes passed before spotting the target in my visor display. It was a network nexus buried beneath layers of security. Saint Peter marked a laser emitter for active defenses. There were passcoded panels and cameras. I was also visible to three Orbitjacks working atop a dish tower on the short horizon. The glide path put me on the station skin just outside the defensive perimeter. I sidestepped into shadow.
Breaking open a Nano pack from a pouch, I pushed it near the perimeter line. Switching to UV imaging I watched a tiny stream of Filmbots crawl toward security sensors. It took some time, but they eventually built Skins over all of them they could find. The Skins would stabilize signal to the particular sensor being used. They weren’t completely blind, but had their bandwidth restricted to prevent triggering a response. I would be a blurry ghost, a passing dust cloud. Or we missed one and the laser would give me a suit failure.
Another Nano pack opened and a small line of Crackerbots convoyed to the access panel. Settling over the panel, they gave a clear picture of construction and security. The hardline they built back to the pack allowed Saint Peter to access the electronics. The lock was a five key pad. He had the code almost immediately.
After a half hour crouched in the dark, I got to move. Hopefully the Orbitjack Battlenet had become bored with me. I set the maneuver pack down outside the perimeter and then walked across. After a few steps, I began to worry less about the laser. So far, so good. The security panel opened up with the right key presses. Beneath was a small access tube. I slid inside headfirst and placed the EMP bomb up against the trunk line. When triggered, it would cook quantum storage cells in the medical records section. The living would just re-upload a fresh copy. Our casualties and targets would not have a fresh copy to give.
I pushed off the access tube and slid back outside feet first. Dragging my hands at the exit let my legs bend down to plant boots on skin. When I pulled my head free and stood up straight, I was looking at another Orbitjack. He was standing outside the perimeter with a six way torque wrench. I bent quickly and slid the panel closed until it locked. To my left was another Orbitjack, he was between me and my maneuver pack. He held a billhook, a short pole with a curved grapple. One of them started talking, I couldn’t tell which. I was walking toward the one by my pack.
I said "stall" and kept walking. Saint Peter launched into that high tenor again. He called the speaker "Tyron" and fired off a lot of weird techspeak. He also put their names up on my visor and marked the speaker as the guy I was approaching. Tyron slid his feet apart a little and got a good grip on the billhook as I got into range. Saint Peter was in mid-sentence, when I rushed inside his reach and straight armed him off the station.
I hit him a little low to break his boots loose, so he was spinning on axis while floating away into space. The disconnect in my actions and Saint Peter’s steady voice let me get the jump on him. His voice didn’t telegraph my movement.
There was a blast of warbling static on the Orbitjack channels. I grabbed the maneuver pack and jumped off the station on a different vector. Looking down I saw the Orbitjack with the wrench spin his tool my direction and then pull a cable gun off his tool belt. The wrench looked like a flashing ax. I added a little thrust from the pack before getting it all the way on. It put me into an outbound tumble, but the wrench flashed by a meter away. When I finally got the tumble stopped, the station was a half-moon of light and dark.
It was tempting to just keep going to Cornucopia. At least it looked inviting. Re-entry would be less fun, running out of air while on the way even worse. I turned back to the station. Saint Peter gave me a glidepath and a simple plan. Details swelled on the station as I approached. There were about twenty Orbitjacks out on a typical shift. If there was trouble, like this, another twenty could be turned out. One of them would be the real Svenson. My transponder was going to become a liability.
I put boots down on the dark side of the station. The long thrusts had almost emptied the pack. I took the pack off, left Svenson’s transponder on it and let it burn the last of its mass on a Cornucopia vector. Saint Peter’s feed of the Orbitjack Battlenet showed several workers near my location and coming in fast. I picked a dark path away from my landing spot as the first one swung by overhead.
He was using a cable gun to place and retract a pull line. Orbitjacks can cover a lot of distance, swinging like an upside-down Spiderman. They even have races, among themselves. I had a cable gun as part of my costume, but had never used one like that. It was very easy to miss a cast or a landing and end up broken or outward bound. The Orbitjacks could find me for an Orbital Marine team to collect while I struggled along the skin.
Saint Peter blew the EMP bomb. He had to act before Orbitjacks could disarm it. One of them was blown out of the access tube and two more had suit failures from the overload. I heard the other Orbitjacks calling their names. The Orbitjack Battlenet showed a large black blotch of lost connectivity around the network node. Mission accomplished. Now Rafe and Etienne could finish their missions, no matter what happened to me.
I put some more distance between me and the angry Orbitjacks. They were milling around confused where I touched down. As long as I stayed low and dark, they would have a tough time seeing me. Of course, it would take an hour to get back to the ship that way. Orbital Marines would be out here with good detectors and homing rifles before that.
Saint Peter recommended locations for two of my EMP grenades, something to do with station communications. I was making my best time toward the ship and only gave it peripheral attention. I was following a route on my visor that zigzagged down narrow lanes. On long runs, I would fire the cable gun and do a pull. Microgravity from the station would eventually put boots on skin for the next course. The light gathering visor let me see objects on the dark side, but reduced depth perception. I was collecting a lot of scrapes and bruises, even through my Combat Skins.
Once I had moved far enough over the short horizon, Saint Peter suggested using an Orbitjack swinging pull. The thought of careening through amber tinted darkness to a high G impact held no appeal. I declined, Saint Peter cajoled. He could illuminate safe cable targets for me and tell me exactly when to retract and fire. It would be like landing a flier on instruments. If I would trust his judgment, he could have me back aboard in a few minutes. The alternative was trying to outrun homing munitions fired by the Marines who were now exiting an airlock behind me. I saw the icons for a Marine squad pop up on the Battlenet not a hundred meters back. That put a new face on things. I asked for my first target.
A red circle highlighted a spot on a tower structure a hundred meters ahead. The gun kicked and the line played out silently. While I waited for a good sticking impact, Saint Peter fired the EMP grenades emplaced earlier. The Orbitjack Battlenet flared white and went down. I could no longer track combatants by their transponders, but the Marines would have a hard time sorting out Orbitjacks to find me. That meant their rifles would delay lock until identity could be confirmed. Usual protocol would be to clear the Orbitjacks off the skin before running a search and destroy. I hoped they stuck to the book.
The cable head got a good stick and I hit the retract switch. I flew away from the station straight toward the tower, feeling like a skier behind a boat. Saint Peter gave me cues. Switch off magnet, retract, reorient on a new red circle, fire. I followed it all as best I could. The cable gun firing kicked back a little thrust that put me off balance. I tumbled, trying hard not to tangle the line, until the green light came on showing a good stick. Hitting the retract spun me around to a new vector and straightened the tumble.
Saint Peter seemed to be keeping my altitude down to sixty meters by using short hops. He brought up a new Battlenet for me using optical sensors on the ship. I was a little hopping flea out on the horizon until the zoom kicked in and I could see my immediate area. The colors were heat red and amplification green. The angle was too extreme to judge obstacles.
I saw a new red circle on a short mast out about a hundred meters. My acceleration stopped as the cable head demagnetized, but I was heading for the station a little too fast for survival. The cable gun couldn’t fire until the whole line was retracted. It felt like a very long wait before the head sped in out of the dark and impacted the front of the cable gun. I used the impact to turn me toward the tower and lined up a shot. It seemed very far away. The gun pushed me back into a slow spin. Saint Peter reported the shot was outside the target. He gave me fifty percent to hit the tower anyway. Or I could retract and try a short target to get back on track. That was only a thirty percent chance. Tumbling toward the deck at high speed was not a great way to make a decision like that. I was hoping it hit the first time as that was the only option that would not require any immediate action. My eyes locked on the cable head stick light. If it didn’t turn green soon, I was going to be wrapped around some mounted equipment like a coat of paint.
Once again, a long wait in absolute terror. This job was getting to be a lot like naval warfare. Waiting for impacts and misses was not a mindset I was comfortable with. Control issues, probably. Give me a planet anytime.
The green light came on and I jerked the retract so hard it almost ripped the cable gun off the safety strap. Saint Peter advised me to let up on the retract. I was panicking a little and building too much velocity. My vector now was swinging parallel to the station surface, pivoting around the short tower. The G forces built up to the outside of the curve rapidly. The cable gun strap pulled me sideways to face the tower and snapped tight.
Saint Peter showed me the next target and a projected path. I would have to unstick the gun head at an exact point. Until it retracted I was going to be rapidly flying off the station, a high target on a set vector to any marines looking my way, or a new rogue asteroid if I missed my cast. I triggered the demagnetizer which felt like falling backward down a hole. I thumbed the retract several times, trying to make sure it was coming as fast as possible. The station fell away from my feet.
The target spot was almost straight down, to allow the cable to travel a minimum distance and slow me down. The wait for the cable head stretched on a long time. I fired it back the moment it hit the gun, hoping it would be faster heading back out. The cable was only so long and the station was getting further away fast. At least this time I didn’t tumble from the thrust. I watched the reel counter scroll backward at high speed. That became my world for a while. Life got exciting when it dropped down to double digits. Then the counter slowed at sixteen meters. The green stick light came on, the gun snapped tight on the strap and my backward fall turned into a sideways arc.
Saint Peter showed me a new glidepath. I was going to swing back down at the station, but he didn’t want me to land or slow down much. He wanted me to shoot low over the horizon and head out into space, again. I saw points appear on the path where I was to hit retract and unstick the head. It was getting a lot scarier as it went, I told Saint Peter so. He answered with his earnest monk voice. It must be bad when he feels I need dulcet tones. "Chuy, I am trying to recover from your fast retract a moment ago. What this does, is redirect your velocity out to the ship. You must follow the control sequence exactly or I won’t be able to reel you in."
From the sound of it, I was almost home. Better to be slung like a stone than go back to the skin and get boxed by Marines. I hit the retract a couple times to line up better on the glidepath. Reluctantly, I unstuck the head and resumed my comet course. The skin of the station grew, passing quickly beneath my boots.
Saint Peter gave me a drag setting for the gun reel. Then he had me fire at a red target and hold on. The drag kicked in, spinning me to face back the way I had come. It felt like the cable was trying to pull me back to the station. After a few seconds, the drag setting was exceeded and the head unstuck. My visor showed a new glidepath at a slower speed. It looked like I was in the pipe, but the pipe was taking me way out of cable gun range. That was a topic for conversation. I seemed to have some time, so I asked Saint Peter for a peek at this flightplan of his. I was pretty insistent about getting the whole plan. You are supposed to keep calm in a pressure suit, but I had a hard time not shouting. The bit of gesturing I did while not shouting gave me a slow spin.
This time I got the tactical commander voice, a reminder of authority but a competent briefer. He showed me my path relative to the ship. The cable reel had been deployed out behind the ship. My flightpath intersected where the cable head should be. I would have to shoot at it as I went by. If all went well, the ship would reel me in quietly and I would be home. There were icons for marine forces around the docking booms. They would box anyone trying to get to a ship from the station. Now the course made more sense.
I made a very careful shot, waiting until the station was a large black ball behind me, eclipsing the nearest sun. It was actually an easy shot, considering the strength of the magnet on the ship’s cable. I wrapped my body around the cable gun and let the combat Skins get a good grip. The retractor slowed me for a while until the cable snapped tight. That nearly broke my arms. I approached the station at a walking pace. The cable gun retract slowly put my boots down on the ship cable head. As the back of the ship became distinct from the dark blob of the station, I turned to face my boots at that round landing pad. The cable slowed enough to give slack before impact. My Combat Skins absorbed the impact without breaking the boots loose. I watched the cable slither away to its home in the firing collar. Home, sweet home.
I entered through an engineering hatch, normally only used in drydock. Saint Peter was kind enough to depressurize engineering so the hatch could open and repressurized once I dogged it shut. He talked me through stowing my gear in various lockers until I was nude, holding my Combat Skins. I went to the zombie racks. The one this body came from, which seemed like hours ago, stood open. I pulled up the bedding and laid the Combat Skins underneath. It flushed pink with a transfusion, as I tipped the bedding back down.
Now I had to play vampire and return to my coffin. I settled in and connected all the plumbing. The medical net slid over my head. The big refrigerator lid sealed with a pressure hiss. Upload.
Initiate Running Backup; subject Navarro, J
Addendum to mission debrief DT-312-3
My eyes opened. I was in my bed, staring up at the golden canopy. Beach sounds wafted in the open doors. I smelled chorizo from the kitchen. That got me up. Walking into the kitchen, I applied casual wear. Grip socks, loose shorts and a white T appeared over me like smoke congealing. In the kitchen was Dorothea, my perpetual novia. She gave me a smile over her shoulder and said, "About time you got up, lazy. Sit down and have some juice." I enjoy that Dorothea always acts like I was just in the other room for a moment. I don’t feel like I’m losing time, just sliding back into my Happy Place.
Back on Earth, twenty-two percent of the population lived almost exclusively in their Happy Place. They either lost their bodies or decided to return to the womb, in a way. The age demographic was pretty divided, with lots of centenarians and young adults building private domains and then living there. A huge number of part-timers, like me, contributed our own numbers to the party. Pragmatists held the idea in favor, being that all the luxury an individual desired could be met for an almost negligible resource outlay. There were also a lot of other uses for the network, involving intellectual property and psychological counseling. As long as enough people remained physical to take care of reality, it was seen as cost effective.
My Happy Place was its own little network. Just the team could access me here. It could also run at about six times reality, on an Upload. I could feel that Saint Peter had set the speed up. This let me recharge and decompress a little before calling up our Battlenet feeds and intel.
Dorothea sat a plate of Chorizo con Huevos in front of me with my favorite sauce. In the coffin, I would be getting a storage treatment, special Cocktails and low temperatures. That download of me was technically the active copy. This copy of me in my Happy Place was the doppelganger.
There were a few ethical rules I had to follow in the Garda concerning Transference. The copy in reality always has precedence. There can be only one. Once a body is imprinted, you can’t re-imprint it. It is a one-time process. If there is no body, then only one complete copy in quantum space can be active. That one applies to AIs as well as people. We bent those rules for sanctioned casualties, as in the case of Mr. Mushashi. Fumiko and Tanaka still existed in reality, so their combatant copies enjoyed no special protections. Popular belief was that an AI wrote the rules. All that I had met were certainly sticklers for them. In this instance, we were simulating a zombie with my occupied body. Customs had inventoried our zombie bodies, so no search would show anything new. If they were so desperate as to open each storage unit and check, Saint Peter would flatline that brain and Transfer me to a new zombie later.
So my doppelganger could become the primary
in that unhappy instance, I got to wait in my Happy Place. The mythology of Limbo and Saint Peter as a Gatekeeper gave me something to think about while eating. A side benefit of running at high speed on a network was that I had time. I went to my console couch after eating and laid forward into the face cradle. Dorothea started working on my shoulder blades. It felt wonderful. Relaxation spread and I opened my mind to the network.
I checked the perimeter first, out of habit. Marines were swarming both inside and outside at the docks. Small craft were scouring near space for clues and transponders. Port Customs would be doing an inspection within the hour. Techs and Orbitjacks were swarming around damaged areas under armed escort. All was as predicted. Next were my compadres. Rafe had driven his drone car into the medical center and blown the EMP. Six people in storage had died, along with the target backups. The random loss was regrettable, but we had no way to mirror them from the secure network. Saint Peter was compiling their biographies to check for threats and possible private mirrors.
Etienne made his shots. Kingmaker Ozawa and two of his minions had been hit from long range while talking on Ozawa’s architectural tree deck. As the deck was wound through force-grown trees three stories up, no sniper’s perch was found less than a kilometer away. That was very good accuracy, even for Etienne. I checked his inventory and found the reason. He had the shuttle Fabricator make some special homing rounds. Our airport contact delivered for the usual fee. A rocket propelled, twenty millimeter saboted flechette that can remember a heat signature is pretty much fire and forget. Each target had six military boat tail slugs delivered in a way to suggest a Security auto rifle. They even had the right rifling marks and propellant residue. Nano would eat the sabot fragments, up range in the forest and bury itself when done. Etienne dumped the recoilless tube, tripod and imaging scope in different lakes. The chip programmer he crushed with his car. Forensics should suggest our guerrilla sleeper team cover.
Etienne and Rafe were being moved to the quarantine zone for a night crossing. They would be safer back in the zone with Father Luke vouching for their presence during the attacks. Their cover would hold until Security got their hands on Brian or Tashida. We hoped to be away from here before that sort of conflicting hearsay could lead to interrogations.
I took a look at Saint Peter’s mission plan. The Concept Mapping and Multithread Sim logs gave me an overview of parameters and operations. The math got pretty deep pretty fast. I had some dumbed-down decision trees and color weighted charts created to help with visualization. Statistics were the easiest way to follow the plan, but sometimes oversimplify or ask the wrong questions. The exercise gave me a better understanding of future cusps, a confusion headache and a feeling of ignorance I always get when peeking into Saint Peter’s thoughts.
At least the headache goes away quickly. It’s a simulation of unresolved decisions that pile up at high speeds, keeping me from losing short term memories to processing lag. The human operating system wasn’t evolved for crystalline speeds. There is a concept for this called KISAS. Keep it simple at speed. If I dialed back to about three to one reality, the headache would not trigger. But I would lose time in my Happy Place, so more breaks were desirable. I went for a swim in the ocean, switching to my diving wear on the way down the beach. There was a pod of dolphins a friend had made for me. They complemented the Sea turtle with a saddle I got from a Haifa Spec Mart. It was a great way to unwind for a while.
And so I spent my days, watching the real world roll by from a comfortable seat. The Customs men searched our ship but found no terrorists. On the chance they might return, my body was left in the zombie rack. Rafe and Etienne were back at the Seminary, helping the sick and filing a missing person report for Nurse Medina. Where I went was a mystery, but Guerrillas suspected Security and visa-versa. Since the body was incinerated in the Cornucopia lab, leaving no DNA or surviving video, it would remain a mystery.
Our doctor team declared that the Nano Assembler had been returned anonymously during the night. They were churning out the Prion nanophage for every infected victim in the Belt or on the ground. Cornucopia Co. had had their equipment destroyed in the attacks, and so were acquiring none of the goodwill and most of the blame for the Nano war in the first place. While the suspected culprits were all dead or feeble-minded from the Guerrilla sleeper attacks, company stock had tanked badly.
The quarantine zone itself went away the next day. Pandemonium and public opinion robbed all authority from the Product Research inspectors. When trucks loaded with Prion nanophage medicines approached the Security checkpoint, they were greeted by hordes of freelance journalists. The soldiers would not stop the breakout because no one from Product Research would address the crowds. Soldiers have an aversion to assaulting journalists on camera. A variety of news outlets would crucify them. Instead, the inspectors quietly closed up shop and slipped away on vertol company fliers. Most of them obscured their faces as they boarded. I saw Major Watanabe still chewing nails as his soldiers loaded up on transports and drove away.
The food markets opened up to certified pure Christian products. Because of suggestions that Guerrilla reprisals might involve poisoning Cornucopia Co. food products, the Christians were enjoying good trade prices. Money flowed into the zone, including some of the stock shorting profits. A Reparations council, formed and chaired by the patriarch of the Soto Zen temple, restored foreclosed properties to all residents of the zone. The bank cartels were unable to fight the action very well, having lost cohesion and influence with the collapse of Cornucopia Product Research.
Shacho Ishikawa suffered a no-confidence vote and resigned. Without his kingmaker, a change of ruling parties was inevitable. Our sympathizer network of temples and independent ranchers were grooming their own candidates from the ranks. Politics would be pushed toward reform, no matter who actually got elected. The Belters could talk about little else. Now that they were riding a wave of money and influence, they could devote more energy to meddling with the status quo. Fortunately, they were so independent that they had a hard time agreeing on anything. They had struck money and the Belter reflex is to grab with both hands while it lasted.
I felt suddenly tired and went to bed. My head hit the pillow and I was asleep.
Deletion of Running Backup; subject Navarro, J
Excerpt of mission debrief DT-312-3
Continue with Primary?
I woke in my body. The Asian features, reflected on an overhead screen, still seemed like someone else. The last I remembered, the Orbital marines were looking for me. But my compadres assured me that all had gone well. We were outbound from Cornucopia. Mission accomplished. I had a reunion with both teams and enjoyed a little celebration. They filled in some gaps and we indulged in back slapping and handshaking. Torelli and I had a long talk, although my new body kept disorienting him. It felt like he was studying me. I found myself getting tired early and retired to a simulator. I needed to see Dorothea. It had been too long since I had been to my Happy Place.
Back at Arkhome, Torelli was as good as his word, giving Father Luke a Commendation to bring back with us. The Grandmaster would put it in our classified trophy room on Oak Island. There was a Freemason temple there that claimed they were ordained to guard our secrets. It was hard to pass on unfunded dedication like that. We would get a bonus and some leave, but only our superiors would know the story.
Rafe and Etienne came by to talk about Christian complications. I was coming back in a new body, the Christians would now treat me as a new Zimboe. Rafe offered formal introductions to his family and friends. His wife and a few others would know the truth, but the rest would treat me as unfamiliar until accepted. It was a thin deception that had to be played out anyway. As part of the deception, I needed a new name to use with the Christians. Jon Katsu seemed appropriate. Etienne liked the sound of it. For Father Luke, Saint Peter and the rest of the world, I would still be Jesus Navarro. That was the name on my Garda wagery. This was just a social arrangement to kee
p from upsetting the strange beliefs of my neighbors. Back to accepting quirks, in a way.
My mother and mi familia wouldn’t be so stiff. It would still be weird, getting used to a new face so soon after the last. But they would be good after a week of making the rounds. Take La Banda de parranda, Cantina crawling with my cousins. Looking Asian was going to be a joke all night. Papa would probably get a kick out of it, for all the wrong reasons. They’re family, but that doesn’t make them perfect.
I had hours to stare at the approaching Earth. After spending time on backwater missions, with their repetitive problems, the Old Girl looked pretty good. At least better by comparison. Months later, she would lose some luster and as time went on, I would long for something else. I guess its wanderlust, but I think if I found a Utopia, I would stay there.
End replay of subject Navarro, J
Excerpt of mission debrief DT-312-4
Narrative feed with minimum paraphrasing
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