The Stone Dogs (18 page)

… and I tell you, Cammie, when I saw the specs on that virus I nearly fainted, and then I nearly heaved my breakfast Damnedest retro-virus complex you ever saw—even managed to work its way into the lymphatic matter. Dormancy period—you won't believe this—up to ten years! The wild version would just rip the shit out of a human immune system; anyone who got it would be wide open for opportunistic infections. From the anthro evidence and the analysis of cognate primate carriers (green monkeys, mainly) I'd say it crossed over into the Ituri population Just about eighty to a hundred years ago. I'll be fucked if I know how, you'd need some sort of blood exchange, or body fluids at least.

Human-human transmission would be easier, not pneumatic or contact but sex would do it. Possibly even an insect vector. The thing that gives me nightmares is the thought that it might have broken out into the general population when we swept the blacks there out into the compounds. They were just starting to do blood transfusions In the 1880s, so we might have got it and back then they'd have had no earthly prayer of beating it they couldn't even have identified it. Could have been the Black Death all over again. The gods' own luck most of those went into destructive-labor camps.

Of course, it's lucky some survived in the Ituri pygmies, too.

Anyway, its given us a ten-year jump on the SD project This is the perfect source of our basic viral carrier—particularly since there are direct neurological effects. Once you finish tweaking this, it'll be like a ripe fig stuffed with botulism.

Biopsych Warfare: An Interdisciplinary Approach
by Professor Colin Demoreaux von Sternheim

Archona University Press, Archona

2004

PROVINCE OF SARMATIA

DOMINATION OF THE DRAKA

CRIMEAN MILITARY RESERVE

AIR TRAINING SECTION

15,000 METERS

MARCH 10, 1973

"Beep. Beep. Beep." The missile lock-on warning repeated itself with idiot persistence, a drone in the silenced cave-world of the pilot's helmet, sharper than the subliminal moan of the engines.

"Shit,
" Yolande muttered to herself, throwing the aircraft into a series of wild jinks and swerves, just enough to keep the
beeps
from merging into the continuous drone of launch.

She was half-reclining in the narrow cockpit of the Falcon VI turboram fighter, immobile in a hydraulic suit that cushioned her against acceleration and a clamshell couch that left nothing mobile but fingers and head. The sky above her was blue-black through the near-invisible canopy, here on the fringes of space; ahead was the smooth semicircle of crystal-sandwich screen, the virtual control panel with its multiple information displays.

Mach 3.5 and climbing, and
nothing
on the fucking screens, nothing at all.

It was a testing exercise, another name for sadistic mental torture. They
might
have programmed an error into her machine. Or simply cut the input from its electrodetectors; it was resentfully acknowledged that the Alliance was ahead in ECM and sensor-technology, and this could be a test of how she would deal with that in combat. Her lips curled away from her teeth behind the facemask. The Domination was not behind in engines and materiels, so use that…

Her hands moved on the pressure-sensitive pads inside the restrainers. The Falcon pitched forward and power-dove, straight down. Something soft and heavy and strong gripped her and
pushed
, pushed until she could feel the soft tissues trying to spread away from her bones and gray crept in at the corners of her eyes. The suit squeezed, fighting the G's and pressing the blood back toward her brain, but nothing could make it easier to breathe or stop the feeling that her ribs were about to break back into her chest. Mach 4, and the altimeter unreeled; 15,000

meters was
not
far at these speeds. The indicator hesitated in its maddening
beep
, then resumed.

"Now!"
she yelled to herself, and yanked at the pads, pulling the Falcon up in a wrenching curve that stressed it to ten tenths of capacity. The pressure grew worse, crushing, vision fading, hands immobile but the AI would continue the curve,
hold
Wotandammit hold don't grayout not now you stupid cow
—

The red telltales blinked back to amber; Mach 3.8, 6,000 meters, half the altitude gone in seconds. The orthodox maneuver, and not good enough, the lock-on was still sounding and altitude was so much easier to lose than regain. Airbrakes. Dump velocity, emergency mode, cycle the vent. The high-pitched roar of the ramjet faltered, stopped.

The airplane shuddered, thrumming, rattling her teeth, ramming her body forward against the clamshell as it slowed; not as good a fit as a body-tailored squadron unit would be.

Might be, if she passed. Her mind drew a picture of how it would look from outside: the long oval of the fighter's fuselage, the stubby forward-swept wings, edges flexing and thuttering as the spoilers popped open along the trailing edge.

Far below serfs in the plantations of the Kuban valley paused for an instant at the flash of silver overhead, the rolling
crack-crack
as the fighters passed, then bent again to the immemorial rhythm of their hoes; it was a familiar thing, and the bossboys were watching.

Mach 1 and dropping.
Lost him—shitshitshit!
The scanning warning started up again, the beeps coming closer and closer together. The rubber taste of the mouthpiece was bitter against her tongue; he must be close now, very close. Still nothing on the detectors.

"Override stops," she said. The computer acknowledged with a patterned light, releasing its control of maneuvers that threatened the integrity of the aircraft.
Threatened to leave me
as long greasy smear on
the landscape
, she thought, and pushed it away.

Fingers moved, like an artist's on the piano.

Left-two-right-one-one. Fractional seconds, time floating by so calm, so leisurely. Touch, touch, crack the vent and bleed air into the turbines for low-altitude boost. Bring the vectored-thrust louvers online, still closed.
Now.

The fighter flipped up, presenting its belly to the axis of flight.

In the same moment the underside jets cut in, superheated air pumping out like retrorocket thrust. Shock struck, like hitting a brick wall, and this time she did grayout, felt the jolt of the medicomp pushing stimulant into her veins. Something in the airframe
pinged
audibly, and a warning light began strobing crimson.

And something flashed by outside, above, a streak from one side of the sky to the other.
"Eeeeeeeeeeeehaaaaaaa!"
she shrieked exultantly, and pushed at the throttle. Speed crawled back up, then the ram cut in, building to maximum thrust, and the giant was back on her chest. Too low for optimum burn, too rich a mixture, the ramjet sound was wrong, thready. But the enemy was on her screens now, the thermal signature of a ramscoop engine centered in the weapons section. He had still been declerating when she did the kick-up; Yolande's Falcon must have disappeared from his board as if teleported out.

The release of tension was like neat brandy on an empty stomach, like orgasm after a long teasing tumble.

"Die, yo' shit, fuckin'
die!"
she screamed happily. Closing, closing; the rearward sensors were less powerful than the ones in the nose, and her own ECM would help. Visual range, nothing fooled the ol Eyeball Mark I, they were both accelerating fast but she had the edge. A touch and the gunsight sprang out on the weapons screen, with the green blips at the lower corners; a Falcon had two 30mm Gatlings at the wing-roots, a concession to the dogfighting days.
Not going to give him a lock-on
warning
, she thought. Closer still, and she remembered her mother's advice:
an ace is someone who climbs right up the
enemy's asshole before they shoot.

He dodged, too late and too point-blank now. Her fingers danced on the pads, and the slim form of the fighter was one with her, dancing in sky. The triple line of the vents filled the sight, and she fired.
Ping-ping-ping,
and the computer stitched a line of hitmarks across the instructor's fuselage; his own machine went rock-steady and began a careful circle back to base, sign that the AI had acknowledged defeat and taken control for landing. Yolande pulled her own plane back and drove for the upper levels.

She was halfway through the second victory roll when the weakened tail-vanes blew.

"That was without any shadow of doubt, the most stupid, arrogant, purely
moronic
thing yo've done, in a course of study marked by mo' than its share of fuckups, Ingolfsson."

Yolande swallowed. The ejection had produced instant unconsciousness; the next thing she remembered was the murmur of Russian as the fieldhands lifted her out of the pod, their broad weathered faces whirling against a nauseatingly mobile sky. A day in the infirmary had taken the worst of the sting and ache away, but her neck still felt as if it had been wrenched all the way around twice and every vertebra in her back seemed to have been squashed into its neighbor. The medicomp weighing down her right forearm clicked and dribbled something into her veins, and the pain behind her eyes eased—the physical pain. Her stomach twisted, and she could taste acid at the back of her throat. Clammy sweat ran down her flanks from the armpits, and the light fabric of her garrison blacks was a clinging burden.

"Yes, ma'am," she said, bracing to attention and staring over the head of the seated Chief Instructor; she fixed her eyes on the crossed flags behind the desk. The national Sag, the Drakon, a crimson bat-winged dragon on a black background, clutching the slave- fetter of mastery and the sword of death in its claws, a green-silver-gold sunburst on the shield across its chest. The Air Corps banner, the skull of an eagle in a circle of gold on black, with flames in its eye-sockets.

The Chief Instructor's office was a plain white room in what had once been the Livadiya Palace, here in Yalta, looking out over the garden and with a view down to the Black Sea. The Livadiya was more than a century old, once a resort for Russian nobles. The time of the Czars had passed, and it had been a playground for the more exalted of the Soviet
nomenklatura.
The Eurasian War came, and now for thirty years the Crimean peninsula had been a training reserve of the Directorate of War.

"Well, have yo' anythin' mo' to say fo' y' self?" Merarch Corinne Monragon was a small woman, no taller than Yolande; in her fifties, with an ugly beak nose and a receding chin and gray hair streaked with an indeterminate mousy color. There was an impressive array of ribbons over the left breast of her garrison blacks: the Flying Cross, for more than six confirmed kills in air-to-air combat, and the Anti-Partisan medal.

Freya, not a washout.
Disgrace, at this stage. Everyone carefully avoiding talking about it, not-friends commiserating.

Two years driving some lumbering gun-truck groundstrike monstrosity with damn-all chance of space training. No chance of being posted to the same base as Myfwany. Black edged in around her sight.

"Ah…" Yolande pulled on her training, clamping inwardly on the tremors that threatened to make her voice shake. Her face was expressionless, save for the beads of moisture along her hairline, and that could have been the crash-trauma. The windows behind the big desk were slightly open on a pale winter noon gray with cloud, and chill damp air cuffed at the heavy silk of the banners, slid across her face.

"Ah, I won, ma'am."

The officer sighed and touched a screen on the desk before her. "Records, Ingolfsson, Yolande, pilot-trainee." She examined it in silence for a moment, then looked up.

"There
is
that, Ingolfsson. There is also
this.
" Her hand tapped the screen. "Which contains good news an' bad, apart from the good-to-passable academics." She folded her fingers and leaned forward, the nose with its pearl stud like the beak of a bird of prey. "The good is that when yo' good, yo' very, very good indeed; a shit-eatin', bird-stompin' wonder of a pilot." The merarch's voice rose slightly. "And when yo' bad,
yo' is fuckin awful!"

Another sigh. "So this time, yo' suckered the best pilot-instructor we got. Wonderful. Then yo' turned a 1,750,000-auric trainer into a large, smokin' hole in a cherry orchard outside o' Krasnodar by doin' acrobatics—just didn't notice the air-frame alarm, eh? We have an
enemy
to shoot down our aircraft, Ingolfsson, but yo've decided they don't deserve the privilege, eh? Well."

Wotan, Yolande thought, impressed despite herself. That was half the price of a fully-stocked plantation. Some imp of the perverse spoke in her ear:
They aren't going to dock it out of my
pay, are they, ma'am?

The instructor took a deep breath. "Well, yo' application fo'

scramjet or deep-space trainin' is, of course, denied." Those postings were reserved for people with squadron experience.

"I suspect if it weren't fo' yo' friend Venders's steadyin'

influence, yo'd have washed out into ground-support work, or even the infantry, a while ago." A pause which grew long. The five friends who had entered pilot-selection training were down to three now; Muriel and Veronica had transferred out. "As it is, yo've made it. Just. Barely. See the adjutant fo' yo' orders; the usual two months' leave, then report fo' squadron service."

"Yes,
ma'am!"
Yolande threw a cracking salute, right fist to chest.
Calm. Why do I feel so calm?

"An' Ingolfsson?"

"Ma'am?"

"Flyin' fighters isn't a game, Ingolfsson. I know there's a killer instinct somewheres inside of yo'; find it. Or it may turn out to be a
very
good thing fo' the Race that we have a deposit of yo'

frozen ova, understand?" She rose and came around the table.

"Congratulations," she said, and they exchanged the wrist-grip Draka handshake. In her other hand was a box with Pilot's rank-tabs.

"Thank yo', ma'am."
The ruby bars clipped onto the epaulets, and she tucked the old silver cadet's pins into a pocket of the tunic. Yolande forced her face to graveness as she pulled the peak-billed cap from her shoulder strap, unfolded it, and settled it home on the regulation recruit's inch-long haircut.