Judas Unchained

“At least I can get dates,” Oscar shot back. It was too late; the moment was gone. If there was anybody in the world he could trust to explain about Adam and his own past, it was these three friends. He smiled broadly to cover his true emotions. Just who am I afraid of? Them, or me?

***

The simulation environment was almost perfect. Morton had been wetwired for TSI before, of course, but this was an order of magnitude above that simple consumer convenience. There were unisphere artistes who couldn’t afford this level of sensorium quality. The navy technicians had even equipped him for smell, notoriously the most difficult human sense for a program to duplicate correctly. Even now it wasn’t perfect: the smell of the smoke was more like citrus than burning wood.

He was walking through the ruins of a town, wearing an armored suit with electromuscle augmentation. It was the only way he could carry the weight of all the armaments the navy expected him to take with him. Boosted senses swept the piles of concrete and shattered composite panels. His virtual vision flipped orange brackets up over possible targets, which he found immensely irritating. The assessment software needed to be completely rewritten. One item in a depressingly long shakedown list.

Electrical power cables showed up as neon-sharp blue lines threading their way beneath the road. Electronic systems radiated a green-blue aurora, whose intensity varied in tandem with the array processing size. Something else he didn’t like; he’d already asked the technical support staff to change that to a simple digital readout. Then there was the atmosphere analysis graphic. Electromagnetic signal display. Radar. Remote sensor windows, relaying images of the surrounding area from the little sneekbots scampering on ahead. Communications network with his squad members, coupled with all their sensor results.

His virtual vision was so cluttered with multicolored symbols and pictures it resembled some cathedral’s stained-glass window. It was a wonder he could see through it at all.

The mission was supposed to be a quiet infiltration of an alien base, which was being built at the heart of the old human town. Make the assessment, locate the weak points, and select the appropriate weapons to inflict maximum damage. The rest of the squad was spread out along a loose front nearly a kilometer long, each one using a different approach route, which Morton considered a tactical mistake; it produced a much greater risk that one of them would be spotted.

The squad’s official designation was ERT03 after the planet and location they were assigned, though they called themselves Cat’s Claws after their most notorious member. All of them were convicted felons who had agreed to serve in exchange for their sentence being commuted. In theory none of them had a record anymore, but talk in the barracks at night generally brought out a hint or two, or more. Doc Roberts, for example, was quite proud of his syndicate involvement, wiping inconvenient memories from anyone who had something to hide. Unfortunately he’d tried to make a little extra money on the side by selling some of the memories on the snuff market, which is how the Serious Crimes Directorate had eventually caught up with him. The court agreed he was an accessory after the fact. Morton sometimes speculated that Doc had been the one who wiped his own awkward little incident.

Right now, according to the squad deployment schematic, the Doc was maneuvering his way through a collapsed supermarket four hundred meters west. Next to him was Rob Tannie, who would only say he had been involved in the attempt to blow up the Second Chance. Nothing concerning his earlier life or lives was on offer. He called himself a security operative. Morton believed him. He had an easy grasp of tactics in most situations the training team put them in, and clearly knew how to handle himself in a fight.

Parker was the second biggest worry Morton had. He had been some kind of enforcer, though he wouldn’t say for whom. He loved the weapons they were being wetwired with, and went on in loving detail about the best way to use them to kill silently and effectively. Basically, he was a thug who lacked finesse in every department. Working as part of a team was difficult for him, which he didn’t make a lot of effort to remedy.

And then there was “the Cat” Stewart. She never talked about what she’d done, which made everyone else quietly thankful. They all knew, and they really didn’t want the details. As yet, Morton simply didn’t know what to make of her. When she wanted to, she could be a perfect squad member, contributing a hundred percent to completing the mission objectives successfully. She didn’t do that all the time, though.