Overthrowing Heaven-ARC Read online

  OVERTHROWING HEAVEN-ARC

  Mark L. Van Name

  Advance Reader Copy

  Unproofed

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2009 by Mark L. Van Name

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN 10: 1-4391-3267-4

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-3267-8

  Cover art by Stephen Hickman

  First printing, June 2009

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  t/k

  Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Allyn Vogel

  For quiet strength and unwavering faith

  Baen Books by Mark L. Van Name

  One Jump Ahead

  Slanted Jack

  Overthrowing Heaven

  Transhuman ed. with T.K.F. Weisskopf

  Chapter 1

  I should never have come down from the trees. The treehouse I had rented perched in the canopy of a hundred-meter-tall, ancient, dark blue wood monster with a ten-meter-wide base and a scent so rich with life that resting in its branches was like nestling in the womb of creation. Every other human in the grove was a Green Rising activist, so I had nothing to fear from them. They focused what little negative energy they possessed on the loggers trying to clear this last remaining rain forest on Arctul so the builders in Vonsoir, the constantly growing capital city whose edges I could see from my house's upper limbs, could cater to the wood fetish of its swelling suburban population. My presence helped allay their fears, because Lobo, my Predator-Class Assault Vehicle—and also the closest thing I have to a friend—constantly hovered in the clouds above me. No team could sneak up on us without Lobo spotting them well before they could do any damage to me or my airy haven.

  I was as relaxed as I'd been in ages. The last job I'd taken had left me needing to relocate quickly, so I followed a four-jump-gate route out of Expansion Coalition space in search of somewhere serene, a place I could relax—a place, that is, where no one knew me. I should have headed to one of the Central Coalition edge planets, but I couldn't quite abandon the notion of finding a way back to Pinkelponker, my home world and the only quarantined planet among all those that humanity has settled. Vonsoir provided a solid compromise: Far enough from EC space to be safe, so close to the fringes of CC territory that no one serious about reaching Pinkelponker would begin their attempt from it, and yet still only a few jumps away from my unreachable home.

  So of course I had to blow it.

  You can't own a PCAV and have it guard you from above without attracting attention. Even the hardcore nature lovers can employ perimeter and airspace sensors, and at about twenty-five meters long by roughly eight meters wide, Lobo makes an easy target—at least as long as I refuse to let him deploy decoys or destroy the sensors. I'd told them I provided courier services, which was true as far as it went; that was definitely one of the things I've done in the hundred and fifty-five years I've been alive. I consequently wasn't surprised when they approached me about providing safe transport for a few of their leaders to a meeting in Vonsoir. I was, though, disappointed; all I wanted to do was rest and think. I turned them down initially, but then they tempted me with free rent and food and a gig so easy I could do it in my sleep, and so I signed on. Soon enough, I was acting as the group's secure shuttle service. Fortunately, the Green Rising leaders left the woods so infrequently that I didn't have to work often, and no one took any of them particularly seriously, so I never had a problem.

  Until now. Until the word spread a little too far.

  Glazer, one of the more dedicated team leads, told her friend, who mentioned me to an acquaintance of hers, who knew someone who needed help, and then before I could sort out exactly how it had happened, I'd stupidly agreed to extend my help beyond my Green Rising neighbors.

  That's how I found myself sitting at a booth in the left rear corner of The Take Off, waiting for a woman desperate to find passage to the jump gate so she could leave Arctul, escape her abusive partners, and start a new life on a planet several jumps away. Once a bar that catered to rough working trade, The Take Off had morphed, via an injection into its business DNA of a cocktail of cash, viral marketing, and retro design chic, into an upscale club catering to the stand and model nouveau riche of a world so blessed with precious gems that every other person you met had the money to buy most frontier planet capitals. Sensor-laced holo walls collected skin and sweat statistics from all who touched them and fed the data into on-site crunchers, which then fabricated images and scenes that complemented the moods of the patrons. Targeted sound projectors created acoustic zones that played off and adapted themselves to the body motions of their inhabitants. Low pulsing beats, sometimes from drums, other times remixes of the heartbeats of couples caught in the act, formed a sonic base for the many different noises rippling through the club. The filtration system injected pheromones into the already musky atmosphere; the club also owned the love hotel next door. Human bouncers, huge men and women wearing see-through armor that obscured only their genitals, ostensibly kept the peace, worked the front door, and chose who entered. Everyone not yet under the influence of one of the club's many intoxicants knew that the cameras, the ceiling-mounted trank guns, and the house AI really ran the show. Small video feeds scattered along the interior walls gave those already inside the building the pleasure of watching with smug satisfaction the desperate pleas of the seekers waiting outside for admittance.

  The easiest way to avoid being surprised at a meeting place is not to announce it until you're already there. I hadn't chosen The Take Off until I was in it and satisfied with its multiple rear exits and proximity to the landing area where Lobo awaited me. Unfortunately, that meant I'd been waiting a long time and burning through a lot of money maintaining solo occupancy of my prime corner table for four.

  "Is this really worth the effort?" Lobo said over the encrypted frequency on the comm unit in my ear.

  "I told you before," I said.

  "I remember, of course," he said, cutting me off. "It's not like I'm capable of forgetting anything. I can, however, question your judgment. You said we don't need the money, and you must be nearly as tired of playing glorified taxi as I am, so I ask again if this is worth what it's costing us."

  "Glazer told me the woman was in trouble she didn't deserve. All she needs is safe passage to the jump gate—and she can afford to pay."

  "And you have to help every woman with a problem?" Lobo said. "Or only those who can pay?"

  "No," I said. "This planet's full of people. You don't see me trying to rescue all of them."

  "But if they asked, one at a time, with their wallets ready to transfer to yours," Lobo said, the sarcasm dripping from his voice, "I bet we'd never jump out of this system."

  "I've taken the gig," I said, "so there's no point in wasting more time discussing it. Are you into the club's security system yet?"

  I knew that would annoy him. I was right.

  "Yet?" he said. "Yet? As you would know if you'd taken even a moment to ask, I cracked through its pitiful defenses less than a hundred and ten seconds after my initial contact with it."

  "Fine," I said. "Why don't you focus on it and w
atch for threats externally? I'll do the same, and I'll check with you after she arrives and I confirm that everything is as it should be."

  "Do you honestly believe I haven't been doing those things while we were talking?" Lobo said, the annoyance still dripping in his tone. "Your brain might not be able to process that many inputs at once, but doing so is hardly a challenge for me. Why you humans consider yourselves the most advanced form of life will forever remain a mystery to me."

  "Then ponder that mystery," I said, "but let me work. Out."

  My would-be client wasn't due for a little bit longer, so I tuned into the appliance frequency to see what the cameras were saying to each other and to the club's door-control system about the milling crowd outside.

  Appliances talk constantly, courtesy of the surplus intelligence that's cheaper to manufacture into almost all chips than it is to omit, and thanks to their purpose-built programming, they are incredibly self-centered: All they care about is themselves and the type of work they do. Anyone with the right data decoder could listen to them, but almost no one bothers; background machine chatter is as much a fact of life as the huge quantities of information and power arcing invisibly through the air of all settled areas. I can communicate with the machines—both listen and talk on their frequencies—thanks to some combination of the changes two key events in my past had made to my body. The first occurred when I was sixteen, when my empathic healer sister, Jennie, fixed the problems that had caused me to spend my life up to that point with the mental faculties of a five-year-old. Jennie then vanished, and in all the years since that time I've never been able to find her or even to know if she's still alive. I continue to hope she is. The second set of changes arrived courtesy of a far less pleasant experience: My time as an experimental subject on the orbital prison station, Aggro, where the Central Coalition government was secretly trying to infuse humans with nanobots. I was the only survivor and the only complete success of that research. I was also one of the two people who caused the disaster that destroyed Aggro and led to the quarantine of Pinkelponker and the universal ban against research into melding human cells with multipurpose nanomachines. Benny, the man who helped me escape and who was my first friend other than Jennie, sacrificed himself in our getaway so I could make it to safety.

  I shook off the memories and focused on the three cameras monitoring the would-be clubgoers. They were discussing the current head of the line, a man who looked my apparent age—late twenties—but who was cultivating a teenage air, probably in the hope that it would make him stand out from the crowd and thus a more attractive addition to the club's population.

  "You can only see his profile," said one of them, "so you can't really appreciate him the way I can. I do, after all, occupy the senior position: Full frontal views of the poor fools as they beg to come in."

  "Tension in profile can tell truths that remain invisible from the front," said another, "as you'd know if your memory wasn't so small and so fried that you can no longer remember our basic programming."

  "Let's not forget the back," said the third. "You high-and-mighty lens boxes may have the better social views, but from the rear I can spot the often telling neck sweat, concealed weapons you'd never detect, and so much more."

  "Would you three please stop arguing and get me some data I can use to make a decision?" said what I had to assume was the house AI. "We have openings, and we need to fill them. Vacancies don't make purchases."

  "He's a teenabe," the first voice said, "and he's not half bad at the role. He lacks the heavy hormonal treatments of the best of his type, but he'll certainly more than pass in the interior light."

  "Calf and hamstring development visible through the tight pants suggest some athleticism," said the rear camera. "We may get lucky and have a dancer."

  "Two men and a woman have cruised the one free teenabe currently inside," said the AI, "and the dance areas are slow, so we'll take a chance. Let him in."

  I watched on the house feeds as the bouncer nearest the door nodded and waved the man inside. Next up was another guy, this one the standard executive type: nearly two meters tall, my height, but less muscular and more graceful.

  "Let him in right away," the AI said, "and comp him for as long as he's here. He's a non-paying investor."

  From the few years I worked club protection I knew that meant this guy had greased a few paths somewhere. He might have been part of the government team that approved the complete overhaul of this district, a sweeping set of changes that would ultimately help turn The Take Off from the only upscale joint in a rundown zone into the only upscale joint in a trendy new living sector.

  I tuned out the cameras and focused for a minute on the news feeds I'd chosen to run on my table instead of the surveillance footage most patrons paid to see. Every person here had the option to offer live coverage of his or her stay in the club, for a fee, to the other people in it. The house skimmed a healthy third, but if you were interesting enough or wild enough, you could more than cover an evening's entertainment with your earnings. I'd paid the premium for total privacy; though the cameras were of course capturing me, I didn't appear on any option on any table.

  What passed for news on Vonsoir was, as is typical of most worlds, a hash of local gossip, government-created flavorless gravy for the intellectually toothless, and the occasional drop of spice via a low-quality interruption by a hacker who fancied himself a crusader but was more likely a high-functioning neurotic skating on the razor's edge between utter irrelevance and complete madness.

  The stories of the moment were not exceptions.

  A new mine had opened on the other side of the continent. The owners of the robotic diggers had risked almost everything in a display of financial daring at its best. Would they retire in a month or be slinking to the jump gate with the last dregs of their savings? Watch this feed for more.

  A new installment of Mysteries of the Jump Gates promised to reveal a theory no one had ever considered before, an origin so startling we would scarcely be able to believe it. Given the huge number of explanations I've heard, either this teaser was all hype or the exciting revelation was something on the order of invisible space giants spitting out gates as they strolled through the universe.

  Showing its dedication to our protection, the Central Coalition government was conducting a small set of exercises in space over Vonsoir. We should all be reassured, not alarmed; they were from the government, and they were here to help us.

  The planetary racing ray finals, due to start in two days, claimed to include two contenders that had the potential to set new Arctul speed records.

  I glanced up and to the left, staring into space and seeing nothing, as the headline triggered a memory of a ride on the back of such a ray, an augmented racer named Bob, in the waning hours of a very dangerous night on a planet far, far from here. Hurtling underwater through the ocean had been a thrilling, joy-filled experience that had ended all too soon.

  A large swatch of brilliant blue in the external crowd feed yanked my attention back to the present. I'd told the client where I'd be, and when she'd said I'd be able to spot her by the bright blue dress, a color not in vogue here due to its ties to the increasingly marginalized environmentalists, I'd thought nothing of it. The sight of it, though, triggered more memories, this time of a remarkable woman I'd once known and maybe even loved, though not in any way that mattered, not really; she still had to leave. She was gone.

  I shook my head to clear it and to make myself focus. Maybe vacations were bad for me. I spent time alone, and though I relaxed I also brooded, focused too much on the past and too little on the world around me. As bad as that was in general, when on a job it was downright dangerous; maintaining situational awareness is vital. The woman I assumed was my client had progressed to third from the front of the queue. I paid the table the fee to bring the external feed to me and to let me zoom on the line so I could study her. Judging from the bouncers, she appeared to be relatively short for modern fashion,
maybe one and three-quarters meters tall. The thin straps on the dress revealed muscular shoulders and arms. If she was hiding any weapons, I sure couldn't spot them. Her skin was pale, a shade lighter than my own, and it made her stand out in the crowd. Her large eyes were dark, almost as dark as her thick hair, which was the perfect black of a jump gate aperture and cut short on the sides and thick on the top. Pretty but not stunning enough to draw much attention in this club, she didn't appear to have indulged in anywhere near as much personal engineering as most of the men and women here. Her obvious nervousness—she couldn't stop shifting her weight from foot to foot, and her hands fluttered as if they were trying to take flight—detracted from her appearance, and I worried about her chances of making it inside.

  Then she reached the front of the line, stared up at the bouncers, and smiled. My worries vanished. Her wide grin infected everyone who saw it, and each person smiled in return.

  I tuned into the cameras and the house AI.

  "Check the expressions on those two," said the camera with the rear view of my client but the front shot on the door guards. "One look from her, and their heads are empty. This one is a charmer."

  "She'll draw a crowd for sure," said the AI, "and they'll be trying to impress her. Idiots seeking to show off inevitably spend a great deal. Let her in."

  The bouncers didn't even nod. They kept smiling, opened the door, and motioned her inside.

  The Take Off was too crowded for me to be able to see her across the large open space, but that wasn't a problem; she knew where I was and could find me. None of the people who had entered previously had looked like trouble, so either I'd misjudged them or any pain coming my way would be behind her. I alternated between watching the space in front of me and checking the external crowd feed. Way down the line stood a group of five guys, each twitchy and overly muscular by local standards, but that in and of itself wasn't unusual; plenty of packs hunting companionship banked on their bodies to attract their prey. Still, they were worth monitoring. The reach of the cameras didn't extend much past them, and what I could see of that part of the line triggered no warnings, so I stopped checking the feed.