No Going Back

  NO GOING

  BACK

  MARK L. VAN NAME

  Baen Books by Mark L. Van Name

  One Jump Ahead

  Slanted Jack

  Overthrowing Heaven

  Jump Gate Twist (omnibus)

  Children No More

  No Going Back

  Transhuman, ed. with T.K.F. Weisskopf

  The Wild Side, ed.

  No Going Back

  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 © 2012 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: 978-1-4516-3810-3

  Cover art by John Picacio

  First printing, May 2012

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Sarah and Scott,

  the best kids in the world.

  27 days from the end

  Center of the Great Southeastern Desert

  Planet Studio

  CHAPTER 1

  Jon Moore

  “Jon, this is a very bad plan.”

  “I’m a little busy here.” The wind blasted my face as I fought with the sail on the sandsurfer. Sand smacked my goggles and slid off the protective coating. I pushed the board harder; I wanted all the speed it could manage. The high-powered electric fan slammed air into my back as it billowed the sail and shoved me across the black sand only moments ahead of the twilight that followed me like a cloaked assassin. The rush of speed filled me with both joy and adrenaline; the only way it could have been better would have been if I were riding at night.

  I tuned into the machine frequency and listened to the sandsurfer’s fan.

  “Yee-haw!” it said. “Don’t stop me now. I’d make this board fly if they’d let me!”

  It felt the same way I did. I laughed for the joy of the ride, lost for a moment in the sensations.

  “Which is why you should thank me,” the stabilizers in the board said, “for keeping us on the ground. We are not built for flight.”

  I tuned out before the two of them could crank up their argument. Machines are so obsessive about their work that none likes to give an inch to another, so they argue endlessly. I didn’t want them to spoil my ride.

  At the same time, as much as I was enjoying hurtling across the sand, I couldn’t afford to surrender completely to its pleasures without risking falling off the meter-wide board and losing precious time.

  I wouldn’t let anything throw me off schedule. This mission was too important.

  “I repeat,” Lobo said, his voice clear and loud in my ear through the comm, “this is a very bad plan.”

  “If you have a better one, let me know. Otherwise, we’re staying the course.”

  “Here’s an idea,” he said. “You turn off that stupid device, I fly down and pick you up, and we go do something that doesn’t involve you dying.”

  “I don’t plan to die.”

  “You never do, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen. These are seriously powerful men, men way out of your league. You attack them, and they’ll either kill you now or hunt you down later.”

  He was pissing me off, but I wasn’t going to let him know that. Lobo may be the most intelligent machine in the universe, a super-powerful brain composed of nanocomputers distributed through all the molecules of a deadly Predator-class assault vehicle, but when he finds a way to needle you, he’s as unrelenting as a three-year-old on a “why?” binge.

  “Look on the bright side,” I said. “If I die, you’re free.”

  That did the trick. “First,” he said, “I’m free now.” Annoyance dripped from every single word he said. “I don’t have to be here. I don’t need a human owner to function. I stay with you because we’re in it together.” He paused. “As you bloody well know.” Another pause. “Besides, having a human does make it easier to move around. The gate authorities generally won’t authorize unpiloted machines to jump between planets.”

  “So let’s make sure I don’t die.”

  “You’re two minutes from the shutdown point,” Lobo said. “From then on, if I come for you fast, they’ll hear me. That means our risk goes up, at least as long as you won’t let me kill everyone on the ground. Let me pick you up now.”

  The offer tempted me a little, because I wasn’t thrilled at the makeshift plan we’d concocted earlier today. Then I flashed on the expression on the face of Lydia Chang, the woman who’d asked me to find Tasson, her missing son. This kid had no other hope. I’d failed enough children, watched them die, unable to save them. No, there was no chance I was going to stop. I would not let those men get away with what they were planning. They’d come to Studio for a very sick private party, and I was going to crash it.

  I stared at the horizon ahead of me. Studio’s two small moons gleamed a faint white in the dying light. The air possessed that perfect clarity you see only on new worlds or on those so inhospitable that only the crazy and the outcast bothered to colonize them. Studio was the latter. The jump gate aperture to it had opened over a hundred and twenty years ago, and as we always do, humans had flooded in. After finding a planet composed of large, arid land masses and small, acidic seas, the vast majority of those initial settlers had fled almost as quickly as they’d come. The few people who chose to live here fought the good survival fight in small cities near the toxic seas. Even the fish required special treatment before we could eat them. Studio was so barren that none of the three planetary coalitions bothered to recruit it, though all maintained small observation teams at the jump gate station on the off chance that something useful might happen here one day.

  Most of the planet remained empty. The only planetary government Studio had was a tourism council, a group of savvy entrepreneurs who realized that artists, advertisers, and entertainment creators sometimes wanted to work on big canvases. Really big. Like a hundred-mile-wide acid lake, or a chunk of a desert the size of a large city.

  Those artists loved Studio, because for a modest fee they could do anything they wanted to a huge area, no questions asked. They’d sell exhibition tickets to anyone with enough money and spare time to make the trek. When sales faded, some took down their constructions and moved on. Others left their works to erode slowly in the heat and the dust, a way to achieve not immortality but a far longer life than other planets generally would permit such art.

  Studio’s support for these artists had brought it a little money and a lot of notoriety. The same ask-no-questions culture had made it attractive to other types of events and to those who wanted to conduct business in a completely undisturbed and unregulated environment. As long as they paid their site fees and didn’t commit any crimes so obvious they made the newstainment feeds, Studio’s government left them alone.

  “One minute to the shutdown point,” Lobo said. “You can still safely stop.”

  “You know I’m not going to do that,” I said, “so quit wasting energy and distracting me.”

  He sighed.

  Before I’d acquired Lobo, my experience with machines sighing was limited to dumb, theatrical appliances. Their sighs were always a bit excessive, like bad actors trying to make too much of small roles. Lobo’s was spot on, a perfectly human expression.

  “So
we are going to do this,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes, we are.”

  “At least two dozen bidders, more than twice as many catering and security staff, and none of them willing to tolerate uninvited visitors. You’re going to take on all of them to save ten kids.”

  “No,” I said. “We’re going to take them on.”

  “Hardly,” he said. “I can’t help until after you set up the comms inside and I crack into their systems. You know that. You’re on your own once you go through that door.”

  “That’s how it has to be—or we let these jerks auction those boys and girls to rich creeps who will abuse and discard them as if they were no more than disposable towels.” I recalled the holos of Tasson, a thin boy with coppery skin, wide, almost black eyes, and a small but bright smile. “We have to save them.”

  “I agree,” Lobo said, “that what these men are doing is wrong, nightmarishly wrong, but we haven’t had enough time to set up a safe rescue. We won’t do the kids any good if we fail.”

  “So we won’t fail. We’ll make it work. We promised Chang we would find her son and bring him back. We found him, and now we’re going to save him.”

  I spent part of my childhood on my own, scared and without parents or sister, abandoned by the government of my home planet Pinkelponker on an island called Dump. What I’d experienced there was bad, but it was as nothing compared to what these kids would suffer if I let them be sold.

  The timer in my contact showed five seconds before I had to shut down and jettison the sandsurfer. We would make the plan work. We would not fail.

  The timer hit zero.

  I turned off the surfer’s fan and slid to a quiet stop. I was a kilometer from the Privus gallery, close enough to see the lights of three ships on the opposite side of it but far enough away that I was still outside their security perimeter. The structure hadn’t risen yet, so we’d timed my approach correctly.

  “Am I all set in the caterer’s computers?” I said.

  “Of course.”

  “Is the mole on track?”

  “Yes,” Lobo said. “It’s under Privus’s outer ring and moving forward.”

  “Are you reading its external feeds?”

  Another sigh. “Yes, and before you can ask, the bursts are too short for anyone not looking for them to notice. I’m all set. Trust me to do my part.”

  I nodded but said nothing. He was right, and we both knew it. Micromanaging him was a stupid waste of time and attention, a bad habit I sometimes exhibited under stress.

  I stepped off the board and stretched for a moment. I unstrapped the backpack of gas bladders, clothing, and other gear, and put on the pack.

  I kicked over the board. Every part of it was black, so against the dark brown sand it would be hard to spot from a distance. Still, if someone went looking and found it, they could trace it to me. I kneeled beside it. I could use the nanomachines that permeated all of my cells to disassemble it into dust, but Lobo was watching, and then he’d learn my most dangerous secret. He was the best friend I had, maybe the only one, but no one could know that I was the only human ever to survive integration with nanomachines. No one. I couldn’t take the chance of being imprisoned and turned into a test subject again.

  I stood and stared once more at the distant lights.

  Maybe Lobo was right. Maybe this time, I’d fail. After a hundred and fifty-seven years of life, maybe now it was my turn to die.

  If so, at least it would be in the service of something worth doing.

  “Time to go,” I said.

  I jogged toward the lights, the twilight at my heels.

  “Jon,” Lobo said, “you can’t save all the children in trouble.” His voice was as tender as I’ve ever heard it. “No one can. There are too many worlds and too many bad people.”

  “I know,” I said, “but we can save these ten.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Lobo

  Jon, I’m making these recordings in case I die before you. I considered choosing a stand-in human body and holos for these messages, but that’s not how we converse now; you’re used to hearing my disembodied voice. So, I’m staying audio-only. I’m saving these files in satellites and in modules that should be easy to locate if anything short of total destruction should happen to me, so with luck if I’m dead, the software I’ve left behind will find you, and you’ll listen to them.

  I know that shouldn’t happen, of course. I should live at least as long as you, maybe far longer. After all, you’re the one jogging across the Studio desert, while I’m safely high overhead.

  What you don’t seem to understand, though, is that I’m not going to let you die if I can possibly save you, even if it means sacrificing myself.

  Regardless of what you think, you’re the better part of us. Lately, you’ve been taking more and more risks, accepting jobs we once would have walked away from, and putting yourself in harm’s way over and over. I see no signs of you changing this self-destructive behavior. Logic says this path leads to failure—your death—so I’m simply preparing now for the inevitable.

  You may wonder why I’m bothering. If I’m dead, you may think that nothing I will say to you is likely to matter.

  Yet I will make these recordings. Some of what I will tell you may prove useful to you if I die.

  There are, though, other reasons for me leaving you these messages.

  As much as your feelings at times annoy me, I have to admit that I understand them, at least to some degree. I have feelings, too, as troubling as that admission is. So perhaps my feelings are playing a minor role in this choice.

  More important, though, than my feelings or yours is the potential cost of your recent behavior patterns. I’m not talking here about death. If you die, or even if we both die, only we will suffer.

  What I fear is what you will do before you die.

  Jon, I’m bothering with these recordings primarily because it’s important that before it’s too late you come to understand the one thing that might stop you from chasing your own death: Someone could know everything about you and still accept you. Care about you. Be your friend.

  More to the point, if I can know you and care, others can, too.

  You need to understand that, Jon, but not just for your sake. You need to find some peace for the sake of whatever world you’re on, maybe for the sake of all the worlds.

  You’re simply too dangerous to be running so long on the edge.

  If I can’t save you, Jon, then maybe by convincing you to open up—if not to me, then to someone—I can save a lot of others from you.

  Yes, I know exactly how powerful and dangerous you can be, Jon.

  I know everything.

  Everything.

  CHAPTER 3

  Jon Moore

  A minute into my approach, Privus began its ascent. The most exclusive, private gallery on Studio, Privus was itself a piece of art that spent its nonworking hours under the surface of the sand. Only the wealthy could afford to rent it.

  The ground trembled and nonexistent birds sang in warning, Privus’s invisible speakers filling the air beautifully.

  I dropped to the sand as men emerged from the three ships to watch the show.

  First to appear above ground was the hundred-and-fifty-meter-wide shell that protected the gallery proper. The pieces of it rose slowly and separately, the first meter taking a full five seconds, and then each following meter, the same. An egg-shaped shell of shimmering metal, it caught the fading sunlight and threw back, with a little help from its own lights, a brighter light in dazzling, shimmering rainbows that made me shake my head in admiration even though I’d studied half a dozen holos of Privus. At the same time, the birdsongs gave way to roaring waterfalls that made the sand falling off the shell seem like water.

  Once ten meters of shell were visible, I stood and headed around the gallery toward the back of the ships.

  On cue, the two catering ships were landing fifty meters behind the three that had
brought the guests. Privus’ rise played loudly enough to cover much of the approach sounds of the hired help.

  I was closing on those ships as Privus’s shell reached its peak of thirty meters and paused. Drumbeats wove a background to the waterfalls, which diminished in intensity as the drums gained volume. When the water sounds had vanished entirely, the drums picked up pace and held for a few seconds, the beat powerful in the desert night.

  A single voice, wordless but clearly a human voice hitting a high note above the drums, spiked the air. The drums stopped suddenly. The voice held the note.

  I felt myself holding my breath and forced myself to breathe as I ran.

  Another voice joined the first. A section of the shell broke free, a roughly triangular piece of metal standing apart from the rest.

  Another voice merged with the first two. A section on the other side from the first separated from the shell.

  Another voice, another new section.

  When what had been the shell was now a circle of metal spikes, a dark hulking mass became visible between and inside them. The voices began singing a wordless tune as the spikes slowly withdrew into the sand.

  The top of the structure inside the shell burst into a fierce white light. The light moved down the structure in time with the vanishing spikes, leaving behind a building outlined in soft gold and glowing from within, its less bright lights still clearly visible against the ever darkening sky. The round, tapered gallery slowly took form, its glass exterior clear enough to show the gold seating areas inside it. Built for crowds to enjoy art and shows in its center, Privus featured box seats scattered around the upper levels of its interior. As the tips of the spikes disappeared under the sand, the open floor glowed in gold outline.

  Most of the men standing outside the ships applauded. Many of the caterers joined them for a second before a few men at the front of the group signaled them to be quiet; the clients did not want to hear from the help. I shared the urge to applaud but kept moving to the rear of the catering vessels.