Demensions - The J-hawker Imperatove: Part II

     We were on our way before the programmed dawn, well along the southeast road to Cawker City as if we were returning to Topeka. At the first opportunity, though, we pulled off the main drag and backtracked north, dodging potholes that could swallow entire planets. The thought of being followed hadn't escaped either of us. Xanish was driving; I settled back and closed my artificial eyes.
     Mystery guns and dead wildflowers. How the hell was I supposed to find Grace with that?
     He woke me just outside the village of Glen Elder. It was a tiny place, little more than a few storefronts in a rolling sea of hills and buffalo grass. A schoolhouse on the corner, farmers' wives squeezing produce at an open-air market in the town square. The road curved, climbing behind the nearest of the low-lying hills...
     "Xano, pull over!"
     He slid the Packard into loose red dirt. Before we'd even come to a stop I jumped out and ran for a better view. There it was. God damn, I was right after all.
     Atop the rise overlooking the parish below stood a small chapel shaded under hickory and elms. Stained glass windows reflected holographic sunlight, its whitewashed steeple rising into the faux morning sky.
     The hill was covered in sweet Williams.
     "Oh my..." Xanish whispered once he'd caught up with me.
     The tall grass was thick with them, dewy fresh petals of white and pink, rich deep reds, violets, and purples blanketing three-quarters of the slope.
     I stood there and heard Grace Isobe as if she were alongside us, wind rustling through her raven hair.
     Oh my God, it's beautiful.
     "She was here, Xano. She was here, I know it."
     He patted me on the back. "You never cease to amaze me, Commander. You're thinking more like a symb every day. Expect Chief Magoffin to shit a brick."
     "Now we go to work." I hurried back to the car, my mind racing with ever-changing scenarios.
     We followed the environmental schematics to the relay site, Grace's most likely destination: A dry piece of farmland adjoining the railroad right-of-way, ten kilometers out of town. A two-story frame house rested thirty meters off the dirt road, yellow with whitewashed trim. Well-tended flowerbeds alongside the porch, a barn out back, and ancient pieces of farm machinery parked under the hot blue sky.
     In the yard an old man sat under the shade of a giant ash, an odd gaffer in coveralls sipping a drink and fanning his brow. He stared as we pulled to a stop outside the open gate.
     Xanish whistled. "This isn't what I expected at all."
     "What has been? Go ahead and run a full-circle sweep, radial increase every twenty meters or so. I want to know what's out here."
     Xanish reached behind the seat and pulled a remote sensing array from his field pack. "What about our friend over there?"
     "I'll handle it. He might be more comfortable with me."
     "Says the cyborg black man with electric blue eyes. Do me a favor and be nice. He's probably somebody's great-great-grandfather or something."
     We stepped out of the car. Xano focused his sensor array on the golden countryside. I called up my absolute timing circuit and had it display on the inner surface of my fractal lenses. Ten in the morning, and the air was already hot. "Good day, sir," I called. "If you don't mind we'd like a moment of-"
     The Kansan bolted out of his chair and up the porch steps, slamming the front door shut with a crash that shook the house.
     Xanish glared at me.
     "I was nice!"
     "You could've lost the silly lenses."
     Three quick whoops from a siren sounded behind us. A black truck that had seen better days slowed to a stop, kicking up clouds of loamy red dust. Police insignia were painted on either door.
     "The plot thickens," I muttered.
     A blond young man climbed out. He wore a hat and gunbelt, sweat stains darkening the collar and underarms of his light brown uniform. A star was pinned to his chest. He barely looked old enough to shave.
     "Mornin', gentlemen."
     "Trooper," I said.
     "Sheriff, actually. Mitchell County. Name's-whoa." He cast a quick glance at Xanish and lit up like a beacon. "Oh, wow. Ascendant caste, right? What house are you?"
     Xano raised an eyebrow in quiet appreciation. "Third Sun Ascendant, actually. House of Colos, Niistan'ach sect. Keepers of the Sacred Stones of Bangalu'r Raex."
     "Boy howdy..."
     I watched this bizarre exchange for a moment, then pulled a cigarette from my pocket and sparked it. "You've got quite an eye for detail, Sheriff. Get out of Kansas very often?"
     "What...? Oh. No sir, I don't." He backed down fast, his cheeks bright red. "My cousin Gideon got him a scholarship to the university at Gagarin-Callisto. Downloads me copies of his pads an' stuff. Can't say as I really understand 'em."
     "I'm Lieutenant Commander Battad. My friend with the stones is Inspector Thoom'niista."
     "Hollis Foley, Junior, sir." He recovered his composure like a pro. "Word on the street says to keep a lookout for a couple'a wily Navy men on the loose. I reckon that must be you."
     I shrugged.
     "Y'all sure know how to make an entrance."
     "We're sightseeing," quipped Xanish.
     I looked out over the amber waves of replicated grain. "So what's the story, Sheriff? You find our girl yet?"
     "There's no one to find, Commander. We've combed one end of the county to the other. Didn't find anything to prove she'd ever made it this far. Even if she did, she ain't here now."
     "Is that a fact?" I didn't say anything about Grace's car or the wildflowers; looked at Xano's sensor array instead. "What's on your screen, Inspector?"
     "Wheat." He pointed to the display.
     "Oh, fine."
     "Sorghum grains, chaff, nitrous soil and xenogines with the usual trace elements. I am picking up a ghost signature of some kind, though. Very faint. It could be a feedback echo from the hypercube substructure. The topsoil here might not be very thick."
     I read the tell-tales and blew a thin plume of scented smoke. "Maybe we're going about this backward. Run another scan, a deep one. Access Main Memory again and cross-reference all known constants in this type of environment. I mean all of them, including the substructure. Factor out everything that belongs here naturally. We'll see what's left."
     "That'll take a while."
     "Understood." I tapped the corner of my eye. "Have the data feed directly through here. I want to review it firsthand. Sheriff?" I pointed to the weathered farmhouse. "Who's he?"
     "Name's Strother Tate. He's just an ol' coot, really. Shoots off his mouth at revenuers every once in a while, but he don't mean no harm. You know how them ol' J-hawkers are."
     There was that word again. I shook my head.
     "Explain."
     "Patriots, purebred Kansas. Proud and stubborn as all get-out."
     I rubbed the back of my neck. We were going nowhere fast.
     "Well I can be a stubborn man too, Sheriff. We've got a crewman lost in this dust bowl of yours, and I believe she made it as far as the Systems site in Glen Elder. Which is right here. So I'd very much like a word with this Jay-whatever of yours."
     The boy counted the stitches in his boots. For a moment I thought he might push back the way the state troopers in Topeka had. Worse yet, a repeat of our less than cordial reception in Lehigh. But he turned and faced the house.
     "Strother? It's Hollis Foley. Why don't you c'mon out here an' talk to these folks." Silence. "Strother Tate! I don't want'a have to come in there an' get you!"
     "We just want to ask him a few questions, son. He'll feel better if you're alongside us."
     "It's my county, Commander. Let's go pay us a visit."
     We approached the house.
     "I've got the sensors churning," Xanish said. "We should get the results soon enough."
     Young Hollis was staring at him again.
     "Something on your mind, Sheriff?"
     "No. Well... yeah, I guess so. I was just wonderin' why you'd go to all the trouble of lookin' like us. People, I mean. Must be kinda awkward."
     "Oh, it is at first. Behavior implants, practicing new motor skills, new ways of speaking, even thinking. But there's an upside to wearing a human body."
     "What's that?"
     "Earth girls put out."
     We stepped onto the covered porch, leaving the slack-jawed boy rooted to the walkway behind us. He ran to catch up. I knocked on the door, dropped my cigarette and ground away the ashes.
     "Citizen Tate, my name is Lieutenant Commander Willem Battad, Terran Expeditionary Navy. I have Sheriff Foley with me." I knocked again. "Please open the door, sir."
     Xano glanced at his sensing array.
     "There's a human infrared pattern just inside, Will. Male, moving erratically. He's alone."
     "I told y'all that already," said Foley, his strong hand resting on the butt of a blue-black revolver.
     I motioned to Xanish that the sheriff and I would circle the house and come in from behind. He nodded and got ready to hold the man's attention from the porch. I led Foley off to the side.
     "Citizen Tate," called Xanish. "We have a number of very important questions to ask. A young woman from Systems Integration may have passed this way recently. Anything you might know would help us immeasur--"
     The door exploded in thunder and gun smoke, wooden shrapnel hitting Xano square in the chest. He crashed to the ground with a sickening thud, wet goo jetting from a dozen holes in his torso. I grabbed a fistful of Foley's uniform and threw him sideways, diving after him as a second explosion cracked. Shotgun, double barrel, 10-gauge at the very least.
     "To hell with you, carpetbagger!" a voice croaked. This is my land! Git off it now while you still can!"
     I pressed Foley between my back and the wall. Pulled out the big Odessa and fixed it on the gaping cavity where the door used to be.
     "Xanish!" I bellowed. "Xano! Status, buddy!"
     He lay sprawled on his back, immersed in a widening pool of the thick pale ichor his species used as blood.
     "Ah-m/m/man. I-j/just-had-this-uniform-c/c/cleaned."
     He stopped twitching, and the gleam in his golden eyes went dark.
     Shit! Shit. Shit. I should've seen this coming. Damn my cocksure arrogance.
     "Back me up, Hollis."
     Hand cannon drawn, I dove through the ruined door and rolled behind a quilt-draped settee. Another blast roared overhead and shattered a curio cabinet behind me.
     Foley's revolver barked in response. I waited, my bimech heart racing, then surveyed the room as carefully as I could. It was furnished as befit the period, everything simple and well preserved, and smelled of oil soap and line-dried linen.
     A screen door slammed in the kitchen. I ran in. Breakfast dishes were washed and drying in the sink. Through the screen I saw Strother Tate flee into the barn, the 10-gauge cradled in his arms. I followed, charging across the yard in cyberneural overdrive.
     I slid to a quick stop beside the barn doors, weighed my options in the space between heartbeats, then spun inside. It was dark, no light at all except for a few thin shafts of artificial sunshine angling down through gaps in the roof. My eyes flicked to night-vision mode and I fired the big recoilless two or three times at random.
     "Come on out, Pop," I called, circling the cavernous space, keeping my back to something solid at all times. He could have been anywhere, hiding behind anything. "I'll bring the whole barn down if I have to. There's nowhere for you to go."
     Which was a lie, of course; I could see at a glance three ways he might escape the place. All I could hope to do was keep the old guy occupied while Sheriff Foley took him out from behind.
     I cranked my hearing up to the max. Timbers creaked, above and behind me.
     He was in the loft.
     "Git out! I didn't hurt nobody!"
     I turned, Odessa up, as a massive cask of rainwater plummeted down. I spun out of the way as it hit the floor and shattered, metal bands snapping back, slicing above my eyes, slamming into my shoulder. The instantly-rigid fabric of my jacket rang like hammered steel. Old timbers heaved and knocked me sidelong. The recoilless flew from my hand.
     I lay there on the broken floorboards, hanging onto consciousness. Heard the rainwater draining through cracks in the split timbers, clattering wet splashes echoing far away. There was an open space beneath the barn, a deep one.
     Strother peered over the loft's edge, the gun shaking in his hands. He was older than I'd thought, his face a caricature in weather-worn leather. He wept like a child.
     "I didn't hurt that girl. I didn't touch her," he insisted. "She was here sure enough, but I just ran her off is all. I ain't seen her since. Why can't you people leave me be?"
     "We're just doing our jobs, Pop," I said through clenched teeth. "That's all any of us can do. Just like you." I was sure my shoulder was broken despite its alloy-reinforced infrastructure, and my arm servos were off-line. If I hadn't been wrapped in meshed duroflex it probably would have been crushed. I silently cursed the bionic interfacing of my prosthetic limbs and their damnable capacity to "feel" pain.
     "The hell you say!" he screamed. "I never once forced a man off'n his property, and no sweet talkin' carpetbagger is gonna force me! No one bullies Strother Tate, you hear?"
     Aw, jeez. He really was crazy.
     A tiny cursor began to blink in my ocular display--the interface with Xano's remote sensing array, still functioning. Red letters slid across a readout that only I could see:
     Commcon.M/Memory access: Deep-scan compositional cross-reference aborted. Target area overlain with a localized phased-selectron interposition field, surface to minus five meters. Portable sensor remotes cannot penetrate. Adjust scanning parameters to compensate. Commcon.end.
     What the hell was this?
     A selectron...
     Aw, shit.
     Hollis Foley, Jr. chose that moment to catch up with us. He ran into the barn through a small side door, revolver drawn, and skidded to a stop three or four meters from me. He had a nasty purple welt on his forehead from where I'd thrown him on the old man's porch.
     I thought it best not to move a muscle. The sensory feedback was agonizing. I really wanted to be back on my ship.
     "Nice to see you again, Sheriff. Where've you been, coffee break or did you have to use the loo?"
     "I'm real sorry, Commander." Sweat beaded on his forehead and upper lip. I could see straight down the barrel of his gun. "You should have left when I told you there was nothing here to see."
     "Yeah, but then we would've missed out on all this country hospitality. I have to hand it to you, though."
     "What do you mean?"
     "Well, I keep thinking of Grace Isobe, you know? It's not easy to hide a missing person these days. You can't bury her, can't chop her up, can't even burn her to ash without leaving a traceable DNA signature behind. But you can turn her invisible, so to speak. Looks like someone here in the Land That Time Forgot figured out a way to do that."
     "What's goin' on down there, Hollis?"
     "Strother, not now."
     I had to hold their attention, if only for a little longer. "Know anything about quantum electrodynamics, Sheriff?"
     One of his eyes twitched. "Can't say that I do."
     "I don't either, really. Forays into esoteric mathematics always give me a headache. Messenger particles, symmetry, supersymmetry� Most people take this stuff completely for granted. Kind of like wildflowers."
     "What's he yammerin' about, Hollis?"
     "Strother, please!"
     I pressed on. "You know, Sheriff, one of the interesting things about quantum fields is that they have tactical applications, which is something I do understand. A field of, say, supersymmetric electrons--selectrons, to pick a random example--can be modulated to scramble sensor readings."
     "Do tell." His gun hand was trembling, his shirt soaked through the chest, down his sides.
     "Renders just about anything invisible to electronic detection, refracting EM waves much the same way magnetostatic shields scatter all those supercharged protons that Jupiter throws at us. One small generator could spin a field the size of Strother's farm here. Now what do you suppose he'd want to hide under all this wheat?"
     The youngster said nothing.
     "Not that it would be easy. Modulating the integrity would take someone schooled in unified field mechanics. And the best place for that in this sector of the Territories is the university at Gagarin-Callisto. I believe cousin Gideon has a scholarship there, doesn't he Hollis? Assuming 'cousin Gideon' isn't a figment of your imagination in the first place."
     Something passed over Foley's boyish face, as if a mask had been stripped away. His eyes welled up like pools of melting sheet ice.
     "I'll thank you to speak of my family with respect, sir."
     "Strike a nerve, son?"
     "Gideon died on his fourteenth birthday. We were horsing around on the roof. He fell. Don't dishonor his name again."
     I suddenly became aware that Foley's vocal pattern had changed. The hick Kansas drawl was gone, his bearing and manner more refined. When the hell had that happened?
     "One can argue that you're our mystery man, Sheriff. Your interest in the good Inspector was a bit too specific."
     "It wasn't a problem to alter the data in my transcripts, insert Gid's name and citizenship files for my own. I had to."
     "You sell out the boy's identity to cover your tracks then lecture me about respect?"
     "I said it wasn't a problem, damn you. I didn't say it was easy."
     "A farm boy pretending to be a physicist pretending to be a farm boy, eh, Sheriff? Which one am I talking to right now? Who is the real Hollis Foley?"
     "That's crazy talk, Hollis!" pleaded the old man. "Don't listen to him!"
     "Shut up!" Foley shouted. "Both of you, just shut up! I have to think this through." The kid was losing it fast.
     A silhouette moved in my peripheral vision. My recoilless was out of reach, but the taser was still with me, hidden within the folds of my coat. I couldn't grab it without being seen. Strother's callused finger tightened around the shotgun's trigger. Just a few more seconds...
     "Drop the weapons, now!" Xanish stood in the open barn door, thick fluid dripping from his ravaged torso. He had a Wolfram-Gotha assault laser carbine trained on the sheriff's revolver and looked royally pissed.
     Foley raised his pistol. Strother flinched sideways. A ruby-red flash sliced across the boy's gun hand. He screamed and fell. I grabbed my taser and fired into the loft. The old man was out before he hit the floor. I held on a beat, then collapsed back into the mud and started breathing again.
     It felt good.
     Xanish put down his carbine and knelt beside me, examining my arm and the gash in my forehead. The center of his body had been shredded in the shotgun blast, but he'd managed to pull most of himself back together again. God bless the resiliency of his liquid tissue matrix.
     "Honestly, look at this mess," he said. "I can't take you anywhere."
     I wiped blood from my eyes and sighed. "I love you too, Space Man."
     We immobilized my arm in a make-shift sling. It would've been easier just to detach the arm altogether, but the flanges in my mangled shoulder were bent out of true. Treated our prisoners' wounds with bandages pulled from the field pack, then shackled their wrists with a pair of docilator restraints. Powered up, the neural handcuffs jangled electrical activity in the central nervous system and played hell with coherent thought patterns. Magnetic locks engaged with a vigorous snap. I shot a quick glance back at Foley, his eyes twitching and vacant. "They've got a selectron field, Xano."
     "I saw the analysis on my array. Something's going on here, Will. Something big."
     "Tell me about it."
     "Any idea where the generator's hidden?"
     Rainwater trickled through the timbers of the barn floor, splashing down into the space below.
     "Yeah. A pretty damn good one."
     The cellar beneath us was easy enough to find. I pulled the trap door open with my good arm, the other buzzing on a massive application of stimulus dampeners. Xano led the way down, our tasers drawn. Foley and the old man lumbered between us, electronically bound and gagged.
     It was black inside the secret room, water spilling in through the broken floorboards above. I could feel the selectron field as we stepped into its nexus, ghostly fingers brushing past my face, like walking through a spider web. Xanish found an electric lamp and switched it on.
     "Niista's blood...," he whispered.
     I could see fine without the light, of course. I stared all the same.
     The cellar was full of weapons.
     Modern weapons, not the powder-burning antiques that Strother and Foley carried, but gleaming 24th century issue. Guns, white-sound disruptors, small arms to heavy projectile launchers, enough to keep any serious racketeer hard and throbbing for days. Enough to take on an entire column of Naval assault vehicles and maybe even win. A portable Tanaka ThoughtNet control system was set up in the corner, surprisingly sophisticated for a culture that wasn't supposed to have any at all.
     Xanish stepped off the last stair. "Three guesses where Lonny Tucker's gun came from."
     "Unless there are other caches like this hidden elsewhere. It's a big tesseract."
     The scrambler itself sat on a heavy table along one of the walls. A hole was dug into the floor beneath it, not much wider than a man but very deep, straight down through packed red-brown soil. Exposed at the bottom was a thick length of the habitat's fusion power grid, humming quietly. Extension cables were jacked into it, up through the hole and into the generator.
     Xano crossed alongside me. I smelled liquefied cell tissue, sickly sweet.
     "How are you holding up, node-hunter?"
     He shrugged. "I've been better.'
     I nodded at the ThoughtNet screen. "Try and break into the interface. See if you can find one of your Grand Designs in all this mess."
     I turned about the room, not touching anything, the micro-processors in my brain calculating the destructive power of everything around us. Perimeter defense monitors hung from the rafters in each corner, feeding into the modular computer system. The room was a goddamn arsenal.
     Without his usual flourish, Xano morphed three additional digits from each hand and went to work, sidestepping the computer's security protocols with an enhanced dexterity that mere humans could never hope to match.
     "There's a horde of technical data in here," he announced, reading as he spoke. "Logistics, arms inventories� You were right. This cache is just one of many. Entries related to the Kansan infrastructure: power, life support, climate control."
     Hello.
     "Grace Isobe was investigating climate control."
     Xano nodded. "It looks like extensive tampering has been done in virtually every one of the habitat's support functions."
     "Wouldn't Systems Integration see that in the telemetry analysis?"
     "Absolutely. But the pattern is very subtle. Systems might not read it as deliberate acts of sabotage, but harmless anomalies. And yes, specifically a climate control anomaly, since that's where the greatest amount of variant data is leaking."
     "And if Systems couldn't diagnose the problem remotely from Makrograd Prime..."
     "They'd send a technician to investigate. Someone like Grace Isobe."
     Someone exactly like Grace Isobe.
     I powered down the docilators that locked our prisoners in mindless stupor and slammed Foley into the wall, pinning him there with my good hand wrapped around his throat. He was lucky I had built-in governors to limit my mechanical strength.
     I shot a sidelong glance at Tate. "Talk to me, Pop, or I snap the sheriff's skinny neck."
     But Strother was lost. He struggled to shake away the effects of the docilator, squinting bleary-eyed at the contents of his cellar as if he'd expected to find nothing more than cans of fruit and preserves.
     "What kind'a deviltry is this, mister?" he slurred. "What is it? What the Sam Hill is goin' on here?"
     "You tell me, Pop. I'm just passing through."
     "He - he doesn't know anything," choked Foley, his face beet-red. I'd all but lifted him off the floor.
     "Try again."
     "He doesn't know, I swear to God!"
     I called over my shoulder to Xanish. "Inspector Thoom'niista, power a feedback surge through the old man's restraints. Increase it every ten seconds. Liquefy his brain if you have to--I want this bullshit over and done with."
     Foley thrashed in panic. "No! No, don't hurt him! Dammit, don't hurt him!"
     "Better he gets it quick than be sentenced to one of the orbital gulags," I lied.
     Strother fell back as Xanish feigned to reach for the docilator control key.
     "It was me!" the sheriff wheezed. "Leave him alone! I did this. All of it."
     "And who would have seen that coming?" I dropped Foley. Hard. My bimech fingers had left visible marks in his skin. "Now, Sheriff. From the beginning."
     The boy staggered to his feet. "This is all about freedom, Commander." He coughed, rubbing life back into his neck. "Ten thousand tesseracts orbiting the greatest planet in the solar system and that's not enough for you, is it? Three sentient species, maybe four. Collectives on Titan and the asteroids. The new planets at Beta Herculis a hundred light years away. Kansas is just one more in a long list, one more world for Makrograd to control. Well, Kansas is the only world my people have got, and you can't have it."
     "I want to know about these weapons, Hollis."
     "Submission to the Provisional Government is crushing us, Commander. We exist because ProGov allows us to exist, and it can destroy us just as easily."
     "The weapons, Hollis! What the hell are you doing with these weapons?"
     "Seven hells, Will. They're trying to secede."
     That stopped me cold.
     "That's what Systems Integration saw in the telemetry," Xano continued. "The support functions have been re-routed to run independently once the tesseract is cut off from the rest of the Territories."
     "Secede? Who is?"
     "Kansas."
     I spun back to Foley, the sudden ache in my head matching the electric throb that was short-circuiting inside my shoulder. He said nothing.
     "Catch me up, Xano. Fast."
     "The abridged version then: Some sort of coalition has gained control of key positions in the Kansan infrastructure. They're bent on severing all ties with the Territories once their power base is secure. No more than a few weeks, if what I'm reading is correct."
     Holy Jesus.
     "Flesh that out just a mite, Space Man."
     Xanish's sixteen fingertips flew over the interface board. "I can't. The coalition is protected by a tight system of cells. The database we're in can't access the others. I can tell you this, though. The rebels are styled after a page from your American history--Kansas history, 19th century. Pioneers who called themselves Jayhawkers."
     Well, well, well. "That explains a thing or two."
     Foley's back straightened. "They were heroes."
     "To their own cause, yes," Xano continued. "But history is written by the victors--something our two worlds had in common. These 'heroes' barnstormed the real Kansas throughout the 1850s, stockpiling weapons, protecting settlers from Southern incursion, leading raids against pro-slavery loyalists. Their overt tactics led directly into the declaration of Civil War in 1861, less than three months after they'd achieved statehood."
     I picked up the thought and ran with it. "Flash forward five hundred years to the descendants of those first Kansans..."
     Xano nodded. "Their very existence staged and manipulated by a government out of touch with the people and out of their control."
     "Son of a bitch. They're going to start another war."
     "No, no that's not true," said Foley, unconvincingly. "We need these weapons in case the protosoids attack. We have the right to defend ourselves."
     "Bullshit. The proties are pacifists! They have no interest in human habitats. We started the fighting, not them."
     "No one has to get hurt if you just listen to reason!"
     "We saw how reasonable you can be in Lehigh. The town practically tore itself apart."
     The old man spat from his corner. "Lehigh? Shitfire, son. Ain't nothin' come outta Lehigh but humbugs and Philistines."
     "You don't sound too cozy with your J-hawker brethren, Pop."
     "J-hawkers. Ha! They shame the word. Been tryin' to force me out since before my sainted Hannah passed on."
     "Why?"
     "Ain't you been listening? They want my property! They want Kansas."
     Foley's voice tightened. "Strother, that's not true. Kansans stand together. We always have. You taught me that."
     "It is true, dammit. They foreclosed on Rube Hopkins not two days ago. Burned out Cecil Dake less than a week before that."
     "Calm down now. You're upset."
     "Nobody believes me. 'Crazy old Strother Tate', that's what they say. I may not be a smart man but I know the devil's work when I see it!"
     The sheriff turned on me. "This is your fault! Barging into our lives like you've got the right." He pointed to Tate. "Look at him! All the old ones are like this now. They've forgotten where they really are, that the Earth is no more than a smoldering corpse. This is their home. Our fight is for them."
     "But none of it's real, Hollis. These people are just props in a museum. It's all an illusion."
     "Not to us! Dammit, this is my home too, sir. I lost sight of that once. Turned my back on it when Gideon died. Then the 'hawkers found me, said my skills could help folks like Strother in ways I'd never imagined."
     "By duping him! Using him as a front to cover up this insanity because he wasn't a threat to anybody."
     "A dozen gaping holes in my thorax notwithstanding," Xano said.
     "No, it wasn't like that!" Desperation rang in the boy's voice. He was apt to try something reckless at any moment. "Strother's gone a lot of the time, looking after his widowed sister in Baileyville. I figured he'd never catch on at all."
     "Hollis Foley," the old man whispered. The look of betrayal was agonizing. "You really are in league with those scalawags? God in heaven, boy. This is my home. What've you done?"
     "Strother, no! I... There aren't any..."
     I slapped the back of his head. "Jeez, kid, pull your head out! You're so caught up in the abstracts of politics you can't see the firestorm that's been unleashed."
     "You don't understand."
     "No, you don't. You're a scientist, for Chrissakes. Don't sacrifice yourself this way for a misguided ideal."
     He struggled with the docilator restraints; pointed to the star on his sweat-drenched shirt.
     "'To Serve and Protect'. Isn't that what it says? Isn't that what we're supposed to do?!"
     At that moment the perimeter defense alarms began to whine.
     "Oh fraa'k," said Xanish. "We've got visitors."
     The screens displayed a topographic overview of the countryside centered on the old man's farm. Six blips had entered the display's outermost boundary, moving up the road that led back to Glen Elder.
     "Damn. Hit the emergency comm, Space Man. Alpha sec-3 on a phased neutrino burst. Get the Agamemnon or anybody else here as fast as you can."
     "Any chance they're ours?"
     "Rachel would've contacted us. Looks like we were followed after all."
     "We just want to go our own way!" the boy wailed. "We don't want to hurt anyone!"
     "Prove it, then. Show me the girl, Hollis. Show me Grace Isobe."
     His face fell. "That was an accident."
     "Not good enough."
     "It was! None of us would be here at all if she hadn't gone snooping behind Strother's back."
     "Not good enough!"
     "She was here!" the boy cried. "Strother chased her away, just like he said. But she came back, damn her. She saw him leave. That's when it happened."
     "Will, there's not time..." Xano interrupted. I waved him off and let Foley continue.
     "The Systems bunker is hidden under the railroad right-of-way at the edge of Strother's property. That's where the relays are. I booby-trapped the access port in case things went south and we were overrun by Navy troops. Your girl came back and set it off when she tried to get inside. Synaptic grenade, fried every nerve in her body."
     "Jesus bleeding Christ..."
     "She was still alive when I found her. She kept whispering 'cryo' over and over. I could barely make it out."
     "Cryostasis. She wanted to be frozen."
     Foley shook his head. "She'd been alone too long. All I could do was sit with her, listen while she talked about stars and wildflowers. Someone named Nadia. Silly things. She was so brave, Commander. So brave."
     His words tore through my gut like ground glass. I rose to my full height, my electric eyes blazing. "Of course she was brave, you bastard. She was Crew."
     Xanish interrupted again. "Will, you've got to look at this now."
     Four of the six blips on the perimeter screens had pulled off the road and were tracing a wide arc that would encircle Strother Tate's homestead. I pulled out my mammoth Odessa recoilless and thumbed the variable bore to maximum. "Any chance we can clear out of here in time?"
     "None."
     "Then we do this the hard way." I swept my gun before the cache of illegal munitions. "It's not like we'll run out of ammo anytime soon."
     "No!" hollered Foley. "You can't do this!"
     The boy made his move, flying headlong into a rack of sonic disruptors. Xanish stabbed his docilator control key. I realized what was happening, too late.
     "Xano, don't!"
     Foley hit a disruptor with his bound wrists as power surged through the restraints. Feedback zapped safety protocols. The disruptor fired, white sound screaming wildly across the room--awful, painful sound that cut straight to the auditory nerves. The failsafe in my aural implants triggered immediately and my hearing shut down to minimum.
     The computer screen shattered. Foley held on tight to the weapon despite the pain, the docilator ripping his nerve trunks to ragged threads. If the beam hit any one of his munitions crates, we'd vaporize before any of us could even think about it.
     I dove forward, spun through the wall of sonic backwash and kicked the gun from the sheriff's hands. Xano slammed into him from below. The disruptor shut off and clattered to the floor.
     Silence. Foley lay in a moaning heap, thin trails of blood trickling from his ears. I wiped sweat from my battered brow and cycled my hearing back up to normal.
     "I'm going to get the car, Space Man. We may need it soon enough."
     Xano nodded. "No heroics, Will. You're hurt."
     "So are you, buddy."
     I kicked in my virtual afterburners and bolted up the stairs. Through the barn doors into blinding sunlight, the tails of my bulletproof jacket trailing behind me. The fresh air was glorious but I had no time to enjoy it.
     Around the farmhouse to the Packard parked in front. Our visitors were almost on top of me, cars and heavily-loaded trucks barreling in from five different directions--two on the road and four crashing through Strother's fields.
     I fired up the engine, then cursed my stupidity for trying to steer and shift gears with only one usable hand. Gunshots thundered behind me as I careened back across the yard. Bullets tore through the car, shattering rear window and windshield in a shower of jagged glass.
     I hit the brakes inside the barn and Xano slammed the double doors shut behind me. Tate and Foley were stashed behind a bank of hay.
     I wasn't out of the car more than a heartbeat before a dozen rounds ripped through the barn's heavy wood walls. Xano and I dove. Strother yelped, pulling Hollis down with him.
     "Battad? Willem Battad!" boomed an amplified voice from outside. I knew that voice. It was Chief Ed Earl Magoffin, from the state troopers' office in Topeka.
     "Chief! Chief Magoffin!" shouted Foley. He jumped to his feet, staggered to the door. "We're here, sir! We're here!"
     "Git down, you young fool!" hissed the old man. Strother threw himself at the boy and dragged him down behind the protective wheels of a massive old combine.
     Xanish pulled a coil of unbreakable constriction wire from the field pack, looped it through Foley's restraints and locked him to the farm machine. I moved alongside the main doors, Odessa drawn, and pushed them open.
     "What can I do for you, Ed? We're kind of busy here, counting all these illegal weapons and whatnot. Why don't you be a pal and come back tomorrow."
     Magoffin laughed. "You got spirit, Navy. I like that. I reckon you've bested that sprout of a lawman Hollis Foley by now. Boy's got a helluva lotta book smarts but he ain't too savvy in the ways of the world, if you know what I mean. You can add his name to the martyrs of the revolution."
     "What?" said Hollis, still hurting from the disruptor blast. "What's he saying?"
     "You've just been declared 'expendable', Sheriff," Xanish answered. "Looks like Citizen Tate isn't the only one who's been used."
     "No, that's not possible! Chief! Chief..." the boy shouted. He pulled against the wire. "Let me go! Chief!"
     "Y'all might as well come on out now," Magoffin continued. "You and your symbie worm haven't got a chance against a passel of real men."
     I opened the door a little farther. "Oh, I don't know. I'm feeling lucky today. We've already exposed this little coup of yours. Maybe we can take you down with it."
     "I doubt that, boy. I doubt it very much. Take a gander at this..."
     A solid bar of lightning ripped through the barn wall and incinerated everything in its path, arcing blue-white fire that blinded the eye. The ion beam bore upward along the left side of the double door, energy streamers whipping back and forth as it went. Hay burst into flame. A second beam chewed down the right side, a third lancing across the top. The doors were being cut out of the wall like flatprints from an old magazine.
     Blackened wood fell inward and crashed to the ground. I jumped out of the way, my back to the barn's inside wall.
     "Oh my God, they are trying to kill us..." said Hollis, his voice trailing off. I could see the fragile ideality he'd built for himself collapse behind his eyes, faith wrenching irrevocably into absolute despair.
     "Xano, how many men are out there?"
     He scanned his sensor array, taking a second too long to focus his eyes. God only knows how much circulatory fluid he'd lost.
     "Thirty-nine," he answered. "They're clustered in small groups circling the building."
     "Alright then. Follow my lead, Inspector."
     I tapped my comlinq and stepped through the smoldering hole where the doors had been. Flame licked the wooden planks, hinges dripping molten slag. I dropped the Odessa to the ground, my hand open and empty.
     A squad car and a rickety Ford pick-up that flew a standard proclaiming the Free Nation of Kansas were parked on the road in front of Strother's house, a good forty meters from my position. The rest were hidden in the fields beyond the other three sides of the barn. Chief Magoffin and seven others crouched in safety behind their rides, faces I recognized from Topeka and Belle Plaine, Independence and Lehigh. All were armed, half of them toting the ion long rifles that had just been demonstrated so effectively.
     Every one was pointed at me.
     "Not feelin' so high an' mighty now, are you Navy?" the chief taunted. His shirt sleeves were rolled up in the midday heat, red hair curling on arms that hefted a giant Magnum-Okada pulse carbine. The star on his broad chest was blinding.
     I stood my ground. "Give it up, Ed. There's no way the Polity Directorate will acknowledge your demands, much less the Supreme Secretariat."
     "Tough talk from a one-armed black man. So typical. The mistake we made all those centuries ago was openin' our borders to your foreign breed in the first place. You an' everyone who came after you, human and non-human."
     "Morality doesn't enter into this at all, does it."
     "Politics are beyond morality, Navy. Ever read Niccolo Machiavelli?"
     "I have."
     "Then you understand." He leveled the pulse carbine at my bimech chest. "Kansas is for the men who are strong enough to take it. I aim to keep it that way."
     "So be it, then." I whispered into my comlinq. "Look sharp, Xano. It's show time."
     "Ready."
     I stepped back. "Let me give you a piece of advice, Ed. Never hide behind anything combustible when you're playing with energy weapons. It can really mess up your day."
     Twin red lasers lanced out from the dark on either side of me and pierced the two vehicles' fuel tanks. The world exploded, flame and twisted metal rocketing outward, greasy black clouds of burning flesh and gasoline roiling up into the perfect artificial sky.
     The blast threw me inside, the gash in my forehead ripping open again, pain screaming in my wasted shoulder. I crawled one-handed to Xanish. He knelt in shadow between the Packard and Strother's old combine, a steaming photonic rifle in each hand.
     "Eight down, thirty-one to go," he said.
     I grabbed a small globe from the field pack--a mobile pressor shield--and flicked it on beneath the gaping hole in the barn wall. An electric whoosh, and the breach was sealed by a shimmering barrier of gray-on-gray. The field generated by the MPS was impenetrable, but it ate energy like nobody's business. The unit's power cell would be drained in no more than twenty minutes.
     I scooped up my Odessa. The pressor field was opaque, but I could hear a dozen men screaming from every direction. All were trying to identify which charred mass had been Ed Earl Magoffin.
     It was no less frantic inside. Fire lit by the ion beams was spreading.
     "Now would be a really good time to hear this plan of yours." Xanish checked the power level of his Wolfram carbine. "I'm starting to lose hold of my matrix. You don't look so hot yourself."
     Right on both accounts. I felt like hell, and with his chest only partially sealed he looked like an animated corpse. I pulled him aside and picked up our remaining MPS unit.
     "Foley's got quantum grenades in the cellar. One should do it. We ride out the blast behind this." I dropped the pressor shield into his hands. "The power cell's not strong enough so you'll have to jack it into the fusion grid."
     "You're not serious."
     I keyed the e-comm to repeat our location an all Naval channels every five seconds, tagging it with Captain McKenna's personal command code. That'd get her attention.
     "Sacred Mother River, you are serious."
     "Grace is dead, Space Man. I want to stop these lunatics before they kill again."
     "By obliterating everything in the process?"
     "If you've got a better idea I'll be happy to step aside, Inspector. But say so now."
     For an instant I saw the non-human in him glaring at me, his alien eyes harsh and unreadable. Then the rational being he truly was returned. He shook his head.
     "My cr�che-mother told me there'd be days like this."
     He took the shield and disappeared down the cellar stairs.
     "Wait..." Hollis staggered to his feet. He pulled against the constriction wire. "Did you tell him what I think you did?"
     Answering was unnecessary. I passed Foley and helped the old man to his feet. Keyed open Strother's docilator with my remote and tossed the bands aside.
     The boy went pale. "Oh my God, you did. Are you crazy?"
     "Worse," I said. "I'm mad."
     I picked up Strother's 10-gauge and pulled the man aside.
     "The rebels are going to take us by force, Pop, and they're willing to sacrifice the arsenal to do it. I hope to God you hate those bastards as much as you say you do."
     I handed him the shotgun. A leap of faith? What the hell. We were dead men anyway.
     He looked at me, then checked to see if the gun was loaded. It was. "I already shot at you twice, mister. How do you know I won't try it again?"
     "I don't."
     Something twinkled in his eye. He took the gun. I turned away, avoiding the shattered floorboards where he'd tried to bash in my head, and gathered our field gear.
     He called after me. "You a spiritual man, son?"
     "Never had the time, Pop."
     "Make the time. I'll give you what you need."
     Foley looked from the shotgun to the restraints to the blood matted on his bandaged hand.
     "So you're taking his side," he said to Strother.
     "Takin' no one's side, youngster. Seems to me this fight of yours ain't about nothin' but sides. His people forcin' their will on you, your people doin' the same to him. An' poor folks like me getting' caught between you."
     Foley shook his head. "It's not that simple."
     "This is my land, Hollis. I can't watch over it if I'm dead. It is that simple."
     "Strother..."
     "You're a J-hawker, son. You know in your heart what that means. Don't ever forget it."
     Hoots and rebel yells outside. An incendiary charge ignited the barn's northeast wall, followed by another from the south. That was it, then.
     The Free Nation of Kansas had sentenced us to death.
     Strother ran to the nearest door and swung it open, shotgun raised. Two of the Lehigh contingent were running in--to close, no more than twenty-five meters away.
     "Carpetbaggers!" the old man howled.
     Thunder roared from his twin barrels at full choke. The men flew backward, gore and shredded pulp from the necks up.
     "This is my home, damn you! Tear it down an' I'll build another where it stood. I'll see you in hell before I let you take it from me!"
     Return shots from the wheat field. Hollis cried out, unable to do a thing.
     Then something caught his eye. I couldn't see what from my position and didn't have time to zoom in telescopically. He pulled the wire tethering him to the combine, stretched it taught, then slid out onto the barn floor, reaching desperately through the dirt and straw...
      The fire was climbing fast now, lapping at the rafters, ready to drop down into the loft. Once the support timbers collapsed, the entire building would fall in on us.
     I met Xanish as he climbed the cellar steps and almost tripped over the mobile pressor shield he'd set there. Cables were spliced into its exposed power core, coiling down into the secret room below.
     He'd stripped to the waist to accommodate a second pair of sweaty red arms that sprouted beneath the first. Each carried a heavy crate he'd retrieved from the rebels' stash, and a grenade launcher was slung over his upper right shoulder. His movement was sluggish, labored.
     "Where've you been?" he huffed.
     "Sorry. Rallying the troops."
     Two more cracks roared from Strother's 10-gauge. Xanish stared.
     "You gave him his gun? Blasting open my chest wasn't good enough? Next he'll be taking a shot at my cherry red ass." He set the crates down and with the sound of thick flowing liquid absorbed the additional arms back into his torso. I took the launcher, a sawed-off monster upgraded with magnetic accelerators powerful enough to hurl a warhead to the molten surface of Mercury and back. The first crate held the weapon's external power supply and feeder cables. The other crate held the grenades. Quantum grenades. Just looking at the damn things made my brain ache.
     Xano jacked the launcher's power couplings into the battery core. I snapped open the breechblock, fumbling one-handed, and slid in a grenade. Locked down the magnetic impellor coils. Calculating the trajectory arc was easy--there wasn't any. A clean ninety degrees off the horizon, straight up. Snapped the breech closed.
     Done.
     Timbers groaned above us. This was going to be too damn close. A forty mm round like the one I'd just loaded had an annihilation radius of three hundred meters, plus or minus.
     I set it to blow at one-twelve.
     "Pop! Front and center, now! Xano, go unlock the sheriff."
     Only then was it apparent what Hollis had done.
     He'd retrieved Strother's docilator, the one I'd tossed aside. He sat hunched over the slender bands, their conductive casing jimmied open, flipping switches in the exposed circuitry with the pin of his lawman's star.
     "Hollis!"
     A sharp click. The lock on his own restraints snapped open. He threw them aside, untangling himself from the wire. Grabbed Xano's assault laser carbine from the Packard and ran before I could stop him.
     Rebel fire trapped old man Tate under the loft, pinning him there between two widening rifts in the barn wall. Hollis shouted and knocked Strother out of the way. The sheriff rose on one knee and raked the wheat field with Xano's laser again and again, tears streaming down his dirty face.
     More shotgun blasts, whines from lasers, chunks of wood and rafters exploding over our heads. The old man staggered in, pumping buckshot through gaps in the spreading flames.
     "Xano, take over," I said. "I'm going after the sheriff."
     No need. Foley appeared a moment later, tearing around the old man's tractor, laser in hand.
     "They've got another blaster out there! Commander Battad, what do we do?" Foley saw the open case of grenades and skidded to a stop. "Oh sweet Jesus..."
     If he was going to act against us, he'd have done so by now. "Into the cellar, gentlemen," I said. "Hurry."
     "Dammit, man!" coughed Tate, hacking smoke and black soot. "I ain't turnin' tail now."
     "We're saving your life, Pop! Do it!"
     The barn's west wall ripped inward in a flash of ion death. Gunshots streaked through the burning debris. Three rounds struck me sidelong, then two more, ricocheting off instantly-rigid duroflex.
     One of them nailed the old man. He spun and fell, the 10-gauge thrown from his hands.
     "Strother!" screamed Hollis.
     I hugged the ground, recoilless drawn, explosive .45s rocketing through the breach into blinding daylight. I couldn't see worth shit because of the blood flowing into my eyes. X-ray vision would've been nice.
     Xanish lurched forward, trying to get to Foley. "Sheriff! Get down!"
     But the boy held his position, backlit by the flames, red laser fire howling from the carbine in his bloody hands.
     "It isn't every day a man finds out he's been living a lie," he shouted. "Don't worry, Inspector! I gotcha covered. Do what you have to while you still can." He stepped up the fire power, determination burning in his eyes like windows into the heart of the wounded sun.
     "Hollis, get down! What are you doing?"
     "Setting things right, sir. I'm a J-hawker."
     "Don't argue with him, Xano!" I hollered. "Move! Move!"
     Between us, Foley and I cleared a path to the trap door. Xanish leapt and his body became elastic, stretching out of the way as the ion beam tore through the space where his chest had just been. He hit the floor rolling into a red-and-black ball and dove head first into the hole.
     "I'm real sorry about the girl, Commander," Hollis shouted over the roaring weapons. "I swear to God I am."
     I squeezed off two final rounds and grabbed the grenade launcher with my good hand.
     "Xano! Let's go, buddy!"
     He'd disconnected the sheriff's scrambler and re-routed its feeder cables into our pressor shield. Mainlining fusion power would either step up the force field's invulnerability quotient by an order of magnitude or burn the sucker out the second it was engaged.
     A sickening groan echoed above us and the roof deck began to fall. Burning rafters crashed down one by one. Floorboards buckled and snapped.
     "Xanish!"
     "NOW!" boomed the symb's alien voice.
     This is for Grace, you bastards.
     I hefted the launcher straight up and fired.
     The MPS warped on, drowning out three final gunshots, three rocketing pieces of lead.
     Hollis Foley shouted and leapt between me and the breach in the wall.
     The quantum grenade hurtled upward at nine hundred and ninety meters per second.
     Two bullets grazed Foley's torso, a third hit him square in the chest.
     The air above us shimmered, gray-on-gray.
     The warhead soared through as the pressor field solidified into an impenetrable dome.
     Up through the collapsing roof into cloudless blue sky.
     Foley crashed into me, ruby-red blood spraying behind him.
     One hundred and twelve meters above the Kansas prairie, the quantum grenade detonated.
     Whitehole.
     Zero-point energy warped through the ruptured singularity at the heart of the grenade, ripping into normal space-time with devastating ferocity. The farmhouse and everything outside it shattered and burned in one incandescent stroke. Metals boiled away. Rebel flesh and bone vaporized in the blast of unleashed quantum fluctuation.
     The concussion wave slammed into Kansas-4's diamond and steel substructure like a divine hammer smiting the sins of the world. The ground inside the dome dropped out beneath us-gravitic generators groaning in subsonic agony--and rebounded back, throwing us so hard we sailed off the floor. Timbers crashed down wildly. Something smashed into the back of my head and infinite blackness, the dark between worlds, swallowed me whole...

     We shut off the pressor shield once the ionizing radiation outside had cooled to a tolerable level. The barn was gone, as were Strother's farmhouse and fields. Smoking white ash for hundreds of meters in every direction. Naval interceptors and an ambulance were waiting for us, lights flashing, some parked on the gray gouge that had been the road to Glen Elder, others circling in tight orbits overhead. Captain McKenna was on-site coordinating the rescue operation, more than a little pissed as to how I'd known her private command code.
     Aw, well.
     Grace Isobe's body was found in a shallow grave less than a stone's throw from where we'd started our scan. It was taken back to habitat Medical for autopsy and closure with the grieving family.
     Counterinsurgency squads stormed into Kansas en masse and rooted out the remaining J-hawker cells. There were actually very few. The Free State rebellion turned out to be a fanatic but small percentage of the habitat's population.
     Strother Tate was admitted to a hospital in Topeka, more from emotional trauma than the gunshot that shattered his left shoulder blade. He wept over the loss of his beloved farm, then dried his tears and vowed to build another once he was released.
     Hollis Foley held on for three days. He'd used the unlocked docilator as the key to open up his own, reversing the wave scanner in the locking mechanism to transmit its trigger code. The bullet that was meant for me hit high in his chest, bounced off the collar bone, and tore through his heart muscle. Unlike mine, his body wouldn't accept bimech replacements. He died this morning. Everything's gone back to normal, as one would expect in an environment where time is not allowed to pass.
     Me, I've got a lot of thinking to do.
     It's easy to write off Grace's death as just another cruel accident. But the chain of events that played out after she died led to the prevention of even more death on a horrific scale, untold thousands who would've been lost if the people of Kansas had gone to war. All because she stopped to pick some flowers. Is that a sacrifice she would have made willingly?
     You got me.
     I'd told Hollis not to sacrifice himself for an ideal. But what does that say about the ten generations of men, symb, and protosoids who built the Territories? How many sacrifices had they made to save us all from Doomsday?
     Maybe Strother Tate is such a man. I've talked with him a number of times now. Never in my life have I cared for anything as much as he treasures his home. He was born and married there. He buried his wife there. And to protect it he was willing to die, an ideal shared body and soul by a boy named Hollis Foley, Junior.
     J-hawkers.
     I still don't get it. Hell, maybe I'm the alien and Xano the true human. A cyborg with a morphogenic soul is better than wondering whether or not you've got a soul at all. I think I'll hang up my taser for a while and spend a few weeks in Kansas. There's an old man I need to see about rebuilding a farmhouse.
     They say home is a spiritual place. They may be right, at that.

The J-hawker Imperative: Part II

© 2001 Dean Wells