“Cluster Rangers,” Maj said.
Del looked at her, opened his mouth, shut it again. “Maj,” he said, “we’re simmers, but are we this good? Good enough to let someone’s life depend on it?”
“If we’re not now,” Maj said, “we’d better get to be, because we have to buy this boy some time. Del, have a little faith in yourself! We’ve been working with these programming modules for two months now. We’re all good at the language.”
“Some of us better than most,” Robin said, walking out of the air, that blue crest of hair nodding jauntily. “What’s the issue?”
“Miss Robin,” Charlie said, with a smile. “Didn’t know you were part of this crowd. Changes the tone of the whole affair.”
Robin high-fived him in a cheerful manner as she came over. Maj made a note to pump Robin about where she knew Charlie from, and what was making him grin in that particular way. “Interesting to see you here, too,” she said. “Maj, what’s the scoop?”
Maj hurriedly told Robin what she needed to know, and what they needed. “It’s an overmap,” Robin said, nodding. “Not straightforward, but when are they ever? Del, the Rangers custom module handler can deal with the details of the overmapping.” She grinned at Laurent. “For the time being, his body becomes the battleground. But we need a body map to conjoin with the Cluster Rangers’ programming protocols—”
“Just so happens,” Charlie said, “I have the New Gray’s Virtual Anatomy in my work space all the time. That be good enough?”
“What’s the resolution?” Robin said.
“Five microns. Ten max.”
“Close enough for jazz,” Del said. “Rangers runs at six-micron virtual grain—Gray’s is a little better than we need.”
“Can you get started on this right away?” Maj said. “We need to get out of here.”
“We can do better than that,” Robin said. “We can do it on the fly. I always keep the module manager in my cockpit for fine-tuning the Arbalest simulation in the microsecond pauses.”
Maj’s jaw dropped. “Do you mean to tell me you’ve been altering your sim’s characteristics while you’re using it?”
Del, too, was looking amazed. “I bow to the master,” he said, and put his helmet on. “If you can do that—”
“Hangar’s out that way,” Maj said, pointing at the appropriate door and causing her own suit to appear. “Laurent, you come along with me again. Charlie, you’d better sort yourself out one of these.”
He blinked, and did so.
“Charlie, you come with me,” Robin said. “They’re all two-seaters. I’ll guest you in, and you can sit behind me and give me advice until we’ve got this solution all properly geeked out.”
They all headed out into the hangars and started the jets warming up. It took a while getting Laurent up into the cockpit — he was slow, and Maj started worrying about exactly how long the effect of being virtual was going to continue to do him any good. But she kept that to herself. “Maj,” Del said on “intersuit radio” as they sealed up the cockpits, “where exactly were you planning to go hunting these bugs?”
“In Rangers space.”
“But, Maj, the bad guys know Laurent was there. If we go in there, they’ll try to get at him again.”
“Maybe,” Maj said. “But I’m betting they’ve already done their worst as far as Laurent is concerned. It doesn’t make sense that they’d hold back — he’s too important to them. We can’t possibly run the modules on my home system, Del! There’s not nearly enough processing power! The Rangers system has more than enough to spare. And as long as the routines we use to hunt these things through Laurent’s body are successfully recast as Rangers plug-in modules, it’s all allowable. It should work — we’ve done enough programming in that system to have a good feel for it.”
Robin looked up from her work in the third cockpit down. “There’s one other problem, though. If the agents from the other side come in after us—”
“We know this space a whole lot better than they do,” Maj said. “We have the home field advantage. They’re bound to be scared. I don’t imagine that it will go down too well with their bosses if they fail. If I were them, I’d be concentrating on keeping my butt in one piece….”
“Ready?” Robin said after a moment. “I’m still working, but there’s no need for us to sit while this is going on. Let’s make tracks upward and see where the buggies are hiding.”
“There are your coordinates,” Charlic said from behind Robin. “The microps have all gone cortical. The program’s mapping the sulci now….”
“Nebula space,” Robin said. “The crossmapping is making it equate to the Beehive Nebula, guys….”
“Oh, no,” Maj said. That part of space was crawling with the Archon’s forces, as well as being thick with a particularly opaque and beautiful, but annoying, nebula. It was a perfect hiding place…and a very dangerous place to have a fight, since you could all too easily wind up shooting your buddies.
“The good fight is never easy,” Del said. The hangar finished evacuating — the stars blazed and sang overhead. “Seven for seven, guys!”
They rose into the unending night. A few minutes later, the synch lasers lanced out, knitting the three ships into a unit. Then the stars’ light crashed down on them, pressed them down to nothing and out the other side—
— into glowing cloud, a mass of ion-excited purple, green, and blue, eighteen light-years away. The three of them hung there in silence for a while, looking…
…and then saw them.
They were bugs.
The Cluster Rangers’ game equivalence mapping had taken the projected characteristics of the microps and matched them to the closest creatures in its own “vernacular.” Now Maj saw what she had quite frankly never cared to see up close — the legendary Substantives, the mindless, nonorganic scavengers left over from “another space, another time,” remnants of the dark and ancient race with whom the Cluster Rangers’ patron species had fought so many long and terrible wars. They were hunger — they ate, and that was all. Many-limbed, many-eyed, nearly immortal, the Substantives lived on energy in whatever form they could find…but they best loved the rubble of shattered planets, plenty of which had been left behind, over time, in their dark masters’ wake. Lacking that, they would eat anything — ships, space stations, light, power…even dust. That was what they were eating now — using invisible, custom-generated ramscoops to scoop up and devour the glowing dust of the nebula. They shone with it, and left trails of excreted parasitic light behind them, the only remnant of their feast.
“Euuuuuw,” Robin said softly.
“You got that in one,” Charlie said from behind her. “That’s the myelin sheathing that holds the brain cells together, people, and they’re glomming it up like there’s no tomorrow. This keeps up for very long, there won’t be a tomorrow for one of us.”
Maj was acutely aware of Laurent, behind her, looking out at this with astonishment and horror. “Let’s go get ’em, then,” she said.
The three fighters dived in. Maj, though, was already calculating odds, and beginning to despair. There were at least fifty of these things scattered around that she could see. Substantives had no weapons that she knew of other than brute strength and consuming anything that got in their way — but how representative were these of the true number of microps presently inside Laurent? Were there hundreds? Thousands? Millions? How many more of these were hiding in the nebula?