Amalfi Echo Read online

  “The pistol wants me to do live target practice,” Tessa said. “That’s nice talk for killing actual people. Not any objects here on the ship, the pistol wants some Marines or Special Forces as targets. I’ve told the pistol that hell will freeze over before I attack United States military personnel.”

  “You feel you’re ready for combat?” Digby said. “I would have thought it to be a little soon.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it. Way too soon. The pistol says that when the training for the strike is complete, I will be ready. I sure wish I had the pistol’s confidence.”

  “Likely it’s chosen your own people for the exercise because if you attack the soldiers of any other nation it could be misinterpreted. Maybe it doesn’t want to unnecessarily start a war,” Digby suggested.

  “I always knew where this was headed. It’s a little different when you get there.” Tessa started sweating even thinking about it.

  “You could pick a different target. One that wouldn’t involve United States military personnel or foreign soldiers.”

  “Like?”

  Digby reflected for a moment, searching the ship’s database. “What about this?” He gestured a screen into being. It zoomed in on a luxurious and extensive hacienda set amongst lush vegetation. The hacienda was a scene of intense activity. Trucks and 4WDs came and went. Heavily armed men guarded the approaches. A large family was having lunch in an elevated courtyard.

  “This is the home of Fabio Restrepo, a Colombian drug lord,” Digby continued. A second screen detailed the murderous biography of Restrepo, continuing on to the sickening biographies of his lieutenants and some of the rank and file soldiers.

  “Yeah,” Tessa breathed, sitting up. “Those bastards are a waste of space.” Ideas started to flow. She felt a tingle of excitement in her stomach. “I don’t have to take them on in close combat. Maybe use a tiny version of the shuttle to drop onto the mountainside and take a couple of sniper’s shots. Then exit pronto in the shuttle. I’ll be gone before they have time to react.” Although she knew it wouldn’t be as simple as that, she felt she had to save face with the Amalfi weapon and come up with an alternative plan. As she thought about it, it did seem feasible. “I could maybe do this,” she said to Digby. Seconds later, she started feeding data from the ship into the pistol which, apparently, had no problems with the new target.

  “What do you call this attack craft?” Tessa said, as they cruised down through the stratosphere. Digby’s sphere ship didn’t use names for objects, presenting its image instead.

  Digby answered with a long stream of musical language.

  “I thought it might be like that,” Tessa said. “I’m going to call it ‘Jazmine’ after our cat who was in the car with Mom and Dad when it happened. They were going to the vet.”

  Jazmine, whose claws were probably the sharpest on the planet, arrived swiftly and silently at Arlington Cemetery, depositing Tessa in a liquid mercury swirl near her parents’ graves. Digby backed the craft up 100 metres to give her some privacy and it was a handy place to keep watch from anyway. Tessa magicked up some flowers, placing a bunch on each grave, before settling herself nearby on a rug. Winter clad the cemetery. The day was cold and clear.

  By now, two Blackhawk helicopters hovered at a discrete distance and, sitting up behind them, a couple of news helicopters, the occupants of which felt terrifyingly like guinea pigs. Police units worked hard to clear other visitors from the cemetery without making a fuss. Everyone watched the jellyfish which, thankfully, stayed where they were.

  There was no attempt to arrest Tessa.

  On the way back Tessa asked, “Why don’t you use the shuttle? Why do you use this?” Tessa indicated around her at Jazmine.

  “Efficient use of the ship’s resources. Piloting Jazmine myself, fully controlling it and its weapons, releases the ship to a role in monitoring only the distant environment for threats to the craft. After it has created Jazmine it doesn’t have to do much else. I could also say,” he added, “that I plain just like flying it.”

  Tessa grinned. “I would to.” She thought about the Starfighter. “Can I sorta change my mind about my graduation present?”

  “I wondered how long it would take you to get to that,” Digby said.

  -oOo-

  Two weeks of real time and six months for Tessa. She was ready for the hit on the Colombian drug lord, Fabio Restrepo. Unavoidably, Marion had to be told. She was not happy.

  “Does the term ‘child soldier’ mean anything to you Digby? That’s when you get children to do things unspeakable when they’re too young to have developed a proper sense of morality. Or any proper defences, leaving them traumatised for life.”

  “Trauma, my ass,” Tessa said. “You’re talking to the Queen of Trauma.” She decided not to mention to either of them the nervous spasms in her guts whenever she thought about doing the killing thing, even on the monsters she had as targets.

  Of course, Marion could hardly claim to be surprised. It was the logical next step in the life Tessa seemed determined to have for herself. Giving up, she said, “It will all end in tears,” reinforcing the point by drenching them all in a rainstorm of tears through which she exited.

  “Okay,” Tessa said, “is that a ‘yes’?” after the water had dissipated.

  “Project Tessa, you are cleared for take-off,” Digby said, using his hands as a megaphone.

  -oOo-

  The tiny shuttle, only Tessa-sized, deposited Tessa on a ridge overlooking the hacienda. Being the obvious place to put a sniper, the ridge had watchtowers and patrols. This would work to Tessa’s advantage because the plan did not call for assassinating Fabio Restrepo. That would draw too much attention. The patrols and watchtowers, isolated from the main troops down at the hacienda, were a much better target for practice. Tessa exited the shuttle tactically, as she had been taught, as she had practiced many times now on a ship creation of this very same ridge, including every single gunman currently occupying it. Already she had killed copies of them many times and had learnt how each of them reacted in a variety of situations.

  Tessa flitted along the ridge, the Amalfi weapon and her working as one. In addition, her ghostly combat suit now had a ghostly pocket filled with the little glowing spheres containing the jellyfish. She reached the third and final watchtower and decided this time to clear it with a jellyfish. Afterwards, she conducted a scan of the ridge. No human life. She allowed herself the luxury of climbing to the top of the watchtower. Down in the valley below, the hacienda was in turmoil. The noise of death visiting had carried down into the valley. 4WDs with machine guns mounted in the back, set out along a dirt road towards the ridge. Gunmen, some with small missile launchers, scrambled into open trucks which also headed for the dirt road. A helicopter lifted off a pad.

  Time to go. Tessa called the shuttle to her and was gone from the top of the watchtower in one smooth movement.

  -oOo-

  In her bathroom, in her living quarters on the sphere ship, Tessa thought about gunslingers and how they cut notches on their rifle butts when they had killed someone. Tessa had arranged a bathroom for herself that was seriously oversized and crammed with pampering equipment and accessories. She sat on a bench seat embroidered in satin, contemplating her tattoos in her reflection in the mirror. A change had occurred in the tattoos on her face and on her left shoulder. A small part of each tattoo had become raised as though it was embossed and the colours had changed from red and blue to a uniform jet black. She had not done this change herself. It had always puzzled her why she had done sketches of these particular designs and given them to the tattoo studio, especially the one on her face which had freaked out her foster parents, although her acquaintances in the underground had thought it pretty cool. Even she had been a little freaked out. She touched the small embossed part of the tattoo on her face. The embossing spoke to her. “Amalfi,” it said. Now she knew why she had chosen these particular tattoos. They drew on her skin the marks that would eventually
signal she had completed her training as an Amalfi warrior.

  -oOo-

  Tessa created a pillow and hit Marion with it, going from Amalfi warrior to a kid in an instant.

  “Are you a teenager today?” Marion said.

  “Think about it, dude,” Tessa said. She had chosen to wear a top which was cut off at her shoulder blades so that Marion and Digby could see clearly the tattoo on her shoulder. She walked backwards and forwards in front of them, waggling her upper arm at them. She inclined the tattooed part of her face towards them as she strutted back and forth. They didn’t notice. Adults!

  When she had had enough of the posturing, Marion said, “We could do this all day. On the other hand, you could tell us what this is all about.”

  Digby had created a newspaper and rustled it for effect, peering over the top, as though short-sighted.

  “Oh, you guys,” Tessa said. “Give me a break.”

  Digby tossed the newspaper aside, the pages separating and encircling Tessa. “Okay, okay,” she said, punching her way out through the pages of the newspaper. She created a chair and sat down beside Digby and presented her left shoulder to him. “Touch the bottom left hand corner where it’s black and raised up.”

  “Are you sure that’s what you want? I don’t want to be accused of anything.”

  “Do it!” Tessa said.

  Digby ran his fingers over the embossed portion. “What am I supposed to be getting out of this? Is this new?”

  “Nothing happened?” Tessa asked. At Digby’s negative reply, Tessa went over to Marion, who was sitting on a couch. “Maybe you’ll have better luck.”

  Mystified, Marion touched the embossing and immediately recoiled. “Amalfi!” she said.

  “It spoke to you,” Tessa said. Marion nodded. Tessa explained about the mark of the Amalfi warrior, saying proudly, that now she really had begun the journey.

  “The one on your face will become the same too?” Marion said.

  “The one on my shoulder will change with each kill, and the one on my face, marks my progress towards the status of Amalfi warrior.”

  Marion frowned.

  “I didn’t think you would like it,” Tessa went on. “Please try to be happy for me.”

  Marion ran a finger along Tessa’s hairline, reflecting. “I can see that you are much happier now than you were and I’m very glad about that. I have to say that I would prefer that you’d won a basketball championship.” Marion hugged her and said “Congratulations. You have well and truly earned this and whatever I think about it, doesn’t matter.”

  Digby put out his hand. “Congratulations. As Marion says, you have worked extremely hard for this and no one deserves it more than you.”

  Tessa shook Digby’s hand solemnly. “Thanks folks,” she said and embarrassed now, disappeared amongst a huge display of fireworks.

  -oOo-

  Marion organised the websites thusly: on her site she placed her broadcast and a selection of additional material about the bugs. She started a blog and posted a continuing stream of thoughts, prompted by her studies, on the responsibilities of leadership which she repeated on Twitter and other social media. These were not dry academic dissertations but pointed remarks about how and why the world’s leaders were failing their people in not preparing for war against the bugs. She began to attract a following of conspiracy theorists, geeks, anxious people looking for more anxiety, survivalists, Islamists and Christians who hated her and loved her but not necessarily in that order, and a huge number of people who mistakenly believed that they were at the Revenge of the Gorgons website, which was now enjoying a revival. Communities began to spring up around her website and the one thing they all had in common was that the bugs were now referred to as ‘the Gorgons’ even though the Gorgons were spacefaring dragons and nothing like the bugs.

  Communities too, were springing up around Tessa’s website. These were tentative because her potential fan base still lacked focus, something to hang their interest on. At the moment she was mostly getting the sympathy vote. Not helping was that Digby, and the learning programs, had forbidden her to reveal anything of her training including field operations, or anything about the sphere ship and since this occupied pretty much all of her time she was left with little to say on Twitter and in the communities.

  In the next week, which was three months subjective time, Tessa carried out an ambush against Shining Path guerrillas in the upper reaches of the Amazon and a combined operation with Digby and Jazmine against a Taliban stronghold in the mountains of Northwest Pakistan. Digby was not interested in the Taliban. The operation was designed to give Tessa experience in field risk assessment, calling in support where required, and the learning programs wanted to reduce her reliance on the shuttle. These kills too, were added to her Amalfi marks.

  In the fourth week, in the final three months of the subjective year Marion had allowed herself, she talked with Tessa and Digby about her plans to break the stand-off, to move things forward again. She chose to do this in a temporary dome set up in the Valles Marineris on Mars. The Mars setting was not a ship construct. They had all been working hard, although Digby perhaps less so than the others, and were having time out on the red planet.

  Marion turned her attention away from the sheer magnificence of the great red slash in the Martian surface that rose up all around them. “What I want to do is have a private chat with a selection of world leaders,” she said to Tessa and Digby, sitting up businesslike in office chairs. “I don’t imagine this is something they will want and what I plan to do is this.” Marion opened an animation she had created. The animation zoomed in on the White House, stopping at a specific set of windows. The shuttle appeared from the upper right corner and poked itself through the windows. The animation moved inside the room where the President of the United States was sitting on his bed, preparing to retire for the night. The First Lady was already in bed, reading.

  “I exit the shuttle which withdraws before anyone sees it, seal the room and have my quiet chat with the President.”

  “What are you going to say to him?” Tessa asked. “Take me along. I’d like to have a quiet chat with him which will involve not much talking and lots of pain.” Tessa, unsurprisingly, saw the President as responsible for the death of her parents.

  “You should have some armed back-up,” Digby said to Marion, “if you insist on not even carrying a side arm. The ship’s heavy weapons will not be much use in that situation. Tessa should go with you.”

  Marion rejected this. “I don’t think so. The last thing I need is a loose cannon in the room with me.”

  “Okay, that does it,” Tessa retorted. “I’m outta here. Think I’ll go be touristy with the big ol’ canyon.”

  Marion immediately apologised. “I was out of line there. I’m sorry.”

  “You’ve both been working like crazy,” Digby said. “Maybe we should do this tomorrow and spend the rest of the day relaxing in a bubbly hot tub with a nice glass of wine and…maybe some platters of meze?”

  Marion looked pained. “Let’s get this done.”

  “Yeah, Digby,” Tessa said. “You do enough relaxing for 20 people. What have you been doing anyway while Marion and me have been working our guts out?”

  “I’ve been busy too…doing stuff,” Digby said, with as much dignity as he could muster.

  Marion called a quick break while she gathered her thoughts. When Tessa and Digby were settled again she said to Tessa, “I probably do need some back-up. We’ll need to run simulations with copies anyway which will take the edge off it for you.”

  “We’ll run Tessa’s side as a training exercise in restraint. It’s not always about killing everything in sight,” Digby said.

  For the next two hours the three of them worked through the animations of how each of the world’s leaders would be accessed and then hit the bubbly tub.

  Before they left Mars, Marion said, “I’m still looking for a way to sharpen Tessa’s online presence. If either
of you can think of anything…”

  And then, in the way these things happen sometimes, the ideal opportunity presented itself.

  -oOo-

  The library block at Delaware Montessori High was surrounded by an FBI response team and supporting them, state troopers and the local police. Inside the block, 22 high school students had been fitted with explosive vests by the members of a previously unknown American jihadist group. The students had been arranged in two rows on library seats in front of the issuing desk. Behind them on the wall, the jihadists had hung sheets painted with slogans and symbols of Islamic Unity. They had painted the terrified faces of the students with similar slogans. Several of the older boys’ faces were bloodied from a futile attempt at resistance. Two lay sprawled, dead, on the carpeted floor.

  Outside, the FBI negotiators were sickeningly aware that their skills would be wasted today. The terrorists had made their demands known through webcams set up in the library. They wanted the release of a number of Islamic extremists held in American prisons, however, frantic intelligence analysis had revealed strong links between this American group and the Islamic extremists in the Algerian desert fortress. The best guess of the FBI analysts was that the demands meant nothing. This was payback time. The students were going to die anyway.

  Unfortunately, this did not mean that the assembled forces outside the school could storm the block and save whomever they could because this was not something that could be explained to the parents or to the wider community.

  The FBI team began the negotiation process feeling an utter sense of futility.

  -oOo-

  Tessa was angry at Marion. “How can you even think like that?” Tessa waved her arm at the screen. “Look at them! They’re not, ‘an opportunity.’” Words failed her. She screamed in disgust and paced up and down, arms folded.

  “Calm down,” Digby said. “I won’t let you go in unless you can get yourself into a better frame of mind.”

  “Oh. I should have guessed. You’re on her side of course. You all make me freaking sick.”