At the Tip of a Spear - Chapter 1

The bodyguard was more handsome than Hueve would have liked. She thought she had mentioned to the agency something about that. It became distracting for her, in long meetings, watching him across the room. Such distractions were rather out of line. Mori had in fact reminded her that morning, before she had boarded the wireway car, "you mustn't draw such obvious attention to him, it only serves to lessen his efficacy". "Yes" she thought, she would have a word with the agency as soon as the conference was over.

The conference, in the grand tradition of generally desk bound worthies, was being held in a simultaneously exotic and yet comfortably familiar mountain top retreat. The views promised to pay off the poor company and hostile environment at least twice over, or so her staffers had joked on the bus ride to the cable terminus early that morning. Hueve sighed, turning away from the handsome body guard to review her talking points for the evening. The minster for trade had started pressuring her administration to enact new import quotas on Fusodilin, their new Aluminum mines were out competing domestic production which was hurting her in the polls. Fusodilillian delegates would be in attendance tonight more than likely. Hueve made a note to de-stress economic self-dependence as a topic before turning to look through the wireway car window.

By this point the car had heaved itself over a mile in the air and 38 miles north of the cable terminus where they had embarked 4 hours previously. The views over the Northern Olimpia range were famous across the world, though Hueve had seen them on many prior visits to the conference. Towards the south east from the car Hueve registered a glimmer on the ground which, for some reason long burried in the evolutionary past of her species, pushed her mind back to the body guard waiting on the other side of the car for the coming disembarkation. As Hueve was musing on the size of the mans neck she noticed that his head split in half. Actually, correcting herself, Hueve noticed that not only had the body guards head split in half, his entire body had been separated into two, now slowly falling apart, sections.

By the time the front half of the thing that had, until quite recently, been the body guard fell forward the entire wireway car had itself also split in half. The front half and the back half, where Hueve was sitting, cleanly separated. The divorce of the two sections of car posed two immediate problems for Hueve. One, while the wire grip was attached to the back half of the vehicle, and therefore she was, unlike the unfortunate bodyguard, not currently in free fall, the car itself was built with the expectation of a particular distribution of weight. Two, the pressure a mile high was low enough to cause nitrogen in her blood to come out of solution. Therefore, in the first seconds after whatever had happened had happened Hueve only fully registered that she was simultaneously tipping forward and in excruciating pain.

"Warning, Blood Oxygen levels dangerously low! Warning, up-link facility connection lost! Warning, velocity exceeded alert threshold! Warning, Blood Oxygen levels dangerously low!" Warning messages flashed into Hueve's vision, while at the same time her circulatory system was flooded with emergency response chemicals. Pain receptors across her body shut down, while others reported their sensations as an afterthought instead of an overriding urge to scream. Her brain began firing more rapidly than any naturally evolved organ could, excess heat being dumped into a small reservoir of Ammonia stored in her gut. Emergency active defense systems were in the process of deploying when Hueve finally regained the ability to form coherent thoughts. Immediately, she cancelled the automatic active defense protocol, a neutron beam was unlikely to be of any use and would only serve to use up her heat reservoir faster than her accelerated thought processes already were.

Hueve had minutes of subjective time now before her fall would end, that time though was intended to help her watch and predict the moves of a potential assassin, to let her move from the line the barrel of a pulse cannon traced out before the trigger was depressed. The difficulty in this situation was that the gun had already been fired, and there was nothing she could think to do that would result in a physical change happening fast enough to alter her current predicament. Somewhat more worrying Hueve was not entirely sure that her mind state would be able to transfer to the up-link facility before being spread across an acre of alpine tundra. Of course, in theory she could initiate a mind state transfer whenever she wanted. The neutrino source buried in her brain was designed to pulse out her entire mind state in less than a microseconds and nothing, save a neutron star directly in the path between her and the up-link facility, could stop the signal from arriving. The chink in this plan was however, the up-link facility. Unlike the unblock-able mind state transmission, all bidirectional communication to that station, orbiting in a high polar orbit, was conducted using nothing fancier than easily blockable radio waves. It was completely impossible for her body to contain enough cross sectional area to interact with a sufficient number of neutrinos for a bidirectional neutrino link to be feasible. So Hueve had to consider two possible options. Either the radio single to the up-link facility was being jammed, in which case her mind state, carried as they were on the backs of such ineffable particles as neutrinos would arrive without incident. Or, the up-link facility had been in some way destroyed, damaged, or otherwise incapacitated. Hueve thought on this for minutes of subjective time, during which individual rocks began to resolve below her. This body was dead, that was certain, it seemed there was no reason not to initiate the transfer. If the facility was not ready to receive her she supposed that she would be no worse off than if she had not started the transfer.

In the vein hope of a last minute miracle the woman waited until just before the first part of her body touched the ground. When, in the last moments of Hueve’s life, her elbow was just a hairs width above a quite unpleasant bolder she ordered her neural implants to transmit her exact current state towards the last confirmed location of the up-link facility. As Hueve’s mind state began to be dumped her body, below the neck, rapidly contracted under the influence of a horrifically altered metric. As the temperature of the organic slug that had been Hueve exceed 500 million kelvin it rapidly fused into silicon before collapsing further into a small iron pellet. Newly liberated neutrinos streamed out, focused by the same metric which had only moments before collapsed the body of the head of state of the most powerful nation in the world. Upon reaching Hueve’s carefully preserved mind, non-linear perturbations were introduced into the neutrino stream letting Hueve flee from her body.

At the top of the mountain, the delegates who had already arrived did not have time to register anything was wrong before the 100 megaton explosion dissolved the resort. At the wireway terminus near the base of the mountain there was just enough time for tourists, who happened to be enjoying the views up the mountain, to register that something was happening, before they to were sublimated.

Upon passing through the region of Hueve's home plant's orbit where the up-link facility had been, the neutrino beam met with only light attenuation, such as might be caused by the dispersed remnants of a former neutrino detector.