Repercussions
Page 23
Crash hopped away from Celest and flew to the other side of the room. She obviously thought he was flirting with her, because she followed and tried to nibble his tail feathers when she landed behind him, giggling. He shifted away from her, clacking his beak.
She came around his right side and nuzzled his neck again, pushing against him. Her parrot form was bigger than him, and he stumbled under her weight. She nibbled at his beak as he went down, wings fluttering.
He scrambled upright and shot into the air. He landed on the pedestal in the center of the room. Celest turned to face him, tilting her head to the side.
The windows behind her shifted colors, filling with angry red.
Crash ground his beak, wondering if he should just cut the connection. This wasn’t going as he had planned. He wasn’t ready for virtual mating with an SAI. The ravens would be mad with laughter if they could see him now. His thoughts spiraled like leaves in a wind.
If she wouldn’t be honest with him, he would sign off. All the warm feelings he’d felt toward her were sliding into the pit of his stomach and turning to ice. This wasn’t what he wanted.
Parrot-Celest pulled her head back in surprise. She blinked.
Celest growled with frustration.
He mulled the idea; seeing how it made sense.
Celest tilted her head.
Before he could answer, Celest shimmered and became a curvy woman with short, blond hair. She was wearing a red shipsuit with a badge that read ‘Enfield Scientific.’ Her face was made of hard angles, but there was a mischievous gleam in her blue-grey eyes.
Crash spread his wings, throat tight with indecision. He still didn’t trust her. He couldn’t give away his identity and endanger all the birds at Night Park. But would she hurt them?
Rack Thirteen would hurt them, if Celest didn’t.
A screeching sound outside the windows stopped Crash’s thoughts. He looked from Celest to the red windows, realizing the sound was coming from outside the expanse.
Crash pulled out of Celest’s network, back to the main antenna of his maintenance drone. He sent several short scan bursts, and a picture of the space around the Endless Surcease took shape.
Two breaching vessels had latched onto the hull. Six attack drones in standoff positions provided overwatch. All sent data streams back to Cruithne Station, to nodes Crash identified as belonging to Rack Thirteen.
He shared the update with Celest, and she cursed.
In another millisecond, Crash found himself shut out of her expanse.
He was alone.
PART 6 – SORDID COMPLICATIONS
RACK THIRTEEN RIGHT HOOK
STELLAR DATE: 09.15.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Cruithne Station, High Orbit Trash Zone
REGION: Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
After several more attempts at contact, Crash had to accept that Celest wasn’t going to talk to him. He focused his attention on the breaching ships, which were a standard design used by most of the pirates operating on Cruithne.
As he expected, he found that both breachers were running on outdated engine control software. Crash started reprogramming the astrogration interface, but had to stop when the two onboard NSAIs attacked his Link connection.
Crash had never faced two opponents at once. He had to quickly occupy one NSAI with an encryption scheme while he rerouted his attack on the second breacher’s engine.
Through the breach vehicle’s control network, he was able to kill its secondary power systems, which forced the NSAI into system preservation mode. Fugia had boasted about doing the same thing to TSF ships on patrol duty. The TSF had instituted upgrades to defend against the attack vector, but Rack Thirteen apparently hadn’t checked the TSF security bulletins.
It was Silver. What did she want? He would have ignored her, but she had never contacted him like this. What if Rack Thirteen was also attacking Night Park?
Crash did his best to maintain his focus on the two NSAIs as he responded to the request.
Crash bit back an angry response, remembering that he and Celest were the only people aware of the Rack Thirteen assault.
Crash raised a mental eyebrow. Silver did not sound like herself. Had something changed?
she said.
When they first met, Silver had been mad with solitude and nearly burned out Crash’s mind when he attempted contact. He had a hard time trusting any overture from her. The truth was he felt safer with her focus on the incubation systems. While she might try to hurt him again, he didn’t think she would ever hurt innocent chicks.
The first NSAI cracked its encryption web and ran a system sweep, clearing Crash’s artificial preservation sequence. It shared the data with the second NSAI, which had nearly gone into shutdown, and they both hit him simultaneously.
Crash ground his beak in frustration. NSAIs wouldn’t normally show such creativity. They had to be working in concert with someone else.
He dropped another logic bomb on each breaching ship’s environmental control log system, which might give him time to check the communication links he’d seen earlier. Rack Thirteen had more powerful resources than he’d thought. If there had been time, he would have pulled Ngoba into the fray. The Lowspin Syndicate would want to know Rack Thirteen had improved their hacking defenses.
He struggled to think of a question that would placate her.
Silver beamed.
Silver had nearly killed him. The idea of mating with her had been the last thing on his mind. Since she’d come to live on Cruithne, he was glad she hadn’t repeated the attempt.
Silver said, sounding crushed.
He had to be careful; she was entirely capable of tracking him through the Cruithne network and discovering his activities around the Endless Surcease. How would he explain Celest?
He had followed the Rack Thirteen comms net back to the nodes he’d located earlier. He had stopped after identifying them before, but now he ran a full scan, building an identity profile on the activity surging across their network.
While he couldn’t tell their identities, he established profiles for the two entities supporting the breaching vessels. They were directing the NSAIs, assisting them with workarounds for each obstacle Crash placed in their path.
They were Operators, and they were good. Fugia would have called them Cyberpukes. Crash had never been able to tell if the term was one of respect or disgust. Maybe it was both.
The first breacher cut through the Endless Surcease’s hull, and five pirates kicked into the dead ship, shouting profane glee across their local net.
She hit Crash with one of her mental slaps, like a shock on his Link, and he saw sparks.
Crash shook his head, blinking. He’d lost his connection through the maintenance drone, lost the active scan on the Endless Surcease.
He spread his wings, overcome by a wave of dizziness.
Crash shut her out. He dove back into the network, re-establishing his connection with both the drone maintenance system and the Rack Thirteen node. The second breacher had made it through the hull as well. Endless Surcease was open for their plunder.
The two Cyberpukes gloated in local chat. Crash monitored their communication for a few minutes as he studied their logs.
It was obvious they didn’t like each other. Their conversation was a long record of childish griping. Now they were talking about what they were going to do with their cut of the recovered transactions, and were trying to one-up each other with outlandish parties in opulent cruisers.
the first Cyberpuke said.
The second hacker scoffed.
Crash opened his beak in surprise. That was a Feynman quote. The second Cyberpuke was Tally from the Puzzlehead forum.
He was about to insert himself in their private channel and call Tally out for betraying the Puzzleheads and everything they stood for, when a scan alert on their system pulled everyone’s attention back to the Endless Surcease.
Spectrographics showed an energy surge in the dead vessel, and then a tight explosion of x-rays burst from the center of the ship.
Anything organic in a thirty-kilometer radius had just been fried.
SEIZE THE DAY
STELLAR DATE: 09.15.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Cruithne Station, Night Park
REGION: Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
An explosion so close to Cruithne set every warning system in local space on high alert. The TSF put the Port Authority on immediate administrative lockdown and the local defense wing deployed attack drones, establishing a perimeter around the Endless Surcease.
Crash eavesdropped on Tally and his partner, who used the handle ‘Krifter’ in their chat logs, as they made rapid excuses to the Rack Thirteen captain.
Thirty Rack Thirteen attack drones scrambled from bays around Cruithne, converging on the Endless Surcease minutes after the TSF had established their cordon.
Port Authority attempted to enforce a lockdown, but the Rack Thirteen drones ignored all calls to return to station. They destroyed one TSF drone before the battle was underway, with the TSF calling in a support cruiser from patrol duty.
Crash checked the flight status on the cruiser and saw he’d have about twenty minutes before he lost all access to the Endless Surcease.
While it was possible Celest might have been bouncing a signal to the dead ship, he didn’t think that was likely. It was too good of a hiding spot. The filament cube he’d seen in her tower was most likely her physical form, and it was somewhere on the ship. Her use of the x-ray emitter indicated she would be shielded—that meant the engine section.
The other parrot’s voice pulled him back into Night Park. Alarms in the bazaar were urging people to return to their homes. Vendors were quickly packing up their stalls. The ravens and non-Link grey parrots circled the open bazaar, cackling and squawking angrily at the commotion.
The Endless Surcease was on the opposite side of Cruithne from the ship where their parrot chicks were housed, but Crash saw the opportunity to get Silver off his back.
he said.
Crash might have enjoyed the compliment if he wasn’t trying to navigate networks on emergency alert. Everything required a new level of focus. He had reached the maintenance drone system again, but it was on emergency hold from Port Authority. He would need to break the administrative controls, which would draw attention to his activity.
Silver appeared beside him in the maintenance network, a ghostly form in the Link.
Crash sighed mentally. He didn’t have time to hide things from her now.
Silver’s shadow pulled away from him, blinking.
He ducked his head.
Silver’s avatar gave him a pointed look, tilting her head.
Silver sent him a location, and Crash immediately found a deployment pod in the TSF cordon. The remotely-controlled container held four of the panther-shaped shipkiller drones Heartbridge had made famous during the Psion invasion.
The Rack Thirteen attack drones were winning against the TSF. They fought with brutal efficiency, going straight for the kill when the space force tried to maintain defensive positions. The Terrans transitioned to offensive operations too late to stop their perimeter from falling apart; their remaining drones fell back to overwatch locations around the Endless Surcease.
Crash didn’t wait any longer. He dove into the TSF control network, not bothering with caution as he set off security checkpoints until he found the admin tier for the shipkiller drones. He locked three in place and dropped into the remaining frame, breaking free from the deployment pod with a powerful kick from his rear legs. With short-range thrusters, he launched through the space separating him from the Endless Surcease.
By the time the Rack Thirteen drones recognized his inbound form, he had landed on the Surcease’s irradiated hull. Crash updated his schematic for the dead ship with several passes of active scan, reaffirming his guess that an SAI node would be hidden in the shielded engine sections.
Voices came up on an open local Link channel broadcast by the nearby Rack Thirteen drones, shouting at him.
With several quick slashes, he cut his way through the hull with the panther-drone’s front claws. He emerged in a crew corridor and quickly kicked off toward the aft section of the vessel.