by M. D. Cooper
As Crash continued to ignore him, Tally demanded,
Crash said as he ran, using another Feynman quote.
In the next corridor, Crash shot around a corner to find himself facing a Rack Thirteen attack drone. The cigar-shaped craft spit steam and tried to drop below him. Before it could fire, Crash employed the dual projectile chainguns on his shoulder mounts. He dug his claws into the deck as the stream of fire cut the drone in two.
Three more drones followed. The breach in the hull had to be nearby.
He cut those drones down as well, then leapt down the corridor with his claws outstretched. In another minute, he reached the second infiltration point and found the corridor crowded with floating bodies from the initial breaching team. The whole area was irradiated.
Past the wound in the hull, he tore through another bulkhead and emerged in the engine section. The next bulkhead was reinforced; he had reached the shielded region.
On the control deck above the engine, Crash found a sealed bulkhead door with a manual override on the lock. He didn’t have the appendages to operate the manual lever, so he scanned for the weakest point in the bulkhead and tore into it. Ten minutes later, he had a whole in the metal the size of his drone’s panther-head. He peered into the gap and found a room barely a meter square, with a pedestal in its center supporting a cube-shaped node.
A quick scan showed limited EM activity. There was barely detectable backup power flowing from somewhere nearby.
He felt the tickle of a connection handshake. The channel opened between his drone and the node, and she hit him with a high-energy discharge that burned out the shipkiller’s communications capability.
Crash found himself back on his tree branch, blinking at the open air.
NAKED SOUL
STELLAR DATE: 09.15.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Cruithne Station, Night Park
REGION: Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
Looking around angrily, Crash immediately threw himself into the network. He fought his way back to the maintenance drone system, trying to reach the shipkiller pod again, but scans showed him only burned debris where the panther drones had been. The entire area was a swarm of combat drones.
The TSS Cautious Effect had arrived, bringing point defense cannons to bear on the Rack Thirteen drones. All civilian communication channels screamed for traffic to clear the area. In the center of the fight, the Endless Surcease still hung like a cold tomb, no indication of activity inside the ship at all.
Crash couldn’t help thinking back to the battle thirty years before that everyone had come to call Lyssa’s Escape, when Ngoba Starl had flooded the shipping lanes around Cruithne in order to hide the Sunny Skies from the Heartbridge dreadnought Benevolent Hand. This resembled the same chaos on a smaller scale.
Other syndicates were getting involved now. He couldn’t tell which fighters were on which side. The only arbiter was the Cautious Effect’s heavy weaponry, which tore apart any vessel crossing their fields of fire.
Crash was focused on getting his maintenance drone through the scattered TSF defensive line, when a flurry of angry squawking rose from the ravens beneath him, and a sudden pain flared in his left claw.
The pain threw him out of his Link connection, and he flapped his wings as he stumbled on the branch. Another projectile followed the first, tearing a chunk out of the plascrete trunk to his left.
The ravens launched off the fountain tree in a furious cloud. Grey parrots in the environmental system overhead launched from their perches, screeching as they shot through the air toward the bazaar.
The ravens’ shared Link was a riot of angry images of the bazaar, running humans, and then a group of three on the far side of the park.
Another projectile grazed Crash’s right wing, and he leapt off the branch, dropping into a long, fast swoop away from the tree. He screeched as he flew, joining the other parrots racing across the ceiling. His heart pounded as he flew, searching for the three attackers.
The humans had spread out, but they were the only people not cowering in the bazaar now, which made them easy to spot.
Crash tagged them in his Link, and immediately shared the info with the murder of ravens swarming around the fountain tree.
The ravens shrieked with joy as they received targets. Immediately, the air above the attackers became a micro-version of the space battle taking place around the Endless Surcease. Ravens shot in, then folded their wings and dove, striking the attackers around their faces and necks.
One of the men scrambled under a vendor’s booth, while another ran, carrying a long rifle across his body.
The third, dressed in light armor stained crimson, raised pulse cannons in each hand and filled the air with concussive blasts. He howled as he fired, seeming quite pleased with himself.
Crash peeled off from the pulse blasts, taking a perch among some ceiling conduit that allowed him a view of the whole bazaar. From here, he could send targeting info to the ravens, who split into groups to avoid the pulse cannons.
The ravens circled faster than the mercenary could track them, and continued to dive and stab his head and the back of his neck, until his armor gleamed with his own running blood.
A section of the ceiling shattered and fell; one of the hidden mercenaries fired recklessly with a chain gun. The man seemed to struggle under the shuddering weapon, then walked its shots toward the center of the ceiling once he had it under control.
Half the ravens peeled off, followed by parrots, and streamed toward the firing mercenary. The man tried to wrench the weapon in their direction, but it jammed as he moved it, and he was fighting its action as the first three ravens cut his grimacing face with beaks and claws.
More mercenaries entered the bazaar from the opposite side, forcing Crash to split his attention between multiple fronts. He’d been forced to leave the maintenance drone in a parking status, vulnerable to any stray projectile from the space battle.
How had they found him? It had to be Tally. He had to have determined Crash’s identity from the forum. He’d probably known for a while.
Crash berated himself as he struggled to highlight the new mercenaries taking positions throughout the bazaar. They were moving in buddy teams to flank the ravens focused on the first three. Crash sent their locations and squawked warnings at the parrots.
A swath of ravens disappeared in a mist of blood and feathers as a mercenary caught them with a pulse blast.
Crash stared at the floating remnants, and his mind went blank, his heart banging in the internal silence. Just hours ago, he had been sailing on a feeling that might have been love, or at least infatuation, and now he felt nothing but furious terror.
Gripping the metal conduit with his claws, grounding himself, he shifted his awareness to the bazaar beneath him, using his mastery of the Link to highlight what Fugia called the Info Jungle.
The wide space filled with walls of data outlining each vendor’s booth, the systems in the deck beneath them, the layers of communication that supported everything in Night Park. A glowing ghost world of information took shape, centuries of interconnected things, the invisible nervous system of the world.
And among that data, Crash saw each Link connection like a gleaming silver thread, leading from the network to its carrier. He saw the floating connection leading to each raven fighting in the air, and then each line revealing the location of every Rack Thirteen mercenary in the bazaar, including the Cyberpuke who had been with Tally
.
In his fury, Crash sent overload waves down each human Link, crushing each mercenary under a tsunami of Link activity.
The Cyberpuke must have expected these kinds of attacks, because he immediately instituted defense mechanisms. The other mercs, however, could only stare dumbly, dropping their weapons as their minds went blank, and then as one, they clenched their eyes and screamed.
They writhed in mental anguish.
The ravens didn’t hesitate. In a few seconds, the face of every human in the bazaar was shredded under beak and claw. Their pressing hands were slick with blood.
Pain pulled a few of the humans from their stupor, and they ran. Others fell to their knees, cowering, covering their heads from attack, unable to respond.
Slowly, Crash gained control of himself. He blinked, looking around the bazaar. He stretched his wings and launched from his perch, floating in a wide circle to take stock of the situation. He counted just under twenty remaining mercenaries, either unconscious or cowering. The ravens cackled in satisfied victory and harried the conscious humans out of the bazaar.
Crash landed back on his branch on the plascrete tree and swooned from drained adrenaline. He felt disgusted with himself and elated at the same time. He had never hurt a human before, but he had also protected the flock.
They were safe.
He could attack if necessary.
Crash’s first thought was to tell Ngoba; but then he had a second, wary thought. He should safeguard this information.
He shook his head, squawking out over the bazaar. The other birds responded with cackles and joyous screeching.
Caught up in the celebration, Crash was surprised by the alert flooding the Cruithne news feeds:
Rack Thirteen had withdrawn their attack drones from the TSF assault.
The TSS Endless Surcease had been destroyed.
PART 7 – EVERYONE’S COMPLICATED
KEYS
STELLAR DATE: 09.15.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Cruithne Station, Night Park
REGION: Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
Crash jumped to the maintenance drone still orbiting Cruithne. He verified the report from the news feed, tracking the battle’s expanding debris field, which undeniably contained the remnants of Celest’s ship. He hung for several minutes, watching the bits of metal spiraling away, until the drone received a recall command and he let it go.
A ruckus from the ravens drew him back to the fountain. Something new was entering Night Park from one of the main corridors that led down to the Lowspin Docks.
Crash spread his wings and launched into the air, floating near the side of the park where the ravens had seen movement. As he neared the entrance, he heard booming-clicking sounds from the corridor. Grinding his beak, he slowed and turned a few circles, hovering over the entrance.
Into Night Park walked the massive form of a shipkiller mech, a powerful bulk of dull black angles. The panther moved with its blunt head hanging close to the deck, scanning as it walked, claws clicking on metal.
The ravens cawed angrily as they sighted the mech. They flew in a wide circle near the ceiling, black eyes rapt on the nearing beast.
Crash frowned mentally. The shipkiller appeared to be a similar model to the one he’d ridden into the Endless Surcease, only it had what looked like a square turret mounted between its front legs.
He realized that the mech was one of the three he’d left in the deployment pod. Running a quick registry query, the identification came back positive.
The shipkiller ignored him, walking through the center of the park, past the empty vendor booths and a few still-unconscious mercenaries, which it paused to scan. When it reached the dry fountain and its plascrete tree in the middle of the park, the shipkiller straightened and then sat back on its haunches, chest out, head erect.
Crash flew in a wide arc back to the tree, landing on his familiar uppermost branch. He stretched his wings and folded them against his body, then tilted his head as he looked down on the waiting mech.
The mech raised its right front claw to press the cube attached to its chest.
As the ravens settled into the tree branches below Crash, the cube came free of the mech’s body and it eased the thing to the deck, then batted the cube forward so it tumbled once and came to a stop near the edge of the fountain.
Crash blinked. He hadn’t recognized the cube before, but now he understood.
It was Celest.
When she still didn’t answer, he tried a different channel, asking in a more concerned voice,
Crash’s Link filled with giggling.
Silver laughed and the ravens cawed at the sound of her voice. Their Links broadcasted happy images, including scenes from their battle with the mercenaries. They were quite pleased with themselves.
Crash bobbed his head at her mention of a puzzle, but let the comment go.
Crash looked down at the lifeless cube. He would need to call Fugia to help them apply power and ensure Celest hadn’t been damaged.
For now, however, their work wasn’t done.
He blinked. He didn’t quite understand this change in her behavior but he liked it. She might always be the prickly parrot he had found on the Hesperia Nevada, but he could handle that if they were on the same side.
Silver gave him another low giggle.
Crash straightened, sending an inadvertent mental blush.
Crash laughed, enjoying this new side of her.
In another millisecond, he had leapt into the shipkiller. Silver’s avatar floated in his Link as they rode the mech together.
The shipkiller rose to a crouch, then turned, head low again, and broke into a run for the exit. Its claws left long scrapes on the deck.
MATH BATTLE
STELLAR DATE: 09.15.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Cruithne Station, Lowspin Quarter
REGION: Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
The mech loped down the corridors of the Lowspin Quarter, scattering terrified humans as it approached. Crash couldn’t help enjoying their responses just a little. Silver laughed every time they slid around a corner to surprise a new group.
At one intersection, a squad of Station Security rallied to fire on them, but Silver just ran past, giggling when their pulse weapons felt like air-puffs on the mech’s hindquarters.
Crash didn’t have time to enjoy the run. He was hunting Tally. The Cyberpuke was nowhere to be found on the open network. He went several levels deeper for a few minutes, tracking the hacker who had run away from Night Park, but that only led to a bar
deep in the pirate-run section of the station.
Silver laughed.
She sent a mental shrug.
Crash let Silver enjoy her smug moment. Her mention of puzzles reminded him about one other place he could search for Tally.
He logged into the Puzzlehead forum and pulled a dump of the members list. In a few seconds, he had their most recent check-in information, which included Link identifiers.
As he suspected, Tally’s profile was among the oldest. The Cyberpuke would have hung onto the older creation date because of the street cred it imbued among users, but it tied him to a time when he didn’t know or care about security as much as he obviously did now. Crash was able to hand off Tally’s profile data to his tracking NSAI, and in a few seconds, he had a list of the Puzzlehead’s common login locations. He overlayed the locations with a schematic of Cruithne and shared the data with Silver.
In these more tightly controlled sections of the station, security was growing more organized. Soon they would reach the upper-tier of the Administration section, and Crash suspected they might soon find themselves facing another mech. They needed to hurry up and choose a destination.