Chiral Justice: A Hard Science Fiction Technothriller (The Biogenesis War Book 3)

by L. L. Richman

  “Recap that for Jonathan.”

  The man nodded. “On it, ma’am.”

  * * *

  Jonathan kept pace with Colonel Valenti as they raced down Invictus’s long corridor.

  “Can you feel him?” The colonel slid him a quick glance.

  “Yes, but it….” His words faded as he struggled to find the right ones. “It’s foggy. I can tell he’s there, I can feel his presence, but that’s about it.”

  They’d just made it to the lift when Will pinged them.

  {Got a response from the admiral, ma’am.} The flight engineer followed his words with the recorded file.

  Valenti shared it with Jonathan as they stepped inside the lift and it whisked them down to the boat bay’s level. Admiral Toland’s voice came over the wire first.

  {All assets have been contacted and are converging on his last known location, but we’d like Captain Case to help us pinpoint it.}

  Her voice was replaced by Sam’s.

  {Jonathan, I understand you can’t communicate with Micah while he’s unconscious, but I think you can still locate him.}

  Jonathan shook his head. “That’s the one thing we’ve found that weakens with distance, ma’am. The closer we are, the more precise—”

  Sam’s recorded voice overrode his protests.

  {Hear me out on this. Try to initiate a gestalt. I know it’s a long shot, but you have to try. Spool up Mirage’s SyntheticVision system, and then reach out to Micah while you’re merged with the ship. Even though he’s not conscious, the thread’s still there. Lean into the connection a bit, see if you can magnify it.}

  Valenti looked over at Jonathan, raising her brows in question.

  He nodded. “That… could work.”

  They hit the boat bay at a run, arrowing toward the Nadir’s extended ramp.

  “Bring up Mirage’s SI,” Jonathan called out as he hit the top of the ramp.

  Yuki pivoted in the copilot’s cradle, dipping her hand into the cockpit’s holographic console.

  “Better warn Invictus,” Nina counseled. “Last thing we need is for someone on the bridge to think we’re trying to spin up our drives while this cruiser’s in flight and the boat bay’s doors are closed.”

  “On it,” Will said, turning to his own console, his hands dancing across its controls.

  Jonathan slid into his cradle, plunging into his connection with Mirage faster than he’d ever done before.

  The connection was meant to allow a pilot’s consciousness to enter into a form of merge with the ship’s Synthetic Intelligence. It was an odd feeling, doing such a thing from inside a larger ship. He’d certainly never tried it when a ship like Invictus was in motion.

  The merge faithfully recreated Mirage’s immediate surroundings, so instead of the inky blackness of space that he was used to seeing, he got a good view of the cruiser’s hangar.

  He pushed outward, sensors piercing through Invictus’s hull until he was once more surrounded by the comforting familiarity of the void beyond.

  He reached for Micah, using the SyntheticVision system to enhance his connection to his twin. He was still unable to rouse him, but his other self’s presence did seem to crystallize inside his head.

  He turned, seeking Micah’s whereabouts in a way not too dissimilar from how a ship’s sensors would tune to a beacon. He felt a familiar tug in the direction of his chiral self, and followed the invisible line forward.

  The thread that connected him to Mirage grew thinner the farther along the line he traveled, but he didn’t have time to worry about that. He needed Micah’s coordinates, and he needed them now.

  A sort of a map appeared inside his head—not so much a set of coordinates as it was a ghostly representation of what Micah had seen and experienced that day—the fairgrounds, the tent, Katie’s mechanics’ pit. Until finally, Jonathan saw the vendor tent his twin had been passing just as the shackling app was slapped against his neck.

  He placed the spark that was Micah’s consciousness as a mental overlay on top of the ghostly projection, and his heart rate sped up when he saw it moving.

  He’d found him.

  He tried to push the information to Valenti, but his connection to his physical surroundings seemed tinny and distant. He heard the colonel shout at him, but had a difficult time making out her words.

  He felt her do something on her end, and suddenly the connection between himself and Mirage boosted, doubling and then tripling in thickness.

  He again tried pushing the projection to her, willing her to see the blip that represented Micah, just as he did.

  He felt confusion from her end; he had the impression that she was jumbling the images around, not quite certain what to do with them.

  He dropped a pin on top of the spark that was Micah, ordering his mind to force a correlation, and willing his wire to attach coordinates to that spark.

  His implant initially refused, unable to resolve their unique, chiral connection with a solid data point that its system was familiar with, but Jonathan kept at it until he found something that would stick.

  He felt more than heard comprehension from Valenti, and then her presence receded.

  Jonathan once more turned his attention to his twin, his focus extending even more fully, until Mirage was once more the thinnest of threads.

  His action provoked an angry response from the colonel. Again, he couldn’t hear her words, but her intent was clear. She was ordering him to retreat.

  Everything in him rebelled, but then he felt a shock, an electric discharge, and heard clearly her angry words.

  {That is an order, Captain!}

  With great reluctance, Jonathan pulled away from Micah, until the gestalt between Mirage, himself, and his twin faded.

  * * *

  Sam closed her eyes in relief as the telemetry came through.

  She understood better than most the risks Jonathan was taking on behalf of his twin, yet she couldn’t bring herself to regret the man’s actions.

  She stood by, hands clenching and unclenching in a sort of tense anticipation, as Toland relayed the information to Major Reid, and the Unit teams sprang into action.

  Toland flipped through several feeds streamed from the drakesuit-clad operators, projecting them into the bullpen’s holotank.

  Sam inhaled sharply when she saw Micah’s form walking with an unnatural stiffness that suggested the unconscious man’s carbyne lattice was engaged and he was being led by his captors through the fairgrounds to an undisclosed location.

  Teams One and Four closed on the agents, but were still too far away to engage. Then, from out of nowhere, Katie Hyer appeared.

  GESTALT

  Bezier Foothills

  outside Founder’s Cup Fairgrounds

  Ceriba

  Katie watched Micah’s eyes roll up in his head the moment the agent slapped the suppression nanopackage on the back of his neck. As his knees gave out, the two agents came up alongside him in a practiced move that told Katie this wasn’t the first time they’d done this maneuver.

  {Thirty seconds out,} Gabe’s voice came across.

  {Too long. I’m engaging.}

  {Hyer, no! Stand down, Chief, that’s an—}

  Katie blocked out Gabe’s words as she stepped out of the alley and pulled out her makeshift slingshot. Notching the jagged bit of metal at the center of the band, she drew it taut against her cheekbone.

  Zeroing in on the officer’s forehead, she let the small piece of metal fly. It went rocketing through the air, hitting the man in the center of his left eye socket with a satisfying thwack.

  The man bellowed in pain, hand rising belatedly to protect his face as he staggered a step backward. He whipped his head around to where Katie stood. “Get her!”

  The agents dropped Micah and went racing forward.

  Flinging the lanyard away, Katie turned and bolted back down the alley. Bending mid-stride, she scooped up the bucket of ball bearings with one hand as she flew past. Hefting it o
ver her shoulder, she let its contents fall behind her, scattering small, metal spheres in her wake.

  A shout was followed by the whine of a weapon discharging. Katie had jinked at the sound of the woman’s raised voice. It was the only thing that kept her from the full brunt of the direct-energy beam that struck to her left, the beam’s edge just clipping her left leg.

  The muscles in her thigh jerked, nerve endings jangling at the near-miss.

  She careened around the corner and slid to a stop behind the recycling bin, her hand scrabbling for the tripwire. Cries and thuds reached her ears as the two agents slipped on the pebbled offering she’d left for them.

  Scuffling noises and more curses told Katie the two were having trouble finding their feet. She used the precious few extra seconds to change her appearance, flinging off the cap and then ripping the Founder’s Cup shirt over her head.

  Thundering footsteps told her they had cleared the ball bearing minefield and were seconds away from reaching the end of the alley. Taking up the tripwire cable, she timed their approach carefully, and with a savage pull, jerked the wire taut just as they came flush with the opening.

  From the narrow slit between tent and recycle bin, she watched as the signboard went flying, cracking the man under the chin. In the next instant, he went sprawling face first into pedestrian traffic, the woman tripping over him as she, too, fell.

  Katie’s HUD alerted her to the presence of two shadowed figures racing around the corner. Wheeling around, she intended to beat it to the back of the tent, but a ping stopped her in her tracks.

  {‘S okay, Chief. Cavalry’s here. Good job taking these two down.}

  * * *

  Micah felt Jonathan’s presence prodding at him, and he fought to throw off the effects of the nano-suppression packet that had dragged him into the twilight of unconsciousness. He was dimly aware of a fight happening around him, and yet was utterly helpless to assist.

  Suddenly, he felt a figure kneel beside him, and an invisible hand smacked a rectification code onto the back of his neck. The code neutralized the subjugation nanopackage, and his consciousness came roaring back.

  With it came a connection unlike anything Micah or Jonathan had ever before experienced.

  It thundered into existence, a thing of incredible power. The Micah side of the merge immediately recognized the danger lurking in its depths, and instinctively tried to pull back, but the Jonathan part of the merge latched on with fierce intensity.

  The Micah half shuddered under the tsunami of thought and emotion that overlaid his own. He staggered under the sensation, oblivious to the fact that his physical body was being bolstered by invisible, drakeskin-clad suits—team operators who had been sent to guard him.

  He pushed against the gestalt, fighting to tear free. {{Pull back!}} he yelled into the mental maelstrom. {{Retreat!}}

  Slowly, the howling diminished to the point where the Micah part could sense that they were two individual identities once more, inexorably intertwined yet separate.

  It suddenly came to him that the gestalt had a distinctly mechanical edge to it. Horror struck as he realized the Jonathan part had nearly subsumed himself within the SyntheticVision system in his effort to reach his unconscious twin.

  He felt more than heard the immense effort his mirror twin brought to bear as he wrenched himself away, struggling to put mental distance between their two selves.

  The merge surged once more as movement distracted Jonathan/Micah from their efforts. They saw Katie Hyer rush forward, saw the ghostly outline of a form they shouldn’t be able to see raise a weapon, targeting the chief warrant.

  Micah crouched, and with a bellow, launched himself at the invisible enemy. Unable to see the Akkadian gunning for her, Katie faltered at the sight of Micah rushing her.

  {{Look out!}} the merge cried out, and Hyer pivoted, eyes skittered around, looking for a foe she could not see.

  The cloaked enemy turned at Micah’s shout, weapon swinging around to draw a bead on him.

  With a guttural yell, Micah pushed off into a flying tackle, his shoulder impacting with the man’s solar plexus. The two went down, and Micah heard the chief warrant yell out for Gabe.

  Moments later, he felt the burning sting of a directed energy weapon as the blast glanced off his shoulder, hitting his opponent in the head. The figure beneath him went slack, and Micah rolled up to a sitting position, slapping at his shoulder with his free hand to try to work the sting out of it.

  In the back of the merged mind, the Jonathan part recognized that this enhanced vision, the seeming ability to see a stealthed opponent, was something entirely new.

  Katie stooped, hooking a hand beneath Micah’s arm, and hauled him to his feet. {You okay?} Her voice came across the team’s combat net.

  {{Yes.}}

  But the merge’s attention wasn’t on Katie; it was on the battle raging around them.

  Micah’s head snapped up, and he called out, {{Boone! To your right, three o’clock. Alvarez, two coming up on your six.}}

  He knew the merge made it difficult for those on the combat net to distinguish between his and Jonathan’s voices.

  Katie shook her head convulsively and muttered, “Damn, but that shit’s weird.”

  Training had her placing her back to Micah’s as they faced off against what, to the chief, were invisible opponents.

  Micah glanced at the weapon in her hand. She was brandishing what looked like some sort of short metal pole she’d found somewhere.

  {{A tent stake?}} the Jonathan-Micah merge thought.

  {{Possibly,}} they agreed.

  The only weapon he had at the moment was the weird, enhanced vision that the gestalt provided. Still, the merge wielded it to their advantage, calling out enemy locations as he assumed an overwatch position over the combat net.

  The battle itself, though violent, was over in a matter of minutes. When all was settled, Micah bent, ripping the hood from the unconscious man who had gone after Katie.

  He looked up when Gabe knelt beside him. {{Never seen them before.}}

  He shook his head slightly at the mental echo.

  {{This is getting weird, brother. Think it might be time for you to pull out.}}

  The Jonathan part of the merge sent mental acquiescence, and Micah felt his twin’s mind fade from its altered state back to the normal presence inside his head.

  Micah sagged slightly, fighting a sudden onslaught of fatigue. Gabe and Boone caught him, guiding him to the ground as Asha came running toward them, donning a field bracer.

  “That was some talent you showed just now,” murmured Gabe as Asha knelt beside him and began a quick exam. “Are you really able to see them, despite the stealth they’re wearing?”

  Micah sent his eyes roaming around the immediate area, scanning the figures where they lay. Some were partially uncloaked, their hoods removed. Others….

  He blinked, and suddenly they disappeared.

  {Gone, now.} He shook his head and cleared his throat before adding aloud, “That’s a new one for the books.” His voice sounded rusty, like it always did after a gestalt.

  “I’d say.” Gabe eyed him thoughtfully. “The colonel’s going to want to hear about this. The director, too, for that matter.”

  Micah nodded. “Not sure it’s worth the danger Jonathan put himself in to try it again, though. He stretched himself pretty thin.”

  He paused, Jonathan sending the impression of Valenti chewing him out. Jonathan tried to hide Micah’s awareness of her words, but the verbal punch they bestowed upon his twin echoed in his thoughts.

  “Colonel’s pretty chapped about it, too.”

  Gabe’s brow lifted in silent query.

  “He went catatonic on them,” Micah explained. “They couldn’t rouse him. Thought they were about to lose him.” He blinked, his gaze refocusing on his surroundings. “Not an advantage I’d want to press.”

  “Not with that price tag, no,” agreed Gabe, helping Micah to his feet. “Soun
ds like the colonel’s already aware, then, and doesn’t approve. Glad to hear it.”

  Gabe took a few steps toward the nearest prisoner. With a booted foot, he gently nudged the woman’s unconscious form. As she rolled onto her back, Micah recognized her as one of the agents that had been guarding the entrance of the Douglass-Washburn tent.

  “Well, it looks like we’ve identified at least one of our moles,” he murmured.

  “That was one of the two people I saw Garza’s agent motion to,” Katie said as she stepped up beside them. She lifted her chin, pointing to another downed figure a few meters away. “That’s the other one.”

  “What about the officer you said you saw, the one who stopped Micah in the first place?” Gabe asked.

  “He was dressed in a general’s uniform,” Micah supplied. “Guy seemed familiar, too.”

  Gabe looked at him sharply. “You get an ID on the man?”

  Micah chuckled. “No, but it won’t be very hard to find him.” He glanced over at Katie. “Just look for the guy trying to hold his left eyeball in. Somebody popped him in the head.”

  Katie grinned, tossing a small chunk of steel in the air with her right her hand. “Got ‘im right good, too. Last I saw, the asshole was bleeding like a stuck pig and whining like a baby.”

  Gabe nodded, and Micah could tell the man was working hard not to smile at Katie’s attitude. “Head wounds will do that.” He looked around. “Anyone see the man the chief warrant nailed?”

  There were headshakes and murmured noes. Then a call came in from over the combat net.

  {Just checked with the fairgrounds, sir. Interestingly enough, the security feed from the sector you’re in encountered a glitch and is currently nonfunctional.}

  “Great, so we have no record of the incident. Bit suspicious, isn’t it?” asked Micah.

  “More than a little.” Gabe shook his head. “This is really starting to piss me off.”

  Micah lifted a brow but said nothing as the other man turned to address the operatives doing the bagging and tagging.

  “Haul them back to base as soon as you’re done securing them,” Gabe ordered.