by M. D. Cooper
When there was no answer, he pinged Esther and then the Speedwell, initiating a team-wide combat net. He could hear his voice shake as he relayed Landon’s truncated message.
Jason and Calista had taken off running the minute they got the gist of the message, Tobi bounding behind them. Ben scrambled to follow.
“I’m coming with you!”
“I’m coming with you, too, sir.” The AI’s voice sounded grim. “And I have a team who will meet us there.”
MISDIRECTION
STELLAR DATE: 05.22.3191 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Department of Neurosciences
REGION: El Dorado University, Alpha Centauri System
Landon stood still, his frame rooted to the floor.
No amount of effort he brought to bear could break through this paralysis. In fact, it seemed as if the opposite were true; the more stringently he tried to break the neuroscientist’s hold on him, the more intense the pain.
He’d heard the scientist had been the one to reverse engineer the shackling program used against the AIs the cartel had kidnapped. He suspected that shackling was the same thing the AI was using against him just now.
He was completely cut off. He’d sent a data burst to Logan and Ben the moment he realized the feed he’d been watching was a carefully manufactured fiction.
Ethan had been cagey about it; the feed wasn’t an exact loop, but rather he had managed to manipulate a section of a recording in such a way that a natural progression of gestures caught by the camera were stitched together randomly. It was why it had taken him so long to trip to the fact he wasn’t watching a live loop.
He fought vainly against the compulsion to provide the AI with everything he knew about the SIS’s hunt for Prime. It was fortunate that he’d been away on the Krait mission, or he might have had more information to give away than the little he knew.
But then Prime ordered him to provide security tokens, even an imprint of his own unique ID. He watched helplessly as his own mind betrayed him to the beast, going so far as to offer up creative ways in which the AI could continue to spoof the system, when prompted by him to do so.
Landon tried, and rapidly discarded, every conceivable configuration to break free of the hold the other AI had over him. While the majority of his mind fought against the flood of data pouring unwillingly from him into the psychopath, a part of his thoughts shifted despairingly to his twin.
He could imagine all too well what his death might do to Logan. After what his brother in arms had been through, this might damage him irretrievably.
It was Landon’s biggest regret and the thing foremost in his thoughts when, his mind now completely stripped of all useful information, Prime compelled the mech to reach inside his own torso.
Landon seized every ounce of willpower and dug into reserves he never knew he had, forcing the gauntleted, three-fingered hand to freeze. It worked for one moment, then another—but then a flare of pain such as he’d never known broke over him, blinding in its intensity.
Before he was consciously aware of the fact, the mechanical hand had wrapped itself around his own core and pulled it from the inset where it had been seated. He watched as the cylinder rose to hover before the mech frame’s primary sensors.
Logan was right. This was one sick bastard, who got off on others’ pain.
Logan. Brother. I am sorry, was his last cogent thought, before the command to pulverize the cylinder was executed.
* * * * *
Prime cursed as he realized the stars-be-damned AI-mech had sent out a warning to his team just before bursting through the lab’s doors. This left him with precious little time to stage a realistic misdirection; he would have to act fast.
The AI hadn’t given Prime much more intel than John had been compelled to provide, although Prime now knew the identities of every member of Phantom Blade. That might prove useful in the future. What mattered now were the location pings Landon’s token fed him. Those locations would converge on them very soon.
Swiftly, Prime reviewed what he knew of his progenitor’s lab, then eyed the closet containing Ethan and the cloning equipment. In two strides, he wrenched open the doors and stared down at that damnable cart that had brought him to life. He began to reach for the isolation unit containing the original Ethan’s cylinder, but his motion was arrested by an item he spied on the cart’s lower shelf.
It was an immutable crystal storage cube, something he’d missed in his haste to free himself that fateful day. Prime bent to retrieve it from where it had been tossed haphazardly among various tools and measurement devices. Picking up a scanner Lilith had left on the cart, he accessed the device and was surprised to find yet another copy of himself.
Of Ethan, dammit.
Prime’s sensors raked across the cart, cataloguing it for any other content he might have missed in his hasty exit from the lab days before.
There.
An empty cylinder awaited an install of a new sentience. Prime snatched it up in one hand while the other brought Lilith’s cloning equipment online. He shoved both cylinder and ICS cube into their respective ‘send’ and ‘receive’ ports and commanded the program to execute.
Lilith had already primed the neural lattice in the cylinder’s core matrices to accept Ethan’s mind, and the transfer completed quickly.
Prime sent the closet door back into lockdown and raced for the autodoc. Shoving Judith’s head roughly to one side, he reached for his own cylinder. Controlling his frame remotely now, he ordered it to seat his cylinder inside the embedding console while slipping the inactive copy of Ethan inside the frame that had recently housed him.
Prime sent his consciousness speeding through the embedding protocol, making rapid adjustments. Time was his biggest enemy at the moment; the autodoc would have to perform a much less integrated procedure on Judith.
This is better for my purposes anyway, he thought. A more traditional embedding risks neural spillover. This way, I can inflict as much pain as I wish, without experiencing any adverse effects myself. And in the end, extraction will be greatly simplified.
That process complete, Prime seized control of the mech frame Landon had inhabited before his demise, pivoting it to face the wall adjoining a nearby lab. This, he had determined, was the room’s weakest point, and it was here that he directed the soldier’s railgun to fire.
Three shots later, a hole large enough for a slightly smaller mech frame to breach had been carved between the two rooms.
Next, he ordered the frame to release Landon’s mangled remains into the hands of the Ethan frame. Prime then shoved the soldier’s cylinder haphazardly back into the mech’s torso and sealed it inside.
He grabbed Landon’s railgun at the junction where it attached to the frame and ordered it to release. Dropping a packet of formation material onto its surface, Prime dove into the weapon and manually altered its ballistics signature. Forensics would now show a different reading than the one native to the weapon Landon had carried.
Swiftly, he sent the Ethan frame through the hole to the lab next door and triggered a few rounds from the ‘breaching’ side to ensure forensics would be led to believe the attacker had approached from this direction.
Now back inside his own lab, Prime closed on Landon’s frame until he was assured that the weapon’s fire would be concentrated enough to destroy its torso while allowing him to retain control of its weapons arm. Firing three more bursts ensured the mech-AI’s cylinder was shredded beyond anyone’s ability
to discover exactly how the AI had perished.
The autodoc pinged, indicating his embedding with Judith had completed successfully. He seized control of the woman’s body and had it stand. He ordered her to take a few tentative steps as he tested her balance and his motor control. Confident he could control the woman in a believable fashion, he checked the AI’s combat net for locations on the approaching team members.
Shit.
He would have to move fast. Panic rose, and he forced it down, moving on to the next task that needed doing as his deadline rapidly approached.
He ordered his former frame to reattach the mech’s gun arm. Dropping more formation material onto the railgun, he returned the weapon’s signature back to its original configuration. Then he paced off the distance required to give his own frame a believable killing blow.
The first of the approaching team’s location icons was mere meters away from the lab’s sealed doors when the railgun shredded the humanoid frame his progenitor had worn for nearly a century.
* * * * *
Jason reached the landing pad first; he raced for the pinnace and leapt inside. A jerk of his head had the pilot jackknifing out of his cradle.
The craft had already been preflighted, so he spent the last few seconds while the rest of the team boarded laying in a least-time course for the university. He looked back, confirming Ben had crossed the threshold, but didn’t wait for the craft’s hatch to shut behind the man. Most atmospheric craft had hatches and doors that were designed to automatically close against onrushing air, and this one was no different. So with a shouted warning for his passengers to hold on, he gave the pinnace full throttle and rocketed down the runway.
Tobias pinged Jason, informing him the hatch had sealed.
Jason glanced back at the big cat. Instead of the reproving glare he expected her to bestow on him, Tobi returned his gaze steadily, her ears slightly back—and he knew that she sensed the same urgency they all did.
Ben’s voice sounded winded and pained but resolute.
Samantha’s voice joined the combat net.
Jason winced internally at that, but took Samantha at her word and kept the pinnace screaming toward the campus. Fortunately, there were no tall buildings he needed to avoid on this section of the ring.
Calista turned her head as he reached for the controls that would send the small craft into a hard braking maneuver. He heard her call out,
Ten seconds later, the craft had landed in the center of the campus’s main quad. Tobias triggered the pinnace’s door, lowering the ramp, and the big cat leapt to the ground, followed by Ben and Samantha. He saw a glint of sunlight reflect off a rapidly moving mech frame across the quad just as he and Calista hit the ground. A query of Logan’s location over the greater team net confirmed his suspicions; somehow the AI had beat them here.
The query also returned Landon’s location. The token appeared active, and Jason breathed a bit easier. He knew the AI would be doing everything in his power to protect his sister.
A thought occurred to Jason and he pinged Landon with a request for a visual through the mech frame’s sensor feeds. The view of the lab from Landon’s ident had Jason shunting the feed to the combat net with a pin identifying its location before taking off at a dead run.
He heard Logan attempt to contact his twin repeatedly, but the only thing the ping returned was that damn visual. He skidded around the corner just as he saw Logan’s frame muscle a set of doors open—and then the AI froze.
Something about the set of Logan’s frame made Jason alter his approach. He slowed as he reached the doors, and touched Logan’s frame to make the AI aware of his presence. He didn’t question the need to do it, nor its incongruity. As he slid past the frozen mech, he saw—
Oh stars. Not Landon.
His eyes slid away from the remains of his fallen teammate as he moved toward the slumped form of another figure on the floor, this one’s frame curved around the inert body of his sister.
TRANSITORY
STELLAR DATE: 05.31.3191 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: SIS Headquarters, Tomlinson Base
REGION: El Dorado Ring, Alpha Centauri System
It had been nine days since Lysander had ordered Eric to launch the Speedwell, and Ben had last seen his wife. Nine long, lonely, and frustrating days, filled with reports that all added up to one big zero where Prime was concerned.
He’d finally had his Link send every query from the Speedwell that wasn’t from Judith to his message cache. He knew the team was filled with an impotent rage over the loss of Landon, but he had nothing to give them, and the guilt he felt every time he saw a message from Logan’s token was more than he could take at the moment.
His undercover operative, John, had been a bit slow to respond, but had finally come through with his Humanity First contact. Ben had begun to wonder if his star agent had lost his touch, but then the leader, George Stewart, had finally agreed to a sting. Now it was just a matter of getting the details all ironed out.
The agent’s atypical behavior bothered Ben; it was just one of several things over the past few days that struck him as strange. Since the attack on Judith, Prime’s behavior had seemed off as well.
Every profiler they’d asked to work up a composite of the entity had agreed: his patterns of behavior indicated that he would continue to escalate.
And yet that hadn’t happened.
There had been a few homicides, even a few AIs rounded up as suspects, but they had appeared as sporadic one-offs, certainly nothing that be considered a step up from the slaughter at the West Bottoms bar.
Ben made a mental note to follow up once more with John later in the day and see if they could fast-track the sting. Stars knew there wasn’t much else he could do right now, besides read yet another useless status report….
At least the courts had settled the plea bargain with Victoria North’s legal team. The SIS had been mining the data for the past week in the hope of finding something that could lead them to Prime.
So far, the information had led to nothing but dead ends. Whoever Prime was, he knew how to disguise his identity better than the average hacker.
He suspected Victoria's legal team had known that what they had on Prime was sketchy at best, and if they wanted the plea bargain to remain intact, they needed to provide the SIS with something relevant. So, although there was precious little on Prime himself, the information did look like it would be helpful in solving other drug and weapons related crimes.
At least his analysts had something to do with their time….
His thoughts were interrupted by an electronic tapping, and he looked up to see the vice-marshal’s holo projection standing at the entrance to his office.
“May I come in?” Esther asked, and he nodded, shoving the case files to one side as the vice-marshal’s avatar approached and appeared to sit in the seat across from him. She nodded at the holo sheet in front of him. “Gleaned any new information from that?”
Ben looked at the offending report and shook his head in disgust. “The team spent six days combing through yotta
bytes of data provided by the cartel, and the only actionable bit of information they found was a rent-by-the-month apartment that Prime had apparently leased near the spaceport.”
He turned to his office holo tank and brought up an image of a basic storage pod. “This pod was found by the owners of the building and marked for resale pending the six-month hold that renters are required to place on abandoned property for former tenants.”
With a gesture, he swiped the image away. “The challenge is getting into it without triggering an auto-destruct. It’s keyed to someone’s token—we assume Prime’s—and so far, all attempts to breach it have been unsuccessful.”
Ben leaned his elbows on the edge of his desk and rubbed the back of his neck absently as he stared off into the distance. “As this is our only possible lead at the moment, we daren’t force our way in and risk destroying whatever evidence might be inside.”
Esther nodded, then gestured to the case files sitting next to the report. “And the other killings?” she asked.
He shook his head mutely as he stared down at the stack in front of him. These represented every criminal action in the past week that even loosely fit Prime’s profile. “Nothing concrete,” he said tiredly. “In fact, I’d lay credits that none of these deaths were carried out by him.”
She tilted her head forward, her eyes narrowing. “Yet some of the victims were Humanity First members,” she began, but Ben immediately started to shake his head.
“None of those killings rise to the level of master intelligence of his known previous attacks,” he said. “The thing that set apart the Enfield killings, the slaughter at the bar, Landon’s murder—hell, even his encounter with Lysander—is the sheer lack of evidence.”
He gestured toward the stack on his desk. “Every one of these cases feels more like a small-time hate crime to me—isolated incidents without any command and control behind them. And each one of these lone wolf attacks left a trail. It might take us some time to track the perpetrators down, but in every instance, there was some form of evidence left behind, clues we’ll be able to investigate: security recordings that were sloppily erased, a hijacked weapon, a safety interlock that had been hacked.”