Cold Snap

by Macky Santiago

  “Say I did want to be efficient. And let’s say, an opportunity presents itself where we can gain access to high-level Conglomerate closed networks and retrieve… invaluable information to the Alliance. All while successfully rescuing persons of interest, and thus turning the tide of this war.” I state my thoughts without actually saying yes to Jean Philippe’s kind, yet unapologetic outing of my intentions.

  “Your memories.” Leon says suddenly, “That’s what this is about.”

  “That’s what this is also about.” I counter immediately. No sense in lying to them now. “Look, I’m a lot of things, but stupid about our lives isn’t one of them. If we have a clear shot, we take it. If we don’t have a clear shot, we don’t take it. I just want to know what the odds are.“

  “Six point two three three percent.” Bellona chimes in curtly, with only six point two three three percent of her usual mirth. “We need a new variable, Yuki. Several new variables. Our success window is so tiny as it is. Adding a secondary parameter is suicide and you know that. Hey, here’s a thought! We’ve actually run scenarios where—“

  “No.” I cut Bellona off because I know that tone and I know what she means.

  I know who she means.

  No way. In the last decade since the Alliance freed me, I have never wanted to work with or get help from anyone else but the seven bots on this ship. I’ll work with others if I have to, but only if they were ordered to play in the same sandbox. And the perky excited tone in Bellona’s voice, coupled with what passes for a scowl on the Doctor’s “face” did not bode well for me.

  Seems like they all know that and don’t care. Traitors.

  “Look, I don’t like the swaggering bastard m’self, but if it means we escape with the wee ones alive, ye at least need to try making contact.” Doctor Capaldi says patiently.

  “We don’t even know if he’s here!” I yell. How is it that I am nine years old again with these knuckleheads whenever he comes up?

  “Actually…” Jean Philippe starts.

  I glare at him so hard, I can actually hear my teeth grinding in anger.

  “Don’t you dare.” I say, heart in my throat and hoping against hope he’s wrong.

  “I was going to say that we won’t know unless you hail him with an Alliance frequency.” He replies evenly. “And no, I did not pick up any trace of the Sol Pernix anywhere.”

  At least he had the decency to ignore my outburst, even though I know he’s judging me. Five hells, I’m judging me.

  The fact that I'm both relieved and yet extremely disappointed (and maybe a little sad) at this update makes me hate that dolt even more.

  “I am not hailing Theron Jaeger. Not even if my life depended on it.” I say petulantly. And I know I am being petulant. Even Bellona’s sensor display moved in a way that would have passed for ‘rolling her eyes’.

  Ah, what the hell do these rust buckets know about feelings? Human feelings, specifically.

  “Well Captain, our survival rate shoots up to actual survivable levels if we involve Captain Jaeger and his crew. Which you know well from experience!” Bellona says, cheery once again.

  These mutinous traitors begin their overly lively discussion about involving Jaeger and his crew. The Sol Pernix crew are all lovely, mind you. It’s just their captain, and his smug… handsome… extremely punchable face that I absolutely cannot abide.

  Theron this, and Captain Jaeger that. Oh, he’s so resourceful! Seventy-four percent survival rate if involved from step one of the process. Blah blah blah.

  “Alright, enough!” I yell. The bots go silent immediately. “You’ve run your calculations with complete disregard for my feelings, so let’s just stick to the plans. We currently have three.”

  “Seven!” Bellona says excitedly. It’s one of her favorite numbers and she loves having more than three plans.

  “Whatever.” I concede. “Mick, Iñigo, and Leon, you implement Phase Zero. Make sure everything is snug and in place. Bellona, as usual you get yourself to the highest—“

  She pouts.

  “Fine, you can go to the surveillance point next to the commercial district.” She brightens, so I quickly add, “But the small one overlooking the central pavilion, not the giant one below the station.”

  “But!”

  “Do we wanna talk survivability ratios? If I have to contemplate working with Captain Fancypants, you don’t get to see the black market on this station. Everyone suffers.” I say curtly as she keeps pouting. “Jean Philippe, we need full infiltration holos and skins for each of our entry and switch points. How are we on time? Doctor Capaldi needs at least a full four hours to bioengineer the skins.”

  “Three hours until all infiltration builds are fully designed and compatible with the Faldan Station systems.” Jean Philippe says. “We’ll make these C-suits our best ones yet.”

  “See if you can get Bel to crunch that down to... two hours thirty?” I look at Bellona for confirmation.

  “One hour forty-five, Captain!” She says cheerily, ‘hooking her arm’ around Jean Philippe’s and steering him towards the engineering room where they can hunker down and crunch through the builds.

  “Take the boys with you. And as soon as you can, outfit them with some temporary skins for Phase Zero. We need to set things up fast.” I say, watching as Leon, Mick and Iñigo follow behind the pair. "Mila, keep running scenarios, vulnerability points… whatever. Find every single way we could be killed from three thousand yards and give that data to Bellona. Both of you figure out a way we can stop that from happening.”

  “What say you, Doctor? Our solnyshka is still in denial, no?” Mila ‘smiles’ wickedly. But I know she’s worried. She only teases me when she's worried.

  “As the only one who shares her sentiments about Theron Jaeger, I would have to say yes. It’s quite exasperating really.” Doctor Capaldi quips

  “Et tu, Doctor?” I say though I'm too tired to really argue.

  The bots were there when Theron turned down my request for a spot on his ship. His excuse was that Ryn Stormcrow would be a better babysitter than he could ever be. But I had grown attached to the crew of the Sol Pernix, and I didn't want to go with Ryn. I still remember Ryn’s honor guard holding me back that day as I kicked and screamed when the Pernix took off.

  My crew know exactly how I feel about Theron, which is more than I’m ever willing to admit. They don’t tease lightly.

  “Well, if we’re all about to die, you may as well tell him how ye bloody feel.” Doctor C’s voice is flat. I know that’s his way of voicing his doubts about our survival.

  “I will keep running the scenarios. You should at least call him. Better chances of survival.” Mila squeezes my shoulder, a human gesture that she had apparently learned from the Doctor to comfort me.

  “We don’t even know if he took the job!” I yell back, half angry and half kidding about being angry.

  “Admiral Stormcrow has left you without backup and with no extraction plans before. At least she was up front about it this time, which is even more worrisome.” Doctor C says.

  “Well, we’ll just have to grab the girls before Octavia arrives.” I say, committing my thoughts completely to the mission. May as well channel all these strong emotions into the keenest, toughest blade of motivation I can fashion.

  “Oh, sure. Because Plan A always works.” The Doctor says flippantly. He hands me two blue capsules. Ah, yes, blessed medical maintenance. Even in the harsh light, they glow softly. “And if Octavia does come?”

  “We’ll take every shot we can without compromising the mission. Simple as that.” I take the pills and swallow them dry, grimacing at the faint residual taste of ozone. “Wake me in four hours, Doctor.”

  “Simple as that indeed.” He says quietly.

  I know he knows I’m conflicted. After all, we’ve learned our lessons the hard way. But I won’t let anything happen to these girls. Or to us.

  “Sweet dreams, child.” The Doctor murmurs, as I head
to my quarters.

  ◆◆◆

  Intercepted Communication Transcript

  Location: Faldan Space Station, Hangar Fifty-Two

  Control Tower Eight: Are you absolutely sure all the sentry bots are operational? The Commander will personally shoot us if they aren’t.

  Hangar Fifty-Two: Affirmative, Tower Eight. Debris dinged some of the bots on shift and scrambled their transponders. All sentries are operational. No red flags.

  Control Tower Eight: Be sure of it. Anything else out of the ordinary?

  Hangar Fifty-Two: None. Well, one ship had to be rerouted from the Main Hangar to here. Big celebrity. Made a lot of noise. Said they should have had a pad in Hangar One. Said they’d complain to the Queen herself.

  Control Tower Eight: Five hells. Sixteenth one today, and it won’t be the last. Top brass is insisting Hangar One be kept solely at fifteen percent capacity. Why? I have no clue. Nobody will tell us anything. You get a name on this gem?

  Hangar Fifty-Two: Sarlin Ha’ar. Some kind of actor or singer. Gave me and my men hell. Told ‘im he’d have to take it up with the Control Towers if they wanted to lodge a formal complaint. Said he would and that his manager would be hailing the Queen within the next cycle.

  Control Tower Eight: *Pfft* Performers. Next time, tell ‘em to take a number and get in line. I need a new job.

  Hangar Fifty-Two: You and me both, sir.

  Control Tower Eight: Keep an eye on those sentries and that ship. No surprises. Tower out.

  Hangar Fifty Two: Acknowledged, Tower Eight.

  Chapter Three

  I wish I could say it was a blissful short rest. It wasn’t. Too much dreaming. Some of it was memories; others were closer to nightmare scenarios. All of them tangled up in a snarled non sequitur mess. None of them from before I was seven years old.

  A fun little side effect from Octavia’s experiments on me is that I now effectively have more than just an eidetic memory. My memories come with high definition playback, plus sound, smell, taste and sensation isolation.

  I can literally remember everything from my seventh birthday (or what I was told was my seventh birthday anyway) onwards. Anything prior to that is a complete blank— my real name, my parents, my home planet. I was constantly told that I was grown in the Leghrelnis labs and “woken up” when I had developed.

  It never made sense to me. Why at the age of seven? Why not as a fully functioning adult? Whatever “science” they justified using to explain why I woke up as a child never did add up.

  I guess it made sense that I circled back to this darker side of my psyche in my dreams. After all, the girls we were going to rescue were supposedly slated for a lifetime residency at the exact location of my childhood nightmares.

  I'll say one more thing about these thoughts. They're very distracting when you’re trying to hijack moving vehicles.

  Which is what we are doing right now at the Grand Concourse, a marvel of Faldanian-Conglomerate relations in travelling infrastructure.

  This superhighway connects every single sector of the Faldan space station. There were layers for travel, layers for residence, even a few tourist spots here and there, all intertwined within a physical lattice of overpasses, underpasses and roads.

  All of our devised strategies had pinpointed this area as the optimal spot to begin our extraction plan for the princesses. And thus, here I am on ye auld hovercycle in whatever passes for ‘broad daylight’ on this station, positioned by one of the major tunnels on the concourse.

  “Okay. Kill the feed in three… Two… One… And broadcast counterfeit signal.” I say as the transport convoy carrying the princesses comes into sight and enters the tunnel ahead. “Cue the lights…” I add, as Bellona and Jean Philippe continue to work their magic.

  I hit the gas on my hovercycle as the lights change. No other vehicles are allowed into the tunnel. On my visor HUD, I track Leon, Doctor C., Mila and Mick. They're hovering in position several meters into the tunnel, all ready for intercept. I knew those propulsion suits we snagged during the Chelnic op would come in handy. Keep flying, my pretties!

  Our timing has been flawless so far.

  Every day, the princesses are taken from the secure Faldan government compound to the grand communications array, so they can address the people of Faldan from a replica of the Faldanian throne room set up purely for show. Good little puppets asking everyone to drink their vita-packs and keep their heads down. Today, we timed it so we can intercept them on their way back from their daily remote “check in” with the Faldanian populace.

  Jean Philippe and Iñigo already infiltrated their guard detail. They were skinned up so nicely, thanks to Doctor C. You wouldn’t even think they were synthoids, let alone robots. Ah, the joys of elite tech! Note to self: these new Covert Deep Infiltration Suits are my new favorite thing.

  But the C-Suits can throw you for a loop. The crew all look so ordinary and human that you’d think there’d be some cause for worry.

  Fortunately, there isn’t any reason to worry at all. Even if they go mucking about without their usual outer casings and armor, they aren’t as vulnerable as your average human. Besides, who better to pose as armed guards than a saboteur bot and his melee combat specialist friend?

  However, before Bellona can warn me, I sense a curveball through her sensors. Up to this very moment, everything was going according to plan. And it still is. I just don’t know what this new variable means.

  On so many levels.

  “Captain. Upper northeast quadrant.” Bellona signals me. I zoom in with my visor and spot him mingling among the civilians. He's pretending to be one of the many plebs taking photos of the concourse.

  Agent Zero. Captain Nandru Zavus of the Galactic Defense Force Conglomerate.

  You’d think an intergalactic “hero” with his star quality would have been easy to recognize. But he wasn’t in uniform today. And his hair, usually obscured by a helmet or service cap, blew freely in the wind. He even had several photocap devices to play up the tourist angle. He looked… free, I guess.

  And that made me ache for a hot second.

  My dumb science experiment of a brain flashed a fictional image of a woman in a sundress accompanying him. Beautiful hair, perfect skin, no scars. A clear message from my subconscious that it shouldn’t be me next to him in this idyllic scenario.

  Not that I’m ever ashamed of my scars, but they’re generally attention grabbers of the wrong kind and make for all sorts of annoying situations. I mean, have you seen me? These scars ruin any attempt at being inconspicuous.

  Anyway, I only had a few seconds left before the lights changed again, signaling the start of my bit in this op. I didn’t have the time to dwell on why Z was here. Even if he’d said that he wouldn’t be able to help and yet had shown up here, in this spot and this time of all the spots and times in the galaxy.

  Well, here’s what I apparently did have the time for: the realization that I was glad he was here.

  Did it matter to me that it meant either he or all of us were in extreme danger? Nope.

  Was there also enough time for my brain to remind me that, to this day, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do about Z and how I felt about him? Yes.

  I breathe in and out, steeling myself for the next step in this op. I also push the avalanche of possibilities that explained why Captain Zavus was currently several meters from me all the way to the back of my mind. No room for any doubts right now.