Rogue Stars

by C Gockel et al.

  “I swear, I should have just shot you again.”

  “I know, I touched something. But it was before your warning, so you can’t fairly hold it against me.” He shrugged and traded the grapefruit for the croissant.

  “You were physically restrained. I would have thought my wishes had been made clear.” She pinched the bridge of her nose in irritation. “Fine. Whatever. So here’s the deal. I need to keep an eye on you, but I also need to be below doing repairs. Therefo—”

  “What damage could I do up here? You know I can’t access any of the controls.”

  Her response was a harsh laugh. “If it’s all the same to you, after your magic trick on the restraints—and the fact you spent last night running rampant all over my ship—I’m going to err on the side of caution. I’m sure you understand. Therefore, you’re going to come down to the engineering well with me, sit in the corner and not bother me while I work.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay? That’s all I get?”

  He relaxed back in the chair and began licking excess butter off his fingers. “I think you’ll find I’m rather easygoing when I’m not tied up.”

  “I’ll be sure and remember that—”

  It was all she could do to keep from slapping a hand over her mouth. She had been momentarily distracted by…things, and the words had simply slipped out. She stuffed the last of her croissant in her mouth and studied the crumbs adorning her plate, trying to ignore how the statement might have arguably sounded. And it didn’t really, not unless you thought about—no.

  Seconds ticked by, and the moment mercifully passed.

  She looked up to find him regarding her…mildly? Displaying slight curiosity perhaps? Even bearing a relaxed posture and amiable expression, the intensity of his gaze unnerved her. She gave him a tight smile and busied herself gathering their plates.

  She carried the plates to the counter and stowed them in the sanitizer, then glanced back over her shoulder. A splash of water to the face and a hand through the hair had improved his appearance a surprising amount, but had done nothing to remedy the darkening bruise beneath his right eye.

  With a quiet sigh she went to a cabinet in the starboard wall. Beneath the medical station was a drawer containing basic first aid supplies; she removed the wrapper on a small gel pad.

  “Here.”

  He barely looked up in time to catch it before it whacked him in the face. She stifled a cringe.

  The pad suspended in the air between two fingers, he tilted his head curiously and raised an eyebrow the tiniest bit.

  “For your eye.”

  “Ahh.” He chuckled. “You did nail me pretty good.”

  She made an effort to not appear amused, though she kind of was. “Stick it on for five minutes and be done with it already. Or don’t. Makes no difference to me.”

  22 Pandora

  Independent Colony

  “Hey Noah, over here, man!”

  Noah Terrage picked his way through the crowd in the direction of the voice. Twice he had to maneuver past slumped bodies, kids zoned out on head trips and oblivious to the world around them. Those people who remained upright were shopping, often for the same.

  “Dude, you got any Skies?”

  He ignored the beggar, other than to surreptitiously nudge him to the left and into the crowd.

  The Boulevard was not his favorite place on Pandora. To anyone visiting it for the first time, the name would be taken as an ironic joke. Booths and fabs lined both sides, stacked at least eight deep. The open way through no longer ran down the middle; instead it veered left, then right, in a seemingly random pattern resembling a path of one of the trippers who frequented it. Multi-sensory signs and giant screens blaring out jarring, discordant rhythms jammed the overhead space to entirely obscure Pandora’s rather nice sky.

  Yet beneath the chaos did exist an actual boulevard, stretching fifty meters in width and paved with marbled stone. At least, that was the rumor. No one had seen it in thirty years.

  So, no, The Boulevard was not his favorite place. Still, occasionally his business necessitated a visit. He didn’t deal in chimerals, but there was a lot more for sale here than merely chimerals. More to the point, there were dealers here who dealt in a lot more than merely chimerals.

  He slid in around the storefront to where his contact rested on a lounge stool and leaned in close so as to be heard over the raucous din. “Emilio, my man. How’s business?”

  Emilio shook his head, sending long, glittering green braids swooshing through the air. “Same old. Want a beer?”

  “Ah, wish I could, but I’m tight on time. Got to gather with a needy client on the Prom in twenty. Next time?” It never hurt to remind Emilio he had a diverse and well-paying clientele.

  “I hear ya. Hang on a sec, I’ll get your gear.” Emilio slipped behind the shimmering barrier which separated the ‘store’ front from the supply area, but returned in seconds.

  A handshake and Noah palmed the small, innocuous-looking gadget and slipped it in his hip pack. He instructed his eVi to transfer the funds to Emilio’s account. And like that, the deal was done.

  He patted Emilio’s shoulder. “Pleasure doing business with you, as always.”

  “I’m gonna buy a top-shelf illusoire with the proceeds, man.”

  “Enjoy, then!” He laughed as he slid out of the booth and back into the crowd.

  The city which comprised Pandora’s inhabited region constituted a two hundred kilometer swath of gleaming metal and bright lights. There existed dark areas of Pandora, but they resided below even the Boulevard.

  People assumed Pandora was unruled, out-of-control chaos, a patchwork of merchants and clubs and black markets. In truth, it had been constructed and continued to be overseen by a loose association of wealthy entertainment moguls. Which individuals participated in the association was a closely guarded secret, presumably because they held important positions in society.

  They built out additional infrastructure when it became needed and ensured the power grid and transportation system continued to function. They kept the slums corralled in small, well-defined areas and made sure the criminal cartels didn’t gain too powerful of a foothold in the commerce of the planet. Agents of the cartels existed on Pandora without a doubt; some of them even had significant business ventures, but they ranked no higher than the successful independent entrepreneurs.

  Pandora was a world where anything went, where you could buy anything and sell anything, where you could live out your wildest fantasy or spend forty years in a haze of parties and booze and chimerals and sex—or do both. And it was an illusion.

  Oh, you could do all those things, to be sure. But the world was an artificial creation. A planet-sized theme park where the machinery of the rides was kept hidden from public view.

  Noah knew this because his father acted as a minor player in the association which controlled Pandora. In the weeks before bailing on his father’s grand plan for his life, he had hacked and made copies of his father’s personal and business records. For insurance, for blackmail if necessary, and out of mild curiosity at what he would be leaving behind.

  He’d never used the information to his advantage, at least not overtly. But simply being aware of the ‘men behind the curtain,’ as it were, gave his life here a certain unreal quality. Like he had been immersed in a nineteen-year-long deep-dive full-sensory head trip. It gave him freedom and, it could be argued, encouraged a level of recklessness and imprudent behavior he might not be inclined to engage in if any of this were real.

  Still…it was all good, he thought as he stepped off the levtram and into The Approach.

  Most of the districts on Pandora were named some variation of a thoroughfare; there was also The Channel, The Promenade, The Avenue, The Passage, and so on. Their names gave no clue as to their character or quality, however. Visitors arrived clueless, but enterprising street urchins stalked the spaceport, willing to size up what a visitor had come to find and what they
could afford and send them in the right direction—for a few credits, of course.

  His apartment was located in The Approach, which only meant it lay in the region between the transport hub and the most popular entertainment district. It actually did have a lot of character, inhabited by a chaotic jumble of artists, merchants and runaways who had decent funds in their account—which he supposed, even after nineteen years, included him.

  He unlocked the door and slipped in his apartment, grateful for once no one frolicked in the hallway, as he did need to work this afternoon. His proffered excuse for not hanging out with Emilio hadn’t been a lie, as such. He did need to meet a client on the Prom in twenty; it happened to be in twenty hours, not minutes. Emilio was an okay guy, but his cohorts weren’t. And besides, he’d just as soon not loiter on The Boulevard any longer than he had to.

  He grabbed a water from the fridge and stepped in his work room. A floor-to-ceiling cabinet lined the left wall, full to the brim with components, spare parts and pending orders. The far wall contained four shelves of equipment and tools. He sat down at the workbench along the right wall, spun around to retrieve the other components from the cabinet, then sat back and contemplated the pieces spread on the table in front of him.

  The item he had picked up from Emilio represented the final component for a special order of custom equipment. Individually, each component was innocuous: a neck wrap, a contact pad to access the tiny fibers at the base of the neck which connected to a person’s cybernetics, a quantum data transmitter and a data buffer. Combined, they created an extremely powerful and quite illegal tool.

  When worn by an individual, the item allowed the person to interface directly with a remote synthetic neural net (‘Artificial’ being the somewhat derogatory but widely used term). The buffer was a necessity because even a heavily cybernetically-enhanced human brain couldn’t begin to process the data streaming from a neural net in real time; absent one you risked frying your cybernetics from the overload of data.

  Artificials were required to be registered and pre-approved by regulatory authorities, who certified the mandated security blocks were in place and sufficient. Even on the most free-wheeling independent worlds they were carefully monitored. And remotely interfacing with one—which thanks to quantum transmission might literally be halfway across settled space—was strictly forbidden. A person walking down the street, or more likely sitting in a corporate boardroom, sporting secret access to zettaFLOPs of mental power went several steps beyond the unfair advantages tolerated by society.

  Seeing as it really was a dangerous tool, he wouldn’t normally be comfortable either constructing or selling it. In this case, however, he knew the client personally and felt certain she didn’t intend to use it for galactic domination. No, he suspected she simply wanted to see what it was like to effectively meld with the mind of an Artificial…and because she could.

  23 Siyane

  Metis Nebula, Uncharted Planet

  Caleb sat on the bottom rung of the ladder, arms draped over his knees and hands clasped loosely together.

  She lay half-subsumed beneath the tear in the wall, working to re-secure a long strip of threaded cabling in the narrow space between the interior wall and exterior hull. She hadn’t said more than two words since they had come downstairs, the two words having been ‘stay there.’

  He had already analyzed what he could see of the hold. Though the rather significant damage muddled matters somewhat, he had quickly classified the engineering section as an advanced but mostly standard layout for a ship of this size, albeit featuring several unusual customizations.

  This conclusion he had come to in the first two minutes; thirty-seven minutes later, there was only one thing left in the hold for him to analyze.

  “So you’re a treasure hunter.”

  It was the most rational conclusion. The instruments and panel readouts on the main deck were geared toward measurement and detection of element concentrations, spectrum spikes and notable astronomical phenomena. They covered too broad a range for a purely scientific expedition; and besides, a double Masters in mechanical engineering and stellar astronomy yet no doctorate suggested she was far too practical to be a scientist.

  The ship displayed a complete lack of corporate branding anywhere, and the last employer listed in her file was from eight years earlier. Taken together with the fair number of personal extravagances, it meant she had to be independent.

  The muffled response came from within the aperture. “I’m an explorer.”

  “That’s what I said—a treasure hunter.”

  She grunted in exertion and a section of cabling snapped snugly against the wall. “And I said for you not to bother me.”

  He gave an exaggerated shrug, though he doubted she was able to see it. “Right, my bad.”

  A few seconds passed. She groaned and slid into the open to glare at him in obvious annoyance. “I find undiscovered planets, resources, astronomical events, other anomalies, and sell the information to whoever can make the best use of it.”

  “To the highest bidder.”

  “If they’re legitimate and meet the correct profile? Usually, yes.”

  “That’s cold. Ruthless even.”

  She exhaled. It was less a sigh and more a forceful expulsion of air from the lungs. He took note of the way the firm muscles in her stomach expanded then contracted beneath the thin, pliant fabric of her shirt, but decided it would be best to ignore the smooth rise then fall of her chest.

  “No, it’s not. Everyone is better off as a result. Without my work, no one knows about the resource. With it, others are able to develop new tech, new materials, even new worlds. I’m merely improving civilization.”

  He burst out laughing. It was genuine and unplanned and he just couldn’t help it.

  She straightened her arms behind her and sat up, the better to direct the full power of her glare at him. “What.”

  The white-blue light of the screens hovering in the otherwise dark hold transformed her irises to liquid silver. He blinked and tried to ignore the startling effect—which was somewhat difficult if he was to continue meeting her gaze. Ignoring every attractive quirk of hers might be harder than first thought.

  But he wasn’t here to get laid; he was here to get off this planet in one piece. Building an amicable relationship furthered his goal, but he suspected coming on to her would result in another elbow to the face. For starters.

  Of course, he probably shouldn’t tease her either. Ah well, too late now. “You are not out here, on this very unique ship, to ‘improve civilization.’”

  Her eyes widened in offense. But he merely regarded her with amusement, and the severe countenance melted away.

  She rolled her eyes at the low ceiling, but her shoulders snapped straight into a proud posture. “I sleep well at night, comforted by the knowledge what I do helps rather than hurts. But…no, perhaps it’s not my primary purpose.”

  Then she frowned, and it occurred to him maybe she hadn’t intended to say so much—which meant she thought she had revealed something about herself she hadn’t wanted to.

  She dropped to the floor and slid back under the wall. “Now would you please shut up?”

  He needed some time to ponder what the accidental reveal meant, anyway. “Certainly.”

  She was eyeing him over her sandwich—roasted penzine, which his data cache told him was a small fowl native to Erisen, and Swiss cheese on dark rye bread. “Why are you out here?”

  His lips pursed together, his own sandwich poised in midair. Damn she was persistent. “I still can’t tell you, except to say it wasn’t supposed to involve violence.”

  “How comforting.”

  He shrugged, annoyed she doubted him, then annoyed at himself for being annoyed. He should really be more in control of the situation than this. “What do you want me to say?”

  “What you’re doing out here.”

  He dropped the remains of his sandwich to the plate in frustration. She
raised an eyebrow in response, which only made things considerably worse. He looked around the cabin, eager to change the topic of conversation. “So do I get to sleep in the chair again tonight?”

  She shook her head in the negative, then jerked it in the direction of the starboard wall. “There’s a guest cot, pulls out of the wall. There’s even a privacy screen. You’ll be snug as a bug in a rug.”

  He chuckled at the odd, quaint-sounding idiom. “A what?”

  “It’s just something my—” Her eyes darkened and she practically leapt out of the chair to carry her plate to the sink. “Never mind.”

  He frowned, as much at her abrupt change of mood as his unexpected desire to make it better. No, it was the proper reaction; a cheerful mood meant harmonious interaction and the absence of guns and hand-to-hand combat. “Thank you, I’m sure it’ll be fine. Not quite the luxurious nest you have downstairs but—”

  The loud clang of a plate against the sink’s surface cut him off. His frown deepened; he made sure his voice sounded neutral and nonthreatening. “Is everything okay?”

  She spun around to lean on the counter, an indecipherable look on her face. “Look, I’m not used to having someone out here with me, in my space and asking questions and—particularly a suspicious and dangerous spy who tried to kill me.”

  “I didn’t try to kill you.” At her dubious glare he grimaced. “Okay, I might have tried to shoot you down. But you did shoot me down, and you don’t see me holding a grudge. Second ship blown up in two months, but whatever, it’s fine, they’re only ships.”

  “To you, maybe.”

  For the briefest moment, her expression became totally unguarded and open. Until this instant, he hadn’t realized the cold, hard demeanor was a mask she had donned for him, or possibly for everyone. This though…this was beautiful.

  He smiled with what he hoped conveyed sincerity. “Your ship’s important to you, I imagine.”