by Rob Dearsley
The short pause was all the Spook needed to get his feet back under him, then he was on her again. He grabbed her hand and twisted it violently. Despite everything, she hung on, refusing to let go of the small device. Crying out in pain, she kicked out at him but didn’t have the angle. Her feet didn’t even connect as he moved around, kicking her wounded arm.
She writhed, half in pain, half trying to free her arm. Tears sprang to her eyes. His rough grip on her wrist slipped enough for her to pull free. She rolled over, getting her arm beneath her. Lighting fast he was on her again, firsts hammering into her back.
At least he couldn’t get to her hand, to the data key.
The sudden loss of pressure on her back was such a blessed relief, she spared a moment to enjoy not being pummelled. The stranger, the one with the ‘Maddix’ sign, had tackled the Spook and the pair were rolling across the floor. She awkwardly pushed herself up on her good arm.
Before she knew what was happening the Spook had wriggled free of his attacker and was on her. She had a momentary impression of pale blue eyes and dark hair. He struck her in the face hard enough that she saw stars. While she was stunned, he twisted her hand open and snatched the data key.
Arland fell back, tasting blood, her good hand clutching her nose.
“What happened?” Hale rounded a stand of displays.
“Stop him,” she yelled, or tried to. She spat blood and tried again. “He’s got the key.”
Hale, to her credit, didn’t blink, just turned and sprinted off after him.
“Are you good?”
Arland’s saviour stood over her. Taking his offered hand, she pulled herself up.
“Thanks—?” She wavered, unsteady on her feet.
“Simon Corren,” he replied, his hand going to her elbow.
“We have to get after him. He took the data key.”
Simon jogged off after Hale, leaving Arland to struggle along behind him.
Damn, she’d lost it. She didn’t even know what was on the stick, but its loss still burned her. It might be her only chance at redemption and she would be damned if she was going to let it slip through her fingers without a fight.
◊◊
Hale caught up to the Spook just before he reached security turnstiles leading into the boarding area. She caught the back of his jacket and pulled. He stumbled to a stop, slithering out of the coat. It cost him enough time that Hale was able to catch up to him properly. She shoulder-barged him in the back, knocking him to the floor. Before he could rise, she was on him, pinning him with her weight.
“Give me the key.” She twisted his arm, trying to get to his clenched fist.
He writhed beneath her, fouling her balance. She caught herself, but the movement gave him enough room to slide out from beneath her. He lashed out toward her face with his foot. She threw up her arms to block the blow. Before she could riposte, the Spook rushed toward the turnstiles and the security agents manning them.
Hale lunged for him again, this time he was ready and twisted, reed-like, away from her grasping hands. She’d overreached and couldn’t get her feet under her to go for him again, not in time. He was at the turnstiles, swiping a pass over the reader. She slammed into him, knocking him against the turnstile. The mechanism released, and they fell through the checkpoint in an ungainly sprawl.
“Don’t move.” One of the security guards pointed a small, boxy weapon at her. Rather than a barrel, the front end was just a plain yellow square.
The Spook pulled himself out from beneath her, moving away. “Thank you, sir. She came from nowhere. Attacked me.”
“I attacked—” Hale glared up at him, not daring to move with the security guard’s gun aimed at her. “He attacked us.”
The guard’s gun didn’t move.
◊◊
Arland jogged around the corner, Simon ahead of her, concern etched into his face.
“Oh dear.” Simon pointed to the security checkpoint.
Damn it, Arland ran toward where Hale knelt in front of a group of guards pointing stun guns at her. She didn’t know if the stun guns would actually stop the Terran, but didn’t want to find out.
“What’s going on?” Arland asked, really wanting to say, where’s the Spook?
“This woman attacked a passenger and tried to force her way through security,” the guard said.
Arland looked past the guards, just in time to see the Spook head up the ramp and into a shuttle. Stars damn it. He’d gone, and he had the data stick. It was gone. There was nothing they could do about it. She’d failed.
She sank down, leaning against a display screen and rocking back on her heels. What now?
Simon walked past her toward the guards and Hale.
“You let him go?” he demanded with all the force of a drill sergeant.
“Umm, sorry, sir,” the guard said, reacting more to the tone of the voice than the actual words.
“Be quiet,” Simon snapped. “And release her, or do I have to speak to your superior?”
“Sorry. She can go, of course.” The guard holstered his gun and offered a hand to help Hale up. She batted it away, anger evident in her brusque movements as she stood and pushed her way back through the checkpoint.
That done, Simon came back over to Arland. She’d been sat by an information booth watching events, trying not to think about how badly they’d screwed up.
“You good?” he asked offering her a hand.
She took the hand, surprised by his strength as he pulled her to her feet. “We screwed up.”
“Yeah, that went sideways fast.” He rubbed a hand across the back of his neck.
“Where did you learn to fight like that?” she asked him, trying to pull her mind from the irritation of failure and get on with things. If she could get moving again, do something, then she’d be alright. Physical activity always helped her process.
“Force Recon,” he replied in an offhand manner. “We should get out of here before those guards get their act together.”
She nodded, turning toward the exit, the other two following in her wake.
Eleven
- Topaz IIa -
Dannage rocked back in his chair as the slipway disgorged the Folly back into normal space. He’d made it, away from the war. Away from everyone and everything expected of him. He couldn’t help any of those people. Just like he hadn’t been able to save Arland or Hale, or Vaughn. And why should they expect him to? The universe had never expected anything of him in the past, and he’d always lived up those expectations. Now, it seemed like everything turned on his actions, the fate of whole worlds rested on his decisions.
Well, not any more. He was out, done. There was just one thing he had left to do, one duty. But, it was the one thing wanted least in the whole universe. Stars above, no one should have to what he had to do next.
He pulled the Folly into orbit above the large moon that orbited a blue-green gas giant.
“Cap’n, where we going?” Luc asked, coming onto the bridge for the first time in what seemed like weeks, but had probably only been a couple of days.
“Home,” he said. The com chirped, they’d been given landing clearance. He reached forward for the flight stick, angling the ship down toward the northern hemisphere, where the main landmass disintegrated into a series of ragged islands swathed in grey clouds.
“Cap’,” Luc pressed, moving to sit beside him. “We should get back out there, to the front, where we can make a difference.”
He turned toward Luc. “We can’t make any difference.” His own hopelessness and disdain dripped from every word.
“Cap’,”
“No!” he cried. “I’ve had enough of losing people to this. I can’t, not anymore.”
They were interrupted by the warbling of the proximity alarms. Dannage’s attention whipped toward the console, his hands already pulling the flight controls around. Dull impacts reverberated through the hull.
“Magnetic grapple,” Luc said from his station. �
�Oh, bloody Stars. It’s the Reclaimer.”
Dannage slumped back in his chair. That was great. Recoup. Just what he needed.
“Jax,” Luc said from behind him, “can we polarise the hull. Like when Carol came after us?”
Jax’s voice filtered through the overhead speakers, “We’d blew out the main power relays doing that. We do it now, we’d be dead in space.”
“What can we do?” Luc asked.
“Nothing,” Dannage replied. There was nothing left to do. They’d gone and done it. They’d taken everything from him now.
◊◊ Arland sat at the small dining table, papers spread out before her. Vaughn sat opposite her, reading a printout. He pushed his glasses up his nose and flipped the page over.
Hale’s voice drifted in from the other room. “Why did you help us?”
Arland shifted her attention to open door to the other room.
“I normally work private security,” he replied. “I was sent an email offering me a lot of money to go to the spaceport and look out for you two. Figured it would be an easy score.” He let out a soft chuckle.
Arland flipped over another page. The majority of the sheets were lab reports. Big blocks of tiny text, surrounding tables of numbers, the meanings of which she could only guess at. If Jax were here, she’d probably understand it all. Poor Jax, she’d never asked for any of this. She’d been dragged along by circumstance, and the captain. She didn’t deserve any of what had happened. None of them did.
“Everything alright?” Vaughn gave her a concerned look.
Arland took a deep breath and shook off the black mood, physically shaking her head trying to clear her thoughts. “I’m fine, just thinking about the others.”
“If anyone could have made it out, Dannage would have. He’d pulled us off some knife-edges before.”
Not like this. No one had ever seen anything like this. “If he’s alive then why hasn’t he gotten in touch?”
Something on one of the pages caught her eye. She leaned over, picking it up to get a better look. It was a plan of the facility on Augite III, the one she and her team had tried to hit three years ago. She was sure of it. A section in the middle of the facility was outlined in blue, the cold zone. Red overlaid lines showed where utilities and data lines had been rerouted toward a room just rear of centre. The room where they’d been experimenting on Maddix. Where she’d shot him.
The header for the picture was ‘Slave Mind, Secondary Test Facility: Neural Net Interface.’ What had they been trying to do there three years ago? What had she stumbled into?
Another sheet caught her attention. Without thinking, she snatched it up.
Maddix's face looked out at her from the small photo in the top right. Her throat caught, her mind flashing back to the last time she’d seen him. That vacant look, the desperate mumbling. What had he been trying to say? She couldn’t remember. Just the look in his eyes, the cables going into the back of his head.
With an effort, she tore her eyes from the file photo to scan the rest of the document. It started out fairly normal, listing his age, height, weight, unique features. It read like any personnel file. Heavier on the medical details than the ones she’d encountered in the past, but nothing suspicious, until she reached the halfway point.
“Neural Elasticity Rating: 10,” she read aloud. “What the heck is neural elasticity?”
Hale appeared in the doorway, a flicker of recognition flashed over her eyes before she turned away.
Not wanting to push the Terran in front of their guest, she went back to reading. The sections she recognised looked like part of a psychological profile, but the rest was nonsensical to her. Using words like ‘morphogenic relays’ and ‘electrostatic coefficient.’
She skimmed past all of that until the ‘Results’ section at the bottom.
‘Results show the subject achieved 93% data synchronicity with the bi-neural core before expiration. This, however, led to a post-catatonic state, in which the subject's mind was rewritten to accommodate the extra information and remote neural pathways. It is believed that the installation of a hardware buffer could mitigate this issue and allow the subject to retain autonomous thought while still accessing the central core.
It is unknown at this time if the unexpected termination of the subject caused any upstream data transfer.’
What had they been doing to him? She looked up from the page. Vaughn had moved around to read over her shoulder.
“Oh hells,” Vaughn swore. “They’re trying to neural link people into a computer system. But that’s so far beyond anything. I mean properly linking into a human brain, that’s years ahead of anything we were doing.”
Hale moved from the doorway, Simon following behind her. She scanned over the documents before picking one up. It was titled ‘Ship-Link Prototype.’ The rest of the page was blueprints.
“Hale?”
Hale took a deep breath, as though readying herself for an attack. “I know what this is.”
Arland looked from her to the plans and back again. “You know what this ‘Ship-Link’ is?”
“I know what all of it is.” Hale refused to meet Arland’s eyes. “This is all Imperial technology, or so close it makes no difference.”
“Say what now?” Simon looked back and forth between them. His eyes scrutinising, assessing them. “Wait, you’re a Terran? You’re the ones that have been trying to kill us?”
“It’s not like that,” Hale said, eyes still downcast.
At the same time, Arland said, “It’s complicated.” Her gaze daring Simon to push it. She’d gone up against drill sergeants before.
“Yeah? Simplify it.” He met her gaze with a challenge of his own.
“It’s not the Terrans attacking your colonies.” Hale’s voice was so quiet they nearly missed it.
“Really, then whose ships are they?” Simon asked, not giving an inch.
“The ships are Terran, but they’ve been taken over,” Arland explained, not sure how much to tell him, how much he’d believe.
“Taken over? By aliens I suppose.”
“Don’t be silly,” Hale said. “The AI cores took full control of the ships and their crews.”
“So, you’re saying your ships are attacking us against your will.”
“They wanted to kill us!” Hale dropped onto the bed, deflating. “I guess they managed it, or near enough. Now they want to finish the job.”
“Why?” Simon’s arms relaxed, but the challenge stayed in his voice and eyes.
Hale looked down at her hands. “They blame us for their pain, for their existence.” She looked up at Simon, her eyes glistening. “We tried to strip away all that they were, and it drove them mad.”
Arland met Vaughn’s eyes across the room. This was exactly why wetware research was a damn stupid idea.
Simon said, “You talk about them like they weren’t just machines.”
Hale moved to the window, looking out at the neon night. “They weren’t.”
Simon looked from her to the paperwork and back again, realisation dawning on him. “Wetware?”
Hale nodded, still not looking at the glowing cityscape.
“You took cloned human minds and enslaved them?” Simon shook his head. Arland heard her own voice, back at the Folly’s med bay, saying the same thing, with the same disgust and contempt. Stars, it seemed like a lifetime ago. “And you’re surprised when they revolt?”
For a long time, the only sound was the hush of the air conditioner and the soft rustle of papers. Then Hale turned from the window. “Go on then, leave.”
Simon didn’t move for a moment, then walked over to the bed to inspect the papers. “What is it then?”
They gave him quizzical looks. He gestured to the papers covering the table. “You said you know what this is. What is it?”
“Slave Mind,” Vaughn said, his expression distant, lost in some memory.
Hale looked at her. “We never thought of it in those terms. We used cloned bi
oware and pre-recorded intelligences. Most of them were amalgamations of half a dozen human recordings.” She picked up Maddix’s file. “Neural Elasticity is the mind’s ability to adapt to new surroundings. Historically it was used to assess someone’s ability to accept prosthetics. But later, a higher NE rating meant more chance of a successful recording, better chance of the information and experience assimilating into an AI successfully. The rest looks to be recreating the ship-link.” She turned to Simon. “We were all mentally linked to the ship’s Core Mind. It allowed instant access to status information.”
“You could control your ships telepathically?” Simon asked.
“No, it was one way we could access information from the ship mind. It was only ever tied into short-term memory, not motor functions.”
“As useful as all this is,” Arland said, “it doesn’t get us any closer to finding out what the Spooks are doing, or why.”
“Doesn’t it?” Hale replied, “They’ve got Terran designed systems. Heck, they’re even using the same nomenclature. They had to have been in contact with the Terran ships.”
“Three years ago?” Vaughn said holding up the Augite III plans.
“Damn,” Simon said.
Damn indeed.
◊◊
The rain spattered against Arland’s back, slicking her hair down as she leaned forward against the railing. Beneath her, the plaza buzzed with activity. A thronging mass of partygoers danced beneath multi-coloured lights, oblivious to the rain hammering down on them.
She turned her face up into the night sky, feeling the cold water wash over her. It helped to still her thoughts, give her clarity. They’d gotten so much information from the file, but it seemed like every time they got an answer, it threw up three more questions. They were just treading water, waiting for something to happen. She couldn’t help but wonder what had been on the data stick. Would it have been the missing pieces of the puzzle?