Eclipse Phase- After the Fall

by Jaym Gates

  Meantime, Park could feel his own limbs drifting back together. Kim was staggering toward the noise, so he decided to try crawling. The first time he took his eyes off his hands he ended up fumbling and banging his chin on the floor, but he could feel the effects fading.

  [She’s down,] Cagehopper messaged, [I got a drone to the scene. Ugliness.]

  Park regained his feet, and Kim was walking almost normal now. They followed the breadcrumb trail back. Cage shared a map of the hallways with them and highlighted Smoke’s location. As they got closer, they heard a wet smacking sound.

  They rounded a corner. Vaidyar’s corpse lay in a mess of gore. Smoke stopped beating her with his baton as they came closer. He trotted up to Kim, sweeping his hands against the floor nervously, and hugged her leg, grunting.

  Kim ruffled his fur, said, “Good guy,” and gave him a cigarette. Smoke took it, lit it, and then hopped over to Gloria’s body. Her eyes bulged, and one hand was limp over her muzzle. “Damn it,” Kim said.

  Gloria’s face was darkened with spreading masses of subcutaneous blood flow. “Internal hemorrhaging,” Park said, “Some of ‘em can do that.” He looked back to Vaidyar’s body. Something was wrong. Pleasure pods had cyberbrains, which meant pod morphs were rubbish at using async powers. So either Vaidyar was incredibly potent with psi, or this pleasure pod was no pod at all.

  “Jake, let’s get this done. I just lost one of my monkeys. Ain’t good for me.” She was still studying Gloria, stroking the baboon’s head.

  Park wanted to take her hand or hug her, but he was feeling that weird day-after-out-in-public distance that sometimes follows casual sex. So instead, he messaged Cage. [Cagehopper, area’s secured. Gonna need a gurney and some cleaner swarms here.]

  A few minutes later Bobdog—scratch that, Cagehopper—rolled up, perched on a gurney pushed by a featureless bipedal servitor bot. The morph that had been Bobdog’s had glossier fur and healthier skin than the last time they’d seen it.

  “You never fail to keep me entertained, Carter,” the neo-bonobo said.

  Kim’s eyebrows creased up nasty, but she held her tongue. Together, she and Park swung Vaidyar’s limp form onto the gurney, trying to avoid the blood. Then she picked up Gloria, stroked her head, and put the small body on the gurney, too. Another foot trail appeared when they were done.

  “Follow that trail to the guest rooms. Get cleaned up, and leave the male baboon there when you’re done,” Cagehopper said, “I’ll examine our guest … and take care of your unfortunate friend. Shouldn’t take long.” He loped off into the dim passageways; the servitor turned the gurney around and followed him.

  [You trust him?] Kim asked Park.

  [Well enough.] He started along the trail. [The unkindly disposition’s an act. He’s down with the cause.]

  “Yeah, speaking of that …” she said. She looked back. “C’mon, Smoke.”

  “What’re you thinking?” he asked. They took another turn. Except for the occasional security door, the corridors were almost featureless. He’d had GiGi, his muse, mapping it for him as they went.

  “That I like how your friends are dealing with this shit instead of just trying to rope it off and hope it stays contained,” she said, “I want to know more.”

  “Org’s called Firewall,” he said, “Ain’t government, though it’s got allies in a few of them.”

  The AR tracks ran to a door at the end of a passage. They went inside and found themselves in a spartan living area. She said, “I requested the TQZ periphery as my beat. We oughta be clearing that land of the machines, but instead we’re ordered to patrol and watch. It’s stupid.” She started looking for a way to clean up Smoke.

  “So you down for helping out some more? Because my next stop’s wherever they were shipping that exsurgent gunk.” He turned a chair around and sat on it.

  She’d stood Smoke on a counter next to a sink and was toweling blood off of him. “Yeah. I have some questions. But if you’re not just a bunch of nutjobs, I want in.”

  —

  They stood in Cagehopper’s lab, trying not to look too often at Janu Vaidyar’s morph. Cranium’d been peeled, and Cage hadn’t bothered covering it up after he went through it for goodies. Some of the augments in her head needed more juice than could be drawn off a corpse. Her cortical stack glittered amid large droplets of blood in a shiny polymer tray.

  Autopsy’d been done by a doctor bot with Cagehopper supervising. Still presenting himself in the neo-bonobo, he perched at the foot of the operating table. He shared a medical data AR channel with them; graphics poured over her body and some severed pieces of it as he began.

  “She wasn’t a pod, just cosmetically modded to look like one,” he said. The neo-bonobo’s voice was rich and musical.

  “Kinda figured that,” Park said, “What else you got?”

  “Blood work.” Cagehopper gestured to a stream of data on blood borne pathogens. “Confirms Watts-MacLeod infection, but then you’d already worked that out.”

  “Watts-MacLeod?” Kim asked.

  Park shot her the entry-level EyeWiki write-up on asyncs. “What else?”

  “Implanted QE comm,” Cagehopper said; the AR graphics flashed on an exposed area of her thoracic cavity sporting a piece of hardware that looked uncomfortably large to be carrying in one’s gut, “That’s the qubit reservoir.”

  “Now that’s helluv weird,” he said, “Who gets one of those?”

  “Human commlink,” Kim said, “Seen it. Once. Guy had it was a Consortium agent infiltrating a real paranoid Guangxi outfit.”

  “Why would Cupcake’ve needed it?” Park asked.

  Kim looked at him like he was slow. “Gangs probably thought she was just a gift, something to seal the deal, not an agent set to watch them with an implanted FTL comm unit.”

  “That’s not so good,” Cage said.

  “Nah, it ain’t,” Park said, “Means they for sure know we’re coming.”

  —

  Park had an incoming message. Long, long distance. It was Eidolon. [Jake Carter, I’ve finished decrypting the routing information from the cylinders Bobdog LaGrange found.] The AGI followed that with a stream of locational data.

  [That’s good news, Eidolon. Thanks much.] He shared the data with Kim, and they started looking it over.

  “Never heard of this hypercorp before,” she said.

  “Panacea. They’re a fly-by-night, most like.” He messaged his muse, [GiGi, dossier à propos de Panacea Corporation, s’il te plaît.]

  They were back in the guest quarters at Cagehopper’s complex. Place smelled a little like wet stone dipped in isopropyl alcohol. Kim’d collected a gene sequence of Gloria from Cage, then she let the genehacker recycle the remains. Maybe she could get her cloned, one day. Smoke paced the long, narrow room nervously while she and Park sat on a bunk poking at AR windows of Eidolon’s findings.

  The picture got clearer. Panacea was shipping the exsurgent goop to orbit after collection. All of it was going to a single orbital factory in the cloud of satellites and smaller habitats trailing Progress, the Planetary Consortium’s largest orbital. It still wasn’t clear what Panacea did with the stuff.

  [Recherche terminée,] GiGi messaged. He pulled up the file and shared it with Kim. [Aw, hell. They’re a nanopharm manufacturer. That orbital’s their main plant.]

  “So you figure they’re putting the virus in drugs. What I don’t get, who the fuck does this kind of thing?” she asked. “There’s no money here.”

  He stood up and stretched. “Someone trying to finish the TITAN’s work for them.”

  Smoke padded up. She dispensed a cigarette automatically. “Like who?”

  “I got a hunch, but I don’t wanna get anyone else thinking on the wrong track. I need to check out the Panacea facility. You riding along?”

  Kim ruffled Smoke’s fur an
d shook a leg. “Riding along? Eff that, Carter. I’m driving.” She put in a call to her station. [Deng, this is Kim. I’m coming by in four hours. Gas up the Skink.] She packed up her kit. “You ever ridden in a Ranger cutter before?”

  He chuckled. “Only in handcuffs.”

  “I’m going to leave that one alone. See you in the garage.” She pecked him on the cheek and made for her prowler.

  Park watched her go.

  [Are you trying to bring her in or date her?] Cagehopper messaged him.

  The room was empty now, and Park knew Cage had everything in here miked, so he said out loud, “Won’t lie. I ain’t excited about putting her through the loyalty tests.”

  Cagehopper messaged, [Only a dumb redneck like you would recruit a high-value asset like her and then fuck it up with feelings.] The baboon might not have smelled what he and Kim were up to earlier, but Cage sure had.

  “We were just passing time.”

  [You know Carter, I’ve got implants that could make you not a completely shitty liar.]

  “I’ll keep that in mind. For when we get back.”

  “We?” Cagehopper’s voice shrilled over the room’s speakers. “I don’t think I heard that right.”

  But Park had not stuttered.

  —

  “So what’re you proposing?” Park asked.

  It was a ground-to-orbit call, so a long second went by before Das Frettchen replied, “Liquidation.” There was some heavy sun spot activity happening that week, and his voice came through scratchy despite the comm software’s attempts to correct for it. “These people are exsurgents, Carter. We’re sparing them the pain of metamorphosis if we kill them now.”

  “You’ve gone fucking technical.”

  “Your first real containment action, and you don’t have the stomach for it. We’re lucky such choices weren’t up to you during the Fall.”

  “This ain’t the same.”

  “You think your heroes”—Das Frettchen spat the word—”in the outer system flinched from their duty? Magnus Ming has sent more people than this to die in his day.”

  “We can fix these people. Your plan: it’s insane.”

  “If you think I lack the resources to make 1,000 people disappear from Valles-New Shanghai, Carter, you’re mistaken.”

  —

  Park floated in the airlock of a Fa Jing U-Facture (Location #0138, District Manager Zhu Lai Leong, according to the AR text and smiling portrait next to the inner lock door). Park was waiting for the security AI inside to finish scrutinizing his false Fa Jing corporate ID and the registration (also fake) on the ship docked behind him. He’d thrown on smart clothing that reshaped itself into a Fa Jing uniform, hung some tools from it, and brought along an automech bot, which clung to the wall near him.

  Through the airlock windows, he could see the rest of Captain Sage Kim’s Martian Ranger customs cutter, the Skink. The ship had erased its Tharsis League and Ranger markings and extruded a random assortment of dummy manipulator arms, conduits, and equipment lockers from its hull. Now it was a dead ringer for the boxy, antiquated old tender vessels that made up the bottom rung of Fa Jing’s immense fleet.

  Beyond the ship, the U-Facture station stretched out behind and ahead of him, an orderly cylinder of pie slice-shaped rented manufacturing modules connected by trusswork and an enclosed central floatway that ran the length of the station. The cylindrical form factor was for convenience, not gravity; clients rented on U-Facture when they needed microgravity manufacturing space. The Skink clung to the end of a docking arm roughly midway along the length of the cylinder.

  The AI inside was taking its time—it’d been almost five seconds—but Park kept it cool. The IDs had been forged by Eidolon, a much smarter AGI, a fork of whom was waiting in the ship to save Park’s bacon if needed. And Park was good at looking like a bored, impatient service engineer—because when he wasn’t on Firewall business, that’s what he was.

  “What’s takin’ so fucking long?” he asked the empty airlock.

  “Verifying,” the security AI said, “Fa Jing Internal Security thanks you for your patience.”

  He hadn’t wanted a response. While he waited some more for the recalcitrant airlock, he messaged the ship. [Eidolon. How’s it shaking out?]

  [I’ve subverted surveillance on the station’s hull, Jake Carter. Captain Kim and Cagehopper have begun their EVA.]

  —

  Sage Kim gulped. Vertigo. The red expanse of Mars filled the upper half of her field of vision. Damned if the planet weren’t never anything but lovely, but at this angle … Kim threw up a little bit in the back of her mouth and swallowed it, again.

  Cagehopper, clinging to her back, must’ve heard it over the comms. “Are you vomiting?” he asked, “I thought you were trained in this.”

  She couldn’t look back at the hypergibbon; helmet didn’t have enough peripheral vision. All she could see were his long, thin arms wrapped around her shoulders. “I did one month of micrograv combat training during academy,” she said. She knew how to use the grip pads on her vacsuit without falling off into space and dying, and that was about it.

  “I should never have left my burrow,” Cagehopper said.

  From the outside, the U-Facture station looked like a stack of discs on a dowel. There were sixteen modules, each five meters thick and one hundred meters wide, with a meter of floatway between each disc. They all connected to the central corridor by a single airlock. Only one of the discs, near the center, spun for gravity. That one would contain the manager’s quarters and several partitions of 1g space for renters that needed them.

  Augmented reality graphics showed her a path across the station’s hull. A multitude of wide, plant-packed windows looked out from the hull; a path was highlighted in green so that she could avoid giving anyone inside visual on her. It would have been a simple walk across the station’s skin, but the meter-wide gaps between modules were just wide enough to be unnerving. Rather than leaping the gaps, she played it safe, crawling slightly between each module at each gap so that she always had at least two grip pads against the hull.

  Their objective was a service airlock leading into the section of the U-Facture station rented by Panacea Corporation, a company specializing in zero-g boutique manufacturing of exotic pharmaceuticals. Some of Panacea’s business was legit. And some of it, Park and Kim suspected, involved lacing drugs with the exsurgent virus and delivering them to unsuspecting patients.

  —

  “You wanna talk containment, Frettchen? We got this contained.”

  “Really, Carter? And you’ve taken steps to do so. In Valles-New Shanghai. My city. How thoughtful of you.”

  “Panacea runs the groundside supply chain. Meanin’ they route the drugs direct to the patients. They’re delivering them to asyncs.”

  “Oh, this gets better and better.”

  “Nah, look: the refined exsurgent goop Panacea laced the drugs with is inert until activated. Cagehopper isolated the trigger protein. Feed these people nanopharm that eradicates all instances of that protein in their systems, and the infection’ll never get triggered.”

  “You’re asking me to put a great deal of faith in the work of a black kettle genetics monkey with an extensive rap sheet, Carter. I don’t think that’s going to fly.”

  —

  Manager Leong didn’t like the look of him, and the feeling, Park decided, was mutual. The Fall’d only made the class divide between Chinese managers and Korean rusters worse, and Leong was all about letting Park know whose status was higher. Which was fine—meant Leong was too busy demanding face to really scrutinize him. Park let Leong float higher than him and pretended he could only speak Korean, letting Leong’s muse translate to Mandarin.

  Eventually Leong let him through with a final admonition not to make anything on the station worse. Park suppressed the urge to smirk. No
telling what kind of sensors the manager had allocated to keep tabs on him.

  Park kicked off from Leong’s office and floated down the station’s huge central corridor. He didn’t like microgravity much, but inside, maneuvering down a big, straight corridor, it wasn’t so bad. Eidolon now owned the station’s primary surveillance systems. The plan was for Eidolon to feed the system footage of Park and the automech opening up a life support conduit and going to work inside it. In reality, Park would keep going and enter Panacea’s module through the front door. If Leong stayed in his office—which he probably would—they’d be five by five.

  [Sage, grandmaster E, how we lookin’?] Park messaged.

  Eidolon messaged, [Jake Carter, Captain Kim. Panacea’s system resists my best efforts. I cannot unlock the doors to their module for you.]

  Kim messaged, [I’m almost at the hatch. What’s the problem?]

  [Unorthodox system design. I am uncertain which systems to subvert. Choosing the wrong ones might put them on alert.]

  [Well the emperor of this little piece of heaven thinks I’m here for four hours to fix some CO2 scrubbers. We ain’t budgeted for overtime on this run.]

  [I recommend manual subversion,] Eidolon said.

  [Well at least I didn’t carry this thing for nothing,] Kim said.

  —

  “This thing” was a hull wart. From her back, Cagehopper handed her the pieces of it, one by one. Disassembled, the wart comprised eight curved lengths of smooth metal. Stuck to the hull, end to end, each formed forty-five degrees of a circle three-and-a-half meters across centered over what Eidolon had identified as a relatively thin section of hull. Kim activated it, and the wart began extruding a dome of clear polymer that soon enclosed them in a hemisphere 1.75-meters high at its center.

  Cagehopper got off her back and clung to the hull while Kim took out a covert ops tool and began cutting. First she drilled a pilot hole. A plume of air, visible as the water vapor in it crystallized, began filling the dome with atmosphere. Then she went to work cutting a circle in the hull.