by Brian Smith
As Ashburn said it, he opened a virtual subwindow in his snoopers and tied into the cameras in the passenger compartment. He zoomed in on one Jenise Molina, his newest reactor-systems watchstander. He studied her features carefully, aware of something niggling at his hindbrain and of a growing sense of alarm.
“Are you looking at her now?” Kusaka prompted him.
“Here,” Ashburn replied, sending his feed to Kusaka’s snoopers with a flick of his fingers. The engineer linked in with him and nodded firmly.
“The hair is different—her voice was a little different, too, but Mike-san, that’s her! Or one just like her. I’m positive!”
“She does look a lot like Ella,” Ashburn admitted. “A lot,” he added, almost to himself. “It’s just that I didn’t authorize any of the new synths for use aboard Thuvia. I don’t trust them, and, like I said, I vetted Molina’s records myself. She’s as human as you or I.”
“Why don’t you trust them, Mike-san?” Kusaka asked.
“They look and act too lifelike for me, and they demonstrated that they can be programmed to harm—” He stopped midsentence, as the abstraction that had been rattling around the back of his brain like stray voltage suddenly arced into conscious thought like a lightning bolt. Son of a bitch! He glanced at the chrono; they had about thirty minutes until rendezvous. Thuvia was in low orbit in one of the “loading zones” for commercial torchships, where she had been taking on payload for Federov Propulsion for the past day and a half.
Kusaka asked Ashburn if he was all right.
“Yeah, I’m fine. . . . I think,” Ashburn replied. “Or maybe I’m just paranoid, or just crazy! Hey, Shiguro-san, sit tight for just a minute, okay? I need to make a call.”
“Yokai, captain-san,” Kusaka replied with a mental shrug.
Ashburn plugged in the call codes that would put him in touch with Boss Forester. It took longer than normal; Forester was currently up on Halsey Station with a small crew of Barsoom Traders employees, awaiting the triumphant return of Dejah Thoris. She was scheduled in shortly; Forester should have been briefed by now on the details of the Deety’s hijacking and recovery, at least to the extent that the navy had been able to piece it all together.
Ashburn had a sinking feeling he might now understand how it had happened, if not the who and the why of it all.
Another subwindow opened in his virtually augmented field of vision, and he was face to face with his CEO, separated by a few seconds’ worth of time delays as signals bounced around between Low Mars Orbit and the distant ML2 point at which Halsey Station sat. “What is it, Dakota?” Forester asked as contact was made. The first thing Ashburn saw was that Boss Forester looked plenty pissed. “This is a really bad time!”
“What’s the matter?” Ashburn asked.
There was the noticeable signal delay, in which Forester’s angry face was freeze-framed at the end of his latest transmission. A slight burst of static, and it suddenly animated again in reply. The image jumped slightly, like a badly edited video. “The damn navy got its wires crossed is what’s the matter! I bring a whole damn crew up here to take the ship back, and she blows right by Halsey Station like she’s on fire and keeps right on going for Mars orbit! Even these navy pukes don’t know what the hell’s going on. I’m telling you, Dakota, it’s a first-class clusterf—” Forester’s transmission cut off abruptly, replaced in the communications window with the words SIGNAL LOST. At almost the same instant, the spaceplane’s viewports autotinted to almost full dark, as did their snoopers, as space outside the ship briefly turned nova-bright.
“What in the actual f—” Ashburn exclaimed, wishing for the first time on this trip that he had a real copilot in the seat, rather than his friend. He spent a busy minute trying to make heads or tails of a world gone wild. The traffic-frequency circuits lit up with frenzied calls to the point that they were effectively jammed. Ashburn rolled the spaceplane in order to bring her optical scopes to bear and pointed them at the source of the disturbance: Mars’s L1 point. It was difficult to get any good information because, this close to Mars, looking at ML1 was essentially looking straight into the sun.
Kusaka had the good sense to stay quiet; he could tell that his friend suddenly had his hands full. Ashburn suddenly got an incoming voice-only signal from Thuvia. He answered promptly. “What the hell just happened?” he asked.
The voice on the other end was that of Gina Jackson, his first mate. She sounded shaken, to say the least. “Marsnet is going crazy,” she replied. “I’m sure it just about blinded you. That bright flash was Yang Liwei going up in a big fireball. It’s gone. We’ve got some jumbled reports that the same thing happened to Halsey Station. We’ll have visual confirmation as we go nightside on this orbit.”
“I was just talking to Boss up on Halsey,” Ashburn said, and then the full implication hit him like a hammer. “Aww, no. . . . No-o-o!” he near-bawled. “Jesus Christ!”
“Everyone who was with him, too,” Jackson said quietly. “Emergency Services is tracking a large debris field from both stations and a slew of torchships caught in the blasts. It’s going to be raining metal all around here within an hour or two. I need to move the ship, captain.”
“Mass tanks are topped, correct?”
“Yes, sir. I was thinking about a simple dodge to keep us clear: burn spinward, up-orbit a dozen planetary diameters, and then make a correction burn to drop us back into orbit after the debris fields clear.”
“Make it happen. I’m going to abort rendezvous and divert to Kasei Spaceport. This wasn’t any sort of accident, Gina—not both stations at once. Something’s going on. Keep the ship out of harm’s way until I make it back to you, and from this point forward nobody is allowed to board Thuvia without my direct authorization—even someone from the company. The last thing Boss mentioned before we lost him was that the Deety didn’t rendezvous at Halsey as planned—she blew past, headed our way. She’s supposed to have a navy crew aboard, but none of this adds up and I’m done believing in coincidence. If you can, see if you can get a telescope on her and track her movements, but don’t under any circumstances try to contact her, and don’t accept any communication from her, either. Once we ground at Kasei, I’m going directly to the company offices—I’m not sure who’s in charge with Boss . . . gone, but we’ll see. I’ll see if we can talk to the Deety from there, but I want Thuvia kept out of whatever is happening. Understood?”
“Yes, captain.”
“Gina, one more thing.”
“Go.”
“If for some reason you don’t hear from me within twenty-four hours, or anything else happens that you feel poses a direct danger to the ship, don’t hang around. Bug out and burn for Earth and we’ll sort it out later.”
Gina acknowledged the order and Ashburn signed off, looking over at Kusaka. “We’ve got problems, Shiguro-san. At least, someone does. We’re not going to make rendezvous. I’m sorry, tovarich, but your trip to Earth is postponed.”
“Mike-san, look,” Kusaka urged him quietly, the alarm apparent in his voice. Kusaka sent data back with a flick of his fingers: camera feeds from the passenger compartment. Jen Hansen, the loadmaster, was accessing the Marsnet through her snoopers, and it was clear she was in distress over the news about what was happening. However, the two new crew members, Molina and Hunjan, weren’t showing any real reaction at all. If anything, both of them were downright stone-faced. “Do you think they just aren’t paying attention?” he asked skeptically. Both passengers were wearing snoopers, and everyone always kept at least a passive link to the cloud in order to catch breaking news or an incoming call. It was simply inconceivable they were unaware that something big was happening. And the more he looked, the more the uncanny resemblance between Ella and Molina seemed apparent.
No more coincidences, Ashburn reminded himself. Dejah Thoris was hijacked—taken from the inside. Now I think I know how. They tried to hit us with an AI drone gunship because they couldn’t do the same to us: we didn
’t have any new synths aboard Thuvia.
“Hey, Jen,” he called, activating the crew circuit between them.
“Captain, are you seeing this?”
“I am. Just wanted to check in and tell you to sit tight for a bit—I’m busy up here. Keep it together back there, kiddo.”
“I— Yes, sir,” she replied. He killed the circuit.
“Shiguro-san, are you armed?” he asked. Carrying personal weapons was commonplace on Mars, although most people opted for nonlethal varieties. Kusaka, however, was currently on his way to a commercial ship for passage to Earth, where the practice was far less common and far more convoluted by law.
“No, not unless you count my daisho, packed up in back with my personal gear,” he replied. Kusaka was referring to his set of matched swords, katana and wakizashi, which were making the trip to Earth with him. The blades were two of his most prized personal possessions; he didn’t use them for training, but instead they had decorated his living quarters ever since his father and his uncle had made them for him to celebrate Kusaka’s achievement of yudansha rank in the martial arts. The techniques used to craft the swords were a mixture of modern and ancient, and while the carbon in their steel was born of Earth, the iron within them was mined from Martian ground. Like their ancient Japanese forebears, the swords were both lethally functional weapons and priceless art pieces—and unless anyone else was forging Japanese swords on Mars, the blades made in Kasei Echigo were one-of-a-kind spiritual and physical fusions of Mars and Earth.
Ashburn was presently thinking more along modern lines.
“All I’ve got is a compact semiauto with special ceramic-based rounds, nothing that’ll penetrate the hull. I’m not sure how effective it would be against one of these new synths. I’m not even sure where to aim to stop or disable one, to be honest. Jen carries something similar when we’re dirtside, but I’m not sure if she even has it on her. Swords, huh?” he added. “Know how to use one?”
“Hai.”
“Would it cut through a synth?”
“There’s only one way to find out,” Kusaka replied gamely, hardly believing his own words. “Do you think we’re in some kind of danger here?”
“Maybe. . . . Hell, I don’t know. Like I said, maybe I’m just getting paranoid.”
“You should listen to your instincts, Mike-san,” Kusaka insisted, suddenly sounding like a wizened sensei. “Most of the time they are correct. Most victims are average people who refuse to listen to their own inner voice. They place themselves at risk out of a fear of being perceived as rude or unfriendly—or paranoid. Those two in the back,” Kusaka added with a surety Ashburn wished he felt, “are synths. I know it.”
“Well, maybe it doesn’t matter,” Ashburn reasoned. “We’re about to abort and head back Mars-side anyway. If they’re synths, they aren’t going to be able to pull off whatever they’re programmed for. I’ll tell you what, though: go on back and grab one of those swords. Once you have it, I’ll make an announcement. After that, we’ll see what happens.”
“What about Jen-san?”
“I’ll let her know you’re headed back and need access to the hold. I’ll tell her to keep back, out of the way. Good luck, tovarich.”
Kusaka smiled grimly and patted his friend on the shoulder as he climbed out of the seat and activated his magboots.
“Luck will have little to do with it, my friend,” he said.
***
“Attention, crew and passengers,” Ashburn’s voice rang out over the PA system several minutes later. “As I’m sure everyone is aware, major events have occurred in the past quarter hour which affect our rendezvous with Thuvia. Due to these circumstances, we are aborting this run and diverting to Kasei Spaceport. Stand by for maneuvering,” he added, ending his announcement with a shot of the acceleration alarm.
In the passenger compartment, Kusaka watched as the only other two passengers there wordlessly unbuckled their restraints and floated free of their seats—all without so much as a look passing between them. The synth in the aisle seat reached up and opened the overhead storage compartment, going after the duffel bag inside.
Kusaka stood silently in the aisle, magbooted firmly a row or two behind them and completely unnoticed, his unsheathed katana held easily in hasso kamae like a kaishakunin of old: the samurai appointed to deliver the final, beheading blow during a ritual suicide. His rational voice was screaming at him that he might be about to commit an act of capital murder, but his inner voice said otherwise. It was the lack of any form of regular human interaction or body language between Molina and Hunjan that clinched it for him—that and the knowledge that unstrapping was the exact opposite of what one was supposed to do after an acceleration alarm.
He let out a piercing kiai and struck with blinding speed, decapitating Hunjan with a clean sweep of his blade. The synth’s head flew free of its body, which went limp. There was no fountain of crimson blood as there would have been from a human being, only a thin stream of viscous fluorescent peridot-colored fluid that immediately formed into spherical globules in free fall. After a few moments, the stream shut off as if an internal valve had closed somewhere.
The Molina synth reacted with speed and violence. It gripped the back of its seat and lashed out with both legs, aiming a somewhat clumsy free-fall kick at Kusaka. Quarters were relatively cramped in the spaceplane’s cabin; there wasn’t a lot of room to move and fight. Kusaka twisted sideways without thinking; he had trained so intensely and for so many years, he had already transitioned to mushin, the state of “no mind,” as martial artists referred to it. His skill was such that he dodged the kick with just enough economy of motion to let it miss him, without unduly upsetting his own stance or balance.
The synth twisted expertly in free fall, trying to recover itself from the missed blow, and that was all the advantage Kusaka needed. In a classic example of the axiom “Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast,” he eased in and attacked again like a striking snake. His first blow severed both the Molina synth’s forearms clean through, leaving it with no purchase on anything, and twisting in free fall. His second was another decapitating blow, rendering the synth inert.
Kusaka backed away quickly once the work was done, cursing slightly as a globule of the greenish-yellow fluid encountered his jumpsuit and adhered to it—he had no idea if it was toxic or not. Behind him, he heard Hansen cursing in disbelief. Although she had been warned, she’d let out a small scream when Kusaka struck, fully expecting to witness an act of cold-blooded murder. The reality of it was no less shocking.
Kusaka dropped his snoopers and signaled Ashburn in the cockpit. “Were you watching?” he asked without preamble.
“Well done, my friend. Remind me never to piss you off, tovarich,” Ashburn replied. “I’ve coordinated a return to Kasei with traffic control, but it’s going to be awhile—things are a little crazy right now. In fact, we’ll probably wind up having to dodge the debris field ourselves before we can make planetfall. What I’d like is for you and Jen to suit up—minimize your exposure to that goop and anything else that might be unhealthy in the guts of those things. Bag up the parts—separately—and try to get some of that green gel sealed up in a container of some kind. I’ll get the cabin professionally decontaminated back in Kasei. Check their gear, too,” he added almost as an afterthought. “Hunjan was going for something in the overhead.”
“Will do,” Kusaka replied. A moment later he pulled a wicked-looking weapon from the duffel in the storage compartment. It was the size of a compact assault weapon and highly advanced. “Can you see this in the pickup, Mike-san?” he asked. “Gun of some kind. It looks like an energy weapon!”
“Yup. Put it back and give their carry-ons to Jen to secure,” Ashburn replied.
In the cockpit, he rubbed at the bridge of his nose under his snoopers as he tried to concentrate on calculating his updated keplers. A thousand questions were swirling through his mind, and there were no good answers for any of them: Who was beh
ind the reprogramming of the Omnisynths, and why? Why were his ship and Dejah Thoris targets, when apparently no other ship in the company was? Who was responsible for destroying two major military spin habs? Why would anyone want to?
Somewhere, somehow, he knew there was a common thread linking it all together. For the life of him, he had no idea what it was.
Tanbar Annex, New Arizona Habitat
Amazonis Mensa Region, Mars
Cheryl Ayers moved quickly and efficiently, realizing she’d fallen into some bad habits over the past couple of weeks. Then she reminded herself it wasn’t true, that they were just different habits. She was used to shipboard life and the navy way of doing things, and two weeks Mars-side working in a federal building had caused her to adapt to the way the marshals did things.
The marshals didn’t wear any sort of uniform on the job; they simply had a dress code and carried badges. Ayers had worn textile navy khakis her first few days of working in their office, until she began feeling more and more out of place. Then she’d switched over and started going to work in civilian attire, tending to mirror the styles worn by the female deputy marshals like Hutton. In any case, the Scobee Federal Center wasn’t a navy ship, and she didn’t have the means on hand at the office to “suit up” fast in an emergency.
A quick trip back to her hostel room in Tanbar Annex had given her time to think and plan. Nuevo Rio was a joint-use spacedrome; in addition to having a civilian spaceport, on the south side of the complex was a Trans-Oceanic Alliance military facility. It was the nearest place on Mars Ayers knew of where she could report to someone in the naval hierarchy, and after what had happened it was imperative to her sense of duty and mental well-being to be with her own people right now.
Ayers changed clothes and quickly threw her essentials into the duffel she’d brought down with her. None of it amounted to very much, and with Halsey Station blown away it constituted the bulk of her worldly possessions. She found some comfort in sealing herself up in her familiar spacing jumpsuit and magboots, and she strapped on the sidearm she’d checked out of the station armory and brought to the surface with her. Mars had turned out to be a good deal less exciting and dangerous than she’d always imagined it—until tonight. Now she pulled the pistol and checked her ammo load, made sure the first round was chambered, and clicked on the safety before returning it to the tactical holster strapped to the thigh of her jumpsuit. She simply put on her gloves—it was the easiest way to carry them, really, and clipped her helmet to her belt.