Lunger nods. Siren and Burnout move fingers to triggers. Adrenaline pumps through Cole’s veins.
“So that’s it?” Cole asks. For the first time, his voice is deadly serious. Gone is the hapless power technician. An ex-Strider stands in his place.
The seditionists hesitate, if only for a few seconds, their own ancient instincts sounding the alarm.
“Here we are, brothers and sisters,” Cole continues, “travelers in the desert between stars, raised in the Age of the Code. And what? We’re going to kill each other on some dead rock.”
Lunger raises a hand, holding back his companions. He sounds intrigued in spite of himself. “Ain’t you been streaming the news, brother? Operation Enterprise is over. The journey ended. We founded paradise in the stars for Humans and Kapruans and all our other alien pals. We’re heroic fuckin’ pioneers! And now, after all that blood and sweat, the scum from Earth swarm out here, taking what they please, biding their time while we die of Morpho. Don’t give me no bullshit about ‘the Code.’”
“Almost got it!” says Pulz.
“I’m an Earther and I want a cure for Morpho as much as you,” Cole says. “But sabotage and civil war—that isn’t the way.”
“You’re late to the party, boysout.” Lunger gives a shrill laugh. He pulls his pistol and watches the EM-vents glow red. “The war’s already here. And you’re on the wrong side.”
“I don’t pick sides,” Cole says.
“Your mistake.”
“Got it!” Pulz cries.
Static buzzes on the comms. Lunger aims. Cole breaks right. A needle of blue light strikes the regolith near his feet.
Cole’s tumble dodges Lunger’s poor shot by a hair's breadth. The bullet leaves a baseball-size divot in the dirt nearby and a patch of red-hot glass. Cole’s momentum is spent and the next shot won’t miss. For one ice-cold second, he’s staring down the barrel of three scorchers.
All three hostiles pull triggers.
Nothing happens.
The blue light in their muzzles fizzle out. The two lackeys keep firing in vain.
“What the shit!” Lunger yells. “Shoot him, already!”
“I’m trying!” Siren says.
“My scorch won’t work!” Burnout says.
“It’s the microwaves.” Cole looks up at the sky, where a point of light is barely visible against the glow of the gas giant. It’s a satellite that beams signal traffic to the dish in microwave form. He points to the useless guns in the seditionists’ hands. “The beam is too wide, bathing the whole area. Triggers the rad-sinks to overheat.”
In unison, all three seditionists look dumbly at their own weapons. It takes a full second for realization to dawn. Three golden visors look up.
Lunar dust scatters as three hostiles charge at Cole. He reaches for the Kapruan peacekeeper baton magnetized to his back. Lunger moves to tackle, and Cole uses the low-G to jump over him, avoiding Lunger’s grasp by centimeters. Cole lands in a tumble. He rolls under Burnout’s beefy fist and thrusts the baton straight into his gut. The stun taser fires, and the biggest attacker seizes up, his gurgled wince picked up on the comm. Burnout’s armor plates could repel a sniper slug, but they’re a perfect conductor for a taser charge, and he faceplants in the dirt.
Cole’s biggest threat neutralized, he whips the baton to his left, jabbing at Siren. She proves too quick and swats the baton out of Cole’s hand. In the same fluid motion, she lands a kick in his gut. She follows with a punch, swinging for the fences, but Cole traps her arm and guides her momentum down. She tumbles away, sputtering curses, as Lunger comes on.
Lunger unleashes savage bar-brawl punches. Cole ducks and weaves, his low-G training kicking in, allowing him to control his movements and stay on balance. Lunger throws a right cross too hard, and Cole darts in. His training intersects with a dozen Earth disciplines—Jiu Jitzu, Capoeira, Krav Maga—and he delivers a knee to Lunger’s side, then a flurry of swift jabs to the joints, where the under armor is thinnest. He twists the seditionist leader off his feet and piles him hard into the regolith.
Lunger starts to get up, and Cole worries his punches are too rusty to be felt through armor. But then Lunger collapses on his stomach, unconscious. Cole grins. I still got it.
Lightning sets Cole’s whole body on fire. Every muscle from glutes and abs to lips and eyelids clench tight. Every inch of him ripped apart by charlie horse. Siren has the baton and she’s tasing him in the back—for four seconds longer than necessary, he realizes with some affront. The moment she lets go of the button and the current stops, Cole crumples like an empty sack.
“That’s right, fuckwad,” she pants.
“Ugh…” Cole can’t believe how pathetic his whimper sounds. Like he’s been kicked in the balls.
“I’m about to ruin your shit.” Siren pulls a small handle from the lip of her boot, where the outer cuff meets the form-fitting legging. It’s the handle of a flash-knife. She flicks her finger and a polished silver blade forms in a nano-second. A halo of red light hovers around the edge, indicating superheated plasma that will cut through Cole’s suit like wet tissue. “I don’t gotta scorch you to put you down.”
“…Ugggh…” Cole writhes, trying to focus his mind on his Strider implant. He coaxes it to channel adrenalin through his body, but it’s been years since he used the technique. His muscles are still coiled up in knots.
Siren drops to a knee. She holds up the four inch knife, aiming the point at Cole’s chest. Her arm pulls back for the thrust.
“Yeagggggh!” Pulz cries as he barrels into Siren. He sounds ridiculous, but his tackle connects. He and Siren go tumbling in the chalk, kicking up mustard-yellow granules.
The comms crackle and buzz with the sounds of their struggle. Cole writhes onto hands and knees, vaguely aware that Pulz has her by each wrist. The kid’s young-male strength is his only advantage as he barely holds off the deadly knife. But Siren wraps her legs around him in a masterful wrestling move and twists on top of him. With her agility and fighting skill, she’ll soon escape his hold and put in the shiv.
The implant is pulsing like a hot needle at the base of Cole’s skull, but he mentally commands it, squeezing it for every last Morpho-Med. He feels like he’s crawling over broken glass, but he manages to reach the baton.
Pulz yelps as Siren knees his groin.
Cole scrapes toward them, the harsh frozen dirt grinding against his suit.
Siren breaks free and twists one of Pulz’s arms into a painful lock.
Cole stretches out his arm, his hangover headache now like bolts of lightning frying his brain.
“Cole!” cries Pulz as Siren twists his arm to breaking and fishes through the dirt for the knife. “Help!”
Siren closes her fist on the knife.
Bzzzzzzt!
The girl goes rigid. Cole buzzes her with the baton once. Twice. A third is probably unnecessary, but fair is fair… Another jolt, and Siren sprawls on top of Pulz, unconscious. Exhausted, Cole collapses on top of her. The three of them are a tangle of limbs.
For a moment, Pulz and Cole lay there, breathing hard. The orange orb of Thoth dominates the sky, brighter and angrier than ever.
The kid breaks the silence. “That was astronomical, lo!” Pulz weakly pantomimes a punch. “You were like bam! And then crunch! With like, fast hands and shit.”
Cole just pants. All he can think about is how much he regrets mixing Human and Kapruan sake.
“When you gonna teach me that stuff?”
“When you stop saying ‘lo,’” Cole replies. “It’s a verbal crutch.”
“Hey, that’s not fair. Lo ain’t a word, lo. It’s more like a conversational tick. Like, I can’t control it. It’s very prejudicious or something for you to make fun of me saying lo…” there’s a tick in Pulz’s brow as he tries to resist the urge, and fails. “…lo.”
“Mmm…” It’s the sound of Lunger, a few feet away, coming to his senses.
Cole lazily stretches out the baton, delivers a quick jolt, and renders the lead seditionist unconscious once more.
“Pulz,” Cole pants.
“Yeah?”
“Prejudicious isn’t a word.”
***
Zhenyi Telescopic Relay Station, Lore Lunar Colony
0348 Hours, KGT
“You’re fucking Earthborn scum, you know that?”
Cole does his best to ignore Siren’s repeated epithets as he paces a deepening track of footprints. The three hostiles are sitting in the dirt at the back of their rover, hands zip-tied to the bumper. After the fight, Cole scanned their faces through the visors and got a hit on their criminal records. As he suspected, all three are members of the anti-Earth seditionist group “the Trueborn.” “Lunger” is really one Roque Mandes, and “Burnout” is actually Wu Jong-Soo. Orbital freighter workers who cut their teeth in one of the paramilitary compounds lurking on obscure planets or asteroids. “Siren,” on the other hand, yielded no human footprint, but her alias is flagged in multiple cyber attacks. The boys are both still taser-drunk enough to stay quiet. But Siren’s taunting is only making the pounding in Cole’s head worse.
Cole wants this day to be over. “How much longer, Pulz?”
“Almost got it, lo.” Pulz is pecking away at a computer console at the base of the relay dish. Monitors on the column show frequency graphics and trails of numbers. “Throwing the dish out of whack like we did crashed the server. If we pull the data core before a reboot, it could fry the chip.”
“Fine. Just hurry up.” A beeping icon on Cole’s Bracer alerts him to an incoming craft. He looks up to see the tapered A-shape profile of a Navy airboat on a steep descent vector, twin rockets from it’s blocky outer fuselages burning hot. The middle fuselage tapers all the way to the bow, where a bank of windows marks the cockpit. In a matter of moments, they’ll be landing by the dish.
“You disgust me,” Siren continues. With her sun-shield down, her caramel skin and almond eyes are visible, revealing a seductive beauty brimming with mystery and danger. There’s something oddly familiar about her, but Cole can’t place it. Clearly, she’s recognized him, probably from old news stories, even though it’s been 6 years since the Striders disbanded. Perhaps he should be flattered. “A Strider plundering Strider-tech for Earth and their Concordat parasites? And you—pretty boy—I see you over there.”
Pulz looks sideways at Siren, his fingers still flying over the haptic keyboard.
“A good kid from the peds doing dirty work for Admiral Bitch-on-Wheels. Guess you really bought all that Sadler dynasty bullshit.”
Pulz’s hands pause on the keys. “Attent, femnaut, the Pulz ain’t nobody’s tool—especially not terrorists taking bribes from the Rakoi. Also, you tried to kill me, shit flusher!”
“The Rakoi.” Siren giggles hysterically. “Fool, you been soakin’ up too many cosmic rays.”
“Pulz!” Cole says. “Ignore her. Stay focused.”
Siren gives Cole a smug grin.
As the kid returns to his work, Cole looks thirty meters away toward the approaching dropship. As it vertically descends between the rows of transformers, it’s fusion thrusters chase chalk-dust across the ground. The vacuum is silent, so the sound of the engines is simulated by the computer in Cole’s helmet.
“Got it,” Pulz says. He gestures to the console. “Your flash drive is in port Charlie-09.”
“Way to go, kid.” Cole gives Pulz a slap on the back as he pulls the flash chip from one of dozens in the console. He examines the pinky-sized shard. The male end forks into a pair of tines. Between them, a tiny gold CPU floats. “How bout that. You’re pretty handy after all.”
“Piece a cake, bro-naut!” Pulz’s grin is practically childlike.
“Aren’t you two cute.” Siren exaggerates her grunt and shifts her zip-tied legs.
Cole plugs the chip into his bracer, and his biometrics grant him full access to the data logs. Only the DNA of a Strider can unlock the chip’s full range of info. He runs a quick meta-data search to find the supplier of the flash drive.
“Sadler, listen to me,” says Siren. For once, the sarcasm has left her voice. “We weren’t out here for sabotage or terrorism—the Trueborn are patriots. That ‘Code’ you were talking about? We’re out here fighting for it! And our mission was to protect the Morpho cure.”
Cole’s eyes flash up from his Bracer. He thinks she must be lying, but a part of him isn’t sure. Beyond the Trueborn’s rover, the Navy ship is settling onto the surface. The thrusters are powering down.
“Siren’s right you know,” says Lunger in a gravelly voice. He’s still breathing hard from the tasing. “You got no idea what you’re handing over. The data on that chip is nav coordinates. We were using them to aim the telescope into interstellar space—that is before you attacked us.”
“Aim it?” Cole asks. “At what?”
“A hyperlight flight path,” Siren replies. “We were given the chip and ordered to use its Strider protocols to override the dish. The null-telescope scanned interstellar space for a lost craft.”
“Like what?” Pulz asks. “A drone? A ship?”
“We don’t know. We only know that if you don’t get those coordinates to our contact, the galaxy could lose it’s only chance at a cure for Morpho.”
Cole and Siren stare each other down. The door of the Navy craft is opening and two columns of Marines are double-timing it toward the rovers, their combine rifles leveled. They’re led by Lt. Murena, Cole’s usual contact in the fleet. They all have similar armored suits to the Trueborn, but theirs are much sleeker, with plates that fit like perfect puzzle pieces, and paint that automatically turns to yellow camouflage in the Lore environment.
A Morpho cure? Cole thinks. Bullshit. And yet, Cole senses she believes what she’s saying.
“Sadler, please,” Siren says as the troops surround the rovers. “Don’t give that data to the admiral. The Concordat will torch anything they find as an illegal—they don’t want a cure! You’re a Strider. You took an oath to do what’s right.”
“Lo, Cole,” says Pulz. “She sounds, like, pretty legit.”
“Area secure!” calls out one of the Marines, her youthful voice full of strike-team bravado. She and the others finish their sweep of the area. They’ve already noted the restrained seditionists and are taking up positions all around. Another says, “Cole Sadler?”
“That’s me.” Cole glances at his Bracer. He turns the display away from the Marines as he reads the results of his search. Last tagged user of flash drive: Kimiko Toshie. He’s stunned—the person who illegally supplied Strider tech to a trio of terrorists is a Strider academy friend—a woman he fought beside at Swarga. A Strider turned terrorist. Can’t be. He’s careful not to let on about his discovery. “Took you jarheads long enough.”
“Sadler,” says Lt. Murena by way of greeting. He nods toward the three seditionists and gives his troops an order. “Secure the prisoners aboard ship.” He clicks the safety on his rifle and slings it over his shoulder. It clicks home as it magnetically attaches to his back. He reaches a hand toward Cole. “Looks like you retrieved the package and repaired the dish. Good work. I’ll take that flash drive off your hands.”
Cole doesn’t break eye contact. He hesitates just long enough to punch in a few last commands, executing a redaction protocol. In the few seconds it takes him to eject the chip, he’s managed to erase any trace of Kimiko Toshie’s name. He hands the drive over. “Sure thing, Lieutenant.”
“Thanks. We’ll have our techs track down the black market source.”
“I unlocked it for you, but you’ve got your work cut out for you. Some of the data was corrupted.”
“Hmm,” says Murena. “The admiral won’t like that. But anyways, I know she appreciates your hard work.” He makes a hand signal to his subordinates.
Some of the Marines escort the three prisoners toward the ai
rship, while others set about tagging the rovers for impound. Siren is fighting all the way as they drag her into the aft hatch. She yells back, “You’re making a big mistake, Sadler. You’re betraying the Striders. You’re betraying the colonies. You’re not a real spacer!”
One of the Marines buffets Siren with her rifle. “Cool your thrusters, can-crab. Or we’ll gag ya.”
As Lieutenant Murena follows the others onto the ship, he says over his shoulder, “Nice work, Sadler. The Iron Maiden’s gonna be damn proud.”
Iron Maiden—his mother’s affectionate nickname in the fleet. A fitting one. Cole watches as the Navy Marines drag off the seditionists and one more piece of Strider tech. As he listens to Siren’s impassioned pleas, he can’t help but think of how that chip represents an increasingly rare type of artifact. One of the last vestiges of a lost dream.
“Yeah,” Cole mutters ruefully. “Damn proud.”
Mark 08
Pike City, Lore Lunar Colony
April 11, 2232
0528 Hours, KGT
Cole Sadler is sober.
This fact is painfully evident as he waits for his mother to answer his comm. He’s been sitting on his musty twin bed for an hour since his return from the Zhenyi Relay Station, fidgeting with his Dreamscape inhaler. The symbol of the UEC Navy spins in hologram above his desk—a comet blazing through a ship’s wheel, flanked by one blue star to represent Earth and one gold to represent Abaya. The image reflects off Cole’s dirty M.R.E. trays. His eyes drift to the fishbowl on his window sill, filled with water and colorful fake rocks, but no fish. He never got around to buying one. He stares through the bowl at a vista of lunar mountains and endless stars, warped by the water.
Kimiko Toshie. A Strider. Turned terrorist.
The thought is too horrific to bear. Cole has been turning the idea over and over in his mind since getting back. The data from the dish was clear—Kimiko supplied the Trueborn with Strider access codes. Possibly for nothing more than cash. But Cole couldn’t decide which possibility was worse—that a Strider joined a sedition cell, or that she was willing to sell her services to the highest bidder.
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