Ceres Rising (Cladespace Book 3)

by Corey Ostman

Jacob tapped his ptenda and dropped the connection. He closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing. If the vision of the river and the canyon and the sky were gone, he could still listen. A coyote howled. The rush of water. An eagle made a piercing cry above and to his right. Its sound split through the backdrop of rushing water, but he knew the eagle well: it was polite and, unlike his ptenda, wouldn’t interrupt frequently.

  But the eagle shrieked again. Then again. Its voice dropped, briefly pausing at a more melodious frequency, then plunging downward. Frequent, thudding bursts.

  Someone was banging on his door.

  Jacob pinched his eyes closed and with his left hand groped for the access panel on the wall above him. His fingers finally located the lip of the unit. He tapped it and heard the door swish open, pause, then shut.

  The sound of the river ceased.

  “Get up,” said Lee.

  Jacob opened his eyes. He scrutinized the opposite wall, hoping to find the canyon in the Cererian dust.

  “We’ve got to talk about Loorden,” said Lee.

  “Why?”

  Loorden. That name was ancient. Jacob wrestled with his memory. Was it a slush run? Was it about sleep squeezes? A roider. J-something Loorden. He had gone to Lee to get a download of Ink, but she and Lee were arguing about—

  “Did you hear me?” Lee said. “I know it’s been hard on you.”

  Losing the canyon was hard on me. Subverting the eagle to a pounding door was hard on me.

  But Jacob remembered now, as much as he didn’t want to. Jeanne had been angry. She’d threatened to attend the next clash and expose Lee’s Ink transmissions. As if that would have done anything. Lee had pulled out a phasewave and killed her. In front of me.

  The phrase hard on you suddenly grated.

  “Hard on me? Don’t you think it was harder on her? She’s the dead one.” His voice cracked, too long unused.

  “Hard because you had to keep quiet,” Lee said. “I want to make it up to you. Here.” He stepped closer, extending his arm so Jacob could see the ptenda’s display.

  Fifty thousand credits.

  Jacob reeled. He was too sick to deal with this. He wanted to be left alone.

  “I don’t want your credits. I want to go back to—”

  “Back to what?” Lee said. “Your canyon? I can take you there. Here, take ten thousand extra. In Ink.”

  There stood Lee, offering him Ink and contempt. Jacob felt like sobbing, felt like he was going to be sick, felt like Ink was pulling the hair from his head, and felt despair that only Ink could stop these feelings.

  “No,” Jacob said. He didn’t mean it, but he had to offer a token defiance. To respect himself.

  He couldn’t look at Lee’s eyes, but he could see Lee’s mouth had gone from smile to snarl. And he was reaching for his ptenda. Lee had Jacob’s squeeze access. He could easily cover Jacob in Ink again. Or deny him Ink forever.

  Without letting himself think of it, Jacob swatted Lee’s hand from the ptenda. But he was weak, and Lee evaded him on the second attempt. The canyon wall began rising behind Lee. Jacob sought refuge behind a crate, trying to keep his senses intact. Over the rushing water, he heard the sound of an activated phasewave.

  He pulled a weapon on me? On a protector?

  Am I still a protector?

  He reached for his belt, where his phasewave used to hang. Nothing. He looked down at his hand. It shook uncontrollably. His skin was sallow, the veins standing out in high relief. He swallowed back loathing for himself.

  I hate Lee more.

  “Murderous bastard! I don’t want your money!”

  Jacob scrambled over the crate and jumped at Lee. He balled up both fists and, shaking or not, brought them down on his head. Maybe it was surprise, though probably dumb luck, but either way, Jacob managed to knock the phasewave out of Lee’s hand. Then he rained down blows and didn’t stop, even as he heard curses and cries, followed by feeble attempts at speech.

  “Jacob!”

  He felt a strong hand grab his right arm and pull him away from Lee. It hurt. His hands hurt: they were raw and bloody.

  Another phasewave hummed to life near his head. He jerked to the side, only to see Protector Donner in her blood red jumpsuit, aiming at Lee’s prone form.

  “Lee Larchmont, you’re under arrest for the murder of Jeanne Loorden.”

  The words struck Jacob. They should have been his.

  Chapter 19

  Zweeeep! Zweeeep! Zweeeep!

  A piercing alarm jolted Mhau out of bed. She fumbled with her sheets for a moment, wrestled on her robe, then bounced over to the workstation. Boot swiveled its head toward her from its perch on her desk. On her screen, the communications feed was blinking: interbode messaging was down. Not the ancient blurp system—that was fine. The messaging network, which not only connected Bode-6 to the other bodes on Ceres, but to all of the slushing crews, was almost completely offline.

  Damnit. Not another system.

  She silenced the audible alarm, then navigated into the offending system, scrolling backwards in time. Probable electromagnetic interference. Increased latency was the first symptom, followed by data loss, followed by complete protocol breakdown. It shouldn’t have happened. The messaging network was redundant for slusher safety. The backup was an old-time surface fiber run, laid down a century ago. The primary network was a modern aboveground laser repeater. If nothing else, they should have had differing error times, differing checksums. Yet both data streams were showing exactly the same errors at exactly the same times.

  She selected the primary network, bringing up a remote session at its most distant node. Telemetry to the Bode-5 node was still sporadic, not yet down. Maybe she could initiate a reboot from that end which would propagate down the entire length of the network, back to Bode-6.

  Even if it did work, she knew gratification wouldn’t be instantaneous. Her roiders were going to hate the downtime. Mhau pressed the reboot badge, knowing full well she’d be setting off alarms at Bode-5. I’ll contact them later and smooth any ruffled feathers with their engineer, she thought. All the Bode-6 nodes went cold, spreading out through the network.

  She glanced at the alarm queue. Three nastygrams had cleared themselves, though the parent alerts remained open. Mhau reached out and stroked Boot on its head. The robotic gecko flicked its metarm tongue and scampered up the wall, just out of reach. It was teasing her, wanting to play, not understanding she needed to concentrate on connecting Bode-6 back to the rest of Ceres.

  The node out by Digby Chasm went yellow for a moment, then green. Two adjacent nodes, each separated by five kilometers, also came back online shortly after Digby.

  Keep going.

  As more subnets winked green, Mhau felt cautious confidence. She pinged the backup network and sent a remote reboot command toward the nearest node. The primary network was nearly all green.

  “Critical alarm rescinded. Situation normal,” the bode’s artificial voice intoned over the system comm. Mhau sat back. She didn’t smile. This was the third spurious failure in as many days, and none of them made any sense.

  As she closed the comm system display, she noticed a belt network message had arrived while she slept. She straightened as she read the sender ID: Panborn, colony sponsor.

  The message header was text only, no video connect required. Good, she thought, glancing at Boot. It wouldn’t do to transmit an image to an aposti with a robot perched nearby.

  Mhau lit the virtual keyboard under her display and manually entered her personal decryption. Most people kept their crypt keys locked in their ptendas. She didn’t trust her keys to anything but the wetware between her ears.

  As the message unencrypted, she noticed it had incurred several bounces prior to delivery. It’s been bouncing from Mars to Ceres for days? She called up the bounce errors. Router 1715.

  Mhau brought back the comm display and checked the error log. Sure enough, there was Router 1715, the first glitch, two days prior. S
he looked back at the bounced messages and frowned. Sender notifications confirmed that the aposti was alerted to the telecomm problem, too. Indeed, he had appended a note to the original message body: UNABLE TO REACH YOU. WHAT IS YOUR STATUS?

  Bwisit! Mhau cursed in Tagalog as she began to type.

  SLUSH OUTPUT NOMINAL. UNAFFECTED BY OUTAGES.

  After she retyped the last word three times, she told herself to slow down. There’s no such thing as real-time. The stream to Mars took over a half hour in transit, so she could at least give herself time to think.

  UNUSUAL SYSTEM ERRORS. INCLUDING REDUNDANT NETWORKS.

  She wasn’t sure how much she needed to tell, how much he wanted to know. But it felt good to type it out. Like a confession.

  THIRD FAILURE SHOWS SIGNS OF ELECTROMAGNETIC INTERFERENCE. TRACES SEVERED BY STRONG EM FIELD, WAVELENGTH EQUAL TO INTERTRACE DISTANCE.

  Mhau stared at the last sentence. She called up space weather and looked at recent solar activity. There were four coronal mass ejections in the prior reporting period, none affecting Ceres.

  She didn’t want to leave the impression that things were out of control. True, she didn’t know why the problems were happening, but she was on top of their repair. Slush operations were never in danger.

  Mhau appended a more upbeat conclusion.

  OTHER THAN MINOR GLITCHES, BODE-6 NORMAL.

  That’s a better way to end a message. Mhau flicked the missive, sending it on its way.

  Chapter 20

  Jacob woke violently. His right leg spasmed against a crate, twisting his body to the deck. He stretched the offending muscle, grimacing. The amount of Ink he’d streamed since midrise had undoubtedly caused the tremors. The longer he detached his mind from his body, the more fraught the reconnection period.

  Jacob rubbed his eyes and looked at his ptenda. Inked for seven hours. He rose, took a few jarring steps, then steadied himself against the wall as a wave of nausea passed. He concentrated on the strong horizontal lines of the crates in the room. As his stomach started to calm, he realized that both hands were hurting, too. The knuckles on his right hand had a dull, throbbing ache while the side of his left hand felt like it had been clamped in a vise.

  Did I fall? Was I flailing in my sleep?

  Jacob considered his hands. They hadn’t looked this bad since he’d gotten in that fight back home with—

  Fighting. I was fighting with somebody. In Ink?

  Jacob struggled to remember. His Ink wasn’t usually populated with other people; it was more about the landscape. Trying to analyze Ink experiences made his head hurt worse. But he knew his injuries had something to do with Ink, or someone—

  Wait. Lee?

  He tried to focus on Lee, but was only getting snippets, some of which he thought might be Ink fever and others that teased as reality. More distinct than his memories, however, were his emotions. He was angry: angry about something he couldn’t quite recall, something that made him—

  Lee tried to bribe me. He washed me with Ink.

  “Lee!” he shouted, rummaging around the room. Lee wasn’t there. But Lee had been. Jacob looked back at his hands, turning them over and seeing the scrapes and blood and bruises. A fight. He’d finally hit Lee with every ugly betrayal he’d been forced to defend.

  And then that new protector had taken Lee away. Grace Donner. Jacob seethed at the vision of the protector pulling Lee down the spoke. It should have been him. Not some offworlder, not some tourist. But she’d been there and he’d failed. He shook in his self-hatred, unnerving his newfound anger, the fiery spark dimming.

  Ink.

  The thought was immediate, born of habit. Before he realized it, Jacob had reached around his neck and tapped his sleep squeeze. Its haptic feedback indicated he still had plenty of timeshare. All he’d have to do was tap it and Ceres would vanish.

  Or I could march out and learn what happened.

  A novel thought. Jacob looked at the door. He knew that the new protector was staying with the doctor. He could go there. She could tell him what happened to Lee. To him.

  But he couldn’t bear to see his old self in the eager protector’s mien. Or his present condition in her inevitable pity.

  Jacob reached for his ptenda. His hand shook.

  Not Ink. Not Donner. Mhau.

  • • •

  Mhau sat at her workbench, dissecting a grappling launcher. Its silvery barrel, dented and scored, begged for retirement. She unbolted the access plate and exposed the massive solenoid. Glancing over the winding, she sighed. Sixteen previous repairs of the superconducting wire stared back at her. This was precisely why she hated this particular launcher. The manufacturer had used an incorrectly doped wire and it was prone to thermal breakdown after minimal use.

  “I loathe you,” she said to the unit.

  She had never approved of it. She’d balked when Jacob bought it for her two years ago, back when neither of them had much money, back when a faulty piece of space hardware represented their future away from Earth. Now that she had a decent cash flow, she didn’t understand why she was wasting her time repairing the piece of junk. It was only sentimental. Only because of Jacob.

  Mhau grabbed a hologram visor and fitted it over her eyes. A magnified view of the launcher shimmered directly above the device. If this repair were like the last several, she foresaw several hours of brainless work. Just what she needed after the glitches in the bode.

  As she lowered to work, a ping sounded at her door. Mhau frowned. With a last dismissive look at the launcher, she put her tools down and bounced to the door.

  “Gak!” Jacob was momentarily startled as her visored face came into view.

  That was different, she thought. She was used to no response at all, but his tiny outburst was more like he’d used to be, back when he had a playful sense of humor. Mhau removed the visor with one hand and reached out to Jacob with the other.

  “Come in. I knew you’d be stopping by.”

  He stepped tentatively inside and took the nearest seat, a small storage bench she kept by the door.

  “You can do better than that.” She guided him deeper into the room and pulled out two chairs. Jacob looked wan and shaky.

  “You look horrible,” she said.

  “Do I? I think I feel worse,” he said, rubbing his hands.

  “Oh! Your hands.” She frowned, realizing how violent his altercation with Lee had been. “Do they hurt? Want me to call Dr. Chanho?” Almost, she reached out to him. But Jacob had taken previous concern and flung it back in her face.

  “I’ll be ok,” he said.

  Will you? She’d thought about visiting him last night, but she’d been disappointed too many times to walk into his storage locker and try to extract him from Ink.

  Jacob stared at her. “Can you tell me what…” He trailed off, eyes bleak.

  “Happened to you last night?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Please. I’m not sure what’s real, what’s Ink—I thought maybe you could help me.”

  “Lee was trying to bribe you. Do you remember that?”

  “Yeah. A little,” said Jacob. “He Inked me when I refused, didn’t he?”

  Mhau nodded. “He was trying to coerce you. Drug you and force you to accept the credits. But you stood up to him.”

  “What did I do?” he asked, rubbing one of his hands with the other.

  “What your hands said you did,” said Mhau. “You hit Lee. Several times. Grace intervened and arrested him.”

  “How did she know?” Jacob asked. “How’d you know? Did Lee confess?”

  Mhau pursed her lips, but decided not to hide it. “Grace used a blurp network to monitor Lee.”

  “Blurp network? Like for advertisements?” Jacob frowned. “When did they install it?”

  “When the bode was built. They never used it. I activated the network for surveillance.”

  “By the new protector.” Jacob looked at his bloody knuckles, turning his hands over slowly until they
started trembling.

  “Have the doctor look at your abrasions,” she said. Was he trembling with the aftereffects of Ink, or self-loathing?

  “I don’t really—”

  “I’ll go too.”

  • • •

  “Time to check on Lee again,” Tim said, launching from the deck and sailing down the hall.

  “No need, pooch,” said Grace. “I’ll just—”

  “No bother!” Tim called as he disappeared into their bedroom. “I’ll hover just outside the door’s viewport for a better look.”

  “Tim seems overly energetic,” noted Kyran.

  Grace shrugged. Certainly the PodPooch reconnoiter wasn’t necessary. Kyran had the isolation pod bristling with sensors, all fed to her ptenda.

  “Prisoner is sitting upright in his cot,” Tim said in her dot. “Back is against the wall.”

  “Resting,” she relayed to Kyran.

  The doctor tapped just behind his right ear. “Tim’s transmitting to me, too,” he said.

  “Prisoner is stretching his legs,” Tim added.

  “Let’s call it exercise,” Grace said. “Tim, I can see all this from my ptenda, you don’t have to—”

  “Prisoner is removing his boots,” Tim interrupted.

  Now there’s important news, Grace thought. “Tim, come back.”

  “Stop using your PodPooch to spy on me!”

  Lee’s voice. Grace smirked. She began to understand why Tim was surveying in person.

  “Tim, how often have you checked on him?” Grace asked.

  “Every fifteen minutes,” he said.

  She grinned and shook her head. “You’re a very bad dog.”

  Tim appeared from the hallway, executing a nimble landing at her feet.

  “I anticipated the prisoner to have more aggressive tendencies, Grace,” Tim said.

  “Too relaxed for a murder and bribery suspect?”

  “His vitals do show he is remarkably relaxed,” said Kyran.

  Tim’s mimic coat flickered. “This level of calm implies he expects to be released soon.”

  “Or he could be planning an escape,” said Grace.

  “Now there’s a pleasant thought,” Kyran muttered.