This was only one of several disquieting trains of thought that kept her sleep cycles brief and infrequent, notwithstanding the admittedly pleasant company.
She watched Dashiel handle the docking procedures, playing the part of arrogant, entitled Advisor for Zaidam security—a man accustomed to getting what he wanted without question or challenge. It probably wasn’t much of a stretch for him, though he’d been nothing but kind and considerate since they’d departed Namino. Slinking his way into her soul one half-smug, half-self-deprecating smile at a time.
He glanced over his shoulder from the cockpit. “Go ahead and get into costume. It’s likely they’ll start scanning us the instant we cross the outer security perimeter.”
She nodded understanding and went to the small tech bench installed in the port wall of the main cabin. Once there, she checked the functionality of her kamero filter and other built-in defensive tools. Satisfied everything was in working order, she activated a simmed ID Dashiel had provided to her, along with its morph. She also loaded a mask but kept it dormant for now.
Next, she donned a semi-fashionable overcoat atop her tactical shirt and pants. The pants concealed a Glaser and a blade beneath a heavy outer weave designed to diffuse targeted scans. Hopefully, the combination of the identity layers, the concealment measures and the weapons would suffice to get her in and out of the most secure prison in the Dominion in one piece. More hopefully, all three of them.
She stashed an extra kamero filter-loaded module for Parc in a free pocket, double-checked all the additions, then returned to the cockpit to watch the approach.
Was Zaidam Bastille an attractive station? Perhaps in a starkly cold way. The quality and complexity of the architecture seemed indisputably impressive. Yet even from the outside, the structure radiated a sterility that implied nothing living resided inside. It was near to true—a warden and two deputies oversaw a corps of dynes and drones, and most of the prisoners were in stasis at any given time.
She seriously hoped Parc hadn’t been here long enough to have been placed in stasis. Waking him up without anyone noticing might be beyond their capabilities.
Two kilometers out from the docking ring, a tractor beam took control of the ship to guide it into a berth…because otherwise someone might decide to ram the structure? A dramatic but destructive and ultimately pointless endeavor unless someone else would be along to pick up the loosed prisoners.
She checked Dashiel to find him wearing a comportment of idly bored confidence. It was his only costume, but she’d seen its effectiveness at Mirai Tower….
She tried to imitate the expression, though it wasn’t an attitude that felt comfortable on her skin. She must remember: they weren’t fugitives breaking into a high-security government installation; they were privileged lackeys doing the government’s bidding as a matter of course.
The hull shuddered as docking clamps locked them into place. She shuddered in commiseration, thinking of the task that lay ahead.
It wasn’t going to be enough to get inside and gain permission to see Parc. They were going to have to get rid of any guards that stood watch and trick any active cams, then free him from whatever manner of restraints the prison had clad him in. Then they were going to have to sneak him out of the prisoner wing, through security and back to the ship, while selling the act all the way to the end—until those clamps unlocked and retracted.
A less risky gambit than jacking a warship and shooting up the place, but not by much.
She leaned in close to Dashiel, though she didn’t display any overt affection since they were probably being watched. “In case we soon find ourselves residents here, thank you. I couldn’t so much as breach the perimeter of this place without your help. Thank you for risking…everything for me.”
“Not just for you. Something is rotten at the highest levels of our leadership, and someone dared to spread the rot to my business.” His lips twitched. “Mostly for you, though.”
Her brow furrowed in undisguised consternation. She still had no idea what to make of him half the time. She longed for the insights into his personality, quirks, flaws and foibles that had been stolen from the empty chasm of her past. Without them, she could only rely on what she saw in the here and now.
“Ready?”
She jerked out of the reverie and nodded. “Let’s do this.”
Together they stood and moved to the hatch. After a few seconds, it opened to reveal a bland, sterile tube of a hallway.
They were subjected to their first scan before they’d taken three steps down the tube. She held her breath, but no alarms rang out. First test passed.
The tube wound around and emptied out into an entry room staffed by a single but well-armed security dyne. “Submit entrance authorization.”
“Industry Advisory Dashiel Ridani requesting entrance, along with my aide, Larahle Spicor, under Charter Provision IV 32.487.” He had made certain the actual Larahle Spicor was going to have an alibi placing her far from Zaidam at this moment; when Justice came calling in the aftermath, she would quickly be cleared of any involvement. The blame would fall on him, as he intended.
“Submit to identity verification.”
Dashiel stepped up to the pane and pressed the fingertips of his left hand to it while staring directly ahead.
Again no alarms, which meant Weiss and the others hadn’t seen through his act. Then it was her turn.
The layers of technology that protected and distorted her identity and her weapons once again weighed thick and heavy on her, as if she wore a double-leaded apron over her body. The weight was purely metaphorical, but she felt it nonetheless.
It hardly lifted when the scanner returned green, as the gauntlet run had only just begun.
“Identities verified. Purpose of the visit?”
Dashiel continued to take the lead. “An audience with Inmate #M47011.”
“Reason for the audience?”
“Advisor business, and outside your purview.”
“Retrieving records on Inmate #M47011. Designation: Parc Eshett. Generation: 4th. Conviction: Aggravated Burglary, Attempted Theft. Sentence: Incarceration pending retirement and reinitialization. Status: Transferred.”
It required more restraint than she’d known she possessed not to exclaim in disbelief and launch into a tirade. Transferred? Were they too late? Had the sentence already been carried out and the Parc she knew erased forever?
Dashiel frowned in displeasure. “Transferred? I wasn’t informed of this development. When did this happen, and where was he transferred to?”
“Inmate # M47011 was transferred at 1150 APT yesterday to the Dominion vessel Tabiji.”
The name didn’t mean anything to her, but there was no reason it should.
Dashiel continued frowning; it really was quite a dour and disapproving expression. If she were the security dyne, she’d be scrambling to remedy his vexation. “Destination of the Tabiji?”
“Not available.”
“I need to see the records.”
The dyne manifested a string of data in front of Dashiel, and she peeked over his shoulder to read it as he did.
Prisoner Transfer Order:
Entry: Transfer of Inmate # M47011 to Dominion vessel Tabiji
Authorization: Alpha 5-0
Responsible Party: Advisor Gemina Kail
Purpose: Rasu Protocol
Vertigo surged through her to send the room spinning, and she swayed unsteadily against Dashiel’s shoulder.
Outposts vanishing.
Prisoners vanishing.
People vanishing.
Herself vanishing. Erased.
It should be impossible that it was all related, yet the evidence danced in the air in front of her.
How many people had been spirited away to some unknown void in the intervening five years between when she’d first stumbled upon this ‘Rasu Protocol’ and today?
Dashiel scowled at the security dyne while he pinged her.
Are y
ou all right?
No. We need to get back to the ship.
Are you sure? We might be able to wrangle more information about what happened out of the system.
I’m sure we can. Back to the ship.
“Thank you for your time. We’ll be departing now.” Dashiel turned on a heel, his hand on her elbow, and they headed down the tube toward the ship.
She stayed beside him until the tube curved out of line-of-sight of the security station, then activated the mask and her kamero filter and pivoted back toward the entrance.
Get the ship fired up and the docking clamps retracted. I’ll be there in a minute. Likely hot.
What? What are you doing?
Finding out more information.
Nika!
She crept into the security entryway, taking care to steer well clear of the scanners. In a place as strictly locked down as this, the scanners might be strong enough to detect the displacement in the air her movement created.
When she reached the counter, she vaulted over it and slammed into the dyne forearms first. They both tumbled to the floor, but she landed on top. She jammed her Glaser against its frame where the CPU should be located and pressed the trigger.
The kamero filter absorbed the worst of the electrical discharge, but her skin tingled painfully in its wake. Also, the dyne’s last act before it malfunctioned was to slam its left arm into the side of her head. So that hurt, too.
She shrugged it all off to leap to her feet and begin brute-force slicing into the internal security console the dyne had used.
There was no time to do anything more than copy the files, as she assumed the dyne had been able to activate an alarm or five in the time between when she’d attacked and when she’d fried its processor.
But she was able to scan some of the data as it transferred into her internal storage, and what she saw chilled the biosynthetic bone matter keeping her upright.
Prisoner Transfer Order…Purpose: Rasu Protocol
Prisoner Transfer Order…Purpose: Rasu Protocol
Prisoner Transfer Order…Purpose: Rasu Protocol
Prisoner Transfer Order…Purpose: Rasu Protocol
On and on it went. Thousands of records. Thousands of transfers.
The instant the copy was complete, she scrambled back over the counter and sprinted down the tube to the echoing racket of reinforcements arriving at the entry room.
Open the outer hatch!
I had to back away fifteen meters to get the clamps to stay retracted. Can you free jump it?
Looks like I have to.
She rounded the last curve to find the end of the docking tube closed by an interlocking door. She had no explosives on her, so she took a deep breath to fill her lungs with air and fired on the door with her Glaser set to full strength until a hole burned through the center of it—then the near-vacuum of space took care of the rest.
She began exhaling as she sprinted through the opening and into space at the same time as the tube’s frame ripped apart. She was almost clear—
—the outer rim slammed into her foot and sent her spiraling off course from her target, the hatch of her ship.
Godsdammit, here she was tumbling out of control during another emergency exit! She frantically tried to adjust her angle while she still had momentum, but she was only able to succeed in pointing herself toward the hull of the ship, far to the right of the hatch.
Her eyes stung as all their moisture evaporated. Her vision dimmed as the last of the oxygen in her lungs dissipated. Internal OS alarms flashed against a black screen like short-circuiting strobe lights.
A thud, then floating.
Then a force tugging at her ankle.
Through a darkening haze, she vaguely became aware of the sensation of gravity. A floor beneath her. Distant sounds. Movement. A solid, warm presence enveloping her.
“Nika, breathe!”
Breathe? Yes, she should do that. Could she? The signal didn’t want to travel from the critical cluster in her brain to the correct location in her body to prompt her diaphragm to contract. Her brain needed oxygen to send the signal. But she needed to breathe to get the oxygen to send the signal to breathe….
“Come on. Please.”
Please what? What was it the voice wanted her to do again?
…breathe. Breathe!
Her body spasmed as she sucked in a gulp of air.
Her eyes burned. Her skin burned. Everything burned—but—
She wrenched out of Dashiel’s grasp and tried to sit up. “We have to get…out of here…hurry.”
“We are. We slipped past the outer perimeter in a few seconds at maximum velocity, and autopilot has us speeding away. We’re out of range of the station’s weapons. Stars, Nika, you scared me.”
He brought his hands to her face while his gaze roved anxiously over her. “You took some external damage, and maybe internal as well. We need to get you hooked up to the repair bench.”
“In a minute.” She crawled on her hands and knees through the open inner hatch and into the cockpit, where she pulled herself up by the edge of the dash to stare at the receding dot of Zaidam Bastille on the rear cam feed.
Dashiel crouched beside her and placed an arm around her with a gentle, protective touch. “What happened in there?”
“It’s empty. The whole prison—it’s an empty tomb. Over four thousand inmates were put on the Tabiji yesterday. Another three thousand a month ago.”
“What? Why?”
She massaged a scratchy, grated throat and sank down to rest against the dash, then met his troubled stare. “The Rasu Protocol.”
“I’ve never heard of it. What does it involve?”
“I’ve no idea, but it’s the answer. The answer to everything.”
55
* * *
Gemina stood at the viewport of the Tabiji. The familiarity of the view it provided—she’d made this trip too many miserable times—in no way diminished its ominous nature.
A ring of immense orbital platforms, each one hundreds of kilometers in length and breadth, spun in orbit around a blue-white star.
It had lost some color, she thought, since her last trip. No surprise, as its energy was being hungrily extracted by the lattice encasing it: a Dyson sphere so demanding that the star could not fully replenish the energy it leeched.
Thousands, possibly millions, of ships darted everywhere in her field of view, arriving and departing from the platforms with an anarchic regularity. Flares of roiling light punctuated the backdrop of space beyond the star, a sign of…she knew not what.
The scene made for quite an imposing presentation on its own, but all the more so when she took into account that it was only one of hundreds of such strongholds scattered around the Laniakea Supercluster. Merely the closest one to the Asterion Dominion’s borders, and a vanguard of the Rasu’s expansion into the Gennisi galaxy.
A shudder rippled through her bones, but she suppressed it before it reached her skin. She must not show weakness here.
An ugly, utilitarian but behemoth cargo freighter approached her location. The Tabiji was a sizable ship—one of the largest in the Dominion’s small fleet—but it was soon swallowed up by the gaping hangar bay of the freighter like a minnow being consumed by a whale.
The Tabiji settled to the deck in a tiny corner of the hangar bay. The next second a booming voice tore at her eardrums. “Asterion Dominion vessel. Provide your cargo manifest.”
Gemina notched her chin up proudly, though she had no idea if anything living could see her. “5,420 biosynthetic life forms in stasis and in a suitable condition for incorporation.”
“Open yourselves and deliver your cargo.”
“Acknowledged.” Did they think they were speaking to the ship itself? Did they think the ship was a living being? Did it make a difference to them?
On her command the wide bay doors lining the sides of the Tabiji swung out and down to rest against the hangar bay floor. Rows upon stacked rows of stasis cha
mbers cascaded out of the hold and were captured by the thick arms of the machinery that staffed the hangar bay, then swiftly whisked away.
“Your next contribution will consist of no less than 8,000 biosynthetic life forms. Our needs have grown.”
She locked her jaw to ensure the protest exploding in her mind remained lodged in her throat. How in all the stars in the cosmos were they were going to deliver so high a number? Start snatching random people off the street? Such a tactic wouldn’t bode well for maintaining peace and order in the Dominion, which happened to be one of the Guides’ highest priorities.
Had the time finally come when the once unthinkable—manufacturing new Asterions for the sole purpose of sacrificing them—remained as the only option left to them?
She’d never envied the Guides less than she did right now, as one fact above all had been made abundantly clear to her before they had entrusted her with this nightmarish duty: defiance was not an option.
She exhaled with stoic poise. “Acknowledged. Request permission to depart.”
“Granted.”
The cargo freighter expelled the Tabiji from its cavernous belly. She wasted no time in reversing course and speeding away, eager to rid herself of the oppressive terror of the Rasu stronghold, though less eager to return to the Guides and deliver the bad news.
But distance did nothing to lessen the dread that came from terrible knowledge—knowledge Nika Kirumase should be showering Gemina with thanks for saving her from having to bear. Twice now! Ungrateful bitch.
Of course, at this rate it might not matter for much longer. For the vice grip of the Rasu was steadily tightening around them, with no end to their ravenous demands in sight and no way to escape the swift and violent annihilation that failure to meet those demands would bring down upon the Dominion.
56
* * *
“Unconditional surrender.”
Supreme Commander Praesidis gazed back at me with an air of chilling calmness, which he was renowned for displaying. “Yes, Ms. Hinotori. You and all your terrorist cohorts will lay down your weapons and surrender to Anaden forces, or we will bomb your every last base into oblivion, and you with them. And before you ask, yes, we do know where those bases are.”
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