The Celaran Probe (Parker Interstellar Travels Book 7)

by Michael McCloskey

  “Log this,” Cilreth said, firing the weapon in the face of the man. He fell back out of sight. The weapon verified the target had been rendered unconscious.

  She turned and ran through the back room. It held a dizzying array of boxes and pseudo VR exercise machines. Cilreth found it odd for a custom software shop, but she wasted no time puzzling it over.

  I wonder if they have someone on the back entrance.

  Cilreth sent one attendant to scout a possible exit in the back. She went through a doorway which led into the other side of store, crouching low to keep her head obscured by the flat advertisement anchor screens and the people standing around VR chairs and mixed VR towers.

  The other man was easy to spot. He was headed right toward the service door she had emerged from. She fired her stunner at him but he ducked away at the same time.

  Cilreth dove down an aisle of demo stations to avoid counterfire. Four people stood in partial VR stations, exercising their bodies while experiencing artificial input into their brains. They had no idea anything dangerous was happening around them.

  One attendant spotted her adversary and tailed him. A second one showed her a suspicious car out front with more men waiting inside. The last attendant showed an unguarded back alley.

  Cilreth used the feed of the man hunting her in the store to double back the way she had come without being seen. The attendant fed her the exit route while she watched the other enemy search for her. She fled through the back door and sprinted away, using the debris in the alleyway to cover her escape.

  Cilreth felt proud of herself.

  I did it! I smoothly integrated off-retina input in a combat situation and used it to my advantage.

  A couple of years ago she would have laughed at the idea of being so happy with such a thing. Now, she could appreciate the complexity of what she had done. She lacked the grace of Telisa and the tactical precision of Caden, but it was a solid job. Cilreth hurried away from the shop, losing herself in a crowd of android work bodies and incarnate tourists. Five minutes later, she contacted Telisa and gave her a report.

  “I’m making progress. I found someone who knows him, and she’ll send him a message,” she said.

  Telisa answered after a few seconds. “How will you intercept the message? Or do you just track it?”

  “She could send a carrier pigeon for all I know. I’ll figure something out.”

  Cilreth considered telling Telisa about her other drug problem, but she decided against it.

  “Keep me up to date,” Telisa said.

  “What did Shiny say about Magnus?”

  “Well he didn’t say no.”

  “Shiny never speaks that plainly.”

  “I mean, even allowing for his way of talking, he didn’t say no.”

  “So far so good? I may need you later.”

  “Yep. What do you think you’ll need?”

  “Well, Marcant’s next level of security may be more... physical.”

  “Ah. I can probably help you with that.”

  “Exactly what I had hoped you might say.”

  ***

  Cilreth continued her research into Marcant from the relative safety of a hotel room. She linked into Vovokan resources in order to both obscure and empower her search. She checked on the progress of her ongoing investigation. A set of results had been waiting for her, describing Marcant’s past exploits and his particular resources and talents. She had not yet reviewed the results since her priority had been on identifying and finding him.

  The profile was stereotypical: that of a young, bright kid prone to crime, who honed his skills and eventually turned from selfish acts to selfless ones. Marcant used his amazing skills to fight the oppressive government and megacorporations at every turn. He had avoided Core World Security his entire career. He had never been caught. As she absorbed the material, it started to feel wrong to Cilreth. She read for another few minutes until she became sure about it.

  This is too smooth, too epic. It’s fabricated. Marcant has put this out to obscure the truth.

  Cilreth opened her eyes and crossed her arms. How could she find out more? She thought of the two young people in the store. They knew about Marcant. Word of mouth. Maybe not passed incarnate, but nevertheless passed in conversation, not online investigations.

  Time to shift methods.

  Cilreth went back off-retina and opened some new viewpanes. She dusted off some of her old programs which were designed to gather information. The programs went online and pretended to be kids asking questions about things, pestering the older kids. What the older kids heard on the street, they told their siblings about; then the information filtered down to younger kids. The information was always distorted, but it could be useful.

  This time, she used the social network model she had created to help find Marcant, and lent more weight to sources closer to him on the graph. Information had to be flowing outwards from those in the know to the lesser ranked and skilled followers who wanted to learn from them.

  Cilreth set the new experiment in motion. Results started coming back within minutes. She checked a few conversations just to make sure things were working. It did not have much so far. That was to be expected. The system would rank results as they came in so she could look at the top clues whenever she liked.

  She saw one conversation where Marcant was described as being “augmented”. She supposed that pointed toward him being a Terran with cybernetic or genetic changes for higher intelligence.

  The next flagged conversation looked useful:

  “What’s his thing? He seems like quite the cult of personality around here.”

  “Augmented human intelligence.”

  “Better link? Genetics? What?”

  “He’s fully integrated with two AIs. They work symbiotically. You know, the whole greater than the sum of its parts.”

  Cilreth considered that. It sounded about as solid as anything could get using this method. She told her fleet to start conversations to verify the rumor. Within another hour, it had solidified. True or not, it was what the scientists, engineers, and hackers in Marcant’s network believed: Marcant had a special rapport with AIs, ones he had written himself, and he had integrated his mind with them to a degree more extreme than anyone had done before.

  Totally illegal. Well, I guess that government isn’t here anymore.

  Cilreth had heard of soldiers the Space Force had integrated with AIs to improve battle performance, both on the battlefield and in space operations. This sounded a lot like that, though if the stories were to be believed, Marcant had cooked it up himself.

  This guy could be useful to the team. Sounds like just what I want... but how am I going to find him?

  Chapter 17

  “We have a new problem,” Adair said.

  Marcant hated it when Adair said such things. It always went the same from this point: Marcant would attempt to dismiss it, and Adair would convince him otherwise. Then Achaius would suggest an aggressive solution and the argument would shift toward the future.

  “Tell me,” Marcant said.

  “Someone from the PIT team is after you,” Adair said. Marcant’s breath stopped. The feeling of anxiety grew from his gut. “That IS a problem,” he said.

  How bad is it when I agree with Adair from the beginning?

  “Your vitals speak for you,” Adair said.

  “I wasn’t expecting something so concrete. Usually you tell me we have to worry about something nebulous a month in the future.”

  “Well this Cilreth is days away,” Adair said. “She walked into the Jaguar shop this afternoon and made it clear she knows you’re connected. She said she wanted to offer you a job.”

  Marcant had heard enough to know Cilreth was the name of a PIT member. He also knew that Adair and Achaius would have more details for him.

  “What do we know about Cilreth?” Marcant asked.

  “She was a tracker, at least she was before joining their team,” Achaius said. “Re
cently, she’s gotten into some trouble with a large illegal drug distributor. She had a tangle with them in the Jaguar, in fact.”

  “The results?”

  “She held her own in a strategic retreat. Good training, but not a talent of hers, I’d say,” Achaius said.

  Marcant knew Achaius had very high standards when it came to tactical actions. If the AI core said she had good training, then she would be at least 95th percentile.

  “What’s a druggie doing on the PIT team?” Marcant asked.

  “Not really a druggie, just a twitch addict,” Adair said. “But truly, she killed a house full of people to get a bunch of twitch. Doesn’t sound like the angels the media says are in PIT, does it?”

  “This is an elite strike team created by the alien Shiny,” Achaius said. “Everyone likes him, but he has machinations going on behind the scenes. He could be worse than the Trilisks.”

  “He rules in the open. That seems better to me,” Marcant said, but his voice was laced with doubt.

  “You haven’t asked the real question,” Adair prompted.

  “I know. Is Cilreth looking for me because of our cell copy fiasco?” Marcant asked as prompted.

  “And?”

  “And why send a lone Terran instead of a collection of flying death spheres,” Marcant finished.

  “I say, no coincidence,” Achaius said.

  Marcant nodded. “So Shiny knows who and what, but not where? So she comes looking, because a Terran can snoop information out that a bunch of force might not get?”

  “He can take people in by force and get anything he needs out of them,” Adair said. “He has chosen not to use force. He has chosen to be nice.”

  Why? Could she be telling the truth?

  “Adair. We need to find out every single scrap of—”

  “Information about the PIT team,” Adair finished for him. “I’m so far ahead of you jelly-brain, let me tell you. So far that you—”

  “Okay then pal, bring me up to threshold voltage and let the info flow.”

  “We’ve identified nine individuals that are certainly part of the team, or have been part of the team. A few more are suspected at various levels,” Adair began. “First, the commonalities. The team travels. In every public appearance they have shown themselves to be fit. Their movements indicate a combination of real physical and virtual training. Whenever possible they are armed and armored in the manner of frontier explorers at least, if not outright mercenaries.”

  “To the specifics then,” Marcant said. “Telisa. She started all this?”

  “Actually she’s the fourth known member,” Adair said. “The first one is Jack Parker himself, founder. An artifact smuggler.”

  “Let me guess. The company was never really about map making, touring, or private scouting. It was about smuggling from the beginning,” Marcant said.

  “Exactly,” Adair said. “The first ship went out several times with Parker and his pilot, Thomas Haist, and an ex-Space Force man, Magnus Garrison.”

  “Capable and self-motivated people. Independent. Not afraid to break the law,” Marcant summarized.

  “Sounds like someone else I know,” Achaius said. Marcant ignored him.

  “This Magnus. Was he high-ranking?”

  “No, not at all,” Adair said. “He’s intelligent and as far as we know, skilled. But he was never an influence powerhouse in the Space Force. I see the roots of the vigorous PIT training regimen in him. It mirrors that of the Space Force. Less rotted by the indulgences of virtual reality, yet incorporating virtual exercises for learning.”

  “So Telisa comes in next?”

  “Yes. A student of xenoarchaeology,” Adair continued. “We have more records on her than anyone else. Telisa starts out as one of the good-at-everything-great-at-nothing kids typical of a generation fifty years past the launch of manufactured genes. She gets her elementary education with a ten-year download package for all the math and language basics. She’s smart, charismatic, athletic, and as it turns out, determined.”

  “Rare. How does she get onto PIT?” asked Marcant.

  “PIT picked her up, presumably because of her expertise and interest in alien artifacts. Soon thereafter I believe they actually met Shiny out past the frontier.”

  “So they meet a live alien, and they fall in together. I wonder what was in it for Ambassador Shiny?”

  “That isn’t clear. And it gets less clear from there,” Adair said. “Parker and Haist disappear after Telisa’s first trip. They have never been seen since. The PIT headquarters used android lookalikes of them for a while, probably covering for their disappearance. We don’t know if they operate from the frontier or if something happened to them, but their relatives on Earth and other Core Worlds act as if they believe Parker and Haist are dead. Telisa’s father is infamously involved in a covered up encounter with aliens in his command of the scout ship Seeker. A ship later destroyed by aliens... but Relachik does not share its fate. Instead he disappears with a team of his own, including Cilreth Sanders, known to be a current member of the team.”

  “This could all have started with her father. Maybe he met Ambassador Shiny on a Space Force mission no one knows about,” Marcant said. “The rest could be orchestrated.”

  “Pure speculation, but possible,” Adair said. “Cilreth is the one after you now. She’s made scary fast progress on this, jelly brain. This is going to come to a head sooner than later.”

  “Tell me more about Cilreth.”

  “A tracker and twitch addict as mentioned. Smart enough, but pre-PIT team, nothing special really.”

  “Tracker and bounty hunter?” asked Marcant.

  “No, just the people finding part, not the physical part.”

  “Then she’s sticking to her specialty; she’s finding me. But once found, she’s not the death squad. Maybe it’s not so bad,” Marcant said. “Who else do we know about? Caden Lonrack, obviously. The super popular Blood Glades champ turned Space Force hero.”

  “That’s right. I think the PIT team needed some more muscle,” Achaius said. “Caden would be combat capable for a Terran.”

  “Maybe she finds me and he kills me. But why not use robots? Terrans aren’t muscle anymore. Robots are.”

  “True enough, but maybe the robots were too difficult to handle in the Trilisk age,” Achaius said.

  “Another theory: Shiny wants to keep his hands clean of this,” Adair said.

  Marcant sat in silence for a moment. “And the other PIT members?”

  “Siobhan Cutter is more than simply the reported ‘most envied woman on Earth’. She’s a frontier automation specialist. Once again, a great candidate for a team like PIT, at least, if the PIT team does what we think it does. She’s tall, from a lower grav world. She had a beef with one of the Trilisks posing as a corporate leader.”

  My view of PIT is polluted by hype. There’s more going on here, but no one knows what.

  “What do we think PIT does now? Can we verify anything?”

  “They work with Shiny. They travel to the frontier and beyond. They have sold alien artifacts to Core World buyers. They’ve killed Trilisks. This we know for sure. There are rumors of UED contacts. That may be simply a piece of the campaign against the Trilisks.”

  “Who else?”

  “Jason Yang: A sharp business mind who ran the PIT cover company. He seems to have moved up and taken a more active role. He’s selling the cover company right now.”

  “Yes, it’s useless. Everyone knows about it. Are there more?”

  “Suspected members: Imanol McCollum, Maxsym Kirilenko, Leonard Relachik, Arlin Donovan.”

  “Anything on them?” asked Marcant.

  “McCollum is a private investigator, borderline mercenary, competent, but not successful before joining the team. Kirilenko is a top notch xenobiologist. No mystery there. Relachik, of course, is Telisa’s father. Donovan worked security on the frontier, possibly turned merc. These four are off the radar at the moment. We don’t
know where they are.”

  “I wonder if the team always travels together on the frontier, or if some of them are still out there while these others visit Earth,” Marcant said. “That’s it?”

  “We have one more glimpse. It’s very interesting and comes from the Space Force,” Achaius said.

  “The Space Force gave up this tidbit voluntarily?”

  “No, not so much. More of the results of a deep dig. I learned that the Space Force briefly put a spy into the PIT team. He was rooted out almost immediately. But he was released alive.”

  “That surprises me, given how many of these people have just disappeared.”

  “Maybe it was compassion, or maybe it was a deal. But when debriefed, the spy reported the presence of one Jamie Arakaki of the UED.”

  Marcant shook his head again. “The UED connection.”

  “Actually almost no one knows about this UED connection. The one that people speak of in conspiracies is that supposedly Telisa Relachik negotiated with the UED to have them help control Earth in the wake of the Trilisk removal. The rumor is traced back to some high sources in the UED, but we don’t know if the idea was manufactured by them to help them out in case they made a power grab.”

  “They must have been thinking about it, in the wake of Ambassador Shiny’s takeover,” Marcant said.

  “I don’t see why they needed the UED,” Achaius said. “Shiny’s ships were more than up to the task of neutralizing the UNSF. They may have wanted help going after the Trilisks in the system. I’m not satisfied with that answer, though.”

  “I think Arakaki was simply recruited like the others,” Adair said. “I can’t explain the other rumors about the UED. It’s possible Arakaki was a spy for the UED on the team, or the other way around. She may have tipped off the UED about the attack on Earth. The UED might have been readying for an attack of their own, but backed down once they saw how outclassed they were.”

  “I assume that there could be more team members.”

  “There probably are more we don’t know about,” Adair agreed.

  Marcant was quiet for a minute, thoughts churning in his head.