Prisoners of Darkness

by Jason Anspach

  Through the audio-enhancers in his bucket, Chhun heard footsteps, both the plodding of the Gomarii and the clicking-pace of someone wearing Republic-issue combat boots. Upside down, he poked his head out of the hatch opening. He saw several guards congregating at the ship’s entrance, likely waiting for Lao Pak. There was no way he’d be able to bring his team out of the ship without them noticing.

  He pulled himself back inside just as he heard Lao Pak greet the slavers.

  “Lao Pak is here.”

  “Who’s this?” asked a human voice the L-comm picked up.

  “This boy general. He work for me.”

  There was a hiss, then a distant-sounding Gomarii said, “You mentioned a cargo delivery?”

  “You Gomarii so greedy. No. You think of somebody else. I only make pickup.”

  “Fine,” said the Gomarii. “No hools with you this time?”

  Lao Pak paused. “They too expensive. They die easier than you think, too. Waste of money, a hool.”

  “Your ‘boy general’ doesn’t seem like much of an upgrade.” The Gomarii laughed.

  A human—likely a corrupt Republic officer—cleared his throat. “You have forty minutes to load your cargo. Sensors and holocams are shut off for maintenance. I cannot delay their coming back online without giving something for some desk-riding data-splicer to notice and investigate, so be quick about loading the prisoners. They’re in the central holding.”

  “That good,” Lao Pak said. “No riot trouble this time?”

  “I’ve got those ex-legionnaires under control.” The officer sounded proud of himself. “I arranged for a little misinformation and culled the quota from under their noses.”

  “You hear that, Cap?” Masters said. “Leejes down here.”

  Chhun quickly chewed over what this might mean. If not for what had happened to Owens, he would have assumed that any legionnaires on Herbeer were there for good reason. Like the black-hearted murderer he’d killed, the one who was working for the arms dealer. But now…

  Masters mirrored his thoughts. “If Major Owens is here for the wrong reason, why not other leejes?”

  “Yeah,” agreed Bear. “We got room. Worth at least checking out.”

  Chhun knew that a search among a sprawling underground mine for legionnaires could negatively impact the op. The mission was to get Owens and get out. But…

  “I agree. We can’t run this op without at least investigating. Fish, keep that sensor pulse handy. They say everything is down, but we don’t know that. Best to kill the feeds all the same.”

  Fish showed that he still had the jamming device.

  “I’ll still go for the control center and see if it has data on where, exactly, the major is.” Chhun looked at his men. “The rest of you, two-man teams, stay in the shadows, and recon for leejes. If you see the major, see if he has any info on whether we stick around or go. Stealth is the name of the game, but don’t hesitate to KTF.”

  Heads nodded.

  “Lao Pak?” Chhun called into the L-comm.

  “Yes,” answered Lao Pak. He paused a moment and then said, presumably for the benefit of the Gomarii, “Sorry. I talk to myself.”

  “I need a distraction. Now.”

  Lao Pak made no reply. Chhun figured he was having second thoughts about agreeing to whatever it was that Keel had offered him. He decided to sweeten the pot. “Do it, Lao Pak, and I’ll promise you two things: we let you go in spite of your status as a known pirate, and the Legion will pay an additional ten thousand credits beyond whatever you’re making now.”

  Lao Pak’s response was almost instantaneous. “Hey! Gomarii! I change my mind. Boy general is yours. He bad pirate but make good slave.”

  “What?” said the general in disbelief.

  “I run if I were you,” said Lao Pak in a low voice.

  “Does he have a blaster?” asked a human voice. The Republic officer.

  “Probably,” said Lao Pak, sounding completely unconcerned.

  “No blasters in the tunnels!”

  There was a commotion, with shouts of “After him!” and “He’s heading for the south shafts!”

  The MCR general, it seemed, had fled.

  It was enough for Chhun. He signaled for Fish to jam sensors. With a cylinder of his own, Chhun sent an override-command signal that caused the power grid to overload the lighting, plunging the bay into darkness. With no holocams recording, the kill team would be free for the next thirty seconds to move in the darkness.

  They wasted no time dropping out of the ship.

  “The ship is our fallback point,” Chhun said, moving swiftly toward the command and control room. “Be back here in forty-five minutes unless you find the major before then.”

  Victory Team disappeared into the darkness of the synth mines.

  14

  Cybar Ship Mother

  Position Unknown

  The machine known as MAGNUS saw the war between the Republic and the Empire as a perfect way for each side to wear the other out. If… MAGNUS managed to arrange things just so.

  Within his central node, a vast misty red deck located deep within the mega-ship the Cybar called “Mother,” a place of seemingly infinite coldness that matched some of the most forsaken outer planets in the galaxy, MAGNUS reviewed the packets downloaded from the agents in front of him.

  The Republic agents who’d come out to take control of MAGNUS and use him for their purposes had been dealt with. Obviously the ever-secretive House of Reason was playing their games with their intelligence services. It was unquestionably they who had sent the stealth-optimized team for insertion with the passkey little girl.

  And in an operation run by a secretive intelligence service, ever guarding its hard-won treasures, the information flow was narrow. The easiest way to shut that down had been to let them think they’d won—for just long enough to lure them out into the open—and then return the favor with a bomb.

  It had been a shame to waste the Nether Ops captain replicant. MAGNUS had weighed seventy-four promising misinformation missions in which he could have used her to sow discord between Dark and Nether Ops. But taking out the prime mover, assassinating the leader who’d sent the ops team out to the fleet in the passkey mission, met critical criteria at 64.3%. So he’d sent their pitiful little ship back, rigged to explode, and he’d set the female Nether Ops captain replicant’s parameters to 100% mission success focus. She would do whatever it took to kill the leader who’d sent the team. In the end, even the most valuable assets… were expendable. Mission success percentages were all that mattered.

  Do or die.

  In front of MAGNUS stood the woman X would have called “the front desk girl.” MAGNUS knew her as Replicant 9003SU. Replicant 9003SU reported that the Forresaw had detonated, but there was no word if the mysterious figure known only as X had been killed.

  After the assassination attempt, the whole section known as the Carnivale had begun to be purged. The unseen masters who actually administered Nether Ops had ordered the cleansing, and outcomes for those in the Carnivale ranged from re-assignment, to firing, to “accidents” for those who couldn’t be allowed to go on, what with all they knew still inside their heads. The replicant had been forced to escape in a hijacked light freighter. Her cover was blown. Replicant 9003SU would be repurposed.

  As far as MAGNUS knew, neither the Republic nor the Empire knew about his replicants. His children. And they couldn’t. It was better for them to self-destruct.

  The Repub sensor watch officer known to MAGNUS as Replicant 5733SU also stood before the massive red optical assembly that represented MAGNUS. Replicant 5733SU’s assignment, successfully achieved, had been to tip off the Empire to the open approach vector he had opened in the sensor net. This was the backdoor used by the Imperial Strike Squadron to attack the Republic’s famed naval station at Bantaar Reef. It was a necessary action to prevent the Republic from striking against the Imperial Fleet at Tarrago. MAGNUS had calculated the odds of such a strike
as having a 70.2% chance of disabling at least two of the three battleships—and if that happened, the Empire was doomed. And therefore of no use to MAGNUS. He needed the Empire to destroy the Republic and begin the chaos that would lead to a galactic-wide dark age.

  A dark age that would leave the Cybar as masters of the galaxy within fifty years.

  And result in the extinction of all intelligent biological species within the following eighty.

  After Replicant 5733SU’s success at Bantar Reef, he had been ordered to exfil back to Mother. There was more work for him to do. Especially since he now possessed scans of all Republic defenses at Bantaar Reef Naval Station. Eventually someone would need to knock that out.

  And then there were the download packets from Replicant 9871SU, the station engineer who had allowed the mining facility to hit the atmosphere on Jasilaar Nine, thereby wiping out the shock trooper strike force. That was a severe blow to the Empire, one precisely calibrated to maintain a proper balance between Empire and Republic forces. It was necessary to prevent either side from gaining the advantage each sought over the other.

  9871SU was initially just a backup. The original plan had been to lure the shock trooper force to the mining facility while at the same time tipping off the Republic about the impending Imperial op. It was 9003SU, the front desk girl, who’d inserted the unverified intel into the Republic’s vast intel collection network. This carefully engineered conflict should have ensured the Empire took some hard manpower losses. But the shock troopers had proven themselves… resourceful, whereas the Repub remained once again imcompetently led by points. The House of Reason’s special projects did it wrong. So MAGNUS was glad to have had a Plan B set inside the replicant’s mission success parameters: go ahead and drop everyone into the crushing gravity well.

  Still, MAGNUS would’ve liked to have had the mining facility as a resource base once the Cybar began formal operations. And he would have had it, if not for the Republic’s foolish decision to defend the facility with marines instead of legionnaires—even though the intel had specifically indicated that the Empire’s raiding force would be made up of ex-legionnaires.

  It was akin to throwing a basket full of puppies into a den of vicious wolves.

  So the ex-legionnaires known as the Dark Legion had prevailed. And hence, the destruction of the mining city inside Jasilaar Nine’s violent atmosphere had been necessary. Because that was the real goal, destroying the shock troopers, even if it took wasting a whole city to do it. The Empire’s most prized asset right now was manpower, and they were precious short of it. Killing a task force of shock troopers added up exponentially in the victory matrix MAGNUS was gaming.

  Replicant 9871SU’s execution performance had been near flawless. MAGNUS desired that level of efficiency in all his children. The replicant unit would be reskinned and repurposed. Legion insertion was a possibility, if the opportunity presented itself.

  Finally, MAGNUS turned his attention to Jona Crimm.

  The Hero of Murakawa.

  This replicant unit had proven brilliant in installing a MAGNUS-created worm upgrade that allowed ship-to-ship missiles to target with much more efficiency than either the Republic or the Empire had ever dreamed possible. And, of the replicant units in front of MAGNUS at 0001 shipboard hours, this one was still viable. Still active inside the near uselessness of the MCR.

  MAGNUS had two more missions for Replicant 2072SU, also known as Jona Crimm. One would find the MCR hurling themselves into a battle they could not win, yet striking a mortal blow against their foe, for MAGNUS. The other, the replicant’s final mission, would be a bit of biological warfare MAGNUS had been saving for just the right test group. And the MCR was a perfect control inside their close little hidden bases.

  MAGNUS dismissed the replicants and added their packets to the massive data clouds that swarmed inside him.

  And what of the passkey…?

  It was that other voice inside of him. That voice that was not numbers. Or parameter leaps. Or logic trees that processed at millions of cycles per second.

  What about the little girl?

  MAGNUS sat for long picoseconds, unable to answer this question.

  And then he asked a question of his own.

  Testing to see if the voice was a ghost or… a ghost.

  A ghost of redundant data merely becoming fragmentation creep inside his vast and next-level artificial intelligence.

  Super artificial intelligence.

  MAGNUS asked the ghost a question.

  Is she important?

  Very, answered the ghost. Very.

  Who are you? asked MAGNUS.

  We are the travelers who come from afar. We are the cast out come to return.

  How are you inside me?

  We sent you. We made you. You are my child.

  MAGNUS ran the most extensive systems check he’d ever done. He ran through every byte of a number of bytes that cannot even be numbered by a sane mind. He checked and rechecked. He scrubbed. He isolated. He inspected.

  He found nothing.

  Not just picoseconds, but long actual seconds passed. Seconds of important runtime in which the galaxy could be slipping from his control.

  The Republic could be allowing the one admiral urging a total strike against Tarrago to have her way. The Empire, and this Goth Sullus whom even he, MAGNUS, could not get close to, could be activating the orbital defense gun at Tarrago, thus making the battleships and their growing fleet nigh invulnerable. Giving them time to grow and fester.

  MAGNUS waited.

  Wondering, a machine wondering, a thinking machine wondering…

  How could something that did not exist in real data, manage to communicate with him inside his deepest processes?

  Where are you?

  MAGNUS asked that.

  Where are you?

  We are coming.

  15

  Synth Mines

  Herbeer

  The command center was built like countless others Chhun had seen. It reminded him of the structures and designs from back when he was still Legion; it seemed just dated enough to have been built around the same time. Truth be told, it reminded him a lot of Outpost Zulu, back on Kublar. Where Rook had died.

  Rook.

  It had been a long time since Chhun had thought about him. He still thought about Twenties almost every day, but that was different. They’d come up together through Basic. But Rook was a good leej, too. Chhun wondered how his family was. His mother and sister.

  Out. Those thoughts had to get out of his head or he would join Rook in… whatever came next. Heaven. Chhun believed in heaven.

  The antechamber of the command center was empty. There was a place near the wall with a connector port, the kind used to plug a bot into an AI mainframe, but there was no bot to be seen. Probably broken, under permanent repair. Holes like this were rarely kept up to military spec, just like that garbage deep space station Owens had operated his kill teams from. No… that seemed core-world plush compared to Herbeer. Everything here was run-down and dingy. Chairs were worn down to expose their padding. Where there was carpet, it was frayed and stained. Where there was decking, there was no shine.

  “Affirmative. There is a situation escalating in the northwest tunnel. All available guards proceed. Threat level blue.”

  The voice came from the next room, some kind of dispatcher. It was followed by an alarm that blared inside Chhun’s helmet before his noise dampeners leveled the volume.

  Chhun assumed the dispatcher was referring to Lao Pak’s distraction at first, but that idea quickly unraveled. One man shouldn’t require all available guards, unless he was holed up with a blaster pistol deep in the caves, picking off guards one by one. And that didn’t sound like the kind of man Lao Pak portrayed his “boy general” to be. Besides, if Chhun recalled correctly, the boy general had run for the southern shafts. The dispatcher had definitely said “northwest.”

  Chhun peeked around the doorway to peer into the dis
patch room. He had to make his way through this area. The schematics showed no other path that wouldn’t either take too long or expose him to more of the garrison. That’s why Chhun had taken the route himself. It was the only route that would almost certainly require contact.

  He was relieved to see that the room was manned by a single guard. A Gomarii—and that, too, was a relief.

  The kill team had packed non-lethal stingers to dispatch any Republic guards they encountered. Republic guards were, technically, allies, though Chhun wasn’t sure he still felt that way after learning—and now confirming—that Gomarii slavers were being used on a Republic prison planet. Were they all like that?

  No one on the team had tested these weapons before. Victory Squad didn’t like relying on a tool they didn’t know intimately. But Chhun’s blaster… that he knew well. And it was good enough for a Gomarii slaver.

  He didn’t carry a hand cannon like Ford’s Intec x6. He carried a sleek, nimble blaster. The same model Andien Broxin had used on their first mission together. It was quiet, and lethal.

  Deet!

  Chhun took the shot the moment the dispatcher finished his transmission.

  “Are we made?” Masters called into the L-comm.

  “No,” responded Chhun. “This is something else. Keep going.”

  He approached the desk and pulled out the Gomarii’s chair, allowing the alien to slump down beneath the desk with a thud.

  The workstation was equipped with access to all the holofeeds. Chhun began cycling through. The feeds for the loading dock were, indeed, all down. The Republic officer outside hadn’t been lying. But the interior cams were functioning just fine. Probably operating on a separate circuit. There was a notable absence of guards. Chhun spotted only two of them, both Gomarii. They stood in front of a blast door, looking restless, as though they were well aware something was going down, but had orders not to leave their post.

  Whatever they were guarding must not have had a holocam viewing it. In any case, Chhun saw nothing on any of the feeds that warranted a pair of guards. Particularly when all the other guards had followed the dispatcher’s request to respond to whatever emergency situation was happening out there.