Rika Conqueror

by M. D. Cooper

  The best option was to alter that NSAI’s parameters, or its source data, in an undetectable way that would achieve his goals.

  He sat down at his table and took a bite of bacon, which tasted worse than usual, and chased it with a gulp of coffee. Barely seeing what was in front of him, Jeremy re-opened the NSAI source codebases and looked at various subsystems within.

  There were dozens of ways he could alter the NSAI’s code, but he needed something that would pass tests and not be detected, and so far, he’d not found a single method that would work.

  “Dammit,” he muttered, beginning to fear there really was no way to pull off the mass sabotage he and Annie dreamt of.

  Which makes sense. These systems are built specifically to prevent this sort of thing.

  “Ten minutes until your shuttle leaves,” his servitor’s robotic voice said, bringing Jeremy to his feet.

  He looked down and realized that not only was he still naked, he’d not used the autodryer, and his hair was still wet.

  Rushing into the san, he palmed the dryer control, and his head felt a chill as the warm air removed the moisture from his scalp while the rest of his already dry body was warmed by the same air.

  For a second, he marveled at how small differences in the same system could completely change perception of the same event.

  The air stopped, and he stared wide-eyed at his reflection in the mirror.

  “Stars, I think I’ve got it!”

  * * * * *

  All through the workday, he was bursting at the seams to tell Annie his plan, but they’d agreed not to discuss their scheme while on the job—either audibly, or via the Link—lest something was overheard or intercepted.

  He knew that she could tell that he had an idea, though, because she suggested he visit her later in the evening for an extra relaxation session.

  Annie’s side-gig was a useful cover for them spending a lot of time together, but the service she offered also made things difficult, because she very frequently had legitimate clients that she couldn’t just brush off without arousing suspicion.

  “Again with Annie?” Par commented after Annie had told Jeremy when to come over that evening. He chuckled and nudged Jeremy in the shoulder, smiling hungrily as he watched Annie walk away.

  Jeremy shrugged nonchalantly, doing his best to ignore the guilt he felt about betraying Anatha, which happened whenever he pretended he was availing himself of Annie’s services.

  “Well, someone’s gotta do it.”

  Par stared at Annie’s ass for a moment, a wistful look on his face. “Stars, I wish I had enough extra credit to ‘do it’ once in a while. It looks like it needs a lot of doing.”

  Jeremy didn’t know exactly what to say. He’d never so much as touched Annie, but that didn’t mean he didn’t want to. Anatha’s memory just wouldn’t let him.

  “Maybe if you didn’t drink and gamble away ever credit you made, you’d have some spare change for some relaxation time,” Jeremy said, shifting the topic.

  “Give up gambling?” Par placed a hand on his chest and gave Jeremy a shocked look. “Trust me, no woman’s ass is worth that. I mean…that’s what sims are for, anyway. I can have annnny woman I want in there. Trust me, I have half the women on our crew sim’d up.”

  “Right, sure,” Jeremy said as they walked down a half-finished corridor in a carrier. “Because that’s healthy. You know it creates issues upstairs to conflate real and imaginary people.” He tapped a finger against the side of his head for emphasis. “You’re gonna get flagged at your next psych eval.”

  “Pssshh,” Par waved a hand dismissively. “I’ve been doing this for years. Hasn’t ever caused me a problem.”

  Jeremy only laughed and slapped Par on the shoulder, glad to have turned the conversation away from the time he spent with Annie, though he was surprised at how defensive he felt about her and how much Par’s remarks got under his skin.

  It’s because she’s a friend and he’s a boor, nothing more, he assured himself.

  * * * * *

  Jeremy spent most of the evening pacing across the small room he called home, waiting until the hour Annie had said she’d be free.

  When it was five minutes until the allotted time, he decided that he could wait no longer and made his way down the corridor to her room.

 

  Annie’s tone was laced with annoyance and something else that he couldn’t pin down.

 

 

  He could tell that was as far as she was going to budge, and leant against the bulkhead, waving idly at a pair of women who walked by, both giving him knowing looks.

  If only they knew what we were really up to in there, he thought with a laugh.

  Jeremy had lost himself in the code he was working on by the time Annie opened the door; he didn’t even notice her until she whispered in his ear, “And here you were in such a rush, loverboy.”

  The unexpected statement caused Jeremy to jump, and he whipped his head around to see Annie’s eyes mere centimeters from his own. She smiled and glanced to the right where Par and two other members of the crew were walking by.

  “Booyah, Jere!” Par called out over his shoulder, throwing a fist in the air, and Jeremy felt his face redden.

  Luckily, Annie wrapped a hand around his arm and pulled him into her room before he could say anything stupid.

  “You were really out of it, there,” she said as the door closed, her demeanor instantly losing the sensual intimacy it had oozed a moment earlier.

  “Uh…yeah,” Jeremy managed to stammer out. “Just deep in code.”

  Annie gestured for him to take a seat at her small table while she walked to her counter and began to prepare a pot of coffee. “You’ve seemed like you’re going to crawl out of your skin all day. I take it you made a breakthrough?”

  Jeremy shifted in his seat to watch her and suddenly realized that Annie was wearing a tight, sleeveless shirt that only came to the top of her thighs…and nothing else. She bent over, and his focus on the drive control system evaporated. He swallowed, desperately trying to recall the explanation he’d prepared.

  At his silence, Annie turned to face him.

  She suddenly blushed as she realized where he was looking. “Shit…sorry, I forgot how much this top rides up.”

  “Uh…it’s OK,” Jeremy said lamely as he turned away, looking out the window at the ever-active Capeton Shipyard. “I shouldn’t have…I’m sorry.”

  Annie walked over to her closet and pulled out a pair of leggings, quickly slipping into them before walking back to her kitchenette.

  “OK, it’s safe to look,” she said with a laugh. “But for the record, it doesn’t bother me when you stare at my ass. I work hard to make sure it’s stareable.”

  Jeremy felt his flush coming back. “I’m sorry, you’re…very stareable, Annie. That’s part of the problem for me.”

  She glanced over her shoulder and nodded slowly. “Right. Anatha. Sorry.”

  “It’s OK. It’s me, right? I should be over her by now…I—”

  Annie turned and leant against the counter. “No, Jeremy. I don’t think you should ever be ‘over’ her. You loved her, and she was taken from you before her time. The fact that you still feel so strongly for her speaks volumes about you. The good kind of volumes.” She gave a kindly wink. “I’m so used to flaunting my booty that sometimes I forget that the flauntee isn’t interested in what I’m offering…that I might actually be hurting them.”

  Jeremy chuckled as Annie turned back to her task, and his eyes slid down to her now-clothed ass. “Annie, I don’t think your booty has ever hurt anyone.”

  S
he gave a soft laugh, her shoulders rising slightly as she finished cleaning the pot. “Well, there was this one time I slipped and fell on a guy’s—well, you get the picture.”

  Jeremy bit his lip and turned back to the window. “Yeah, I do.” He took a deep breath, trying to think of unsexy things, like the fungus that grew on the outside of Capeton Orbital, or what Karl always smelled like after he visited the lower warrens. Anything but how he was betraying Anatha’s memory, because those thoughts conflated feelings for Annie and Anatha, and he was pretty sure that was not helping at all.

  “OK,” he said as Annie finished with the coffee maker and came to sit across from him. “You know how we were thinking that the NSAIs were going to be the way to go?

  “Uh-huh…except that every modification to the NSAIs gets reviewed six ways from starday. No way can we introduce a systemic change into one of their core systems.”

  Jeremy nodded. “Right you are…except, what if the change to the NSAI’s core systems was something that would also solve all of the thrust balance issues for the Pinnacle-class ships?”

  “I can imagine a few people getting excited about that…but have you actually solved that problem, too?”

  “Yeah,” Jeremy waved a hand in dismissal. “I thought of all of this this morning while drying my hair.”

  “Your hair?” Annie asked, her silvery laugh derailing Jeremy’s thoughts again.

  He nodded vigorously and explained his solution to the thrust balance, then went into how that fix would require him to tap into a subsystem in the NSAI’s codebase that wasn’t used anymore because it didn’t work with the fuel mixtures the empire had switched to in recent years.

  Annie’s eyes grew wider and wider as he explained his plan to her. At one point, she muttered that she was going to need coffee to process it and walked to the now-full pot and poured two cups.

  “OK, let me get this straight,” she said while settling back into her chair. “You have to write a new subsystem that clearly is doing something that everyone wants. That subsystem has a dependency on this other subsystem, but just to load a code library that isn’t in use anymore. Except, the library’s inclusion requires a dataroute to be opened that will give us remote access into the new library, and in turn, it can access the other subsystem that isn’t supposed to be used anymore.”

  “It gets better,” Jeremy said, grinning broadly. “No one rewrote the test platforms they use at the shipyard, so when the old library gets included, so do its tests. Opening this privileged dataroute is actually a requirement to pass the tests! So long as no one in DSQA notices, we’re going to be home-free!”

  Annie’s grin matched his own as she laughed. “Those poor bastards in QA are so overworked, they haven’t seen starlight in weeks. No way are they going to go digging into the parameters for tests that are passing!”

  Jeremy nodded vigorously. “The only thing we have to do now is tell Chief Flo about this so we can test it out on the Pinnacle. Once that ship completes a successful full burn in every configuration, I’ll explain that my systems will improve efficiency in every ship and get it put into the master repository. Then when the next NSAI code updates roll out, our backdoor will be in every Nietzschean ship at Capeton!”

  “Shit, Jeremy. This is amazing. So, just one question, how do we trigger this? I get that we access the privileged dataroute, but that means another system has to tell the NSAI to run the subsystem for the wrong fuel mixtures.”

  “Right,” Jeremy nodded. “To do that, we’re going to need to install a small NSAI into a low-security system that won’t be subject to any serious review.”

  “Damn,” Annie ran a hand down her jaw. “That actually might be more difficult than the other part of the plan. Where are we going to tuck in a new NSAI that no one will notice?”

  “I’m not sure. I was thinking that maybe Par would know.”

  Annie snorted. “I think that bringing Par into any part of this is the last thing we should do. He hasn’t been able to keep a secret since he first learned what his penis was.”

  “So how will we do this? To be honest, it would be best if whoever we find wasn’t in DCS at all.”

  “I think I have a solution.” Annie spoke the words slowly, like she was worried Jeremey wouldn’t like what she had to say. “I want to introduce you to a friend of mine.”

  “A friend?” Jeremy asked, his eyebrows climbing up his forehead. “Have you been telling someone else about our plans? What if they spill to the Niets?”

  “What, like Par?” Annie asked with a laugh.

  “Yeah, well, I asked about him. And you were right, he’s a risk.”

  Annie reached a hand across the table and clasped Jeremy’s wrist. “I would never put either of us at risk—well, any more than we already are. But I need you to trust me. Do you trust me, Jeremy?”

  The feeling of Annie’s skin against his sent an electric tingle through his entire body. It was the first time they’d touched. It was the first time he’d had any sort of intimate contact with a woman since Anatha.

  Stars…I’m considering her hand on my wrist to be ‘intimate’, he thought while nodding mutely.

  Annie gave an encouraging nod. “Good. Good. OK. This is going to be a shock, but I want you to meet Leslie.” She turned to gesture to an empty space in the middle of her quarters.

  “Uh…what?” Jeremy asked. “Are you messing with me?”

  “Leslie, stop playing around.”

  A soft laugh came from empty air, and a moment later a woman appeared. Her skin was jet black, as was her long hair. Small, triangular ears poked out of her hair, and large, yellow eyes blinked at him. She took a step forward, and a sinuous tail whipped around behind her.

  “Jeremy. I’m so glad to finally meet you. What you’ve figured out is really going to help us.”

  It took Jeremy a moment to realize he was on his feet, backing away from the strange cat-woman.

  “Us?” He glanced at Annie, who had also risen, her hands extended entreatingly. “Who the fuck is ‘us’?”

  Jeremy,” Annie said in a soft voice. “The resistance. We’ve been working against the Niets for years. Now, with Leslie’s people, we have a chance to strike a major blow. You’re a huge part of that.”

  “Wait…Leslie’s people aren’t your people?” Jeremy asked.

  “Well, sorta,” Leslie said, white teeth standing out against her black lips as she smiled. “I’m with Rika’s Marauders. We’re here to kill Constantine.”

  Jeremy’s mouth fell open, and he looked to Annie, who was nodding vigorously.

  “Yeah, it’s all true,” she said.

  “Well, shit.” He swallowed, forcing down a mixture of fear and elation. “We’re killing Constantine, too?”

  REUNION

  STELLAR DATE: 04.30.8950 (Adjusted Years)

  LOCATION: The Refuge, Faneuil

  REGION: Genevia System, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire

  Rika had to stop herself from bouncing on the balls of her feet as the Asora approached the massive cradle centered in one of Faneuil’s underground docking bays.

  She clenched her left hand over and over again in an effort to relax, ultimately giving up and rising onto her toes, momentarily forgetting the worldlet’s low gravity as she lifted into the air.

  “Rika…settle down,” Barne muttered next to her. “It’s like you’re spring-loaded or something.”

  A snort escaped her lips as she touched back down on the deck, activating her maglocks to be on the safe side. “You’re just grouchy because Leslie is insystem, having fun, and you’re out here.”

  “Maybe,” Barne grunted. “So maybe you could show a bit of compassion. She’s big on monogamy, and I’m feeling the pinch here.”

  Rika shrugged. “You knew what you were getting into. I have pretty much zero compassion for you. Chase and I, however, are gonna fuck like rabbits. For days.”

  “Oh?” Silva asked as s
he approached. “Think you have time for that?”

  “I’ll make time,” Rika replied with a nervous laugh.

  “What? After all we’ve been through, you’re nervous to talk about sex around me? That’s all we used to talk about back in Hammerfall.”

  Rika chuckled. “I dunno. Somehow over the years you became a mother figure for me in my mind, and talking sex with you just feels weird.”

  Barne leant around Rika to wink at Silva. “I’ll talk sex with you all you want, Major. I’d consider it my duty.”

  “I only have sex if I get to use my GNR,” Silva said, making a lewd gesture with her weapon.

  “Shit, Major,” Barne muttered. “I said ‘talk’ sex, not get violated by your e-beam.”

  Silva gave the sergeant major a menacing grin. “I’ve only got one mode. Hardcore.”

  “Stars, Silva.” Rika said as her eyebrows rose. “So much for thinking of you as the loving mother.”

  “This is me being the loving mother. I’m just practicing at scaring away anyone that Amy brings to see me. I figure if I can get Barne to stand down, I can chase anybody off.”

  “I’m standing all the way down,” Barne said, crossing his legs.

  As the trio spoke, the Asora settled onto the docking cradle, vapor clouds pouring off the ship as the bay’s air came into contact with the ship’s cold hull.

  “Damn,” Barne said. “I thought I told them to fix the dehumidifiers in here.”

  “I’m sure it’s on the list,” Rika replied. “No one’s used these bays in centuries.”

  “No excuse,” the sergeant major muttered.

  As the cradle’s ramp lifted toward the Asora’s starboard midship airlock, Rika marveled at the fact that they were tucking ships up to a kilometer in length below Faneuil’s surface. Every one of the Marauders’ craft were secreted away in subterranean bays—with the sole exception of the Fury Lance, which had settled into a canyon not far away.