by M. D. Cooper
“I’ll try not to wreck it,” Petral said as the airlock closed.
“Well,” Xander said to the rest of them. “She’s lovely.”
Fugia grinned. “She doesn’t have much patience. I appreciate that about Petral.”
“Doesn’t impatience lead to misunderstanding and violence?” Xander asked.
“We’ve got a long trip ahead of us,” Andy said. “You can all talk about that later. Once Petral’s launched and Kindel is back on board, we need to execute our initial burn for Proteus. I’m already pushing our window for Neptune. I’ve got two crew rooms left in the habitat ring. Is that going to work for you?”
“That should be wonderful.”
“Good. I need to get back to the command deck. Harl, would you show them the empty rooms?”
The Andersonian guard nodded. “Are you carrying any weapons?” he asked.
Xander turned, spreading his hands. “Only my biting wit. We have a few things we need to get from the shuttle, then it’s all Petral’s.”
Andy nodded to Harl.
“I’ll wait with them, as well,” May said. “I have many questions. I haven’t been able to speak with an AI like this before.”
“Are you insinuating that I’m special?” Xander asked. “I’ll accept the compliment.”
“She means in physical space,” Fugia said. “I’ll be honest, now I’m wondering how many weird humans I’ve met were actually AIs or some other form of artificial creation.”
“Haven’t humans been terrified of automatons for most of their existence?” He nodded toward Fugia. “What if you’re an automaton and you don’t know it?”
“I’m too irritated all the time for someone to have made me this way,” Fugia said. “It’s inefficient.”
Xander shot Andy a brilliant smile. “This is going to be wonderful,” he said. “We’re going to have the best conversations.”
Andy resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “I’ll be on the command deck. Let me know when they’re clear of the shuttle and Petral is ready to launch. I want to hurry up and burn.”
Xander gave him a mock salute. “Aye, aye, Captain.”
“I will make sure it’s done,” Harl said.
“Thanks.”
As Andy walked away from the ongoing commotion at the airlock, which made Xander sound like a fluttering bird from a distance, he asked Lyssa,
Andy nodded grimly.
Lyssa said.
In another hour, Xander and his crew had cleared their shuttle, the ship had fueled up in one of the Resolute Charity’s bays, and Petral and Andy had designed a flight plan to get her back to the Cho in under twenty-four hours. Without her augmented body, the g-forces would turn her to jelly. Fugia had promised to slow Brit at the JSF detachment.
With the shuttle launched, Fran activated the second hard burn, taking them to Uranus and the orbital maneuver that would end in orbit around Neptune, where Proteus waited.
CHAPTER TEN
STELLAR DATE: 10.05.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: District FQ, Ring 9, Callisto Orbital Habitat (Cho)
REGION: Europa, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
According to Lieutenant Sendi, Kraft had an infection that was killing him. Brit stared at the med-system’s report as Sendi explained the implications of moving him too soon. She only half-listened to him, instead doing the mental math on how long it would take her to reach High Terra if she waited too long. Everything depended on what kind of ship she could get her hands on. The funds Fugia had made available were substantial but not limitless. However, none of that mattered if Kraft died.
“It isn’t often the base med system gets slowed down like this,” Sendi said. “Are you sure he wasn’t exposed to something the system might not check for? Some naturally occurring contaminants won’t register on the scans. He’s experiencing massive organ failure.”
“I don’t know,” Brit said, studying Kraft. He lay with this arms at his sides, skin waxy and breathing shallow. He looked artificial. The truth was, she had no idea what he might have been exposed to on Clinic 46 or even before. She had seen enough strange scenes as she looked into labs during her short stint at the station that she could only guess at what a resident of that place might be carrying. Would Tim experience some kind of long term illness that hadn’t manifested itself yet?
“Weren’t you with him when he was hurt?”
“Not exactly,” Brit said, making it clear she wasn’t going to elaborate. She crossed her arms. “I thought your commanding officer was on her way?”
“Captain North should be here any minute. She was finishing another meeting.” He pursed his lips. “Major, I think we need to move this man to a real trauma center, or even the district medical facility. This little med bay isn’t going to guarantee his survival.”
“No,” Brit said flatly. “He stays here.”
“Can I ask why?” Sendi said. “It’s not going to cost any more time for whatever trip you need to take. If anything, better facilities could get him well faster.”
“Is he going to die?” Brit asked.
Sendi shook his head, obviously caring about whether Kraft did die. “I don’t know. I can’t say. This hasn’t happened to me before.”
“Welcome to life, Lieutenant. I can’t move him because he’s in my custody and I can’t get any other agencies involved in this. I need to get him stabilized and then get him into a ship and out of here. Can you do that?”
“I think I can do that.”
“Thank you.”
It took Captain North another hour to arrive. Brit was eating a ham sandwich Private Carson had brought, along with a pile of tasteless chip-like crisps. Kraft hadn’t changed, although his vital signs seemed to have leveled at a place just above death, stabilized by a cocktail of drugs and electrodes that Sendi designed. As annoying as the lieutenant might be while talking, he appeared quite competent at his job.
The captain was a short, brusque woman with white-blond hair and hard blue eyes. She walked into the med bay with Private Carson trailing behind her looking like he’d just had his ass handed to him.
“You’re Major Sykes,” North asked.
Brit didn’t put her sandwich down. She finished swallowing her bite and nodded. “I need to talk to you alone, Captain.”
North looked at Sendi. “Is your patient going to survive you leaving?”
“He’s as good as I can make him right now, Captain.”
“All right. Go ahead.”
Lieutenant Sendi came to attention and saluted the captain, which she answered with a disinterested wave. Carson copied the lieutenant but didn’t wait around for the captain’s response. He pulled the door closed behind as he followed Sendi.
Captain North looked at Brit. “Do I need to salute you now?”
Brit shook her head. “You checked my security profile, what do you think?”
“Major, I’ll be honest. I don’t understand your security profile, and this is an office designed as a front for special operations.”
Finishing the sandwich, Brit set the plate on a nearby cabinet. “I need to borrow a comm terminal for a secure message back to High Terra. Can you help me with that?”
“Is it going to bring heat on my people if we’re your origin point?”
Brit nodded toward Kraft. “I need to arrange transportation for my friend here. I don’t plan to be in your hair another eight hours if I can help it. Your lieutenant might be annoying but he’s doing a good job. “
“What happens if he dies?” North asked.
Brit shrugged. “I lose an opportunity. But nobody’s going to come looking for him.”
“Does this have anything to do with the Heartbridge mess off Europa?”
&nb
sp; “Do you like paperwork?”
“Not especially.”
“Then don’t ask me to say anything that obligates you to write a report.”
North snorted. “Well, that’s not any fun. I figured I do you a favor and you share a good story with me at least. Some random TSF officer with a questionable security token blows into my office with a wounded civilian who hasn’t had an official visa in five years, which was last checked on Cruithne of all places, near dying of no apparent injuries, and you standing there in that armor like you walked out of a black ops vid.” She raised an eyebrow. “Shit, I don’t need you to tell me the story, apparently. I can tell it myself.”
“That’s probably the best option,” Brit said. “Believe me. If I tell it, it will just exhaust you. I’m exhausted, and I still have a long way to go before I’m done with this, while the people I care about are headed in the opposite direction.”
“The story gets better,” North said. “Sounds like duty’s a bitch.”
“Yes,” Brit said. “That would be a fair thing to say. Look, I really need to send that message as soon as possible.”
North gave her an appraising glance.
For a second, Brit thought the captain was going to see through her ruse, question the validity of Fugia’s hacked security token, and take both her and Kraft into custody. It was already clear to Brit that the “meeting” Sendi had said North was tied up with had actually been the time necessary to verify Brit’s story.
“It’s down the hall,” North said. “I’m going to put a guard on your prisoner here and take you down there myself. We don’t want him waking up with nobody around to stop him from leaving, right?”
Brit breathed a little easier. “Thank you.”
North shrugged. “This isn’t the weirdest thing I’ve dealt with this week, trust me.”
“What’s you’re unit again?” Brit asked.
“56th Detachment, Joint Jovian-Terran Space Force Liaison Office. Say that five times fast.”
“What you need is a snappy acronym.”
“We have one, but I don’t think it’s much better. We’re the 56th JT Liaison Office if anybody asks. 56th Jet-Lo, for short.”
Brit couldn’t help chuckling. She hadn’t been away from acronyms long enough to appreciate the subtle humor in the nickname. They probably had a thousand inside jokes about jets that didn’t fly or how low they all rolled.
When the soldier arrived for guard duty, Brit followed North down the hall to another room with three individual communications stations. Each soundproof cubicle had a display terminal and pad of paper with a writing stylus.
“You have actual paper?” Brit asked.
“When you deal with spooks, you provide them odd things like paper. I’ve seen some even write their notes in code.”
North left her alone in the cubicle. Brit shut the door, closing off the sounds from people walking down the hallway, and stared at the dark terminal for a minute, composing her message before she even activated the comm-link.
She was writing to Colonel Transon, the man who had helped them find Sunny Skies. He was currently the highest-ranking officer Brit could call from across Sol and expect an answer. She thought of sending a message to her old unit commander, but she didn’t especially want the TSF knowing her location—if they didn’t already when she’d walked into the 56th Liaison Detachment. It was only a matter of time.
Rather than recording the message, Brit typed it out as concisely as possible. She needed to know who in the TSF was working with Heartbridge. Somewhere there was an officer who was running the contracts. Not the general who said they were in charge. Brit wanted the operational commander. She wanted to talk to the TSF’s version of Cal Kraft.
She hit send and then crossed her arms to wait. It was forty-minutes from the Cho to High Terra, give or take a few minutes based on their place in the dance around Sol.
Brit quickly grew impatient and left the cubicle. She checked on the soldier assigned to watch Cal Kraft. She didn’t want to scare the kid by telling him Kraft might kill him if he woke, but she tried to make it clear she was to be notified if Kraft stirred or the medical display changed.
“How am I supposed to find you, Major?”
“Ever heard of the Link?” she asked. “I imagine I must have a big red flag beside my presence on your network.”
The man nodded sheepishly, and Brit walked down the small mess hall and drank two cups of coffee, admiring the multi-dispenser juice machine from afar, something she knew Andy would have commented on. He was endlessly proud of the juicer he’d repaired on Sunny Skies, announcing, “My kids will have fresh juice!” even if most of what they actually drank was mixed.
Brit pushed thoughts of Andy out of her mind and focused on the plan ahead. She conducted a quick survey of the markets for used ships, looking for something small and fast. There wasn’t much available that also appeared reliable. She didn’t want to buy a ship just to spend another week in dry dock getting all the problems ironed out.
The other option was hiring a ship. She didn’t like the idea of spending a week in transit trying to reinforce a lie about why she had Kraft as her prisoner. Once he woke up, she would need to contend with him as a threat, something compounded by other people. After what had happened to the crew of the Mortal Chance, she didn’t want anyone else’s blood on her hands.
In two hours, a communications specialist poked her head in the mess hall and nodded toward Brit.
“Major Sykes?” she asked. “You’ve got an answer on the secure comms.”
Brit gulped the rest of her coffee and went back to the communications section. Locked back inside the soundproof cubicle, she keyed the terminal and couldn’t stop herself from smiling when she heard Transom’s gruff voice.
“Brit Sykes. There’s a name I didn’t think I’d ever hear again, let alone hear from you. I’m not surprised you’re still on this hunt of yours. I’m also not surprised to hear you’re out at the Cho. I just got the briefing about Europa. We may be sending additional units that way.”
He cleared his throat, sounding older and heavier than the man in her memory who had barked orders at her and Andy during attack operations.
“Listen. I didn’t have to dig too deep to answer your question. It’s no secret the TSF is expanding attack drone operations. The guy in charge of material acquisitions on High Terra is a colonel named Jon Yarnes. I actually know him, and I think he’s a good man. You can trust him. I’m attaching his communications token. You’ll have to send a special request for secure comms. I don’t have his secure-side address. Besides, if I ask that’s going to raise some eyebrows. So you’re on your own with that. Anyway. I don’t know if you’ve seen Andy, but give that guy a hug for me, and hug those kids of yours, too. I see the Sunny Skies pop up on flight logs every now and then and it makes my cold, loveless heart warm up just a little. Take care, Brit.”
She replayed the message, staring at the comms address that had come along with the recording. Sending a message in the clear would be fastest but didn’t leave her many options on content. She couldn’t come out and say her name was Brit Sykes and she was bringing a Heartbridge operative into the TSF for interrogation. Brit turned over various messages, trying to think of something that would both verify her identity and get Yarnes to respond.
There was also the question of whether or not someone like Yarnes was in Heartbridge’s pocket? Working in material acquisition was a prime opportunity for bribery. It happened all the time. If she told Yarnes too much, she might arrive to find herself cut down by more black-helmeted mercs.
Brit queried Colonel Yarnes’ bio on the TSF database and skimmed through his bio, which wasn’t wholly different than hers and Andy’s. He had attended the academy four years before her, followed by years of anti-piracy and special operations. Her gaze hung on a paragraph describing an award he won for an operation on a location called the Fortress, which she recognized as one of the earliest Weapon Born researc
h sites.
Calling a place “The Fortress” was generic enough. It could have been any of a thousand pirate bases in InnerSol. But his timeline was close enough that he could have been there when her special ops team attacked the same facility. It had been horrible. Even thinking of the name made her close her eyes for a moment, trying to think of anything other than the human research subjects they’d discovered in the asteroid. If Yarnes had been there, he would understand a fellow vet reaching out.
Stretching her fingers, Brit typed the message: “Colonel Yarnes: I also took part in operations at a place called the Fortress. I had a question I hoped you could help me answer.”
She included her secure communications token, which implied the request for an encrypted response.
Brit sent the message and released a pent breath. She closed out the terminal and stood, squaring her shoulders. Her armor, while light, was starting to chafe in places and she was feeling her lack of a recent shower.
When she got back to the med bay, she found Lieutenant Sendi checking Kraft’s vital signs.
“Major Sykes,” he said, pressing his hands together. “I think I have good news. He’s stabilized for good. This autodoc is slow, but it’s registering progress.”
“That’s good,” Brit said, slapping Sendi on the back. “How long until we can leave?”
The lieutenant cringed in spite of himself. “Well, that’s the difficult part. Since we can’t move him to a fully capable facility, the autodoc is predicting at least two days for his organs to heal, and that’s just to allow him to be taken off life-support. He’ll still need to be kept in a medical coma.”
“How long for that?” Brit asked.
“I don’t know. Two weeks?”
Brit nodded, smiling for the first time that day. “That’s actually the best news I’ve heard today, Lieutenant Sendi. Thank you.”
Sendi gave her a guarded nod and didn’t jump when she slapped his shoulder a second time.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
STELLAR DATE: 10.05.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Heartbridge Corporate HQ, Raleigh