by M. D. Cooper
Lyssa wasn’t sure how to respond to the praise.
Fugia paused.
Lyssa smiled.
Fugia waved a hand.
Lyssa laughed.
Fugia grew silent again, obviously thinking.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
STELLAR DATE: 10.06.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: District FQ, Ring 9, Callisto Orbital Habitat (Cho)
REGION: Europa, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
If Kraft had been poisoned, that meant someone at Heartbridge knew he’d failed at both Clinic 46 and the Resolute Charity and felt the company had something to lose if he talked. Despite her desire to destroy the people who had built places like Fortress 8221 and Clinic 46, Brit didn’t believe in conspiracy theories. She believed most people were too stupid and self-interested for broad plans to truly function, and for a company like Heartbridge to embrace technology that hurt people, there had to be a powerful motive in play. The Weapon Born represented an intersection of profit and science, two strong motives for people on both ends of the altruism scale. Things like the Weapon Born existed because of both the Cal Krafts and the Hari Jicksons of the world.
Brit and Petral secured a tiny former long-range courier ship called the Cross-Current that had once been commissioned in the Mars 1 Guard. The crew cabin barely held two, but the cargo area was large enough to hold the portable med pod containing Kraft, kept unconscious in a medical coma.
Brit had been impressed with Petral’s haggling skills and Petral had seemed to enjoy herself immensely, her smile growing more feral as the broker grew equally sour.
The Cross-Current didn’t offer much in the way of amenities, communication or navigation controls, but once the course was set using local astrogation resources on the Cho, the engines kicked in with the kind of thrust Brit hadn’t felt since her high-g training in the TSF.
During the long flight, Petral had explained her understanding of how Lyssa had come to be implanted in Andy, a story Brit hadn’t heard from the beginning. Petral had met Hari Jickson—the runaway Heartbridge scientist—on Cruithne, introduced by a man named Ngoba Starl, who was head of a local crime syndicate called the Lowspin.
“Why do you always get this half-smile when you mention Starl?” Brit had asked, thinking there was some hidden joke she wasn’t getting.
“Oh, you haven’t met Starl yet. He’s one of my special boys.”
“You mean he’s an idiot?”
“The opposite,” Petral had said.
Starl knew he needed to get Lyssa across Sol but couldn’t trust his people or any other local resources, so he’d developed a plan to test small freighters across Sol. Sunny Skies was the only ship that had made it to Cruithne.
“That doesn’t mean Andy’s good,” Brit had said. “It just means he’s lucky.”
“You could look at it that way. Ngoba is a big believer in luck. He’ll tell you that spirit is equally as important as expertise. I can see why he liked your ship. Fran seemed to approve, and Ngoba trusts Fran more than anyone.”
“Even you?”
Petral had laughed. “Oh, he doesn’t trust me.”
For Petral, there were too many parallels between Jickson and Cal Kraft. “I should have protected Jickson better, should have told Ngoba he was in more danger than we thought. I don’t think we realized just what was at stake for Heartbridge. AIs have been leaving InnerSol for years. This just seemed like another smuggling job that Ngoba was doing as a favor.”
“A favor for who?”
“Fugia. And if you asked her, she’ll tell you she’s doing all this for a parrot, which makes no sense to me. I think it’s her idea of a joke. Maybe humans mimicking AIs or vice versa, I don’t know. I know there’s a math problem that’s been floating around for years, something only SAI can solve. When they do, it shows them a path to Proteus.”
“There’s nothing at Neptune but mines and military test sites.”
“And AIs, apparently. An AI named Alexander.” Petral had made a ghost whoooo with her hands spread and laughed. “Everybody’s scared of Alexander and no one knows what he is. I think he’s a mining rig that went rampant, thinks it’s the reincarnation of Alexander the Great and wants to rule Sol with Cleopatra.”
“So who’s Cleopatra?”
“Me, of course.”
*****
They reached Marsian space in just over two weeks. After their initial burn outside the Cho, the drive system had been maintaining their velocity with maintenance thrust. At the midpoint, Brit executed the braking burn that would take t
hem into the outer edges of the Marsian gravity well for a slowing slingshot to Cruithne.
Petral had suggested making the asteroid their final destination and Brit saw the logic in it. Petral had resources there and it was within real-time communication distance of High Terra. Brit’s last visit to the pirate station hadn’t been the friendliest but she figured she could avoid any Heartbridge clinics that might have her marked for arrest by their corporate security. If OuterSol had any advantage for her, it was the weakened reach of Heartbridge.
They debated the advantages of taking Kraft directly to the TSF headquarters on Cruithne, which would have immediately passed him into government custody and protected them from any follow-on attempts to finish the job of killing Kraft and anyone with him.
In the end, Petral had convinced Brit she had the local resources to keep Kraft in one piece while they negotiated with Colonel Yarnes to secure a safe transfer. Brit preferred the option that meant Yarnes wouldn’t know where she was for at least a little while. She still didn’t know if she could trust Yarnes. He’d sent his secure communications token and then replied with an affirmative when she suggested she had information that related to the Fortress, but hadn’t sent more since leaving the Cho.
Petral had liked the idea of making the man wait. Brit preferred not to play cat-and-mouse games and wished she’d had a way to contact him as they drew closer to Earth, but the Cross-Current’s communication system barely reached Ceres as they passed.
The Cross-Current was small enough to dock directly with Cruithne. As they approached, Brit monitored the astrogation console, but the ship took care of the math involved in matching delta-v.
When they were within communications range, Petral squealed like a teenager and pulled up several of her favorite vids.
“I’ve got time to catch up on my shows now,” she said, and subjected Brit to a solid eight hours of Cruithne-produced telenovella drama during the landing sequence. Brit had to admit the shows had begun to grow on her, with their downtrodden dock-rats pining to become crime bosses while running circles around the inept station administration and corrupt TSF commanders, layered over fast-burning love stories.
“I tried showing some of these to Cara and she just didn’t seem to get it,” Petral said. “If I had a daughter, this is the first thing we’d be watching together.”
“Cara seems to like her dating game.”
Petral waved a hand. “That’s too serious. She plays to win. These are all about how the game is played, having fun while you’re doing it. That’s completely different. I think your Cara is a bit ruthless in her own way.”
Brit had never thought of Cara that way. “What do you mean?”
“I mean she has a lot of you in her. She’s going to run a place like Cruithne when her time comes.”
“I have no desire to be a crime boss.”
“Yes, but you have this sense of right and wrong that keeps you awake at night. You can’t stand injustice, deep in your bones you can’t stand it.”
Petral shot Brit a knowing smirk. Brit didn’t answer, knowing she was right. What did they call it in the Academy? A shadow strength. The same attributes that made her a great officer made her brittle and inflexible.
After the docking procedure was complete, they waited in the cabin while the Port Authority acknowledged the ship. Petral’s face went blank as she updated her contact information and checked her networks. She’d explained that she left several agents in charge of her affairs while she was gone and would need to verify the quality of their work.
Brit checked on Kraft, finding him in the same state as he had been four hours ago, bio-signs steady. The bacterial refresh was doing its job to keep him from smelling, although the air in the tight cargo hold smelled like bitter disinfectant instead.
She was looking forward to getting off the ship but was also feeling some apprehension at trusting Petral completely. In the two weeks since the Cho and Petral’s blunt honesty, the woman had continued to share every raw detail of herself in a way Brit found irritating and refreshing, but also didn’t seem bothered when Brit told her exactly how she felt in turn. Telling Petral she was cranky and wanted to be left alone didn’t result in passive aggressive remarks like it might with other people. Petral simply said, “Sounds good,” and engrossed herself in her own things like the telenovellas.
After a life of living with other soldiers with an inordinate fear of loneliness and terrible boundary control, Brit almost couldn’t trust Petral’s honesty. She found herself liking Petral in spite of her baked-in guardedness.
“I’m ready,” Petral called from the cabin. “You ready to get off this fartbox?”
“Fartbox is the last thing I expected you to say. Yes, I can’t wait to get out of here.”
“My man Charles is meeting us at the port. He’s going to take Kraft to a secure holding area while we get cleaned up and then meet Ngoba.”
“We’re meeting Starl?” Brit asked. Petral hadn’t mentioned actually coordinating with anyone on Cruithne.
“He wants to meet you and I need to bring him up to speed. I think he’ll be a good resource for our negotiation with Yarnes.”
“The TSF isn’t going to barter with a crime syndicate.”
“We aren’t going to say that,” Petral said. “We’re going to know it. If we don’t need the TSF, really don’t need them, then you’ll be able to bargain from a place of strength.”
“I’m not a fan of bargaining for anything, honestly.”
“You spent too much time in a chain of command. You forget that you’re just as valuable as some general if you’ve got what they want. More valuable, even. We need to break you of this authoritarian mindset.”
“I guess.”
Petral came into the cargo cabin and checked the airlock seals, then activated the unlock sequence. The outer door ran its verification checklist, then slid open, followed by the inner barrier. Iron-scented air from the Cruithne cargo docks floated inside the cramped space.
Petral breathed deep, grinning at Brit. “You smell that? Smells like home.”
“Smells like oil and grime,” Brit said, “mixed with a bit of mold.”
“A rose by any other name. Come on. I see Charles.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
STELLAR DATE: 10.25.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: The Span Club
REGION: Cruithne Station, Terran Hegemony
The Span Club was a multi-level space with a huge dance floor and curving bars along its outer edges. Columns and hanging platforms were scattered throughout the club for dancing or sitting to watch others dance, with a section of tables for dining near the dance floor.
Having just come through the front vestibule, Brit and Petral stood on the terrace that allowed people to look down on the dance floor and tables, before walking down a long staircase on the outer wall to the main floor. Looking across, the dance floor was certainly interesting, with its mix of colors and textures. The club didn’t seem to cater to any one fetish, from the hard-augments to the biologically modified.
The focus of the space, however, was a long table opposite the entry, where Ngoba Starl sat in the middle with various people on either side of him. All attention went back to the center of the table where Starl held court, his white teeth flashing as he smiled and laughed loudly, heard through breaks in the music.
“This place is ridiculous,” Brit shouted at Petral over the droning music.
“It’s the heart of Cruithne.”
“Of course, it is.”
Brit was wearing a black suit that hung off her right shoulder, with wide sleeves that ended just above her wrists. She supposed it was a proper mix of elegance and freedom of movement.
Petral, on the other hand, was wearing a brilliant red dress that hugged her body until it flared at her calves. While it appeared constricting, the material seemed to move easily enough. The woman obviously enjoyed being the center of attention; started waving at people all over the club as
soon as they walked inside. Petral was home.
Walking the long staircase to the floor meant everyone could watch them as they descended. Brit’s gaze swept over the club as she walked, checking each face that turned their way, waitstaff, people dancing on the columns and floating platforms who had the advantage of height. She noted several people who seemed to be waiting at the bar, paying more attention to those around them than anything else, and then focused on Ngoba Starl, the man who had convinced Andy to transport Lyssa.
Starl was wearing a pale grey suit with a matching pocket square and bowtie, both the color of red wine. His dark skin contrasted with his white teeth and steel-gray eyes, and Starl’s curly hair and beard were both trimmed close but still slightly unruly.
Overall, he looked like a man who cared about his appearance but wasn’t afraid to get his clothes dirty when necessary. There was a hardness in his broad, finely chiseled face that Brit supposed came from his upbringing, which Petral had described as starting at the lowest orphan squat in Cruithne.
The people on either side of Starl were a mix of syndicate members in suits like him, with their own matching pocket squares and bowties, and other people in dresses, Administration, and TSF uniforms, and even one woman with skin covered in glowing cilia like a sea anemone.
“Petral!” Ngoba called as they approached. He stood and spread his arms so she could lean over the table for a bear hug. “It’s so good to see you, my dear. You’ve been gone too long.”
Starl’s accent was pure Cruithne, something like refined West Indies English on Earth tempered by five hundred years of Spacer slang.
Brit was surprised when Petral dropped into the same accent. “So good to see you, Ngoba. I’ve missed you.”
They were also communicating via Link; Brit could see it in their expressions.
Petral held Ngoba’s face for a second, like an auntie might while assessing her favorite nephew, then stepped back to motion toward Brit.
“This is Britney Sykes,” she said, dialing back her accent to merely a flavor. “I think you’ve met her husband.”
Brit stepped forward to shake hands, and Ngoba took her hand in both of his, looking directly into her eyes.