The Administration center served as a clearinghouse for the entire sector. A Kyvern-run arm of the Directorate managed the labyrinthine nightmare of a bureaucracy that hovered over, in and around doing business here. Doing anything here. Doing anything anywhere, for the station was a clone of sixty-four other installations in the Milky Way alone.
Kyvern were bred to perform this function, thus he had to assume they found fulfillment, even pleasure, in accomplishing it day after dreary decade, but Eren was already restless and he’d hardly crossed the station’s outer shields.
Sector 23 Administration was business from end to beginning, with no revelry in sight on the cheerless station. A single lounge for employees did brisk but glum business on the uppermost piazza.
This was not a place where Idonis loitered—so he needed to look less like an Idoni and more like a Kyvern. The spoofed identity and credentials were in place, but now up went the hair into a tamed knot and out went his usual sueded corium attire in favor of a muted brown suit. His irises artificially dimmed to a dull amber, and a cybernetics routine lightened his skin tone several shades until it resembled the fairer skin dominant among Kyvern. He didn’t have to work hard to fake the permanent scowl most of them wore.
The first of many queues greeted him at the station entrance. Security.
He frowned—or he would have were he not currently doing so—as the length of the wait was surprising. Though bureaucratic, Kyvern were typically highly efficient at their tasks.
A glance toward the front of the jam revealed four Vigil units and a Watchman. Ah. So security was going to be notably tighter than usual, and they’d brought in non-Kyvern muscle.
He chuckled to himself at the possibility the increase in security was due to him, or rather due to his actions at the Phoenix Gateway. The flash of pride was quickly doused by annoyance at the fact his success had in turn made future successes for him and others that much more difficult, at least for a while. But now wasn’t the time to lessen the pressure on the Directorate; it was the time to increase it. Risks be damned.
He was three people from the front when a furor broke out on the other side of the entry checkpoint, off to the left.
“No! I didn’t do anything wrong! I wasn’t trying to steal!”
The Watchman left the checkpoint to go see to the disturbance, and Eren willed the queue to move faster. The front-line Vigil drone units folded when presented with impeccable if false credentials, but the Praesidis Watchman wouldn’t have been so easy to fool.
He stepped up to the checkpoint.
“Present Accepted credentials.”
The Watchman reached the shrieking Naraida woman, who had been cornered by two roving Vigil units.
Eren did as requested.
Her pleas rang loudly above the generalized din. “Please, sir, there must be a glitch with my account. I should have the funds—”
The Watchman used his diati to lift the woman into the air then slammed her face first to the floor. He motioned for the Vigil units to restrain her.
“Business?”
Eren kept his voice flat. Dulled. “Addition of a new cargo ship to an existing transport business registration.”
The drones extended spindly arms to lift the unconscious woman up. Her head lolled against her chest, and her pliant limbs caused her to sag low between the drones. Blood streamed down from her forehead, and her spiraire had been crushed. They should see to that soon, or she was liable to suffocate from a lack of nitrogen before they got her to a containment cell. Did they care?
“You are cleared to pass.”
Eren strode through the checkpoint without any gesture of thanks to the Vigil unit and kept his gaze straight ahead as he passed the drones dragging the woman away. The Watchman passed two meters behind him on his way to the checkpoint.
He stopped holding his breath.
Over the course of the next interminably long minutes he traversed endless levels full of endless hallways of offices, registries and certification departments, the sole variation being the length of the queues to access them. The interior displayed so little character he had to consult his map overlay several times to confirm his location and path forward.
The one oddity of note he encountered was an Efkam lighting a passage as it slipped and slid along the floor. How the blobs were able to move without leaving a trail of slime behind them was among the great mysteries of the universe. It warbled a greeting at him as it passed, but he ignored it, because he’d be expected to do so. The Efkam were surprisingly open, friendly creatures—but they were only tolerated by the Anadens. Not entertained.
He’d almost fallen asleep from boredom by the time he reached the Maintenance Hardware department, some two hundred levels and a thousand hallways from where he’d begun.
A Vigil unit blocked the entrance. It floated upward to leer menacingly over Eren. “This is a restricted area. Present authorization for your presence, return to the guest levels or be pacified.”
Someone needed to teach the machine a touch of nuance. He presented a small Reor slab. “Special authorization from Sector Oversight, originating outside of Administration management.”
The unit inserted the slab into its reader. Two seconds later it jerked and dropped to the floor as the virus on the slab shorted out its operating routines.
Eren maneuvered the bulky ball of metal into a dark corner by kicking it forward and around to the left. Once he made sure it wasn’t going to roll back out into the entry, he retrieved his slab, pulled on a glove and held his hand to the scanner gating entrance to the interior rooms.
The barrier thinned to allow him to pass, and he walked into the data vault. Time was ticking, and a surge of adrenaline assured he was now fully awake. He located the nearest access point and tapped into it.
The station’s data archives weren’t porous or weakly protected, but in recent years anarchs who weren’t him had begun to develop some brilliantly crafty hacking routines.
Zettabytes of data populated the system, and all but a few gigabytes of it were useless to him. He relied upon several dozen cross-referencing tags to lead him to the files he needed. Once he found them, he didn’t hang around and decide which vessel offered the best option; he simply copied the data onto a new Reor slab and backed out of the system. Then he hurried toward the door—
“Vigil unit H962 is down in Maintenance Hardware. Cause is undetermined. It could be either a malfunction or sabotage.”
“Watchman dispatched to your location.”
Eren pressed against the wall of the vault room and peeked around the corner. A guard stood over the unit Eren had disabled, doing what all persons like him did best—guarding it until someone possessing greater authority arrived.
The one thing that never, ever showed up on missions was good luck. Bad luck? All the godsdamn time.
He dug around in his kit for a piece of hardware he could spare and palmed a small power bridge stabilizer. His options for getting out of the data vault were limited. If he created a distraction, they would know someone had been here and flag the incident as malfeasance. Without a flag, however, the disabled Vigil unit would look like it had suffered a rudimentary malfunction. So maybe he should wait and hope the guard walked into another room long enough for him to sneak out.
But a Praesidis Watchman was on the way; no time to hope for good luck that never came anyway. He hurtled the bridge into the vault room. The loud clatter got the guard’s attention, and the man sped past Eren’s shadow into the vault.
Eren ran for the door, then the hallway, then the transit tube. He had twenty seconds at most to get off this level before someone spotted him.
He reached the tube and leapt inside the same instant the Watchman materialized at the other end of the hallway. “Halt!”
The tube shot upward. He’d been seen, but not scanned, so…he considered abandoning the disguise. But a description of a ‘male Kyvern in a brown suit’ described several thousand individuals on the st
ation at the low end, which made it a better disguise than ‘baroque Idoni man with fiery hair and starburst eyes.’
So instead he caught his breath and mentally ran through the full list of his terrible options for reaching the docks, getting through security and escaping the station.
“Vigil Administration Security, halt!”
The Watchman—a quick peek over his shoulder confirmed it was the same one from the vault floor—emerged from a service tube behind Eren, apparently having taken some top-secret shortcut to the transport lobby. Multiple Vigil drones sped forward to block possible exits and aid the Watchman in apprehending his prey even as two guards rushed in.
Should have ditched the costume. To his right a crowd of people shrank away, eager to obey any commands the Watchman might direct their way. No hiding in the crowd until he could sneak away unnoticed.
To his left was a sleeping pod showroom. It would have a rear exit leading to a service corridor, which would lead to yet more corridors where he would be run to ground. A trap of his own making.
Ahead were the hangar bays and transport ships. But the entrance to the docks sat at the end of a long, open lobby perfect for shooting him in the back—or the front, since the fully staffed checkpoint gated the entrance.
He tightened his grasp on the Reor slab encoded with the transport ships’ data and prepared to fry it. If he got nulled, which it appeared he was about to, at least he could prevent Vigil from learning what information he’d stolen. He, or someone, could try again later.
Fate accepted, Eren turned around slowly, arms in the air but hands fisted. “Is there a problem, sir? I was on my way—”
The Watchman and both guards flew backwards through the air as if shoved by an invisible force. As they slammed to the floor far down the lobby, the bystanders gasped and shifted in confused unrest.
Eren spun around to see a man in a hooded cloak standing a dozen meters away, between him and the entrance to the docks. The man’s right hand was splayed in front of his body and surrounded by a flaming crimson aura.
Well, this wasn’t exactly better. The murmur of dread crossed his lips unbidden. “Inquisitor.”
“No.”
Eren jumped as a hand landed on his arm to accompany the furtive whisper coming from his left. Another hooded figure stood beside him—directly beside him. How had someone gotten so close without him noticing? Beneath the hood radiant silver irises framed by rich bordeaux locks stared intently at him. “This way. Let’s go.”
He nodded in hurried agreement. “Nos libertatem somnia.”
The stranger’s eyes narrowed. “What?”
Not an anarch. Arae! Eren tried to back away, only to have her—yes, he decided it was likely a woman, though he couldn’t identify her Dynasty—tighten her grip. “Please, come with us. We’ll get you out of here.”
“Us? You mean you and the Inquisitor? I don’t think so.”
“Would you rather die here?”
“If that’s required, yes.” Movement in the corner his vision heralded the Watchman and guards struggling up off the floor.
“Ugh….” The woman groaned and tugged on his arm. “This is a rescue, so will you come already? Live through the next ten minutes and we’ll explain everything.”
“What are you doing? Obey Vigil and turn him over!”
The speaker, a stodgy Kyvern man in a brown suit—Eren snickered—surged out of the crowd toward them, as if intending to grab Eren himself.
The mysterious woman spun toward the man and flung her arm outward. A stream of blazing white energy whipped out from her wrist to leap across the three meters of open space and slash the man across the chest. He collapsed to the floor in convulsions. The rest of the crowd now began clamoring backward in full-on panic.
Admittedly impressed, Eren made a swift calculation. Certain death now or probable death later. So long as he could succeed in wrecking the Reor slab before death came, probable and later were always preferable to certain and now.
He assented, and the woman instantly took off running. After a few strides of being dragged along behind her, he caught on and matched her pace. They rushed toward the docks entrance as the recovering security personnel advanced behind them and drones closed in on both sides.
When they reached the Inquisitor, the man thrust his arm out in a fresh burst of diati. Eren risked a peek behind him to see his pursuers stopped cold by a shimmering wall that spanned the lobby, leaving only the three of them on this side of it. Ahead of them, at the checkpoint, all the Vigil units were down and the line of entrants had scattered into the docking passages.
The woman paused long enough to place a hand on the Inquisitor’s shoulder. “Caleb?”
A deep male voice bearing an unfamiliar accent responded from beneath the hood. “Right behind you, baby.”
“You better be.” She renewed her grip on Eren’s hand and sprinted forward once more; they sped through the checkpoint unmolested and into the maze of the docks.
Footsteps pounded behind them. He didn’t risk another peek back, but he assumed they belonged to this ‘Caleb,’ for better or worse.
They rounded the next corner as a burst of heavier, harsher thuds echoed down the passage. Abruptly the woman yanked him to the left, into a docking module.
“Breathe out and get ready to jump.” She slammed an open palm on the panel, and a white glow pulsed beneath her fingers and up her wrist into the sleeve of her cloak.
The door opened and she proceeded to shove him through it—
—into space. There was a ship, but it wasn’t actually docked.
Momentum carried him forward across the chasm into an open airlock. His feet briefly touched a solid surface. He grabbed a handle in the wall as one body then another landed in the small antechamber with him.
The outer airlock closed, artificial gravity slammed his feet to the floor and air flooded in. The hatch in front of him opened, and Eren stumbled into the ship’s cabin.
The woman followed on his heels, then the Inquisitor a second later, and the inner airlock hissed shut, sealing him in.
5
SIYANE
MILKY WAY SECTOR 23
* * *
“VALKYRIE, GET US OUT OF HERE!” Alex shoved past the Anaden to reach the cockpit and slide into her chair as they accelerated away from the space station.
‘Two drone vessels are in pursuit.’
“There will be more.”
She ignored the comment, but Caleb pointed their guest to one of the jump seats behind the cockpit. “Sit down.” Then he leaned in above her shoulder. “You got this?”
“I got this.” Targeting lock warnings flashed on the HUD. Two…four, five security drone vessels. “Rifter active. Swing around E 82° on plane and act like we’re going to shoot at them.”
The pursuers were too small to pick out against the backdrop of the dark, hulking station, but their energy signatures shone bright as flares. They fired as they closed in—they were quite fast—and foul-colored cadmium lasers consumed the viewport.
“Power, Valkyrie. I need power.”
‘Reallocating.’
The lights in the cabin dimmed. The gauge crept up. “Cloaking now, Rifter remains active. And…sLume drive engaged.”
The weapons fire vanished in favor of the superluminal bubble, and she exhaled. But relaxation still lay some distance in the future. “We’re basically fleeing in a straight line, which isn’t a great idea. Mesme, help Valkyrie find a good hiding spot off of our current vector.”
Mesme darted across the entrance to the cockpit in a wave of shapeless lights. Alexis, as we are now in my home realm, I have asked you to refer to me by my proper name.
“I will when you start calling me Alex. Maybe. Honestly, you should’ve considered the ramifications of having an unpronounceable name before you chose it. Now, can we focus? We have an escape to complete.”
“The drones’ weapons didn’t hit your ship.”
She tossed a smirk i
n the direction of the Anaden. “No, they didn’t.”
‘Mnemosyne, the region eighty parsecs into Sector 22 on a N 31° W vector appears to lack any structural development. Am I correct in this assessment?’
The location will suffice to provide temporary safety.
‘Adjusting superluminal course.’
“Thanks, Valkyrie.” Alex took a deep breath, let it out and spun the chair around to face the cabin.
The man they’d rescued had abandoned the jump seat to stand in the center of the main cabin, a look of perplexed frustration marring his features as his gaze jerked between her, Caleb, Mesme and various areas of the interior.
Behind him Caleb stashed their weapons, locked down the cabinets and pretended not to have a keen eye fixed on their guest. Using the diati in such an intense manner was sure to have him wired and a bit jumpy, so she’d try to keep the spotlight on her for a while so he could…she didn’t want to say regain control. Reimpose inner calm.
She smiled blithely. “Well, that was bracing, no?”
The Anaden settled his attention on her but stepped to the side so Caleb wasn’t behind him. Tall and lithe, his movements reminded her of a leopard: alert, wary and swift. “What is this ship? Who are you people? Why do you have a Kat on board?”
“I’m Alex. He’s Caleb. The Kat—I like that, by the way—is Mnemosyne. It has its own ship but nevertheless keeps showing up on ours, which is the Siyane. And also Valkyrie, since she’s basically the ship. It’s a long, dreadfully esoteric story. Now about—”
“What do you mean, ‘she’s basically the ship’? Why does the ship have two names?”
“I mean Valkyrie’s quantum circuitry permeates all systems and structures of the vessel. Among other things. She’s an Artificial—a synthetic intelligence—and the ship doesn’t have two names. They’re two separate entities. Sort of. They once were. I said it was esoteric.”
The man—they’d been given a time, place and general description of who to be on the lookout for from Mesme’s contact, but not a name—dropped into a chair at the kitchen table and reached up behind his head. Long copper hair twisted into silken strands fell out of a knot to spill over his shoulders. As she watched, his skin darkened from a tawny beige to rich sienna. He rubbed at his eyes, and when he reopened them they shone a vibrant gilt—neither bronze nor gold, but akin to solar flares.
Relativity: Aurora Resonant Book One (Aurora Rhapsody 7) Page 3