She rolled her eyes. “I suppose we’re all finding ourselves working for AEGIS in one way or another, even if it’s in spite of ourselves.”
The IDCC governors had finally gotten around to giving her an official title in the organization, Minister of Colonial Affairs. In the absence of stipulating, the job seemed to entail not only interfacing with the IDCC member colonies but handling external relations as well, both with individual worlds and institutions. Like AEGIS.
He shrugged. “It’s not a bad thing, and we can use the help. It’s been a busy week. Now that most of the systems are in place and running somewhat smoothly, improvements are coming at us fast and furious. At this point we’ve scrapped or shelved almost all the existing equipment in favor of new or upgraded gear—sometimes twice.
“I’m trying to confirm everything’s tested before green-lighting it, but the problem is we don’t know how long we have to prepare. Different things need to happen if we plan to move in a week than if we have six months. It’s no one’s fault, but that doesn’t make all the pieces any easier to manage.”
She gave him a wicked little grin. “You know you love a challenge.”
In answer, he slid a half-step around the table and placed a hand at the small of her back, lightly but firmly enough to feel the sharp intake of breath as her lips parted.
He still had trouble believing he invoked such a reaction in her. She was brilliant on a revolutionary level, elegant and a superstar in the private and public spheres. Far too lofty and illustrious for a former ground pounder.
But so long as he did invoke such reactions, he was not about to discourage them. His voice lowered to a murmur. “So, how much longer do you think we need to stay here? To avoid being rude?”
Her gaze roved across the room. “Perhaps fifteen minutes. Or twelve…no, nine. Nine more minutes should be sufficient.”
“Good.”
Nao Quhiro spotted them and all but sprinted over. Malcolm’s hand fell from her waist as she picked up her plate and stuffed a shrimp in her mouth to buy herself a few seconds to prepare.
“Jenner—it’s Brigadier now, isn’t it? Congratulations, and so good to see you here. Fabulous performance earlier, don’t you think?”
Malcolm donned the falsely cordial expression everyone wore at these functions. “A worthy commemoration, no question—”
A loud clang rattled beside him as Mia’s plate fell to the table. He spun to find her bracing both hands on the rim of the table, her head hung low between her shoulders.
Memories of a brutal attack and a more brutal seizure flared in his mind as he steadied her, his hands now at her waist in concern instead of desire. “What’s wrong?”
She inhaled deeply and gave him a wan attempt at a reassuring smile. “I’m all right. It’s not me. But Devon’s been attacked, and his girlfriend’s badly injured. I’m sorry, I have to go.”
She’d talked to him about how strong the Noetica Prevos’ connection to one another remained, though it rarely asserted itself so dramatically. “Of course. I’ll go with you.”
“No. Please stay. You’re a guest of honor. Make my apologies to the governor for me?”
He didn’t like it, but he didn’t want to delay her by arguing. “If you’re certain. Keep me updated.”
“I will.” She squeezed his hands then turned and hurried out.
14
ROMANE
IDCC COLONY
* * *
MIA RUSHED INTO THE EMERGENCY SUITE at Curación Hospital to find two doctors, three medical bots and a bevy of screens clustered around a stretcher. The limited free space barely revealed Emily’s still form laid out on the stretcher.
Beyond the swarm of activity, a security guard held Devon out of the way.
No one tried to stop her entry as she hurried over to Devon, though the guard did give her a warning glare when she neared. She leaned in close and kept her voice low so as not to disturb the medical efforts. “Do they know what’s wrong?”
Devon exhaled but didn’t get any words out. His unusually fashionable clothes were splotched in blood; the fact it wasn’t the first time she’d encountered him in such a state disheartened her. Back on Anesi Arch, after they’d fled EASC Headquarters, she’d wanted to spare him the pain of the kind of callous life experiences that had shaped her past. But she couldn’t do so then, and it was patently clear she couldn’t now.
“Her cybernetics are fighting themselves. Whatever she was injected with has caused a mutation in their programming, and both the original and the mutation see one another as foreign invaders.”
The doctor seemed to be answering her question, and when he shifted slightly toward her she realized she knew him, if only in passing. His name was….
Philippe Johansson. He rents a long-term executive bay from you at Exia Spaceport and is apt to take frequent off-world trips.
Thank you, Meno.
Before she was able to respond to Johansson, several screens began blinking red and he pivoted back to the stretcher. “We need to shut her down—shut everything down and bring her as close to a stasis point as possible.” He tilted Emily’s head to the side and attached conductive sensors to the ports at the base of her neck. “I’m booting down her eVi, but we need to get her Artificial to disconnect and go into standby mode. Can anyone here make that happen?”
She turned to Devon. “Can you contact her Artificial directly and convince it to shut down?”
He blinked, and after a beat nodded. “I can. But—”
“Do it now, son.”
“Right.” His expression blanked for a few seconds. “It’s agreed to disconnect…and it’s done.”
“Thank you.” A medical bot rolled an isolation chamber into the room, and the other bots lifted Emily’s body up off the stretcher and placed it inside. Mia got her first good look at the girl as they moved her. Her skin was ashen and drawn tight over her bones, almost as if she were decaying before their eyes.
Mia shuddered and banished the image from her mind.
Devon tried to rush forward, but the guard held him back. If Devon really wanted to, he could disable the guard with hardly a thought. But she imagined he wasn’t in a mindspace where it would occur to him to do so.
His voice quivered. “What’s going to happen to her in there?”
Johansson input a series of commands into the external control panel. “This chamber will lower her body temperature and slow her organ functions—and the ware routines interacting with them—to the minimum life-supporting level. It won’t be cryogenic stasis, but it will be close. We need to try to halt the progression of the degeneration until we can find a way to reverse it.”
Mia frowned. “Why can’t you simply flush her cybernetics? I know she’d lose any custom code she’s installed, but I’m positive it’s a price she’d happily pay.”
As the cover closed over the chamber and the frail-looking body inside, Johansson faced her. “I can’t decipher the malicious code. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. And until I can, I can’t design a flush that will wipe it out.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, ‘it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen’?” Meno had fed her the man’s public file in the intervening minute since identifying him, and he was a highly respected biosynth specialist.
“Well, for one, it appears to display a five-dimensional quantum configuration, which isn’t exactly mainstream technology.”
Crap. “Dr. Johansson, I need a copy of all the scans you’ve taken of the malicious code.”
He gestured to the other doctor, who began shepherding the chamber out of the room. “I have to ask why, Ms. Requelme. I recognize you’re a Prevo and a notable one, but you’re not a physician or a scientist.”
“Because I may know where it came from.”
Devon wasn’t sure when or how he’d ended up standing at the entrance to the corner lab in the basement of the hospital. He wasn’t even sure when or how he’d left Emily’s room—the new room,
the one in the ICU wing where they’d moved her isolation chamber. Moved her.
But now he stood here, watching Mia work at an interactive terminal in an expensive cocktail dress and no shoes. His mind kept drifting off, though, and when it returned he’d be confused all over again for a second.
He cleared his throat and tried to keep his attention fixated here. “So?”
She held up a finger, but her focus didn’t otherwise avert from the two wide, virtual screens scrolling live code in three dimensions.
He tried to focus on the code himself. He knew he could understand it easily as well as she did if he just concentrated.
Devon, you’re making yourself sick. You can’t do everything, and Mia can handle this.
We can handle it, too, dammit!
But perhaps we shouldn’t.
He didn’t want Annie to be right. He felt as if he was betraying Emily every minute he wasn’t working exclusively to save her. Cracking the virus would be helping her, of course it would be helping her…but as a programmer by trade and a hacker by hobby, he was also afraid it would feel too similar to fun, and he shouldn’t be having fun. He should be suffering.
He should be in that chamber. The attack had been directed at him; he was certain of it. The third assailant had stabbed Emily with the injector in a panic as they fled, desperate to do at least some damage.
She was going to die because of him.
“She’s not going to die, Devon.”
He glanced up in surprise to see Mia had spun her chair around to face him. She cringed. “Sorry—I didn’t mean to intrude, but that thought was quite loud. It broke through the noise.”
He got what she meant. The Noesis existed as a constant hum in the recesses of one’s mind, like a whispered, warbling song in round, unless you honed in on it with purpose. But sometimes an event—an emotion more often than a concrete thought—burst up out of the whispers with the subtlety of an out-of-tune horn blasting a diminished chord. If it related to you in any way—if it originated from someone you knew personally or affected something you cared about—you perked up and paid attention. Otherwise, you let it subside back into the hum.
He shrugged weakly. “Do you have something?”
“I do. It’s been altered extensively, mostly to better target our standard cybernetic operating firmware, but the base virus does originate from the Anaden.”
“Shit, Mia.”
“It’s conceivable there are other Anadens here and they’re targeting us, but it’s more likely the code derives from our dead specimen and the research they’re doing at ASCEND. Either way, the implications are not good.”
He accepted with a rush of relief this gift of one tiny thing he could do to help Emily. “Somebody sold out. Okay. Copy me everything you have. I’m sending it to Navick.”
ARCADIA
EARTH ALLIANCE COLONY
“We completed the forensics on the airlock hatch before docking the vessel, so we wouldn’t destroy any evidence.”
Richard nodded at the detective, a captain with the Arcadia civilian police. “Good work. The interior’s been scrubbed now, too?”
“Yes, sir. My people will have a final report for you in a couple of hours, but we didn’t find much beyond the bodies and a bunch of dead systems.”
He’d completed a cursory review of the bodies at the morgue before coming here, enough to confirm the blanket cause of death with the coroner. “Nevertheless, I want to take a look around inside and get a feel for the scene.”
“Understood.” The detective entered a code into the bay’s entry panel and the outer hatch opened. Richard fitted on a breather mask since the ship’s atmospherics were permanently offline then stepped inside.
Even devoid of bodies, the lack of lights, air and noise made the ship feel like the tomb it had been. Twelve dead mercenaries, all former Triene cartel members. The forensics team had been forced to manually locate the physical imprint of the serial number for the ship, but it came back as the Baladan, registered to Paolo Acconci, one of Aiden Trieneri’s top lieutenants before the cartel leader’s death. Mr. Acconci had now joined his former boss in the grave.
A vocal opponent of Olivia Montegreu’s absorption of Triene’s business and personnel, the evidence suggested the man acted as the driving force behind the takeover and sacking of the Zelones headquarters building in the aftermath of her death. For all the good it had done him in the end.
Richard’s gaze passed over the silent, dark cockpit. Dead mercs were nothing new—not even twelve at once—and ordinarily SENTRI would have passed the incident on to whoever owned jurisdiction, likely Arcadia law enforcement based on the location of the vessel when it was discovered.
No, what had kept SENTRI interested, and what ultimately led to him coming here from Cavare instead of returning to the Presidio with Will, was the manner of their deaths. Their cybernetics had been fried, catastrophically overloaded by an external power surge—very external. He couldn’t draw definitive conclusions this early in the investigation, but all evidence pointed to the source being the same EM burst that shorted all the ship’s systems.
The same evidence indicated the burst was delivered from outside the ship. The unlucky scout who found the wreck insisted the hatch had been firmly shut before he opened it, with no signs of tampering. No objects or bodies had been vented into space, and the lower cargo ramp was similarly untouched.
Ship-to-ship electronic warfare was nearly as common as dead mercs; entire squadrons of every military were devoted to the practice. An EMP device powerful enough to permanently fry every single system on a ship was rare technology, but they did exist. And it appeared they now existed outside the military.
Conversely, damaging a person’s cybernetics via forced electrical surge was becoming an all too frequent crime, but thus far it only proved feasible at close range. Prevos were able to do it by touch, and an EM grenade could kill an eVi’s operating system from up to twelve meters away.
He did recall several merc hits in the last year where the weapon of choice was a handgun modified to deliver a lethal EM shock. Though they’d found no proof, most if not all of the hits ended up attributed to Zelones agents. In fact, one such incident had occurred not far from this one…a military cargo transport ambushed on the way to Orellan, the crew murdered and the cargo stolen. He seemed to recall Brigadier Jenner had worked it. He made a note to pull the file and ask Jenner about it.
But to his knowledge, a weapon did not exist that could remotely overload a ship’s systems, breach the interior and fatally overload the cybernetics of every person inside, all while leaving the hull and structure of the vessel intact.
Of course, a lot of weapons existed today that hadn’t a mere two months ago. If such a weapon was running around in the hands of some tattered remains of the Zelones cartel or was being sold on the black market, he needed to know about it.
He started to head down into the crew quarters when a message came in from Devon Reynolds. Concerned it might contain word of a new attack or bad news on Devon’s girlfriend’s condition, he opened it immediately—then pivoted and hurriedly departed the ship.
The EMP mystery was going to have to wait.
PART III:
MOTES OF DUST
“The world will never starve for want of wonders;
but only for want of wonder.”
— G. K. Chesterton
AMARANTHE
15
NEPHELAI
MILKY WAY SECTOR 49
* * *
COSIME SAT ON THE RIM of the sheer glass ledge that encircled the tower, legs swinging with ever-restless energy high above the planet’s surface.
When Eren had gotten her message, he’d thought the meeting location an odd request on her part, as she couldn’t have acquired the explosives here. There was no black market trade on Nephelai; there was hardly a deli unit for visitors on Nephelai. When he’d asked, she’d claimed to be seeing to some other business and hadn’t elaborat
ed.
Now that he was here, though—now that he saw her delighting in the particular spot she’d chosen—he got it. Regardless of what had brought her to the planet, she’d lingered simply because she enjoyed the open air and expansive sky. It was in her blood.
The Naraida had been discovered by the Novoloume during the latter species’ early days of interstellar travel. They were one of the few Anatype species unaffected by the Novoloume’s pheromones, which tended to send most others into a sexual froth on close exposure. The Naraida were intelligent and civilized, but they lived close to nature and were centuries away from achieving space travel, primarily due to the fact they had not pursued it.
Some of them, however, harbored a wanderlust which extended beyond the verdant forests of their homeworld, and they agreed to take on the role of non-bound servants to the Novoloume in exchange for access to the stars.
When the Directorate had come upon the two species several millennia later, it had swiftly broken the master-servant relationship. To Eren’s way of thinking, the message was clear: in Amaranthe, no one was allowed to subjugate except the Anadens.
The spot Cosime had chosen was located very high up the tower—so high the ocean and the massive pumps churning it were only visible through breaks in the clouds below them. Her spiraire tweaked the air she inhaled, so the thinness of the atmosphere was unlikely to affect her. His own respiratory system adjusted to such variations well enough, but he nonetheless felt the difference in a nagging desire to breathe in ever more deeply.
She canted her head back to gaze upside down at him as he approached. “You’re late. Another day and I was going to message Xanne to see if you got nulled being a show-off and were still rehabbing.”
“Sorry.” He settled down beside her. “I ran into a complication.”
“With the mission prep? Did you get the ship designations you needed?”
Relativity: Aurora Resonant Book One (Aurora Rhapsody 7) Page 10