Hellcats: Anthology
Page 4
Holo-Kat sighed. “You will get arsey about this, I know. So I will leave a truth-stamp with Stella. You know it can’t be faked. And I’m asking you to trust me...well, yourself. Because honestly, we can’t go on as we have been anymore. The past has become an unbearable burden. It’s compromising our efforts to make a better present for ourselves. We just need to get through the years as best we can. This will help us do that. Be kind to yourself, Future Me. We desperately need a little kindness.”
Kat turned off the hologram and hung her robe on a hook. “I know. I don’t know what I did or why I need not to remember it but… If I’m honest, I’m afraid of finding out.” She hesitated. “Do you know, Viz? What did you see?”
The cat licked his paw for a few moments before replying.
“I don’t know what it is…but Past Me did. That’s why I have to come back here for the Eclipse, to shield it from those around me. Ah well. Probably just as well.” She threw back the covers on the bed and got in. “I’m so tired. I’ll sleep for three days now. Wake me up if you need food or water…or anything.”
Viz demanded with a half-hearted attempt at surliness, but she was asleep, and he did not have the heart to push it. He was still feeling bruised at her emotions in the simulator.
But when she was breathing heavily, he sprang down from the table onto the bed and curled up with her, cuddling close like a kitten in the darkness.
“Lady Katerina. It’s been a while.” Stella, now reactivated after the solar storm, was waiting in the antechamber when Kat came out of the vault, Viz riding on her shoulder.
“Stella, this is Viz. Viz, Stella.”
The cat stared at the android.
“It’s lovely to see you,” Kat went on. “Is that a new housing you’ve got? Slightly different shape, I think?”
The AI hoisted up her tunic to mid-thigh and posed rather more shapely legs than before. “What do you think?”
Kat grinned. “Nice. Useful when dealing with human males, I should think.”
“Your species’ affectation by shape is incomprehensible to me, but I am not averse to using it against them.” There was a click, and several compartments in the side clicked open. “Look, they have pockets.”
Kat roared with laughter. “Superb.”
The AI fell into step next to Kat as they left the hall and headed to the elevators. “How was your stay?”
“You tell me.”
Stella smiled. “You know I can’t do that, Lady Katerina. You gave me strict instructions on that score. And you reinforce them every Eclipse, for what it’s worth.”
“I know.” Kat shook her head. “Doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
Stella stopped at the door to the elevators. “Look after yourself, will you? For me and…for him.” She nodded in the direction of the vault.
“For him?” Kat scoffed.
Stella smiled. “He needs someone constant. I will not last forever, unless they invent a new power source. He needs you.”
“Look, Stella, we’ve been through this before. Yes, we got married when we were drunk one time, and we had a bit of fun for a few months, but it was never going to work. We’re only still married because we’re both too obstinate to give up our half-share in the ship or the healing chamber. It was a fling, nothing more. It’ll never go anywhere. Let it go, will you?”
“Yes, Lady Katerina.” Stella sounded oddly regretful.
Viz gave her a considering look.
Stella’s wrist-unit buzzed, and she glanced at it. Her eyebrows went up. “Well, he’s already worked out how to replace the money, it seems. Just got the receipt for an order he placed when he set up a company a hundred and fifty years back, and I know it wasn’t on the books this morning. Honestly, if he hadn’t given me an illogic circuit, my system would have crashed long since with the amount of time-tinkering you two do.” She read the receipt and glanced up. “It’s a tech company, called Vade Mecum Enterprises—”
“Are you leaving?” The door to Varin’s chambers opened, and he stood there, looking as tired as Kat felt, but with an edge of mischief about him.
“Yes. Thanks for the hospitality. Not that I had a choice.” Kat patted herself down. “Got all my implants, got my bag…dammit. Stella, I think I left my necklace on the bedside table. Would you mind awfully?”
“Of course not, Lady Kat.” Stella headed back to the shielded chamber.
Varin watched her go. “Since when did you wear jewellery?”
Kat shrugged. “Women are changeable creatures, I’ve heard. You got a problem with that?”
“Not at all. I just don’t think it’s true.” He leaned on the pillar of the door, waiting.
“What are you up to, Varin Entorin?” Kat narrowed her eyes.
“Why would you think I’m up to anything?” His air of wounded innocence was punctured when the elevator opened to reveal a set of guards.
“You’re such an asshole.” She rolled her eyes to high heaven. “Again??”
Varin shrugged. “You know, old times’ sake and all that. Besides, I still don’t know what you were doing there, which probably means I’m not going to like it. Although you should probably know that we found that virus you downloaded into the servers. The thing that troubles me is that it doesn’t seem to do that much. It’s all show and noise. The fire alarms, for the most part.”
Kat smirked as the guard droids advanced and one took hold of each of her arms. “Yeah, you were supposed to find that one. Mind, you should probably know that there were three viruses on that sphere.”
Varin threw a hunted look at the screens and consoles on Stella’s desk. “Three viruses?” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Are you going to tell me?”
She glanced down at the new wrist unit Stella had ordered for her, all ready to re-download TX, and grinned. “You’re about to find out.”
There was a boom from outside. Varin dashed to the balcony. “What did you do?”
“May I?”
“Bring her,” he snapped to the droids, who trundled her to the balcony.
She looked out. “That’d be the Queries desk, I guess.”
“The Queries…? Why?!” He stared at the billowing smoke. “It isn’t a real bomb, is it? Another one of your illusions?”
“Of course it’s not real. People would get hurt. But it looks real, so they’ll call the fire teams who—” She looked at her wrist unit, “are about to be unavailable. Viz?”
The cat pawed open the opening of her backpack and slid down into it, reaching up to pull the flap down. The clip rotated as he closed the seal. Then it rotated again into the little-used third position: Activate.
The guard droids sagged and the screens on Stella’s desk went blank as a series of alarms across the building went off and then wound down drunkenly. There were bangs and shouts and the sounds of confusion as Kat stepped up to lean on the balcony rail with Varin.
“So this is your second virus?” he demanded. “What do you hope to achieve by this? There’s nothing useful about the Queries Desk.”
“Nothing at all except its location.” She grinned. “And no, this is the third virus.”
“Its location?” He frowned. “By the entrance?”
“By the entrance which your security guys would use to get to the shuttle bay if, say, a ship fired up and looked likely to take off.” She grinned as he stared out with dawning realisation. “I’m quite aware that you’ll have had a guard on the Immortal Wanderer almost from the moment I walked in the building, and if you have any sense at all, it’ll be made up of humans because they’re harder to hack. But in the event of a fire, when firecrews can’t be assembled from with
in, let’s say if the front entrance went into lockdown because the fire was in the Queries office…”
“The guards would be called off from the shuttle bay to deal with the fire,” he groaned.
“Enabling me to make my exit.” She looked down as her wrist unit beeped.
He grabbed her wrist. “You are not yet free.”
All the laughter died out of her face. “Let go of me, Varin Entorin. You have not earned the right to touch me.” Anger flared in her eyes and where their wrists were close, a pulsing brilliance began to burn brighter and brighter.
“Lady Kat, I’m afraid there is no sign of your…” Stella stopped in her tracks. “Is everything all right?”
The light winked out. Kat maintained that icicle stare until Varin let go of her wrist.
“Everything is fine, Stella, thank you.” He walked across the room to put himself squarely between Kat and the door. “I see why you sent her down into the shielded chamber, Kat. But I still can’t let you go. You haven’t told me what the second virus is.”
“Ah, now the second virus is the interesting one.” Kat’s wrist unit beeped again. Now, Viz, she thought. Stella cocked her head on one side and blinked. “The others are really just to keep you busy while the second virus runs—which it has been doing for the 24 hours since the post-Eclipse start-up. It was integrated before lockdown so it’s bypassed all your security. Sorry, Stella.”
“Can you deal with it?” Varin asked the android.
Stella went over to her desk and laid a hand on her server interface, eyes flickering with data transfer. “I believe I have found one of them.” Her screens lit up again and the guard droids hummed and straightened up, looking to Varin for instruction.
“Grab her, dammit!” he snapped.
“Not today, I’m afraid.” As the guards strode towards her, Kat vaulted over the balcony railing and swan-dived out and down from the tower. Varin and Stella appeared at the window just as the Immortal Wanderer swooped down, catching her with a tractor beam. It brought her up into the hold, and as her feet hit the deck, the doors closed and the ship shot off up into the atmosphere. Kat grabbed onto a pipe for balance.
Varin’s voice crackled from her wristband. “What did you do to my computers, dammit?”
The ship levelled off, and she made her way up to the bridge. “I prepaid a one-way ticket to Space Corps to a very special cadet who has just had a research lab donated on her behalf by a mystery donor.”
Varin sounded pained. “Stella says you’ve just got rid of the past ten years’ profits! Is this another one of your fine adjustments?”
She paused for the bridge doors to open. “Of course. It’s only money, and it will save so many lives, Varin, so many. Besides, you’ll have earned it all back again in another five, if I know you. Oh, and get rid of Hennam. He’s an unpleasant piece of work.”
“Already on that one. But seriously, you can’t just—”
“Oh, I think you’ll find I can.” Kat ended the message, grinning.
“Two minutes to hyperspace, in old time,” TX announced over the ship’s intercom.
“You backed yourself up! Thank goodness! Good to hear your voice, TX. You had me worried there.” A yowl reminded Kat to let Viz out of the backpack. She let him out onto the copilot place and swung into her seat, checking the readouts and putting the controls into manual. “TX, Viz. Viz, TX. I’m sure you’ll get on swimmingly.”
She watched the shuttlecraft lift off from the planet below, carrying an apparently insignificant cadet called Helen Dex to an assignment with destiny, and nodded to herself with some satisfaction. “Nice. We left it just long enough for her to get to the shuttle. Right! Get comfortable, Viz; time to jump into hyperspace. TX, let’s skedaddle before Varin’s guards work out how to turn their hyperdrives back on.” She flicked a switch.
“Where next? And when?” TX asked.
Kat glanced back at the world, fast receding behind her. “I need a holiday. Let’s go somewhere warm with beaches and decent cocktails.”
“Fair enough, and those.”
“Anywhere in mind?” TX asked.
Kat sat back in her seat and stared out at the panoply of stars and worlds in front of her. Then she grinned. “Surprise me.”
JA Clement lives in the South of England with her husband and a luxury lurcher. She mostly writes fantasy but has been eyeing up space opera for a while. She is also proud to have achieved the title
Chief Herder of Cats
on this anthology.
Find out more at jaclement.com.
The Graphene Rat
By Jon Evans & E. G. Bateman
Hacking skills and a not-so-bright cellmate are all a genius needs to break out of orbital prison, but with the locals hot on their tails, will they be feline the pressure or will they beat the odds and get away squeaky clean?
The alarm was beginning to get annoying and the strobing red light wasn’t helping Craig Leander—aka The Graphene Rat, cyber-hacker extraordinaire—finish what should have been a trivial hack. Sure, he’d spent eighteen hours a day in a two-man cell for the past three years, and the closest he’d got to a computer was monthly vid-terminal time with his wife, but he shouldn’t be this rusty.
There was no time to waste on this part of the plan, though. If they were lucky, the guards wouldn’t discover that they were missing for an hour and Craig would be long gone. At least, the parts he cared about, which was to say, his mind.
“Is it going to work, boss?” Benny asked. “Will we really get back to Earth?”
“I have a cunning plan,” Craig replied, smiling confidently. The big man had beamed happily, not even questioning just how cunning this plan would have to be. That kind of doubt was two steps of thinking further ahead than Benny was comfortable with.
But now his accomplice was getting stressed, and that wasn’t a good thing.
“Boss, this doesn’t look good!” Benny whined.
Craig gritted his teeth. Benny was good-natured, for a knuckle-headed enforcer, but he must have been dropped on his head at birth. Conversations with him always took a few more back-and-forth exchanges to get through than Craig’s preferred accomplices. Breaking out of Securimax IV wasn’t a solo job, though, and he hadn’t exactly had his choice of henchmen. The other felons were either too smart to take the risk, or too violent to be trusted.
The Graphene Rat hadn’t earned his moniker by committing robbery with violence.
No, he was a criminal with panache. A modern-day Moriarty, the newscasts called him when he went to trial. He had saved a copy of that headline so he could have a poster made when he got out. The ones applauding Agent Mauser for a five-year investigation that had cost Craig his freedom weren’t so welcome.
It had taken Agent Mauser five years to put him away, and when he’d finally been caught, it hadn't been because Craig had made a mistake, exactly. One of his contacts had deviated from his orders during the preparation phase, and Mauser had caught wind of it. If the idiot had told Craig about it, they could have cancelled the job and been free and clear. But Mauser and his team exploited that one tiny weakness and unravelled the whole plan from that one detail. On the day of his last job, Mauser had been watching them the whole time.
By tomorrow evening, when word of his daring escape from an orbital prison reached the newscasts, there would be new headlines. Something like ‘Criminal Mastermind Turns Tables on Agent Mauser’ or ‘Graphene Rat Escapes Agent Mauser’s Trap’ would make a perfect trophy.
“A bit more detail, Benny? What do you see on the screens?” Craig asked, as gently as he could. Benny didn’t like being teased about being slow, and who could blame him? He’d seen Benny get upset in the cafeteria at the teasing from an enormous gang leader on his first day in orbit. That guy got released on parole after nine months of intensive care when the judge ruled it was inhumane to keep some
one so incapacitated in prison any longer.
“The screws are in the shuttle bay, boss. They’ll catch us,” Benny said, his big round face wrinkling in consternation.
When Benny had come out of solitary, Craig had needed only to show some basic empathy toward the man to win a firm friend. It wasn’t hard, because Craig had been bullied for the exact opposite reason, and it wasn’t his fault he was the smartest man alive any more than it was Benny’s that he was one of the dumbest.
After they became friends, Craig got no more grief from anyone, and he even petitioned the Warden for them to be cellmates. He was the only person who could talk Benny down if he got upset.
“No, Benny. Even if they were right outside the doors, I’ve closed the bulkheads. They’d need ten hours to cut their way through them,” Craig replied. It was a blatant lie, but padding the timescale seemed more likely to calm his friend down. “I’m almost done here, we’ll be gone in a few minutes, you’ll see.”
“Won’t they chase us? The cams at the Loop will see my ugly mug, boss.”
“Take some deep breaths, Benny, just like we practiced. We’re going to be in disguise. They won’t recognise us, I promise. We just have to get on the Loop and make it to my hideout.”
“Where Mrs. Leander is?”
“That’s right, Benny, where Mrs. Leander will help us. Now, get in the pod, ok? We’re about to be out of here forever, buddy.”
“There are cameras at the Loop boss. They’ll see my mug!”
“No, Benny. Remember, we’ll be too small for them to see. They’ll be looking for two handsome rogues, remember?”
“Oh, yeah. It’s a good plan, boss. Genius.”
Craig nodded as he helped Benny get comfortable in the transfer pod. “That’s why this will work, Benny.”
“Yes, boss.” His hand came up, stopping Craig from sealing the pod. “Will it hurt?”
Craig looked away and focused on the final tweaks. He pushed the board back into the machine. It beeped twice and lit up. When he felt sufficiently relaxed enough to lie, he looked back and smiled. “No, I promise big man, it won’t hurt. But we have to go now, or we’ll be too far out for the data stream to connect.” The truth was, he didn’t have a clue if it would hurt but this wasn’t the time for doubt.