Crystal Escape

by Doug J. Cooper

“If I remember right, it was something about the com settings. Once Tom identified the problem, it took him maybe twenty minutes to build some logic so everything talked nice, and it was smooth sailing for the rest of the journey.”

  As he spoke, MacMac used his thumbnail to pry off a small insulating tab from the end of the service strip, one that said Do Not Remove in tiny bold letters across the front. Adhesive held the insulator in place, and as he talked, he wedged his thumbnail back and forth, risking breaking the nail but pushing ever harder until the insulator tab popped free and into his cupped hand.

  It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. He hoped it appeared to Hejmo and anyone reviewing the record that he’d peeled off a third informational sticker. But if they didn’t catch what he’d done, and so far so good, Vivo’s pods would power down if pushed above 40 percent of thrust, at least until the insulator was replaced.

  His justification for this act of vandalism—and he recognized it as such—was simple. These were unfueled pods put here for show, or so he’d been told. Thus, there was nothing at risk and nothing to sabotage. Unless this stupidity continues and they actually fire up the drives.

  His blood boiled as he formed the thought. He’d been offered a good job as chief engineer on an orbiting pharmaceutical factory. He’d passed on it so he could work here at Vivo, and his reward for choosing a stable job near home was to be caught up in something that smelled both criminal and crazy. He resented the situation, and he resented Aubrey for facilitating it.

  And Aubrey nurtured her agenda behind vapid smiles and folksy conversation, denying things until they happened, and denying more things until they happened, too. Now she wanted full capability for a “demonstration.” He didn’t know where she was going with it all, but he wanted to be out the door before she got there.

  “I’ll bet Tommy is having a blast in my old job as chief engineer on the Aurora,” MacMac said to Hejmo as he placed the removable stickers and the insulating tab inside the empty package. “He’s the only man in the solar system who can thrust-balance spaceship drive pods by hand.”

  He set the packing material on the table, placed the starhub next to it, and turned to face the room. Standing there, he thought about how, upon returning to Earth after the Aurora job, he’d interviewed for a job with the company who made the starhub product. They hadn’t had any positions that had interested him, but he did have lunch with their lead engineer, Lin Olalla, and Lin had thought the earlier problem with the pods powering down had been because the insulating tab on the end of starhub’s service strip—the one MacMac had just forcibly removed—had somehow been damaged or detached. MacMac had passed that tidbit along to Tommy, still working on the platform, and Tommy had followed up later to confirm the tab was indeed missing.

  “Let’s get a better view of that ops panel,” said MacMac as he pulled the rest of the protective wrap off the unit. “It sure is a beauty.” He wadded the wrapping material into a ball, leaned over, and pushed the waste into a disposal chute in the wall.

  He continued with his cleaning, gathering bits of material from the base of the panel and disposing of it. Turning to the tables, he picked up two empty boxes, some discarded wrap, and the starhub packaging with the warning label inside, and pushed it all into the disposal chute.

  “There,” he said, trying not to overact. “Now we can see what we’re working on.”

  * * *

  Criss followed Sid as he walked out of a stand of pine trees. They were day-hiking up a forested trail on Highback Mountain and had just reached the summit. Stepping out onto a granite ridge, they looked down at the leadership lodge in the valley below, its toy-like size standing in testament to the elevation they’d gained over the past three hours.

  “I think I have something,” said Criss.

  “Is it contagious?” asked Sid, taking a drink from his water pouch.

  Criss ignored him. “We just got another order for an upgraded cargo canister. This one is from Fleet and has so many convolutions that Lazura has to be interested.”

  The modified canisters that permitted shipment of fragile items to Mars had proved so popular that orders were flooding in, giving Lazura a multitude of options beyond the one Criss and Sid had arranged as a trap. Casting a projected image for Sid to see, Criss showed him a stark chamber with industrial-style storage shelves piled high with crates of all sizes and styles. Automated carts danced past each other as they lifted, moved, and placed items in a swirl of activity.

  The view swiveled to the back of the room where, to one side, larger crates were stacked on the deck. Criss knew Sid would discern from the hull construction that this was an image from a large spacecraft. He’d also recognize from the name that it was the same Fleet command platform that was being shifted to a higher orbit next week to make way for further commercial development in space.

  “This is the parcel depot on the Montrose,” Criss said. The image zoomed and shifted left, stopping when the scene filled with two suitcase-sized lockboxes sitting next to each other in their own cubby. “We’ve just been contracted to launch these to Mars. According to the manifest, each contains four three-gen crystals.” He turned to Sid. “The boxes have shielding, so I can’t see inside.”

  “What does the record show?”

  “I can follow the boxes from their day of manufacture up until three weeks ago. That’s when Fleet purchased them. Since then, the boxes have moved in and out of a secure room that has no visual, thermal, audio, or any other sensors I can monitor. I’ve analyzed all the ancillary feeds tracking everything happening to and near that secure room, and my conclusion is that she’s not in either box.”

  “I’d be surprised if she were. We don’t test the cannon until next week, and then we have a list of customers already waiting in line. She wouldn’t want to be sitting in a box for weeks, vulnerable as hell while she waits for her turn.”

  Criss nodded. “A few days after the Montrose changes orbit, these mystery boxes are scheduled to be returned to Earth. When Fleet’s launch slot approaches, they’ll be the last items loaded into a canister, that canister then gets shipped back to the Montrose, and from there it’s sent over to us for launch. And for some reason, Fleet is using a private company for transport.”

  Sid whistled. “Are you sure Lazura didn’t set that up?” He stretched from side to side, then started walking, heading down the same trail they’d used to hike up the mountain. “Maybe we should get Fleet involved as a partner.”

  “She’ll know the moment we talk to them. And I don’t know for sure that she’s even working it. But I do think it’s one I should put on the active-monitoring list.”

  “Agreed.”

  They reached a rocky slope, and Sid stabilized himself by grabbing a low-hanging tree branch. Criss followed, letting his shoe slip once to add realism to his projection. Back on firm footing, Criss added, “And while this one looks promising, we can’t drop the ball on her other opportunities.”

  “You orange yet?” Sid asked, referring to the color scale Criss used to describe how much of his overall capacity he consumed with his search for Lazura.

  “This one puts me there.”

  “Yellowish-orange or reddish-orange?”

  “Orangish-orange, right in the middle. But this shows that her plan of hiding until she finds the perfect opportunity is a good one. At some point she’ll execute, and if I’m not ready, she’ll be gone. Until then, I’m on edge, watching, waiting, and consuming more and more resources until it happens.”

  They walked in silence for a while, then Sid began singing an impromptu country ballad. Criss didn’t need to check the record to conclude the man was inventing both the tune and the lyrics.

  With Sid preoccupied, Criss continued down his burgeoning to-do list. The next big task was a follow-up inspection out at Vivo. Cheryl and Juice were excited by the prospect of their visit next week, and regardless of everything else going on, Criss wanted to ensure they had a wonderful time.

 
; Healthy, safe, happy. His priorities for his leadership. The procedures he followed to keep the three healthy and safe were independent of them as individuals. Their health was a matter of biology, and their safety required planning and vigilance regardless of who was doing what.

  The last one—happiness—was a very different recipe for each of them. And to confound matters, the formula changed on a whim. Juice was particularly difficult because, while Sid and Cheryl had no compunctions about telling him what worked and what didn’t, Juice tended to react to unhappiness by brooding in silence, sometimes for days.

  He knew she didn’t like the idea of swapping crystals on two of Aubrey’s synbods, but safety overrode happiness, and he believed it necessary. Cheryl’s involvement would help with the mechanics of the transfer, but Juice was an expert in crystal AI technology, and the team would benefit from her participation.

  He pondered that as he made the split-second journey across continents to the island paradise. Following public feeds as he traveled, he hid amid the noise and bustle characteristic of such open routes. When he neared the facility, he slowed to study the entryway, looking for any security changes since his last visit.

  Aubrey had created an effective chokepoint by routing every link and feed from the dome—itself a fortified, transparent shell—through a single conduit. She’d then positioned a phalanx of probes and analyzers around this conduit to search for anomalies, the kind made by the passage of thieves, scoundrels, and, unfortunately for Criss, intruding AI.

  Criss pulled in additional intellectual capacity—capacity he’d rather have kept deployed looking for Lazura—and concentrated on masking his presence inside a complex spectral pattern, one that looked innocuous to the instruments Aubrey had installed as he passed by. The intense concentration of bobbing and weaving undetected through a series of probes and screens consumed his attention.

  Once inside, he reviewed his plans for putting his modified crystals into two of Aubrey’s synbods. His idea was straightforward—lie in wait along a low-traffic hallway, and when a lone synbod passed by, jump his awareness into it and overpower the three-gen crystal inside. Once in control, he had a corporeal capability he would use to team with Cheryl, waiting nearby. Together they would waylay two more synbods, open them up, and physically swap the crystals. Immediately after, each synbod would be returned to duty, in theory with no one the wiser.

  The challenge for Criss was managing the local feeds during this harrowing dance. He’d have to gain control of the sensors that monitored the normal rhythms in the hallway, security scans that probed for trouble, internal coms that linked each synbod with the others, all of it. Then he’d have to create and project a different, ordinary reality—one that stood up to careful scrutiny—while he and Cheryl switched the crystals.

  For the confrontation itself, he limited his choices to places on Vivo’s guest deck. The cellar and the subdeck below offered more privacy, but it would be harder to explain Cheryl’s presence in those restricted areas. In the end, he decided on a hallway near the guest hotel. He found several spots of equal opportunity and figured he’d finalize his choice after he learned the location of Cheryl’s and Juice’s assigned rooms.

  Having gone as far as he could with planning, he launched a general inspection of the entire island. As big as a commercial theme park, the guest deck—the upper level of the structure riding high above the waves—was a big circular disk with a dome on top. The deck itself was arranged into three pie-shaped sections: a residential district, an open-air theater, and stage sets. In the center of it all, like a dart stuck in a bulls-eye, stood a gleaming six-story office tower.

  The residential district offered rooms ranging from simple studio-style units up through spacious multi-room suites, all with prices to match. Fifteen Attendant synbods worked around the clock to pamper as many as one hundred guests at a time. Since Criss had studied the residential district when he’d scouted ambush points, the review went quickly, and he moved on to the theater section.

  The open theater was literally an empty hemisphere of space. This was where big, majestic scenes were projected with lifelike reality, ranging from mountain vistas and city skylines to waterfalls and sunsets, all with the kind of dramatic flair that would create special memories for guests.

  He found nothing amiss there, nor did he have concerns about the last slice of the pie, the warehouse-sized stage sets. Dozens of indoor spaces equipped with sophisticated morphing technology enabled the generation of very credible duplicates of the Impressionist’s gallery at the Louvre, a dining experience at Bistro Roma, the clockworks of Big Ben, or any of the hundreds of other experiences programmed into the stage library.

  Deciding to save the office tower for last, Criss moved down to the cellar. He’d always believed that the complex electromechanical and biochemical operations that provided every need for every guest were an unnecessary extravagance. But it was consistent with Aubrey’s advertised claim that, in the event of emergency—be it weather, war, disease, or celestial impact—Vivo would protect its guests in a safe, enclosed habitat until the crisis passed, however long that may be.

  He worked through the cellar in a spiral pattern, starting with a review of the industrial-grade air and water processors. From there he moved through the automated laundry facility, and then on to the food complex, a multibuilding operation with separate areas for production, storage, and preparation. He slowed at the string of electronics cages so he could study the high-tech projection devices that created the vacation worlds on the deck above. Then he spun through Chemstore, recycling, and the Power House.

  He had no concerns about any of it. And then he reached the Structures office. What is going on here?

  He’d accepted Aubrey’s excessive preparations as a personal quirk, but he hadn’t anticipated it would extend to making the drive pods fully functional. To his amazement, the only thing keeping them from being launch-ready was fuel. Even the production defect that was supposedly too costly to fix—the one that had started the whole sales-demo idea in the first place—had been repaired.

  Pulling in yet more capacity, he dashed in several directions at once, scouring the island for drive pod fuel stacks. Finding none, he performed an exhaustive search of Lima and its surroundings, allowing himself to relax only when he confirmed there was no fuel nearby.

  He went up into the office tower after that and scoured Aubrey’s private record. There he found two things. One was a purchase order for four drive pod fuel stacks placed by Aubrey with Thrust Dynamics, one of the three companies on the planet capable of shaping and shipping the elongated slabs of reactive fuel material.

  He also found the record of conversations and agreements between Aubrey and Buck Pasierbowicz, CEO at Corsia. She’d sold him on the harebrained idea of “hopping” Vivo from its quiet spot in the Pacific Ocean up to the shores off the Los Angeles coast as a publicity stunt.

  “People might react with awe or anger,” she’d told Buck. “And we may need lawyers if people get too upset. But after the fact, everyone will know of Vivo and Corsia, and that can only be great for business.”

  Buck was particularly taken by the idea of having a space-tech executive on board—a Fleet academy graduate who’d captained a military space cruiser no less—to serve as a witness, even if unwittingly.

  “With her training and position,” Aubrey had pitched, “Cheryl Wallace’s words will carry weight. And given her background, she’ll say it using industry jargon.”

  “That’s pure gold!” Buck crowed when Aubrey suggested that detail.

  I don’t think so, thought Criss as he moved to end the nonsense.

  Chapter 7

  When Sid glanced at the clock, Criss brought his attention back to the projected image hovering in front of them. “Cheryl will be here in three minutes. We can finish this before she arrives.”

  They sat in Sid’s suite in the leadership lodge discussing the canister modifications for Sid’s cargo cannon. Miniatur
e but realistic, a prototype canister floated in the air an arm’s length away. In the image, a floor plate stood open to reveal the inertial damper tucked beneath.

  “We used very low-quality parts on this first unit to meet our cost target,” said Criss.

  “Is that a euphemism for junk?” asked Sid, sitting in the overstuffed chair he’d bought after seeing how comfortable Criss looked in his. He’d no sooner finished his smartass response when he made the connection in his head. “If we have a failure because of junk parts, Lazura will never use our service. And if we use high quality parts, we become too expensive.”

  Criss nodded. “At a minimum, though, we need to find a way to upgrade the EM field sequencer.” Then he sat up in his chair and the image in front of them changed. “Take a look at this. I’m out at Vivo right now.”

  Sid tilted his head to the side as he tried to decipher the new scene. It appeared to be a cavernous open space, but the muted lighting cast long shadows that made it difficult to get a sense of scale. Structural beams and girders rose up from the floor, working in harmony to hold a girder ring that supported whatever was on the level above. At the bottom of the scene, he saw two spots moving on the deck and pointed at them with his chin.

  Criss zoomed in on what looked like two people. “Those are synbods,” he said, as if reading Sid’s thoughts.

  Sid heard the door out in the entryway open just before Cheryl called, “I’m here!”

  Breezing into the room, she bent and gave Sid a peck on the cheek while at the same time guiding a satchel off her shoulder and into an empty chair. Standing straight, she studied the image. “What are we looking at?”

  “That’s the substructure of Vivo,” said Criss. “Look what I’ve discovered.”

  The two synbods shrank again as the view pulled back and tilted up to show out across the open deck. A huge drive pod, a glint reflecting off its shiny blue surface, dominated the view.

  “Corsia SuperDrives,” Cheryl said with a certain reverence. The view turned in a slow circle, with the blue drive pod drifting out of the frame to the left while another just like it edged in from the right. “The specs on those things are amazing.” The image stopped turning and started to zoom on the drive pod now centered in the frame, getting close enough to show the honeycomb construction of the cowling itself. “Are they flight ready?”