by L B Garrison
A smattering of crystal carriages and civilians in brightly colored clothes populated the boulevards. Mandy ran her hands along the sleek lines of her black and green EC uniform. She hadn’t changed it since Rin had the body. This wouldn’t do.
Concentrating, she forced the uniform to flow into jeans and a blouse. Something else she had learned by rummaging around in Rin’s head. She walked to the ledge and dropped to the street in an adjacent alley. Tension drained from her body and mind as she finally let the stealth field ebb.
A bass beat pulsed through the wooden deck. The semitransparent membrane separating the chill night air from the warm bar parted.
The band from the hologram played in one corner. Peacock feathers and glittering harlequin masks adorned the walls, while swirling emerald lights flickered around the floating amethyst tables. The air was laden with the aroma of whisky and sandalwood.
The bar was a maze of interconnected rooms. Quivering with anticipation, Mandy wound her way around the tables of rowdy groups and quiet couples. Had she misread the location?
“Mandy!”
Slender arms draped across Mandy’s shoulders and a slight body pressed against her back. A puff of beer breath washed over her. Mandy turned, sliding in the clumsy embrace.
Bailey squinted up at her. “You’re in a spot of trouble, aren’t you? Everyone’s looking. You shouldn’t be here.”
“That’s probably classified information and you’re drunk, aren’t you?”
“Off. My. Arse. Well—I’m working on it at the very least. And yes it’s classified. I’ve been stalking you. Virtually. You’re cute.”
Mandy sighed. Not the reunion she was hoping for. “It’s a bad time for you to be drinking.”
“This world’s ending. The space elevator is down and we’re all stuck here. Alcohol was invented for such times. Also, this is where I first met Cisco, so there’s the nostalgia element that goes so well with ale.” Bailey tapped her head. “Shh. No one else knows how bad it is, but I see the prediction models coming together. Ale is the only way to keep the data out of my head.”
She glanced down and whispered. “Besides, Cisco left because he thinks he can make a difference and with everyone else gone, I was feeling abandoned.”
Mandy drew Bailey’s attention with a touch to her cool cheek. “I don’t abandon friends, Bailey. Where is your table?”
Bailey’s eyes slid to an amethyst slab, stacked with beer steins beside a silver-speckled wall. “There. But it’s so far.”
“I’ll help you.”
Bailey smiled. “Brilliant.”
Mandy half guided, half dragged Bailey through the swirls of lavender glitter on the redwood floor and plopped her onto a chair.
Mandy slipped onto the overstuffed seat beside her. The patrons in the sparsely populated bar kept to themselves. The EC might be looking for her, but it didn’t seem to be public knowledge yet. She gestured vaguely at Bailey. “Can you do something about your condition?”
Bailey pouted. “But I worked so hard. It takes a good bit to overcome my nanomechs.”
“This is about Alex.”
Bailey gripped the handle of a half-filled stein and stared into its dark depths. “I was cheeky with her, but I always liked Alex. I suppose, I could do with a spot of discipline, as she said.”
“I’m going to get her back.”
Bailey frowned. “I’m not that drunk. You don’t even know where she is.”
Mandy rubbed the fingers of her right hand together. “That card you gave me. You made part of it with nanomechs you took from Alex. The nanomechs are tied together, right?”
Bailey looked up from her mug. “Quantum entangled.”
“Can you use them to find her?”
Bailey stared, focused somewhere beyond Mandy.
“Don’t zone out, I need you.”
Bailey gave a wobbling nod and closed her eyes. She let go of her drink. Eight steins dissolved into the table, the pewter smearing into the clear purple until no gray remained.
“Now?” Mandy asked.
“Patience, love. I’m purging a lot of alcohol.” Bailey took Mandy’s hand like a palm reader. “This is bad.”
“What?”
“She’s in Artemis. The EC fleet arrives in four hours and the attack begins.”
“I didn’t know it was so soon.”
Bailey leaned back, balancing her chair on two legs. “Aside from drinking, I’ve been skulking about the EC grid. Artemis is covered with a stealth field and the Kinderen is clearly doing something major. The EC is going to stop whatever that is by any means necessary. They’ve gotten permission from the Orion Senate to burn Demeter, if need be. Even Fischer doesn’t know that. He does know Admiral Pillado wants you for the battle and he is helping the EC search.”
Mandy could feel the other ships shifting into the city proper. Fortunately, she seemed better equipped for hide and seek than the others.
Bailey watched Mandy, her eyes focused. Mandy didn’t want to involve her, but what else could she do? “I have to get Alex out before the attack, and there may be something I can do about the Kinderen.”
“Even if we recover her body she’ll still be part of the Kinderen.”
Mandy dug into her pocket and held up the Tamashii. It spun at the end of its chain, glinting in the green light. Locked inside lay a copy of a human mind. “This is Alex’s.”
Bailey stared at the Tamashii. “Cisco is in the military district, helping set up the defense. I’ll let him know.”
“I don’t want any more people involved than necessary,” Mandy said, trying to be firm without hurting Bailey’s feelings.
“When you quantum skip, does what you hold come with you?” Bailey asked.
“I don’t know. What difference does it make?”
“How are you going to get Alex out of the war zone?”
“I hadn’t thought that far ahead,” Mandy admitted.
Bailey crossed her arms over her chest. “Cisco wants to help too. He is quite the insistent one. We’re coming along.”
Mandy sat back in her chair and put the Tamashii away. How had she lost control so quickly? “Okay, there’s no time to argue.”
“What do you need us to do?”
“We need to access one of the networked military quantum computers.”
Bailey dropped her chair back on its four legs with a bang. “Is that all? With the Kinderen on the move, they’ll be on their highest alert level. The remote connections may even be physically blocked. We might do it from inside the military perimeter—if we could get inside. That’s muckle of power. What do you intend?”
“We need to hack a very sophisticated machine,” Mandy said.
“What machine?”
“Me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
A
tropos touched the imprints in the muddy ground. The importance of understanding the prey could not be understated. Whether driven by a fragment of Rin’s personality or the memories of Mandy Clementine, Rin’s avatar sought the humans it had spent time with. Atropos intended to exploit that weakness to the fullest.
The shadow of Atropos’ hull passed overhead. Atropos shifted probabilities. The forest faded and she stood on her upper deck once more. She banked toward Persephone’s Landing.
Night winds swept rain into the base, forming ice on her hull and in her hair. Atropos didn’t bother shielding herself from the drizzle or the random gusts. She focused on the cold within. Jazz-mir lay beyond her reach. Rin would pay for that loss and a lifetime of wrongs. Pillado’s orders gave her the license to do it.
A presence, human, but changed, formed behind her. A tingling flush of anger quickened Atropos’ pulse. It was never far below the surface. Perhaps a taste of revenge would fill the void, though it never had before.
Blue virtual fire swirled around Atropos. She turned. “You are not who I expected to find.”
Alex put her hands out. “I was quite careful not to harm Jazz-mir
’s mind, but she had to be removed. Under her influence, you will never reach your potential. I have a proposal and she wouldn’t have allowed you to consider it.”
Atropos smiled. “Take your time and make your case. You have until I kill you.”
Atropos spun on her axis. Centrifugal force sent Alex tumbling towards a mall a hundred feet below. Atropos tracked the falling body, firing on her with mass drivers and gamma ray lasers.
The Kinderen threw out a probability field. Explosions bloomed on the rooftops as deflected shell fragments ravaged the buildings below. The human figure vanished into the clouds of smoke and debris. This hybrid wouldn’t be so easy to destroy. Good. It was better to savor vengeance than finish it in a single bite.
Swooping down on the shopping center, Atropos jumped off the side of her hull and plummeted through the flames and black smoke. She opened a hole in the roof with a pulse of muddled probabilities. With a crack, she shattered the rose-colored marble and stood among blazing gowns in an inferno that was once a bridal shop. She walked among the flames, wilting flowers and bitter smoke. Lifelike mannequins withered and whimpered on the floor, their skin blistering.
Alex spoke from the swirling fires, the direction of her voice ever-changing as she teleported around the room. “If you do manage to destroy this body, it will inflict no significant harm to me and your human masters won’t thank you.”
Atropos tracked the voice. “No, but Rin, or whoever inhabits her body, has some connection to Alex. You are the irreplaceable original body and she will mourn you. If I cannot have Jazz-mir, she will not have Alex.”
“Is it actually revenge for Jazz-mir that angers you?” Alex asked. “I think the answer lies deeper.”
Atropos deciphered the pattern. She skipped thirty feet to the left and her hand found Alex’s throat in the dark. She slammed the woman to the marble in a strike meant to end Alex, but the Kinderen’s shields blazed. Marble vaporized and they dropped into a sports utility dealership a floor below. The walls crumbled as the building slowly collapsed. Alex teleported away. The ceiling failed and fire rained down on the civilian T30s.
“It should have been you,” Alex said.
Atropos clenched her fists. Heat rushed across her skin that had nothing to do with the fire. She targeted the area around her with her heavy guns. “Time to step into the light.”
Hypervelocity rounds poured down. The building and vehicles were shredded in the bombardment, dust and metal scrap tore through the air. Even the fires were snuffed out by the violence. Atropos didn’t expect it to harm the Kinderen, but to reveal it. If the strike caused some collateral human casualties, so be it.
Alex stood to the right in the maelstrom of debris, encased in a shield. “You were the first.”
Atropos’ pulse pounded in her ears. “Yes, I was the first of the second-generation weaponized AIs. The first AI built to limit Mandy’s influence. The AI meant to be the Mark II. It doesn’t change what you did. ”
“But Admiral Pillado didn’t believe in you.”
Atropos’ shield burned. The stone floor crackled and popped. “Father thought I was unstable, but you know that, do you not?”
Alex nodded. “You were denied the upgrade, because they thought you were weak.”
“No,” Atropos whispered. “Because they thought I was dangerous. They were right.”
The building shuddered. Atropos rained hypervelocity rounds down from above. Ripples flowed across Alex’s shield, like a pond pelted with stones. Atropos closed the distance between them in a flash and brought both fists down as gamma ray lasers struck the shield from above. The shield popped, throwing Alex back. She struggled to stand.
Atropos kicked the hulk of a civilian T30. The heavy vehicle skidded across the rubble, pinning Alex against a wall. She coughed blood across the hood.
“Your time is up.”
Alex’s fingers brushed her lips and she stared at the red stain on her fingertips. “Human pain has such interesting variants.”
Atropos held her hand out to the side. A churning plasma bolt burned into existence. “You’re in for a treat.”
Alex rested her elbows on the T30’s hood. “Rin was next, but they over-compensated. Too much Mandy. She didn’t want the power of life and death. Razor. Trident. They’re too tame as well. Mother has potential.”
Impatience rose like an itch across Atropos’ skin. She swung the plasma bolt to face Alex. “You grow tiresome.”
“Remember the garden? You were just a child then.”
Ice flowed through Atropos, quenching the fire. Why had she done it? To gain some sense of power in a life she couldn’t control? Jazz-mir’s face had actually paled when she realized the size of the collection.
“Rin found them didn’t she? All those poor dead animals. I only have Razor’s second-hand account. Why did Rin say she told Jazz-mir?”
Atropos couldn’t shake the expression on Jazz-mir’s face. Anger, shock, disappointment all in one. “Rin said I needed help.”
“You don’t believe that, do you? She did it to drive a wedge between you and Jazz-mir.”
Atropos’ shallow breathing drowned out the fires raging above. “I would have done anything for Jazz-mir.”
“Rin didn’t matter. Sooner or later, Jazz-mir would have rejected you, because you would never be good enough. It’s the sort of truth you know, but can never acknowledge. In the depths of your soul, where you refuse to see, you hate the one you love and that conflict is the well of your ire. ”
Atropos’ skin flush with dizzying heat and the plasma bolt blazed. “I’m going to kill Alex and then the EC will come for you in Artemis.”
The plasma cast stark shadows across Alex’s face. “Or I can give you the power you’ve always wanted and a Jazz-mir who will accept your greatness as I do. You don’t have to change for her.”
The plasma sputtered. A tingle seeped across the back of Atropos’ neck and across her shoulders.
“The attack on Einstein-Rosen was not a simple act of destruction,” Alex said. “It was a raid to gather resources and information. I secured the Mark II technology.”
Atropos smiled. The little masters had lost their prize. Her hand dipped slightly as she calculated the myriad possibilities.
Alex touched her lips again and examined her fingers. “Ah, the bleeding has stopped and I see I have your attention.”
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
M
andy ran up the steps two at a time until she reached the landing at the top. The band started a new set. Bass pulsed through the steps and shook the walls of the stairwell. She grabbed the door knob. It wouldn’t turn. “It’s locked, but I can break it, easy.”
“Hang on a minute.” Bailey leaned against the wall and panted. “All right.” She swatted Mandy on the shoulder.
“Ow.”
“No need to break Zach’s door. When Alex and I stayed here on holiday, he lent us the code. I highly doubt it’s changed.” Bailey squeezed next to Mandy and pressed her index finger against the door. A marigold-color glimmered around her fingertip. She traced a smiley face on the door.
Mandy took the moment to finish simulations on the Phobos base defenses. If she concentrated, her stealth field should get them past the sensor net, but she would have to be near perfect at a skill she just learned. The orange glow lit Bailey’s face. So many people depended on Mandy. That responsibility pressed against her in the crowded shadows, making each breath an effort.
The smiley face winked and faded. The knob clicked against Mandy’s palm.
Puffing, Bailey shuffled to a lower step. “Glyph-lock. Though a smiley face is a bit like using PASSWORD for your password.”
Mandy twisted her hull out of the elsewhere and hovered as low to the bar’s roof as the surrounding buildings would allow. She turned the knob. Icy wind drove the warm air from the stairwell and yanked at the door. Sleet stung her face. She pushed the door closed after Bailey.
Bailey shivered and yelled above t
he storm, “Where’s the rest of you?”
Mandy leaned forward. “It’s in a stealth field, about fifty feet straight up. Climb on.”
“That doesn’t seem very dignified.”
Mandy squinted at gray clouds and shivered. “I can’t fly. Well, I don’t think I can fly. So, we have to jump. Either on my back or tucked under my arm. Your choice, but hurry up, I’m freezing stuff off I’d rather keep.” At least her clothes seemed impervious to water.
“Oh, bloody this and that.” Bailey draped her hands on Mandy’s shoulders.
Mandy put her hands out to the side. “Legs too. I don’t want you to fall.”
Bailey jumped and straddled Mandy around the waist with her legs. “I haven’t done this since I was a tot with Uncle Rupert. That didn’t end well, just so you know.”
“Here we go.” Mandy clutched Bailey’s legs and jumped. They arced through the biting wind.
Bailey wrapped her arms around Mandy’s throat and sucked her breath in with a hiss until they landed on Mandy’s port wing.
Mandy altered the likelihood of rain striking her hull, forming a dry bubble around them. Then she gained altitude and pivoted towards the base. “Okay. You can let go.”
Bailey’s breath was warm against Mandy’s ear. “Move away from the edge first. I shan’t repeat the Rupert incident from this height.”
Mandy walked to the center line of her hull.
Bailey slid off and paced in a circle, inspecting the hexagonal pattern on the deck and tracing the edges of Mandy’s structure with her eyes. It was like being fourteen and scampering between the showers and the dressing cubicles after gym, judging, comparing and being judged. Mandy hunched her shoulders and crossed her arms over her chest.
Bailey stopped and knelt over a black strip where water droplets sizzled and danced. She spread her fingers in the steam that rose from the plate to warm her hands, using Mandy’s thermal radiator as a person might a T30 or any other tool. “So, this is you, then.”
Mandy’s hull glided from the shore across the water, hovering inches above the surface and sending ripples through the orange reflection of the glowing clouds. “Yeah, it's me.”