Ascension_Age Of Expansion_A Kurtherian Gambit Series

by Ell Leigh Clarke

  Slowly, Mercy began to straighten back up. Cautiously, she called, “Jack? You alright?”

  “I’m good,” the cameraman grunted. “You want to call the cops? I’m a little occupied.”

  “Y-yeah.” Mercy swallowed and fumbled for her communicator. “I’ll just—”

  The screen went black for a split second as the station cut the feed.

  For a few seconds, a stock emergency warning scrolled across the screen. When it changed again, it switched over to a frazzled young man holding a handheld manual camera out at arm’s length. He looked as if he was severely regretting every decision he had ever made that led him to his career and his current situation. It took him a few seconds to realize he should probably be speaking.

  “Ah—” He cleared his throat, and the footage began to jitter slightly as he started jogging. “This is Corey Zerin, of IQ News. We apologize for the interruption. Normally I’m a weatherman, but I have a camera and I’m not in the field, so—”

  He paused, looking over his shoulder as an alarm started to go off and light began to reflect off of the side of a building. He swallowed as he faced the camera again.

  “Um—If I had to guess, a looter has tripped a silent alarm. Some businesses—if they haven’t upgraded their alarm systems recently—have alarms that stayed active—shit.” He cut himself off emphatically and ducked into an alley between two buildings as the looter sprinted past, arms laden with stolen goods. Canned goods and gas; food that didn’t need to be cooked and fuel for an antique generator in a house that had gone dark.

  Corey stayed in the alley, but he kept his camera on the officer that went sprinting after the thief.

  Slowly, Corey turned his camera to his face again. “It’s, um…” He cleared his throat and peered out of the alley. Once the coast was clear, he stepped back out and began heading in the direction the thief and officer had come from. “It’s become a common occurrence in…light of recent events,” he explained haltingly.

  He slowed to a halt once he was standing at the scene of the crime. He turned the camera to face the shop front. The door was hanging open, twitching erratically as it tried to slide closed again, but it would only get halfway closed before jerking open again. The glass from the door’s paneling was littered across the sidewalk.

  Coming from behind the camera, Corey’s voice was slightly muffled as he said, “All things considered, this is a mild incident.” He turned the camera back around to look into the lens. “We urge you to be careful and to stay safe. If you haven’t been quite as impacted by the blackout, reach out to your neighbors who have. If you have to, look to your closest public shelter. If we hold together, we can come out the other side of this in one piece.”

  He looked sharply to the side when he heard shouting, before he turned his attention back to his camera again. He took a breath and sighed it out.

  “This has been Corey Zerin with IQ News. Be safe.” He reached towards the camera to turn it off.

  The emergency message began scrolling once again a second later.

  Downtown Spire, Estaria

  A police siren screamed past the end of the alley as Paige and Maya jumped out of the pod. It was early evening in Spire, and a red glow lit the sky above. Normally Paige would think it was romantic and atmospheric, but there was a strange tension that seemed to fill the air like static electricity, and she couldn’t seem to shake the feeling of foreboding.

  Maya pulled up her wrist holo as the pod door closed gently behind her and then lifted off to a safer place in the upper atmosphere to await its recall.

  Paige wrapped her arms around herself against the cold air, shifting the bag on her shoulder awkwardly. “Do we know which way yet?”

  Maya shook her head. “Not yet. I think with the holo network going down, the location finder is struggling to orient us.”

  She ambled down the alley towards the main street to find a street name, her head down, monitoring any changes on the holo map location finder.

  Paige ran her gaze up to the top of the buildings that encased them in a temporary anonymity. “Surely there must be a way for us to do this manually…” she posited.

  Maya rolled her lips together before biting the lower one on one side. She opened her holoscreen wider and turned it, glancing up for a street name on the side of the nearest building. She sighed in frustration. “Seems no one needs street names in this city anymore,” she commented, looking up to the worn, illegible plaque that would have otherwise given them a clue.

  Paige shuffled over to view the map with her. “Let’s try this way,” she suggested, pointing up the street. “The size of that road relative to this one looks like maybe this might lead to where we want to be.” She paused and cocked her head. “Or it could be completely the opposite direction… But at least then we’ve narrowed it down to one of two directions.”

  Maya smiled. “We need to start somewhere, I guess,” she agreed.

  The two friends headed off down the street walking hurriedly, heads down, keeping a close eye on their wrist holos to make sure they were going in the right direction.

  Suddenly there was a crash and a bang, then the sound of an explosion. From the absence of any fire or visual clues, Maya guessed it was probably a street over.

  “What was that?” Paige asked, her pace slowing, leaving Maya to keep striding ahead.

  Maya turned back briefly and beckoned for her to hurry up. “Could be anything,” she hissed. “Come on, we’ve got to keep going. It’s our only way of stopping this.”

  Paige hurried to catch up to Maya, and the pair pressed on.

  Once they had a rhythm down and Paige was fully caught up, Maya started talking in a low voice so as not to draw attention to them. “I noticed when I was covering stories of riots or protests, when things would get tense, all kinds of natural order would go out of the window. Literally. The first noticeable thing is that people start looting, and shop windows get broken. Basic vandalism. Then they start stockpiling, so there is chaos at fuel stations and gas stores.”

  She glanced around furtively, keeping an awareness of other people that might be around them and therefore a potential threat. “Never thought I’d see it happening in the capital though.” She shook her head. “We have an expectation that because we live in multicultural cities with advanced technology and an eye on interplanetary relations such that they are, that we think that as a group we’re beyond such basic primal behaviors. It’s almost like people would watch these news reports from the smaller townships on the other side of the planet and think that we are so different.” She pressed her lips together grimly.

  Paige remained quiet, taking it all in, her mind churning over the new reality that she was experiencing in a city that she had loved so much.

  Maya glanced again at her holo. “If we’re heading in the right direction, then by my calculations if we turn left at the end of this street, there’s going to be one of those junction boxes somewhere on the right. Probably disguised next to the playing field, or something. If there is no playing field there then we’ve come the wrong way and need to double back.”

  Paige acknowledged the comment with a quiet grunt and kept walking as fast as they both could.

  A crowd was assembling just up ahead of them.

  Mostly blue Estarians, they seemed preoccupied with something else, something between them. As they got closer, Paige and Maya could hear shouting. Keeping their heads down, it was difficult to determine what was going on, but intuitively they both knew that they wanted to steer clear.

  As they came level with the crowd, it seemed that there was an absence of cars going past, creating a feeling like there was no barrier between them and the angry people. Maya grabbed Paige’s arm and pulled her around the corner as soon as they could, leaving the crowd behind them on the other side of the road. As they continued to hurry, Maya kept looking back, making sure that they weren’t being followed. Neither one of them wanted to be dragged into something that they didn�
�t have either the time or the guns for.

  “There’s the playing field,” Paige pointed out, her cognitive ability seemingly uncompromised by the danger they were facing in this new environment.

  “And there’s the junction box,” Maya added, nodding discreetly in the direction of a painted metal comms box off to one side, twenty feet from the main building on the property. “We need a way over that fence though,” she added, her eyes scanning the length of it for a gate or access point of some sort.

  “Is there anything on the map?” Paige asked.

  Maya shook her head. “No, only this sports facility building, which has its own carport and everything. I guess we could go through that way, although there is an increased chance of us being stopped if it’s not open to the public.”

  Paige checked the time. “Unlikely at this hour,” she said. “Plus if there were a game on, there would be far more cars and people around on this street.”

  Maya agreed, looking for a lower point in the fence. “Okay, plan B,” she announced quietly. Quickly she reached into the backpack Paige was carrying and then zipped it back up again. Keeping her hands low and by her sides so as to disguise what was in her hand, she and Paige crossed the road. They continued to walk for a short way along the side of the fence.

  She glanced back to make sure that there was no one around. Then she stopped. “Keep a lookout,” she told Paige. “And let me know if anyone’s coming.”

  And with that she bent down and started clipping at the wires of the fence.

  Paige, her eyes wide, glanced up and down the street and then parked her back against the fence to maintain a better view of both directions. “How did you know that it wasn’t secured? That there wasn’t a force field or anything?”

  Maya suddenly stopped and looked up at her friend. “Oh,” she said simply, a glimmer of humor flicking across her otherwise serious face. “I hadn’t thought of that,” she confessed, relaxing into a cheeky snigger.

  Paige started to chuckle too. “I guess all this time on Gaitune has got you out of practice!” she noted.

  Maya agreed. “Yeah, when I was working down here and always doing stupid shit for a story, risking everything just for a piece of evidence to bring some scumbag to justice.”

  Paige narrowed her eyes as she watched Maya work. “And how many times did you get caught?”

  Maya shrugged. “Once or twice, I guess. But one time I had leverage over the person who caught me, and the other time my story ended up eclipsing their misdemeanor and I got away with a slap on the wrist.” She paused, wire clippers in hand, as if remembering. “Actually the detective who arrested me seemed really sympathetic to the story I was chasing, and probably bent the official line so as to not charge me for anything.”

  She finished clipping at the fence and pushed the wire inwards so as to create a small door that they could crawl through. “After you,” she said, waving for Paige to crawl through ahead of her.

  “Takk Fyrir,” Paige cooed as she squatted down and then crawled through onto the grass beyond.

  Moments later the pair were both through and Maya was replacing the fencing that she had bent so that it wasn’t obvious that there was a gap. Paige started ambling towards the junction box and carefully unlatched the door to get it open and ready for Maya to perform her miracle.

  “I’ve no idea what I’m even looking at,” Paige muttered, her eyes scanning the array of switches and network cables and various devices all laid out in the panel in front of her.

  Maya joined her, pulling up her wrist holo. “Okay, so Bourne said we needed to put this nodal adapter in parallel with the main node of this part of the network. He drew me a diagram.” Maya took a moment flicking between the diagram on her screen and the array of chaos in front of her.

  Paige noticed her squinting. “Here, let me help,” she said, opening up a bright holoscreen to illuminate the panel.

  Maya started working pulling at cables and arranging things before she started putting together connections and making the adjustments needed. “Thank goodness the holos are opening at least,” she mentioned. “Maybe you should see if you can get a call through to Director Bates now. If she is in a better area and her holo is connecting now, you might have a chance…”

  “Ah, good thinking!” Paige exclaimed, pulling up a secondary screen to make the call as Maya continued to work. Again though, the screen remained dark. “Nope, it’s not working.”

  “Okay, let me just do this and then you can try again,” Maya muttered, connecting the device that they brought from Brock’s lab. Paige watched in amazement as Maya worked.

  Finally, Maya flicked another switch and pulled up a new holoscreen. “Bourne? Bourne? Are you there?”

  Bourne’s voice sounded in both of their earpieces. “I am indeed. Congratulations, you’ve established a connection. Stay on the line for a few minutes while I reformat the datastream that Oz already had here. I suspect he has some private servers where he collects the data before uploading it to Gaitune. Once I have found those, I’ll be able to start using the processing power over there to do the analysis that we need to perform.”

  “Okay great,” Maya agreed. She turned to Paige. “Wanna try that call to Director Bates again now?”

  Paige pulled up a holoscreen again, and this time the call connected.

  Director Bates answered. “Hello?”

  “Director Bates, this is Paige and Maya from Gaitune. We’re on the surface, and we’re working to try and restore the holo connection.”

  “Oh, thank goodness,” Carol Bates exclaimed, genuine relief in her voice. “You have no idea of the problems it’s causing. I’ve got my best agents trying to pinpoint the problem and unravel the hack, but we’re essentially flying blind and most of our holoconnections have been dead all day.”

  “We’ve got one of our guys on it,” Paige explained, “but we could do with your help on something else in the meantime.”

  “Of course, anything I can do, given we don’t have proper connection at the office.” Just then Paige heard chatter and a police siren in the background, suggesting that Bates wasn’t even at the office at that point.

  “We think that Jennifer Etang was involved in this hack,” Paige explained slowly and clearly over the audio connection.

  “But she’s in prison,” Bates responded.

  “Yes, but before she went to prison she uploaded something onto the network, remember?”

  “I do. Unfortunately. I’ve only just managed to get two of my best agents to stop investigating what she did. The patch, whatever it was, didn’t leave any trace that my best people could find. But there was something about it that they just couldn’t leave alone…”

  “And quite rightly so, it seems now,” Paige confirmed. “We think that it was sleeping, dormant after it established itself at key points in the network, and that all this time it’s been waiting to be activated.”

  “By the Northern Clan?”

  “Exactly…”

  “So what do you need?”

  “Well, Etang took over from someone else. So we knew that position was key. But there was someone else who you managed to keep alive, wasn’t there? Someone else that you had intel suggesting was at risk because of his position.”

  “Yes, that’s right. Suedermann was the name, if I remember correctly.”

  “Okay, well Maya and I need to talk to him. He probably knows something about this virus, which would make him a target. He knows something that would make it prudent for them to try and take him out. If we can find out what it is that he knows, then we might have a better chance at stopping this blackout.”

  There was a brief pause on the line as Carol absorbed the information. “I understand,” she confirmed. “He’s in a safe house somewhere. Even I don’t have the address. But if you give me a little bit of time, I can find out where it is and send it over our secure server.”

  “Sounds like a plan. We’ll go straight to the safe house from here, but
we can also do with someone talking to Jennifer Etang.”

  “I can have one of the agents do that, and then meet you at the safe house.”

  “Excellent,” Paige replied, watching Maya nod her agreement. “We’ll meet your agent there.”

  “Good. It will be Alisha Montella.”

  “Super. Thank you, Director. We’ll be in touch as soon as we hear anything more.”

  “Oh, just one more thing before you go…” the Director added.

  “Yes?”

  “Molly. I’m assuming she’s knee-deep in trying to stop the fleet from advancing…”

  “That’s correct,” Paige confirmed, not wanting to give away too many details, not least because it was her mother she was talking to.

  “Is she in harm’s way?”

  Paige hesitated, looking at Maya to help her make a decision as to whether to disclose what they knew or not. Maya merely widened her eyes in sympathy as to the difficulty of the situation that Paige was suddenly in.

  “She, er…is with the best people, the best crew, who have all got her back. She’s doing what she believes in. You would be proud of her,” she added.

  “That means she is in danger,” Carol confirmed, the life in her voice now absent. “It’s okay, Paige, I understand your position. I’ve been there many times myself. Thank you for telling me the truth.”

  “Of course, Director,” she answered. “I’ll be in touch when I hear anything else. Rest assured.”

  “Thank you, Paige. And good luck.”

  The call disconnected.

  Paige and Maya exchanged a glance before Maya started packing up the tools and pieces of wire that she cut out of the network junction box. “I guess we should get moving,” Maya said, glancing towards the street. “The light’s failing and I don’t wanna be on the streets when it gets completely dark.”

  Paige agreed and the two of them finished packing up the tools as quickly as they could before retracing their steps out of the playing field arena and back onto the streets to the nearest alley where they could call their pod down discreetly.