She’d done it. Found her home. Her heart had always known it was gone, yet tears filled her eyes and snailed down her face. She wiped them away, hoping Baz and Hoss hadn’t seen.
From the following records, CESS had left the planetocide business long ago. They were still corrupt, their fingers black with devious operations – sex trade, crime, military dark operations, government and individual blackmail. A veritable mountain of evil. Money made the galaxy go round. Greed oiled the wheels.
Ember gulped. What could she do?
Leave their employ and walk away.
Was that enough?
No. Hells no. She wanted to grind her teeth on their bones, flamethrower their testicles, laser their eyeballs in their sockets, and make sure they never ever did this again.
Anger, retribution and sheer bloody-minded pissed-offedness was howling and twisting through every dark and righteous cell in her damned body.
How could she just walk from this?
She’d thought the cybermonks were deserving of punishment? CESS needed destruction rained down upon their bloodied souls.
She couldn’t walk, no. She simply couldn’t. Love, being happy, it had to wait. She had shit to do.
Of course it wouldn’t be simple. CESS wasn’t one man or one head. CESS was a snake-pit of writhing tentacles, and every one of them needed lopping off at the genital level. Using blunt scissors. Grrrr.
If Baz could get a signal from Leaf, maybe her data knife could get one too. Maybe something nearby was boosting the signals?
It was. A device underground, near where the library had been, was boosting still. Automatic perhaps, it didn’t matter why or how.
She encrypted her message, triggered an emergency burst, waited. Seconds later a CESS starship replied.
They were coming for her. Coming to get that DSU she’d said she had. That very important DSU.
Bait.
ETA 2.2 hours.
If she survived this, she’d beg forgiveness off the guys. If. If they still wanted her. If she wasn’t in pieces or in prison or persona non grata on a million planets.
While she’d uncovered this foulness, Baz had received a reply from Leaf.
She nodded amiably when asked if she was ready to go off-planet. She agreed to a discussion about their future when Hoss and Baz pinned her down to talking some time soon.
They smiled and she smiled back. Gods, what was she doing to them?
This had to be done. Had to be!
Since the Leaf’s ETA was two hours after hers, she could say anything. She was just going to be sad if she couldn’t come back to them.
A note, she had to leave them one.
Her hands were shaking again, and since this time she needed to write it on paper, it made for a messy farewell note, spotted with tears. Her anger was still at fire-and-brimstone level and she was surprised the paper didn’t turn to ash beneath her fingers. Paper. The one thing she blessed the Xatar for was their obsession with the old ways. Apart from their robotic armor, and their weaponry, their star ships...okay maybe preferring to use pen and paper was a bit daft.
The Xatar always had been daft. A pity CESS hadn’t managed to planetocide them.
Ember pinned the note to the pack and walked away from Hoss and Baz, pretending she was merely walking for recreational sake. There’d been no signs of anything alive here in the smoking ruins so they allowed her to go quite a distance.
Incoming. Await transport, scrolled in red down her retina. Incoming.
The starship’s little golden emissary vessel shafted down through the clouds, like a communication handed down by the gods, and landed in a cloud of dust and pulverized building. By the time Hoss and Baz were running in her direction she was entering the hatch.
As it took off, she watched them jog to a halt and shrink into tiny dots. She didn’t wave. She fully intended to return to them. Waving was a goodbye.
She prayed they wouldn’t hate her for this.
Think positive and plan well was a CESS employee primary imperative.
She would live and come back to them.
She only had a few thousand highly trained security guards and soldiers to outwit, as well as AI defenses to breach. Luckily, she had just the right tool.
CESS was a spiderweb and she was mama spider, coming home...toting all those flamethrowery, testicle-eliminating things. Okay, her metaphors were getting out of hand but fuck she was so angry.
They’d killed her planet, her parents, turned her into an orphan, made her life a bitter, hollow thing compared to what it could have been, and all of them would suffer, because really this was what any reasonable girl with any courage and a cataclysm virus would do.
Chapter 27
While Hoss was still staring up at the golden shuttle that’d picked up Ember, Baz trotted to the black pack he’d seen her leaning over earlier. He’d thought her behavior odd, but then Verd was such a mess he figured it was that. That she was sad or needed space to think. So while he and Hoss had been scanning for survivors, she was supposed to be reading the DSU and then what? What had she done?
He read the note, let his hand flop to his side. Hoss came up behind him and snatched it away.
“What the fuck?” Hoss sounded incredulous. “What is she doing?”
Baz scrubbed his hands across his face then through his short hair. He listened as Hoss read the note out loud, still in that slightly high-pitched voice. Kinda funny for an orc, if he didn’t know the whys.
But already he knew most of the words.
I love you both, so, SO much. I figured it out. Came to terms with why I’ve been so awful about it.
I love you. I do. I do. I wanted to hug you and tell you this but you’d have stopped me.
Please believe me when I say I’m torn. I think I’ve fucked up us, our relationship. Maybe I don’t deserve you two but I have to do this.
She’d underlined that last part.
I read the DSU and it told me something I’ve been looking for all my life – where my home planet was. My home. Who destroyed it.
CESS did. That’s right. The company I worked for killed my world. They’ve done so many terrible things, and I think I can take them down.
I’ll be back.
If you hate me, I’ll understand.
Love, Ember
XXXXXXX
PS You might want to destroy this. It’s the one bit of physical evidence that will say what I did. Am going to do. This is not going to be pretty.
Finally. Proof that CESS wasn’t a squeaky-clean company. His days of being a mute had muffled his old existence and the rage he’d once felt toward CESS wasn’t there. He was still totally on board with taking them down, just not with Ember doing it.
“Fuck!” Hoss screamed then threw the note in the air. As it fluttered down, Baz caught it, then he stuffed it in his mouth and chewed.
“What are you doing?” Hoss thrust out his hand. “I want it. I don’t care what she said. If she dies it might be all I have left of her.”
Very deliberately, Baz swallowed. “Then let’s make sure she doesn’t fucking die. I’m following her up there.” He pulled up his retinal screen and ordered the Leaf to get down here ASAP. Not that she wasn’t already going fast as possible but he needed to do something.
Hoss was still swearing at the sky, probably at Ember’s vanished ass.
“I’ve told Leaf. I’m getting on it and you are too. You’re an orc, aren’t you? Do you leave your mate to get things done by herself? Leave her to die?”
Hoss shook his head, scowling hard enough to carve grooves in his ugly orc face. “I’m half-orc, like you’re half man. I feel like hitting you but I won’t...because you’re right.”
“Good! That note’s going to give me indigestion.” He rubbed his stomach, grimaced.
Hoss looked skyward again. “When we catch her I am going to...”
He could hear Hoss’s teeth grinding. He almost smiled. He was afraid to imagine everything that could g
o wrong with Ember’s little crusade of revenge. They had to save her. Not just because he loved her.
They had to succeed at this because he was dying to know what Hoss intended to do to her afterward. Spank her butt? Fuck her until she begged them to stop? That probably made him a sick man...cyborg. One of those.
Chapter 28
Ember lay back in her seat and played some death-punk orchestral music as the shuttle tore through the atmosphere of Omm then headed outward. Somewhere in the Omm system, a CESS starship waited for her to deliver the DSU which they obviously wanted. There’d be backups, of course. CESS wasn’t rudderless or leaderless.
But this, this DSU, held what those on Old-Earth might term der Fuehrer. An apt comparison, considering.
The cute thing about this was that she didn’t have to do anything much at all now that she was returning to CESS. The virus either succeeded or it didn’t. She’d tweaked, added some ramifications and limitations, but it was self-driven, reproduced by itself, died by itself, according to rules she’d set up.
The shuttle docked, and she had no idea what she was stepping onto until she exited.
No screens had been shown to her going outward. An incognito super-secret starship.
Or not.
The hatch opened onto a transparent walkway leading in, and this was not merely a starship, though there were starships nearby. This was a pseudo-world, a synthworld, a hollowed globe created by humanoids to sustain life. Only the uber rich could afford such creations. Once made, they could be steered. Hyperspace travel could be incorporated, and clearly this one was capable.
On the outside it seemed a solid sphere, with defensive installations, communications arrays, an engine of mammoth proportions. Within, once she’d whisked along the shoot-rail that took her through the crust, an entirely new world was revealed.
Within was no world such as a god might be imagined to design. Instead the entire inner skin of the crust bore gravity and there were lakes, rivers, forests, towns, and beaches curving upward and overhead. She stepped from the shoot-rail carriage and looked above to the heavens where an ocean lapped. The sky was the core of this bizarre inside-out globe. She shaded her eyes to see past the miniature arti-sun. If she walked for long enough, she could look up and see where she now stood.
This was CESS Nexus – the holiday destination of only the most supreme executives.
“Miss Ember?” Two security-prime guards waited before her dressed in perfect black neo-suits. Beyond them was a field of trimmed green grass with some small, four-legged animals frolicking. It would be A harmless and B useful in a hunt, should an exec choose to spend a day doing so.
“Yes?” She smiled politely.
“You have a DSU unit we are to remove from you. “Please?” He held out his hand, palm uppermost.
“Of course.” Somewhere light music played – a stark contrast to the death punk she’d had booming at her ear. Ember extracted the DSU from her pocket. “Here.”
The grimace on the man’s face said he’d noticed her general disarray, the holes in her tights, the holes and grime everywhere. Her red curls stuck out wildly too.
“I’ve been in a bad situation for over a week.”
“Yes, we understand.” He nodded. The precision stripes of shaved hair running from front to back over his scalp matched those of all the guards she’d seen. Easily identified. “Until further notice, you’re free to indulge in the facilities of Nexus, providing you stay within this area.”
A map flashed onto her retina with the area delineated in translucent blue. There was a beach to one edge, a set of buildings at the other, and walking tracks. She was being treated well.
“Thanks.”
He turned and marched away. One guard stayed with her.
“New clothes?” she asked. Anything to make them think she was happy and merely waiting as requested.
The generic guard gestured for her to follow and set off down a gravel path toward the buildings. Birds flew overhead. The knee-high, deerlike animals pranced. A few strangers in swimsuits or sporting attire walked by, paying her no heed. Her internal awareness of time ticked by.
In ten, the DSU should be in the hands of someone relevant. In fifteen they’d have decided it was safe. In sixteen they’d let it access the system. In sixteen point zero two it’d have spread like a tsunami to every system on this sphere. Another two it’d wipe out everyone and everything’s data, as far as they could tell.
Progressively it’d spread to any adjacent starships. Nothing would escape unless they did not connect the DSU to that first system.
Every exec in the upper echelons would lose their ID forever, throughout the galaxy. Hyperspace travel made piggybacking a virus to everywhere as simple as spreading the black plague with a fleet of superfast rats.
She knew these spheres and though not aware this was where she was being brought, it would go down fast. Without arti-grav to hold people, critters, water, and dirt, and whatever else was here, to the crust, without air scrubbers and life support, this sphere would be a hazard to life within an hour. Breathing in dirt and acid was not good for you.
She followed the man, smiling gently, her boots crunching on the gravel, while thinking how only a few hours ago, she’d been walking among ruins.
Nexus was going to be in ruins too.
It mightn’t be safe for her to be loose, and so she’d added in her little extra plan.
When the siren blared, they came for her – five guards. She fingered the rack of fashionable dresses for one more second as they burst into the salon.
The siren meant the DSU was talking to the system. It meant her virus was amok.
Amok amok.
An announcement began to repeat on a loop.
Emergency. Emergency. This sphere will likely become dangerous to humanoids within twenty spokmins. Evacuate. Evacuate. Use your allotted emergency pod.
Ember went quietly, down the stairs to the maintenance route that wove within the crust to the jail cells. There were always places to restrain prisoners. They let her in, locked the sliding door, and left her. Their eyes had showed their fears even if they said little.
She knew why.
This lovely little fleet of starships and the Nexus sphere was soon to be a graveyard of diseased, high-tech corpses and here she sat in the very, very middle. Ember walked to the low bed against the stark white wall in her cell and she lay down.
Waiting for the cataclysm wave to ebb was a bitch.
Where else was safe except for here? Out there, someone might’ve decided she’d brought something in with her and then they might have shot her.
A few explosions above told her someone was panicking.
She shifted her back on the bed, felt gravity give up the ghost, and floated upward.
Eventually the lights went out, the machinery stopped humming. In the dark she listened to the last of the pods thumping out into space.
Never get a nerd-geek girl angry with you. She might just shut down your life support systems and your life. Every database CESS owned or monitored across the galaxy would be so much digital scrap very, very soon.
Yet she wasn’t suicidal.
“Recover,” she whispered.
The backup she’d arranged of the vital systems kicked in and spread, filling up the ghost she’d made of what used to be in control of Nexus. It was enough to allow her to live here for a few days, until she figured out how to leave. It was possible she couldn’t, that no transport remained, or could be hailed, but that she was prepared to accept. The penalty of such a thorough revenge.
Die you evil motherfuckers.
She had indeed nuked them in the testicles.
The jail door slid open. Lights came back on.
There would be no one else here, or the system would not have rebooted.
Alone again. She hummed a tune as she walked the deserted corridor.
Her boot steps echoed. Tip tap. Tip tap.
Alone again. Only this time she
’d lost the tune.
She stopped dead, suddenly afraid to emerge onto the inner crust. What if she were wrong and someone else was here?
What if she couldn’t leave? She actually did want to live – wanted to go back to Hoss and Baz and say, I’m done. To explain and beg forgiveness and put her case for doing what she’d done.
As if they could ever understand this crazy path she’d taken...
Ig appeared as she stepped out onto the inner crust, fluttering before her. The arti-sun was blooming again. The oceans and beaches were a mess of intersecting random waves and dead or stunned fish that’d splattered back to the surface after floating into the sky.
A chaos of towels left by their owners.
A surreal artwork of fallen picnic hampers.
She wondered how many tanned execs in swimsuits were currently hurtling into space in pods, never to be found. Because, after all, they’d ceased to exist.
Data erased, they were no-ones now. Why rescue a no one?
The building here looked mostly smashed, but...
She turned in place.
There was no one.
Alone for reals.
She’d achieved what she wanted to and...felt terribly hollow. She’d had her insides scooped out. The pain of not knowing her past had gone and had been replaced by something else she couldn’t yet quantify.
Worth it? Yes. Give her another day of this. She might change her mind.
Okay, a few hours.
She found her way to the nearest hatchway and peered out the transparent viewsphere as if she could thumb a ride from one of the floating hulks out there. Starships were bumping into each other – collisions of elephantine proportions that broke off pieces as large as skyscrapers and flared fire into the blackness.
If one of those hit Nexus she’d be toast.
Communications had not been preserved. She was not perfect. She couldn’t yell for help and she’d reduced every ship nearby to a nonfunctioning lump of metal. Bravo, she whispered, turning her back to the viewsphere.
Steel (Dark Monster Fantasy Book 2) Page 15