by M. D. Cooper
“Rika! I’m here to spend my hard-earned credit on some of Jessie’s fine brew. Best on the station, if you didn’t know.”
Jessie gave Rika an imploring look, and then gave Denny a long-suffering one. “Payment up front, and you can have all the coffee you want,” Jessie said.
Denny’s face adopted a wounded expression and he touched a hand to his chest. “Jessie! Are you calling me unscrupulous? You cut me deep, cut me to the quick!”
“Yeah, I am,” Jessie said. “Credit.”
Denny muttered something incomprehensible as he fished in his pocket for a hard chit. He finally pulled one out, and slapped it on the counter.
“Man of my word,” he said. “I’ll take a large.”
Jessie turned to grab a cup, and Denny stared longingly at her ass.
“See that, Rika? Jessie’s built all nice and proper. Not like your hard, carbon-fiber rear end. I bet she gives a good fuck, too—though I suppose you’d be good for something, now that you have lips again.”
Rika took a bite of her burger and did her best to ignore Denny. She knew he was just trying to egg her on; he had checked her out on more than one occasion. Though there were augmented bones and muscles underneath her matte-grey skin, her ass didn’t look that far off from its original appearance. It wasn’t covered in skin, but that wasn’t so unusual.
“No comment, Rika?” Denny smirked as Jessie wordlessly handed the gang member his coffee with one hand, and took the credit chit with her other.
“You hear something, Jessie?” Rika asked with a wink.
“Yeah, some sort of dripping,” Jessie replied. “Like a leaky faucet, or something.”
“A snot faucet, maybe,” Rika said with a laugh.
“Watch yourself,” Denny cautioned, his voice dropping, and even managing to sound a bit menacing. “Pinky wants to play a long game with you; get you over to her side through slow persuasion. Me? I don’t see the appeal so much. Maybe I’ll just take you out of play right now.”
Rika looked down at Denny, and slowly raised the remainder of her burger to her mouth, popping it in and chewing slowly.
“Maybe you should try,” she said around a mouthful of food. “Then I can punch your mouth off the shit lump you call a face, and no one will have to listen to you anymore.”
As she spoke, a small voice was wailing in her mind, reminding her that she only had fifteen percent charge, and that a fight in the warrens was not what she needed right now; but another part of her just wanted to do the universe a favor, and wipe the stain that was Denny from existence.
“Fuck you, Rika!” Denny shouted as he took a step back and pointed a ballistic pistol at her. “I’m sick of your superior attitude. You’re shit, just like the rest of us, and you can still bleed and die.”
While Denny pontificated, Rika reached down and unplugged the charge cord from her side, then took a step away from Jessie’s stand.
Denny kept the weapon trained on her head, while Rika kept one eye on his trigger finger, and the other on his feet as he twisted to track her.
After a minute, Denny seemed to reach a decision. His brow furrowed an instant before he pulled the trigger. It was all the tell Rika needed—she jerked to the side, and the projectile flew through the air where her head had been.
Her arm shot out, and her steel fist slammed down on Denny’s right wrist, shattering the bones within.
The gangster screamed and dropped his gun, but his look was not one of defeat; more like pained joy.
Rika turned to see seven more members of Pinky’s gang approaching—each one of them armed, and all appearing to be spoiling for a fight.
“Gonna get it now, bitch,” Denny hissed as he dove to the side of the corridor.
Rika dropped as well, reaching for Denny’s discarded pistol as a hail of bullets and pulse rifle blasts flew overhead. She scampered behind a pillar and double-checked her body’s readout.
She had been hit in the side and the leg by three ballistic projectiles, but none had done any damage. The low caliber weapons the gang employed wouldn’t be able to penetrate the artificial skin covering her body. But without the plating on her cyborg limbs—taken by the Nietzscheans at the end of the war—a lucky shot could wreck a knee or an elbow joint.
“You sure you want to do this?” she called. “It’s gonna get messy.”
“Fucking kill her!” Denny shouted before anyone had a chance to respond—not that Rika expected any of the gang members to argue for clemency.
Rika knew that the pillar would only protect her for another minute before the attackers surrounded her. The corridor offered little cover, which meant that her best defense was a strong offense. One that involved taking a better weapon than the pistol she now held.
She peered around the pillar and quickly scanned the corridor with her eyes, wishing that she had just one of the drones she used to carry back in the war.
Three goons on the right, which meant the other four were on the left. She jerked her head back as a round struck the pillar, just three centimeters from her eye.
She responded by reaching her arm around the pillar and firing back at the approaching attackers, her visual overlay providing targets based on the gang member’s most recent positions.
Two separate screams let her know that her predictive algorithms were working just as well as ever. She estimated that her enemies were within two meters on the left side. Rika took a steadying breath, dropped to a crouch, and then leapt out around the left side of the pillar, kicking at the legs of the closest attacker while firing into the torso of another.
The pistol got off two shots before it jammed, and Rika threw it aside as several shots struck her chest. She saw that the shooter was one of the gangsters on the right side of the pillar.
She leapt to her feet, grabbed the man she had shot, and flung his body at two of the attackers, then delivered a roundhouse kick to another guy, shattering his ribs and probably his spine with her three-clawed foot.
A spray of bullets hit the bulkhead nearby, and Rika threw herself at the shooter, breaking the woman’s neck with a well-aimed blow.
The rest of the fight passed in a blur, and less than a minute later, Denny’s accomplices were either dead or drawing their final breaths.
Rika cast her eyes about, searching for Denny—the piece of shit who had started this, who had brought out the killer in her.
As she looked for him, Rika realized that the corridor was nearly empty. The refugees and other passersby had cleared out to avoid getting caught in the crossfire.
A wave of sorrow hit her with the realization that her months of careful control—where she thought that she was improving, becoming human again—had really just been a thin veneer over the vicious machine that still lay underneath.
The sound of shuffling feet reached her ears, and she turned to see Denny sliding out from behind a pillar several meters away, still cradling his shattered wrist. His wide eyes stared at her with fear, and she saw tear streaks down his dirty cheeks.
“Get out of here,” Rika said wearily. “Tell Pinky I don’t want to see her dicks down here anymore.”
Denny nodded manically and then turned and ran.
Rika let out a long breath, and took a step; that’s when she realized that the fight had not been entirely one-sided. An actuator in her left knee had been hit by a bullet at some point, and she had limited motion in the limb.
She would have to pick up a new one from a nearby mod-shop. They wouldn’t have one with the right specs for her, but she should be able to retrofit one of their civilian models.
Rika hobbled back to Jessie’s booth and leaned heavily on the counter.
“I think I’ll need another coffee,” she said.
No response came, and she realized that Jessie was nowhere to be seen. The stall was small, so Rika leaned over the counter, peering into the corners around the stove, table, and chill-unit.
Her breath caught, and a choked gasp escaped her throat when s
he finally caught sight of Jessie.
The stall owner had hidden underneath the front counter, and a stray shot had passed through the thin walls of her stall. The wound on her forehead was small, but the back of Jessie’s skull was a tangled mass of blood, pink hair, and grey matter.
Rika turned aside and threw up; spewing out her burger and coffee, followed by whatever else was left from her lunch earlier in the day.
She tried to hold back the tears, but it was impossible. She collapsed to the ground, sobbing uncontrollably.
Which is where the station security found her eleven long minutes later.
P-COG
STELLAR DATE: 07.09.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Combat Information Center, MSS Foe Hammer
REGION: Interstellar Space, near the Praesepe Cluster
David eased back into his seat in the Foe Hammer’s CIC, and set his coffee pouch in the pocket on the side of his chair. If there was one thing that the Marauders had over the military, it was that the Old Man let people drink coffee at their posts.
Not that coffee was the only thing better than the Genevian Armed Forces—but it certainly ranked high on the list, as far as David was concerned.
He pulled up the logs he was reviewing and gave them a visual scan, looking for patterns that may not be apparent to others. He spotted a few interesting alignments in timing, data size, and destinations.
Probably nothing nefarious, but still worth checking, he thought before pushing them into one of his analysis matrices.
As a P-Cog, or Pattern Recognition Specialist, David’s job was to look for things others missed. Even though a dozen other humans and AIs had been over these logs, there was always a gem nestled in them for a P-Cog to pick up.
It was his special gift from the Genevian Armed Forces during the war with the Nietzscheans. Some draftees— conscripts, if he was being honest—got the real shit mods, like the mechs; especially the K1 models. But other poor saps like himself got their heads jammed full of upgrades that served other purposes.
David’s upgrades were dedicated to spotting patterns and ferreting out connections between seemingly unrelated things.
Massive NSAI grids usually performed tasks like that, but some wiz in the GAF’s R&D division decided to capitalize on the one thing that humans had in spades over NSAI: intuition.
David had known all his life that he had good intuition. He could talk his way out of almost anything, and spot good and bad deals a mile away. It had made him a great contract negotiator before the war, and his services were always in high demand.
When he was drafted, the aptitude tests had picked up on his abilities, and he was shipped off to a lab filled with a lot of unfriendly-looking folks in gleaming white coats.
That was when the poking and prodding inside his brain had begun. Thankfully, he remembered little of it; but there had been lucid moments. Moments punctuated by fear, terror, and agony.
In the end, he had come out packing a lot of extra hardware between his ears. Enough that his skull needed passive cooling—which accounted for his lack of hair and the addition of cooling fins on his head.
The adaptation had earned him the nickname ‘Sharkie’ in the military—even though he’d never seen a shark with seven fins.
After the war, David had attempted to return to his prior work; but because of the mech-conscript program, most Genevians assumed that any GAF-modded person was a criminal conscript, not a draftee.
Few people would hire him, and those who did wanted to use him to hide criminal activity—not seek out wrongdoing.
That was when a friend from his division had told him about the Marauders, and how the group was almost entirely filled with Genevian Armed Forces vets who were trying to find a place after the fall of Genevia.
David had enlisted as soon as he could travel to a recruitment center. And look where he was now, working in the CIC of the Old Man’s flagship.
A yawn escaped his lips, and David picked up his coffee pouch and took a long draw of the bitter drink. At least here, in the Marauders, when he found something wrong, he could do something about it. Most often, the wrongdoers were unsavory types that would see the business end of a Marauder rifle before long.
Until this operation; the goal of which was the overthrow of the Theban leadership, and the forcible annexation of Thebes by Septhia.
As far as David could tell, both the Septhians and Thebans were good people. Sure, they had their issues; but on the whole, their governments represented the people, elections were as fair as any, and the populace was content and prosperous.
He understood that the Septhians were worried about Nietzschean expansion—everyone spinward of the Pleiades was. It seemed like nowhere was safe from the specter of war anymore. All of the major empires and federations in the Orion Arm were gobbling up their smaller neighbors at an alarming rate.
Though the Praesepe Cluster was small—less than one hundred light years in diameter—it contained well over a thousand stars; and the nations within its bounds were tightly-knit, possessing great strength in numbers.
That is what made David wonder about the Septhian desire to attack Thebes. Septhia was a much larger alliance, with over fifty member systems, compared to the Thebans’ five; but there was no reason he could see why the alliances couldn’t work out mutually beneficial treaties.
Over the years, the Septhians had made frequent overtures to the Thebans, offering them a place in the alliance—but the Thebans had declined each time. David could see why. Thebes was on the edge of the cluster, facilitating trade with systems deeper within Praesepe.
They also controlled one of the few areas in the cluster with less dark matter, making Thebes a gateway into the star cluster.
David pulled up a map of the cluster on his console, overlaying the stars with the latest dark matter dispersion maps. Dark matter was the Praesepe Cluster’s greatest strength, and its most vexing problem.
Outside of star clusters and stellar nurseries, dark matter was only found tightly packed around stars. But in clusters like Praesepe, it was everywhere—making FTL all but impossible.
Without entering the cluster through a region of space like the one Thebes controlled, it could take decades, even up to a century, to travel to the cluster’s inner reaches.
While there were two other alliances in the cluster that controlled regions of space with sparse dark matter, they were on the far side. Thebes controlled the clearest dark matter region near the Nietzschean border—a border that was only thirty light years away after the Niets’ conquest of Genevia.
David ran a hand across his head, tracing the grooves between the cooling fins—a pensive habit he had picked up after getting the mods, and constantly worrying that his brain was somehow going to hemorrhage from all the alterations.
He was not the first person to see this obvious connection. If the Nietzscheans were planning to annex the Praesepe Cluster—an act that would expand their empire tremendously—then Thebes was the obvious place to start.
But, rather than attack, a far better plan for the Septhians would be to convince the Thebans of this possibility, and aid in bolstering their defenses.
Scuttlebutt amongst the Marauders maintained that the Thebans must have received such an overture and viewed it as the first step in a slow takeover, after all the other diplomatic attempts had been rebuffed.
David could see that possibility, but all his intel on the Theban President, a woman named Ariana who was just now entering her seventh term, showed her to be a competent and reasonable person.
Would the Septhians really resort to toppling the Theban government just to secure the rimward edge of the Praesepe Cluster against the Nietzscheans? They must have made a very convincing argument to the Old Man for him to engage in this sort of subversive action—an action that had Marauder teams operating as assassins within Thebes.
One thing was for certain: if the Nietzscheans got wind of this before the Septhians had secured Thebes
, the Niets would undoubtedly strike, and strike hard.
Which was one of the many things David was keeping a keen eye out for. There could be no leaks from the Marauders that the operation was underway.
Thus far, there had been no leaks that he could see. Not that David was surprised; if there was one thing the Marauders had in common, it was a deep hatred of the Nietzscheans.
But something was tickling in the back of David’s mind. There was a thread that he couldn’t quite see, waiting to be found and pulled. Something didn’t feel right about the arrangement with the Septhians, with the whole plan in general.
There was a piece missing, or out of place, or both.
David brought up a new set of logs. The details and content of the Old Man’s arrangement with the Septhians was not accessible to him, but the logs of the communications themselves were.
He spread out a holographic matrix and began filtering the logs into the framework, looking for patterns that only a P-Cog would spot, searching for that clue that would explain to him what was really going on.
KRUEGER’S
STELLAR DATE: 07.02.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Rika’s Quarters, Dekar Station
REGION: Outer Rim of Parsons System, Nietzschean Empire
Rika lay on her hard bed, trying not to think about the last few weeks. She had seen a lot of death over the years—a lot of it caused by her. She had watched teammates die in her arms, and witnessed the enemy cradle their dead comrades.
Somehow Jessie’s death was worse.
Jessie was just a woman trying to make the best of a shitty situation in a shitty world.
She had died because of Rika. Because Rika had let Denny—one of the most pathetic examples of humanity ever to breathe air—get the better of her.
Rika felt as though darkness was pressing at the edges of her vision, and she knew she was slipping into a deep depression.
While the Nietzscheans had pulled her compliance chip, they had left the other mental augmentations the GAF had inserted into her head.