She looked back at Julia. “So, you and uncle Paul are an item?”
Julia nodded. “As good a description as any.”
“Thank-you,” the young woman replied dramatically. “Why can’t men ever give a straightforward answer to something like that?” She leaned in, lowering her voice to a false whisper. “I bet he hasn’t even used the ‘L’ word, has he?”
“Perhaps,” Ava joined in the torment, “the great Knight of the Equestrian Order, the storied inspector from the dreaded Eye, is afraid of rejection, just like every man in history!” She gave him a playful shoulder bump, much like the ones she’d used to shove him into the tunnel walls of Hardisty.
“Can we please seek refuge in battle or something?” Paul asked plaintively. At the sound of chuckling behind him, he rounded on the two Marines.
“Don’t think they won’t turn on you two, once they’re bored with me,” he warned.
“She’s already bored with us,” Rodrigues insisted. “She’s been giving us the gears for weeks now. You’re the fresh meat, Marine.”
“I really should have killed you guys when my blood was up,” Paul groused. “No gratitude.”
Armstead suddenly grabbed Rodrigues’ shoulder. “That’s her,” he hissed. “I can’t believe I’m just realizing this now, but that’s the same Urbica who shut us down at Irricana. She’s a general now.”
It was comical to see how quickly their demeanor changed. Both men stood straight with their feet forming a forty-five degree angle. Their hands fell to the sides of their legs, palms inward and their eyes aimed straight ahead.
Julia looked over at them, the conversation dying out as the two men suddenly became the focus of the small group.
“Rest,” she ordered simply.
Their right feet remained in place but they were otherwise returned to a more relaxed position.
“Kidnapping young girls, huh?” She raised an eyebrow at them.
“Technically, ma’am, we were just holding her,” Rodrigues corrected, but his face flushed in embarrassment. “Uh, by holding, I just mean we were watching her… uh…”
“Guarding her,” Armstead corrected hurriedly. “Just guarding.”
“Ma’am,” Rodrigues added more calmly, “we knew we were taking some pretty stupid orders. Hell, they were coming from Colonel Kinsey, so that was the first clue, right there.” He shook his head. “We couldn’t choose our officers, so we tried to do the best we could. We made a lot of bad calls along the way, but we tried to serve our emperor.”
“By trying to carve Irricana and Santa Clara out of his domain?”
“Well, they didn’t exactly tell us that was their endgame, ma’am. We thought we were trying to find a real secessionist movement by blowing up a few low-value targets on Irricana to catch their interest.”
“Imperial citizens died because of you,” she pointed out. “People you were sworn to protect.”
“They did,” Rodrigues replied evenly, “and it’s not the first time Marines have caused the deaths of Imperial citizens, is it?”
Julia nodded grimly. The balance of responsibility. She’d given orders herself that had led to civilian deaths and they’d been necessary in order to prevent even more deaths.
Behind their shiny public image, the Imperial Marines had more than a few skeletons in the closet, not to mention a few buried in the backyard.
She looked at Ava. “Maybe I should take these two off your hands?”
Ava nodded. “I’d appreciate it. I’d like to be rid of them and, if they’re with you, I’ll still know where they are.”
“Attention,” she commanded, nodding at the boarding concourse behind her. “You’ll wait for us at door twenty-three delta. To your duties, fall out.”
The two men left the group and trotted toward the concourse entry.
“Do they come with any accessories?” She asked sardonically.
“We did capture two intact suits and we recovered three that might have gotten shot up a little, but they’d be good for parts,” Paul replied.
She smiled, raising an eyebrow at him. “Might have gotten shot up?”
“Hey, we had a dramatic escape going on,” he protested. “You can’t just slip quietly out the back door. Anyway, I was thinking of using one of those and giving Ava my dragoon armor. She can’t use HMA without a Marine transponder but my suit from 1GD should be the right size range for her.”
“I have a spare suit that took damage to the reactor coils,” she told him. “Anyway, we can talk equipment later. I’ve got something you folks need to see.”
“The Gray cruiser?” Ava asked. “I’d certainly love a tour.”
“Hm?” Julia quirked her head at Ava. “Oh, yes! That too, but I have a shuttle waiting to take us out to the Naughty Helot first. There’s something down in the holds you’re not going to believe – well, Paul might…”
“I might?”
“You saw the same thing when we took the Sucker Punch from the Grays.”
“And it’s in the hold?” He asked. “Well then, something is definitely going on.”
They passed through into the concourse and headed for twenty-three delta. As they rounded a meat-on-a-stick concession stand they spotted three monks gesturing wildly at the two guards she’d posted at the door. The two Marines were simply standing to the side minding their own business.
Julia came to a halt beside the monks. “What’s the trouble, gentlemen?”
The guard gestured at the three alien monks. “These three wanted to board the shuttle, but I haven’t heard anything about, them till now.” He gestured at Rodrigues and Armstead. “Don’t know who these two fellas are, either, but they seem to feel they belong outside this door for some reason.”
Julia turned first to the senior monk. “My guard is simply acting on my own standing orders,” she told him. “I also had no idea you might want to join us aboard the Naughty Helot. Is Brother N’Zim expecting you?”
“He is,” the monk rattled.
“Very well,” she gestured to the door. “Your help is certainly welcome, as long as you conceal none of your findings from us.”
“That’s the deal to which we agreed,” he rasped.
It was nice to deal with aliens who understood the utility of contractions.
She looked at the guard. “The other two are provisional new recruits. I want you to keep them on the shuttle till we’re ready to leave the Naughty Helot and proceed to the Ava Klum.”
The flight over was unremarkable and rather quiet as Julia didn’t want to go into specifics with the unreliable Marines listening.
She led them onto the Naughty Helot and down to the cargo holds. “Like I said, something’s going on.” She waved up at the rows of pods.
“The crew mostly killed themselves,” she added, “once it was clear they were going to lose the ship. Same thing happened when we cut out the Walter Currie. Self-inflicted head-shots and they looked terrified while they did it.”
“Some extreme form of operant conditioning?” Paul asked her.
She nodded. “And the Grays are behind it. We caught two of them as they came out of that control pod, over there.” She nodded toward the modular office where the three monks had found N’Zim.
“One of them saw my HMA suit and took me for a guard. He threatened to complain to Kinsey.”
“Bastard was in charge of Saoirse’s kidnapping as well,” Paul growled. “This time, we don’t need him to give evidence, so the first person to lay eyes on him can go ahead and improve the airflow to his brain.”
“So why are there Humans in those pods?” Ava was moving closer to the nearest row.
Julia reached out and put a hand on her arm. “Best to stay clear,” she advised quietly. “They’ll be mostly conscious and you don’t want to torment them by making them think they’re about to be set free. Not that they can really get upset, but why confuse them?”
“Why aren’t we letting them out?” Ava asked.
Julia shook her head. “You should have seen how fast the crew of this ship killed themselves when we came aboard. After the Marines were cut down, the rest dropped like flies.” She waved at the pods. “If we let them out in the middle of their enemies, who knows what they might do?”
She gestured to the control room and led them over. N’Zim saw her coming and came out to meet her.
“What have you learned, N’Zim?” Julia asked.
“I’ve learned that Humans are an assault on the olfactory receptors,” the monk chortled. “Especially on a Gray ship where you don’t have proper showers.”
“That’s hardly news,” she replied mildly. “I could have told you that before you came aboard.”
“I really wish you had,” he replied, a twinkle in his segmented eye facets. “There are surgeries…”
“Have you learned anything about this?” A wave at the pods.
His claw waved from left to right, his gesture to indicate he was back to being serious. “We believe this station was set up to monitor the effectiveness of their conditioning,” he rattled. “There are sub-routines to test the various programmed responses and we found something very interesting.”
She resisted the urge to ask. N’Zim was still a Brother of Confidences and he was always trying to nudge her into asking unnecessary questions.
After a pause, he relented.
“They’ve programmed a shutdown of sorts.” His gaze drifted to the pods. “Some have killed themselves, yes, but a very specific signal can trigger the same response in all subjects. It can only be sent using a trio of quantum cores at the facility where they do the actual programming.
“The signal stores itself in ships’ systems like a parasite infecting a host and it passes itself on every time a new ship is encountered. We estimate ninety-five percent elimination of all subjects within eight days of sending the signal.”
“How many subjects have they processed?” Ava cut in.
“This ship’s records account for roughly eighteen percent of the crews, mixed between both sides.”
“Holy shit!” Paul whispered.
The monk regarded him for a brief moment before turning back to Julia. “Your species has strange religious practices.”
“How long has this been going on?” Paul asked.
“Since before we lost track of this ship.” N’Zim extended his arms in what looked like a shrug. “The pod itself has records tracing back to the Dresden incident.”
Both Paul and Julia looked to Ava.
“Dresden was one of the colonies,” Ava explained, almost in a whisper. “It was wiped out by a fleet from Spiria. They bombarded the surface with asteroids and killed everything. It sparked a war that’s been going on for a decade.”
“A crew of Dresdenites was conditioned as well,” N’Zim added. “We believe they were the ones that fired on Weg, providing the pretext for the Spirian assault.”
“Holy…” Paul darted a glance at N’Zim. “The Grays aren’t just meddling in this war for their own purposes; they engineered it in the first place.”
“Do you think they plunged us into war just to keep the colonies off their backs?” Julia asked nobody in particular.
“I think it’s probable,” Paul ventured. “This region doesn’t really rate as a priority for them, but the colonies are big enough to give them headaches. I think they did it so they could concentrate their mischief on the Imperium.”
“But they’ve only just started probing the Rim,” Ava said. “This war has been going on for years.”
Paul shrugged. “That’s a major fraction of our lifespans, but it’s just a blink of the third eyelid for them.” He turned back to N’Zim. “Anything in there tell us where the programming is actually being done?”
N’Zim chopped his hand down in an angry negative. “They altered the nav computer so it wouldn’t record any waypoints. There might be something in the Gray systems; they wouldn’t think you capable of penetrating their systems, of course, but…”
“But so far they’re right?” Paul grinned at the monk. He moved to the control room and ducked inside the door, bumping his head on the low ceiling. The other monks who’d come with them on the shuttle looked at him but, if there were any expressions on their faces, they were lost on the Human.
Paul had little experience with their race. Gray systems, on the other hand…
“I’ve hacked my way into a few Gray systems over the last few months,” he said as N’Zim joined him. He grabbed a small storage cube and pulled it over to sit on.
“You’re familiar with the control layout?” N’Zim waved a claw at the holo-panel.
Paul nodded, uploading the translated interface from his CPU. “I am, but I’m hopeless with their glyphs. Let’s switch to Imperial Standard.” Having already loaded the new interface, he was able to make it seem like the work of an instant. The screen flickered and settled into a new interface.
“Was that already in their system?” one of the monks asked.
“No,” Paul grinned. “After the last few encounters, I’ve started carrying a copy with me.”
It was true enough to evade the Brothers’ legendary ability to spot lies, but it also avoided letting them know about the powerful quantum core that resided in his sinuses.
“Might we get a copy of that program?”
He shrugged. “I have no problems with that, but you should make the request through Commodore Urbica. That way, anything I give you is governed by your agreement with her.”
His sister had already briefed him on the Brotherhood of Confidences. Information was their chief currency and they were excellent negotiators. The monks could be easily insulted by an outright refusal to trade in data, but they despised anyone who gave it away for free.
He quietly turned his CPU loose on the access code and deactivated it. It was an easy enough matter to remove the entire security subroutine, having done it several times before. He didn’t want these monks stumbling upon a sophisticated security program and wondering how he’d gotten past it so quickly, and he certainly didn’t want to put on a dumb show of pretending to hack it through the visible interface.
He checked the system. There was room for a full copy on his implants so he stored the current version as an inactive copy. He still wasn’t sure if he trusted these monks and he wanted to have a copy before they got their hands, or claws, on it. Plus he would also be able to see what information they’d viewed.
“Alright, let’s take a look at the inventory records and see if there’s any kind of origin tag for the pods.” He used his fingers to activate the menus on the holo-screen rather than the much faster neural interface.
“We have cargo transfer records,” he muttered, “but the pod serial numbers don’t correlate to the unit tags. That’s a good thing.”
“Why is it good?” N’Zim asked.
“Look at it this way,” Paul sorted the list from the last run. “By serial number, we see no correlation to the unit tag assigned to each pod.” He re-sorted the list. “By unit tag, we see no correlation with the serial numbers.”
“So the unit tags are based on some other parameter,” N’Zim chortled. “They change prefix for no apparent reason.”
“Other than the timestamp,” Paul offered. He pointed at the column showing the date and time that each pod came aboard. “They’re already in ascending order so the unit tags aren’t randomized; they’re simply incremented each time a pod comes aboard.
“That gives us the pick-up times at each world they’ve been to. Given the times and the cruising speed of this vessel, adding in an estimate for time at each destination and you should be able to match these times to a relatively limited selection of possible courses.”
N’Zim made a long chittering noise and one of the other monks croaked in response. “We should be able to come up with a list of probable origin worlds within two days.”
Paul nodded. “I’ll leave you to it.”
He barely remembered to keep
his head low as he got up from the storage cube, and he stepped back out onto the cargo hold decking. He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. “Those guys’ll be busy for at least a full day finding our target.”
“Well, there’s not much else to see here.” Julia turned to Ava. “Let’s go see the ship we named after you.”
The first thing Ava mentioned, upon exiting the shuttle in the cruiser’s hangar bay, was the ceiling height.
“It’s almost the same height as you’d find on a Human ship.” She wrinkled her nose at her brother. “Wouldn’t it save resources if they lowered the ceilings to match their smaller size?”
“Sure would,” he replied, “and it would be a major pain in the ass, or maybe forehead, to any Humans trying to board them.”
“So why bother with higher ceilings?”
“Standardization, mostly,” he told her. “Remember, the Grays sell dumbed-down versions of some of their ships on the export market. By not having different ceiling heights, they can be more efficient at producing wall panels, stanchions, wiring harnesses, you name it.”
“Plus they probably think it has an intimidating effect on smaller races, when they see the inside of a Gray ship.” Julia chuckled. “Kind of like how the Marines like to accidentally drop orbit boxes of extra-large condoms behind enemy lines.”
“Hey,” Paul interjected, “those are good for keeping the rain out of your rifle barrel.”
“Not to mention fire bombs,” Julia shot back with grin. “Fill ‘em up with flammable hydrocarbons, set fire to the lube – seriously, why is that stuff so flammable? – throw it onto the air intakes of an enemy tank and BOOM!”
She gestured toward the ship’s centerline. “One thing, at least, is large for purely practical reasons. The main guns are this way…”
It seemed like an eternity, but the tour of the Ava Klum finally came to an end. The real Ava had returned to her own flagship, and Paul and Julia found themselves alone.
It was a glorious, creak-free hour.
“I hope N’Zim and his pals don’t take too long to find our target.” Julia turned on the mist shower that seemed to be an integral part of any Gray captain’s suite.
Beyond the Rim (Rebels and Patriots Book 2) Page 19