by M. D. Cooper
AID
STELLAR DATE: 09.30.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: GFS Satisfaction, en route to Jericho
REGION: Gedri System, Silstrand Alliance
Sylvia turned away from the console and clenched her fists, shoulders tensing with pent-up fury.
“I take it that you’re not meeting with success,” Maverick said, his tone carefully moderated.
The woman’s head turned enough to reveal pursed lips and a furrowed brow. “Ya think, hon?”
“So what’s the problem?” he pressed. “I thought you knew how to do this. You removed the AI from Grayson, after all.”
“Sure.” She turned to face Maverick, not a lick of fear or subservience in her posture.
For some reason, he had never managed to instill either in Sylvia—though he hadn’t really tried. She was a repulsive mountain of flesh. He knew that some people liked that, but so far as he was concerned, she might as well have been an alien. Or a slug.
“Annnnd?” he prompted, as she failed to provide further information.
“Well, Jerrod is different than other SSF AIs I’ve worked with. Removing him from Grayson was complex, but in the end, all I had to do was get the AI out. Once that was done, the colonel wasn’t under his control anymore. The problem is that Jerrod has built-in control capabilities. If he’s in your head, he can own you.”
“Which is what you’re trying to deal with,” Maverick spoke through clenched teeth.
“Yeah! With you breathing over my shoulder. Look, I’m good at getting shit done, brute force jobs and stuff, but removing Jerrod’s less desirable abilities while keeping his cognitive abilities intact—and controllable—is the type of thing that will take months to sort out. And that’s after I re-image and experiment on him a dozen times. Probably burn through a few of your volunteers, too….”
She left the word hanging, and he sensed that she was considering another option.
“Spill it. How can we speed this up? The SSF isn’t going to give us months before they come back in force. Trust me, they won’t just let Gedri go without a fight. Then things aren’t going to look so good for either of us.”
“We could just leave,” she said with a shrug. “I don—”
Maverick was across the room in four strides, his left hand filled with the loose flesh around her neck, his right holding his plasma blade aloft. “Finish that sentence. Do it. See what happens.”
The words slipped past his lips in a venomous whisper, their dark threat causing her to pale in response.
“There’s someone who can help,” she rasped. “Heaven.”
“Heaven? The station, or where you expect to be in a minute?”
“S-station,” Sylvia rasped. “A modder. Finn. His girl can do it. They’ll know how.”
Maverick let go of the woman, not caring as she fell to the floor, her breaths coming in long, slow gasps. His plasma blade was still lit, and he gestured at Francis where she stood by the door.
“Get them for me, Francis. This Finn and his girl. We’ll see how they can help.”
The collared girl nodded and left the room, leaving just Maverick and Sylvia.
“Well, get up, you loathsome thing. I expect you to keep working—unless you want to go to the other heaven.”
ATMO TOWER
STELLAR DATE: 10.02.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Red Zone, City of Montral, Jericho
REGION: Gedri System, Silstrand Alliance
Kal hated the Red Zone.
It wasn’t any sleazier than the rest of Montral—well, not by too much—but it was somehow less coy about it.
Montral…coy. Right.
He supposed that ‘coy’ was the wrong word. Other parts of Montral, even the Ventralla District, at least tried to appear as though they were governed by rule of law. Even if that law was survival of the fittest.
In the Red Zone, the law was Maverick’s whim, and whoever he currently held in favor could do as they wished in his absence. Granted, that could be a double-edged sword. Maverick rarely left Jericho at all, let alone for weeks—but when he returned, the person he had left in command was either elevated or killed. Survival was far from a fifty-fifty toss-up.
Some took the job seriously; some decided to party like they were living their last days.
The current lieutenant in charge, a man named Yaris, was one of the serious ones.
Kal turned back from the high-rise window that overlooked the Red Zone. “It’s crawling with cops and thugs.”
“It’s always crawling with them,” Barry replied. “That doesn’t change, no matter who’s calling the shots.”
“Yeah, sure,” Kal shook his head. “But sometimes they’re just shooting the shit down there, and other times, they’re actually doing their jobs. Watch how the patrols overlap and how they’re actually checking corners. Those aren’t the sloppy seconds.”
Barry pushed past Kal and stood at the window for a minute before shrugging. “Still doesn’t matter, we’re not going in on the streets.”
“Yeah, the tunnels, I know. And you think that whoever is all organized on the ground—and the air,” he added, as a drone flew past the high-rise, “won’t be watching the tunnels?”
“They won’t watch tunnels they don’t know about.”
Kal pursed his lips. The conversation felt like it was a repeat running on auto. “OK, fine. But the first sign that they do know about your super old, super secret tunnel, we turn back. Because without a way around their patrols and sensors, this isn’t happening.”
Barry turned from the window and locked eyes with Kal. He stared unblinking for almost a minute, then nodded. “Fine. Yes. Are we going to finally do it tonight, then?”
“Yeah, clock’s ticking. Let’s go.”
An hour later, the two men stood outside one of the ancient atmo-towers that stood in Montral’s center. Long before the dome had been erected, towers like this one had dotted Jericho, pumping out atmosphere in an attempt to turn the world into a paradise.
They’d almost managed to succeed, but after centuries, the endeavor had failed—though no one knew why anymore. The people ultimately erected domes over their cities and let the rest of the world—aside from the deep valleys—turn back into a lifeless rock.
Barry had somehow gotten his hands on partial schematics for the towers, design plans which showed an aqueduct that had been used to supply water to the tower. It ran under the city, right beneath The Shade, as luck would have it.
Kal honestly didn’t see how the city engineers could be unaware of a five-meter-wide pipe that ran beneath the buildings, but Barry claimed it wasn’t on any city blueprints. Kal had verified that, but that didn’t quell his fears. Maverick had clawed his way up through the gangs and syndicates on Jericho over the course of centuries.
He was the most hated and feared man on the planet—likely in all of Gedri. Which meant he had enemies, and he was wily enough to survive them. In Kal’s experience, that meant that Maverick likely laid baited traps.
Traps like design specs for an atmo tower that revealed a conveniently placed water conduit.
I’m an idiot for going along with this.
Still, Barry was desperate, and if Kal didn’t go with him, the man would do it on his own—and likely kill himself in the process. At least in this scenario, Kal could spot any traps and get Barry out before either of them died.
I hope.
Though it no longer spewed atmosphere into the planet’s skies, the atmo tower did still refresh the domed city’s fresh air supply—something that impressed Kal to no end. Not just because it was thousands of years old, but that it had survived thousands of years in Montral of all places.
That was a strange thing about Jericho. Though each of the cities were ruled by gangs and crime syndicates, all operating beneath the thin veneer of the Gedri Freedom Alliance, there was an unspoken rule that no one messed with key infrastructure systems.
Power, water, air—and in Mont
ral, the space elevator…. They were all verboten. No one even threw a rock around those facilities. Which, of course, made Barry’s plan either genius, or ridiculously dangerous.
The two men were dressed as repair techs from a company that maintained the power regulators the facility used. So far as Kal could tell, the regulators were standard fare, but on Montral, contracts could last centuries, with entire fiefdoms built around the privilege of maintaining key infrastructure systems.
Barry replied.
The response seemed too easily given, and Kal mentally steeled himself for the need to backtrack out of something stupid that Barry might say.
He strode toward the front gate and stopped at the security booth, waiting for the man inside to turn away from his lunch to address the pair.
“Yeah,” the guard finally said, his mouth full of what had to be half a sandwich.
“Checking in,” Kal said, gesturing to the scan pad sitting on the far side of the booth.
“Not on my schedule,” the man grunted. “If I’m not expecting you, I don’t scan you. Now bugger off.”
Kal silently cursed his friend Arin, who had assured him that he and Barry would be on the schedule.
“Check again. We’re on it,” Kal insisted. “Or we’d better be. If we don’t get in there and service the primary regulator, power’s going to blow on the main tower.”
The guard glanced over his shoulder at the tallest of the ancient spires. “Main tower’s not operating right now.”
“Yaris wants it fired up and pumping atmo when Maverick gets back,” Kal said. “He’s supposed to be getting to Valhalla any day now, so she wants a test run.”
“Not on my sche—”
“Check it again,” Kal insisted, knowing that if he didn’t press the man, Barry would, and then things would get messy. “Or I’ll make sure it gets back to Yaris that you’re the reason we didn’t do a test run. Better hope the regulator holds.”
The man chewed his sandwich for a few long seconds, swallowed, and then sighed. “Fine, whatever gets you out of my face.”
He turned to his console and mashed a finger into a schedule icon. A list of deliveries and personnel appeared on the screen. Kal was surprised there was no privacy block keeping him from seeing the info, but decided not to tell the guard how to improve his security.
“Huh,” the man grunted. “Well, there you are. Must have been a late addition.”
“Ya think?” Barry muttered, and Kal resisted the urge to elbow his comrade.
“OK.” The guard passed the scan pad through the window. “Tokens and bios.”
Kal and Barry each Linked with the pad and passed their public keys, matching tokens with what was on file, and then verified their biosignatures and vitals.
“Looks good,” the guard mumbled around another mouthful of food. “Be sure to check in at the front desk and then register with the shift boss.”
“Will do,” Kal said with a nod as he led Barry along the walkway toward the main doors.
Kal nodded in response, and fifteen minutes later, they’d made all the appropriate check-ins, using their fabricated excuse to get them full access to the main tower.
Following Barry’s ancient blueprints, they turned down a dimly lit corridor that led to a stairwell on the northeast corner of the tower. The floors were clean, having been scrubbed by bots, but the walls were dull, their plas pitted and the color faded.
They reached the door that led to the stairwell, and Kal tried it, not surprised to find that it was locked.
He placed the terminal patch kit over the door’s access panel and waited the typical fifteen seconds, after which there was an audible snick, and the door opened.
“See?” Kal said as they stepped into the stairwell and waited for the lighting to slowly activate.
“Sure, and if it had failed?” Barry asked once he’d closed the door behind them.
“I’m not an idiot. It would soft-fail and not raise any alarms.”
“That you know of.”
“Kid,” Kal turned to face Barry, his grey eyes boring into the younger man’s green ones. “I’ve survived on this shithole a lot longer than most people in my position. I’ve done it by knowing what’s a wasp nest, and what’s a wad of plas. I’m not risking my life here, so trust that I’m not risking yours either. Got it?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
The two men began to descend the stairs in silence, Kal noting that it hadn’t seen as much cleaning as the hall above. The air was moderately fresh and there was little dust, meaning that they were still on the central filtration systems.
Which meant there could be errant nano about, circulated with the air that kept them all alive.
He kept a passive scan sweeping the area, the EM sensors running from small domes on his shoulders, hidden beneath the technician’s uniform. Periodic blips of activity showed up on his HUD, but it was consistent with normal background activity from nano and microbots that were ever dormant or entirely without power.
There were sensor nodes on each landing, but they registered as offline as well. Kal suspected that they only performed periodic sweeps. Operating full, constant scan everywhere within a facility like the atmo tower—especially with it being so old—would have likely produced a host of false positives to constantly track down.
That was where people tended to fall back on the ol’ Mark I eyeball—and that was where Kal usually found an in.
Still, it unnerved him that the atmo tower was so easy to breach. Either the tower guards trusted too much in the unspoken rule that the facility was hallowed ground, or there was some sort of surprise waiting for the pair.
“Almost there,” Barry said a minute later. “Just two more flights.”
Kal nodded a silent acknowledgment, and when they reached the bottom of the stairwell, a thick alloy door with a strange-looking security pad faced them.
“Well, there it is,” Kal said.
“What is?”
“The surprise. I’ve never seen a pad like that before. Must be original…or at least a few centuries old.”
“This where you bring out the good stuff?” Barry asked.
“Yeah.”
Kal opened up the case he carried and extracted a pad hack and small quantum comp. He slid the pad hack’s access cable into a crevice on the panel, waiting for the filaments on the end of the cable to stretch out and tap the pad.
They waited in silence for several minutes, Barry casting questioning looks at Kal that the older man ignored. Finally, the green light came on, and he connected the pad hack to the quantum comp.
“OK, now we let it sniff a minute before it begins slinging codes.”
“How’s it gonna know codes from back when this panel was put in?” Barry asked.
“Well, because there are only so many—not that we have time to try a fraction of them—but more because this panel is connected to the central system, and all we have to do is sniff the maintenance codes and initiate a re-code in the panel, and it will let us set our own password.”
“Really?” Barry asked. “That seems really easy.”
Kal shrugged. “Well, there are a number of other breach techniques the unit can try, but that one works most of the time. And the reason why it’s
so ‘easy’ is because I’ve spent years building the toolset with a deep database of tricks to pull this off. You can’t buy off-the-shelf shit to do this sort of thing.”
Barry fell silent, and the comp continued to do its thing. It was taking longer than it should have, but Kal wasn’t about to tell his accomplice that. Then, almost four minutes later, it flashed a green light, and the panel switched to unlock.
The door swung open, and Barry was about to step into the dark passage, when Kal held up a hand. “Wait.”
He released a microdrone and it flew out, carefully mapping the space beyond, building a detailed picture of area and passing it to the two men.
“OK…” Kal shook his head. “That’s some old-school shit.”
“Looks like something out of the vids.”
The image that the drone was building up in their minds wasn’t fantastical, it was just different. There were only so many ways to configure a corridor, but this one had the feel of a time gone by. It was the little things, like the pattern on the deckplate, the types of brackets holding conduits against the wall, the shape of the lights—which were still dark. It all had a sense of aesthetic, yet rugged design, which was missing from everyday life on Jericho.
“Looks like one of the museums back in Silstrand City,” Barry commented. “Or one of the old starliners that they take out on special holidays.”
“Well, in Montral, ‘They don’t make ‘em like they used to’ is always a truthful idiom.”
“So are we good?” Barry appeared impatient.
“Well, sure, if you want to be target practice for that turret down there.”
“What turret?” Barry asked in a quiet voice, peering into the darkness.
“Just kidding,” Kal said with a snort. “There are more sensor pods down here, but they’re all offline as well. Maybe no one cares about this place.”
Or maybe it really is a honey pot waiting to catch stupid flies like us.
“So can we go already?”
“Yeah, just watch the drone’s feed and don’t use any lights. We have three hundred meters of these corridors before we get to the pumping station.”