“I have you at no disadvantage, I see.”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “That seems pretty clear.”
“I was referring to knowing your name already.”
“I wasn’t.”
Cooper sniffed. “All right, then. I see we can move straight past the pleasantries. I have a proposition for you, Mr. Price.”
“What is it?”
“Leave. Immediately. Let these people continue their lives in peace.”
“Do you mean the residents of Habitat 1? You’ve made them your slaves.”
“Yes, but it’s better to be a slave than dead, isn’t it?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about my intention of venting all their oxygen until they suffocate, unless you leave right now. If you continue your attempts to infiltrate this habitat, there will be no one left for you to save. Be a good boy and leave us be.”
“There are emergency protocols that will prevent you from doing that. They’ll grant us enough time to get the population out.”
“Tens of thousands of people live here, Mr. Price. Besides, don’t you think I would’ve already overridden those protocols? It isn’t hard to do. I’ve had control of this place for months, and I’ve prepared for every eventuality.”
Jake fought to slow his breathing. “I don’t think you understand, Cooper. We’re not leaving without those people.”
“And I’m not letting you leave with them alive. You’re not very good at this, are you, Mr. Price?”
“Good at what?”
Cooper gave a theatrical sigh. “About now is when, typically, you’d offer me something I want in exchange for my cooperation.”
“Okay. What do you want?”
“I want a way to leave this system. I’ve seen what’s happening. I have the sensor data showing thousands of ships waiting to swoop through the system, in all probability leveling everything in their path.”
For a long moment, Jake weighed the possibility. “Fine,” he ground out at last. “I can grant you safe passage out of the solar system, provided we can secure it for ourselves.”
“I don’t mean aboard one of your ships. I mean that I want a ship. A warship. I want you to allow me to accompany you to wherever you create a wormhole using Bronson’s Javelin—I know his is the only wormhole generator that still functions. And I also want one of your mechs.”
Jake squeezed his eyes shut. He couldn’t honor any of Cooper’s demands. Can I?
“Let’s meet face-to-face,” Jake said. “This isn’t something to be discussed over comlink.”
“I won’t meet with you, Mr. Price,” Cooper said, his tone admonishing. “No, no. You’re far too hotheaded. Send in someone with a more even temperament, so that we might discuss matters sensibly. Preferably someone practiced in negotiations. And just one individual, Mr. Price. Unarmed. I don’t trust you with anything beyond that.”
“All right. Where should I send them?”
“The central module you see atop the habitat’s roof is an armored observation unit. It’s also Habitat 1’s master control center, and I’ve adopted it as my command center. You can send your emissary there.”
With that, Cooper terminated the transmission.
Jake’s heart was beating so hard it made his vision vibrate—or maybe that was just the mech dream. Either way, he couldn’t let the anger he’d let Cooper induce get the better of him.
I’m glad we didn’t meet in any other context. That’s not a guy I could live with for any length of time.
“Tessa,” he said over a two-way channel. “I have an extremely high-risk mission for you, but only if you accept.”
“What’s the objective?” she said, without hesitation.
“Saving the people of Habitat 1.”
“I’m in.”
Chapter 44
Redemption
The inner airlock door hissed as the seal broke and it lowered into the ground to admit Tessa into Quentin Cooper’s command center.
Cooper’s jaw dropped the moment she removed her helmet, though she’d been around long enough to recognize a man who saw his every action as part of a performance.
“Tessa Notaras,” he said, his accent ratcheting a few socioeconomic levels higher than his normal manner of speech. “You know, the possibility that it might be you crossed my mind when I saw you exit the shuttle out on the roof. But I couldn’t be sure until your helmet was off. It is you.”
“It is.” Her eyes flitted to the control panel behind him, then back to Cooper’s face.
“How have you been?” he asked. “We’ll need to search you, of course.” Cooper snapped his fingers at a pair of guards flanking the airlock, who took it upon themselves to start dismantling Tessa’s pressure suit to give her a patdown. One of them even ran his fingers through her white hair, which was held together with a silver band. So close.
“How have I been, you ask,” Tessa said, her tone musing, as though she wasn’t having her personal space invaded by a couple of amoral gorillas. “Do you mean since you murdered most of my Three Points associates?”
An offended expression replaced Cooper’s warmth—or at least, an expression meant to simulate offense. “Now, Tessa, I know you didn’t take that personally. Tell me you didn’t. That was strictly business. Either Daybreak was going to take over this planet or Three Points was—we both know that. I was just the one to move first.”
“Neither of us needed to take it over. We had a good thing going, Cooper. A marketplace, and one Darkstream didn’t have its fingers in. Until you let them stick their whole hand in, of course.”
“Tessa, you can tell me that Three Points didn’t spend a considerable amount of time preparing to eventually take over, but I won’t believe you. At any rate, to be fair, my takeover did work out rather well for me, wouldn’t you say?”
“For a few months. Until now. You just lost two habitats.”
“But I’m gaining a warship, along with a MIMAS mechs. Not a bad trade for a two-bit drug lord, wouldn’t you say?”
“I’m afraid the MIMAS is out of the question. Are we going to stand here staring at each other, or do you have an actual negotiating table?”
“I do, in fact. It isn’t much, but it’ll do.” Cooper waved at a round steel table with two seats, and Tessa walked toward it. “Now, I do find it odd that your starting position appears to be that I can’t have a MIMAS mech. That seems to suggest that you will get around to offering me it, eventually, if I know anything about negotiating. But I thought you’d be cannier than—”
Tessa changed directions just before arriving at the table, sidestepping around Cooper’s back and snaking an arm around his forehead. Simultaneously, she jerked on the end of the silver band holding her hair together, and the band snapped into her grasp, rigid, becoming a blade as long as her hand. Her long, snowy hair cascaded down her back as she pressed the blade to Cooper’s throat.
“Oh, I like my negotiating position quite a lot, actually,” Tessa said. She began to drag Cooper backward, toward the control panel.
“She’s botched it,” the drug lord said, sounding almost resigned. “Shoot her!”
He tried to jerk away, but Tessa’s grip was stronger than he’d anticipated, apparently. He remained in place, but his goons followed his orders, pumping lead into Cooper as well as Tessa.
There were at least three bullets inside her by the time she made it to the control panel, using Cooper as a shield against the onslaught. The man was likely dead, by now—he’d taken a lot more abuse than she had.
But Cooper had been right. The memory didn’t fill her with pride, but Three Points had spent a lot of time preparing for a takeover, and she knew a fair bit about a habitat’s control systems.
Enough, anyway, to know what to press to let Jake and the others inside this control center.
She input the command while holding Cooper’s corpse close, like a lover.
He absorbed several of the bullets intended fo
r her, but not enough of them. She took more hits, and her breathing was coming in ragged, burbling gasps, now. Her legs gave out underneath her, and she fell backward against the panel, still holding Cooper’s body across most of her torso.
As the inner airlock opened to admit Jake inside his alien mech, Tessa thought of Gabriel Roach, oddly.
It occurred to her how similar she and Roach were. Both of them had done horrible things, and both had been completely unable to reconcile those things with the fact that they viewed themselves as fundamentally good people.
Despite that, they’d continued to do the horrible things. They’d continued exposing themselves to that moral abyss.
It hadn’t been the alien mech that had disintegrated Roach’s psyche. The mech had sped up the process, but that would’ve always been the end game. He was completely unable to accept either the reality that he’d done evil things or the fact that, for his sanity, he needed to turn around and start doing good.
As her consciousness faded, Tessa knew that she’d also come close to fragmenting.
I didn’t quite get there, though. And maybe we can call today a redemption.
Jake made short work of the Daybreak soldiers inside the control center, and then he slid out of his great metal hulk of a mech to kneel at Tessa’s side.
“Hang in there,” he told her. “We’re going to get you back inside a shuttle. Get you to the nicest sick bay those warships have to offer.”
Tessa shook her head.
“Come on, Tessa. We have to move, and I need your cooperation for that. I need you to stay with me, okay? We don’t have much time. The Meddler ships have started to tighten the noose, with Alex at the center. Soon enough, they’ll close around us. If we’re going to get out of this system, now is the time.”
Tessa shook her head once more. “I’m gone,” she managed to croak. “Don’t waste any more time on me.”
With that, the darkness took her.
Chapter 45
Intelligence
Lisa woke to a softly lit room with beige walls and sumptuous leather furniture. Sitting up, she found herself in the embrace of an armchair with just the right amount of stuffing. Before her sat a coffee table carved from mahogany, and while it was clearly expensive, it was understated, too—small, with only a few flourishes included by the craftsperson.
The light level seemed to increase as her eyes adjusted to it, so that they never felt strained by it. Across from Lisa was a long, leather couch the same color as her armchair.
Squeezing her eyes shut, she tried to recall how, or why, she was here. A soft hiss reached her ears, and she opened her eyes once more to find that a rectangular aperture had opened in one of the walls to reveal a tall, thin robot covered in interwoven plates of silver and gold.
Crying out, she leapt to her feet, hand flying to her hip, where she kept her sidearm holstered.
It wasn’t there.
The robot made no move toward her—it simply stood there, regarding her, as though waiting for her to piece everything together.
I was outside the Morning Light. Fighting the Ravagers.
On the heels of that memory came the realization that this robot matched Rug’s description of the ones she’d thought had been under direct control by someone or something. The ones the other robots had done everything they could to protect.
“You…you’re a Meddler,” Lisa said.
“Very good,” the robot answered, moving smoothly to the couch and taking a seat. “Though we prefer to be called Progenitors.” It was odd to see a robot in repose, and odder still when it gestured at the armchair Lisa had woken in. “Please. Sit.” The aperture closed silently—ominously, especially since it had no visible mechanism for opening it again.
Lisa remained standing.
“There’s absolutely nothing you can do to effect an escape from this room until we’ve had our chat,” the Progenitor said. “You can try harming this telepresence robot, but even if you succeeded, it wouldn’t have a meaningful effect on…well, anything.”
“Telepresence robot. So that isn’t what you actually look like.”
“Far from it.”
“Why won’t you meet with me yourself, then? Are you so cowardly?”
“A number of reasons, a principal one being that you aren’t ready to behold our faces. The experience would break you.”
“I highly doubt that.”
“You’d be surprised. At any rate, it’s out of the question. This is the way we will have our discussion.”
Lisa decided that accepting the thing’s invitation to sit would be the best of her limited options for projecting strength. She suspected that attacking the robot would prove just as futile as it claimed. So she sat.
“You said you prefer ‘Progenitor.’” She felt her mouth curl involuntarily, in distaste. “So you view yourselves as…parents, of some sort?” The idea perplexed her, but that was the meaning of the word, as far as she could remember it.
“Of a sort, yes,” the robot said, nodding, its elongated head turning the motion into a vaguely threatening one. “The word can also mean ‘that which originates,’ and we have served as the origin of many things. We’re only getting started in that regard, in fact.”
“What have you…originated?”
“The Gatherers, for one. The Amblers. The Ravagers. The alien mech that your friend Jake Price pilots. And…” The robot held up a spindly hand, palm-up, in a nonchalant gesture. “And the Ixa.”
Lisa shook her head. “You’re lying. The Ixa weren’t created by anything. Their evolutionary past is well-studied, well-documented.”
“You’re right. But we initiated that evolutionary past, Lisa. There’s a lot for you to get up to speed on, you know—things that the rest of your species has known for twenty years, now.”
“The rest of my species…they’re alive?”
“Yes. They won the war. Congratulations, by the way.”
Despite herself, a tiny flame of hope flickered inside Lisa. So there’s something for us to return to after all.
“It was, effectively, a war against us, since the Ixa were our unwitting war hounds. But actually, the term ‘battle’ might be more appropriate for that conflict—maybe even ‘skirmish.’ Because the war is far from over, Lisa. Far, far from it. You might say that our little scrimmage here in the Steele System was another battle in the same war; a battle it seems we have won.”
“That’s wrong,” Lisa snapped. “We’re not done fighting yet.”
“We’ve won,” the Progenitor said, sounding slightly uncomfortable, as though it felt awkward about having to explain this to Lisa. “But that’s not what’s important. What’s important is what all this means for our continuing efforts to exterminate humanity.” The thing’s voice had gotten increasingly cheerful, putting Lisa in mind of a vid advertisement for some new system net service. “Are you ready to learn?”
She said nothing, not enjoying the sense that she was being toyed with.
“I’m going to assume you are,” the Progenitor said. “Okay, so here it comes: everything that’s happened here in this system, it was just one big intelligence gathering exercise. How’s that for a mind-bender?”
“I can’t even begin to unpack that gibberish,” Lisa spat.
“My,” the robot said, sounding genuinely surprised. “Testy. Okay. Let me help to break it down for you. We engineered Darkstream’s arrival in this solar system. For a while now, we’ve had the ability to tamper with wormholes as they’re being created, and we tweaked the one Darkstream used to leave the Milky Way so that it brought you to this specific part of this galaxy. Once your former employer arrived, their exoplanet experts saw that this system was the only one around that showed no signs of colonization. So they selected it and hoped for the best. That was also by our design. Are you with me so far?”
Lisa didn’t answer.
“I think you are with me. You’re sharp, Lisa, that’s well known to us. So, okay. Darkstream chose
this system to colonize, and of course they were delighted to find resource exploitation infrastructure already in place—infrastructure far more efficient than anything humanity has had access to before. The only obstacle to using it, of course, were those pesky four-legged giants. The Quatro. But they seemed primitive enough, and humans have always been easy to manipulate when it comes to making them fear and hate something. So Darkstream taught their fighting men and women to hate, and to kill, the Quatro, and all was well with the world.
“Until, that is, Bronson and the Darkstream board of directors learned that the Gatherers’ owners were well aware of how they’d hijacked them. We’re getting into new territory for you now, aren’t we? You see, we approached Bronson and the board soon after that first year—soon after they succeeded in suppressing the Quatro and seizing a healthy share of the resources for themselves. And we cut them a deal. We told them that they were welcome to continue using those resources. We didn’t even want a percentage. But we did have one condition.”
The Progenitor paused, clearly leaving space for Lisa to say something. She didn’t want to play its game, but she did want to know what Darkstream had given them in return. “What was it, damn you?”
“In exchange for the use of our resource-gathering robots, we required Darkstream to build a surveillance apparatus the likes of which humanity has never known. It’s perfect, for its purpose—the technology is ours, so of course it’s perfect. Since almost the beginning of humanity’s little experiment in the Steele System, we’ve had access to virtually everything that every human here has said or done. Everything in the Steele System was either constructed by Darkstream or using their materials. Everything from the habitats you’ve lived in to the devices you’ve used to communicate. We could never have done this without the company’s help, but we did do it. Through lucid, we practically came to learn some of your thoughts, though of course most of those did escape us. Pity.”
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