I jerk up in my bed, in the darkness, panting and sweating and clutching at my face.
I'm Taryn. I'm here.
I rub my face vigorously, then punch the bulkhead repeatedly until I hit the intercom and the lights turn on.
It was just a nightmare. It couldn't have been real... Could it? Did Amharr really butcher his own brother?
I cringe and pull the blanket tighter around me.
What happened to him?
What's happening to me?
-
I realize it's five in the morning when Jade answers my call—which took me a good half hour to patch through the intercom by hand—with a series of mumbled profanities.
"I need to ask you a favor," I say.
"Bug-Nut?" He snaps awake. "What—? How are you?"
"Bugfuck crazy. Can you meet me?"
"Sure."
"At breakfast. In front of the mess hall, 'round six."
"Course. But... What happened to you? Preston said you just popped up in some cargo bay."
"I'll explain later."
"Okay. See you at the mess hall, oh six hundred." I can hear the smile in his voice. "I'm so glad you're back in one piece."
"The wrong piece."
He chuckles.
I close the com and climb back up into my bunkbed. I'm intact, physically speaking. There's not a single trace of what's really going on here. No proof. Almost makes my anxiety unjustified, like I have no right to feel so wounded, no good reason to be scared. But I do.
Predictably, breakfast is the last thing on my mind when I enter the mess hall. A vile mixture of smells and noises assaults me as I open the door. The room is packed and damp, a cauldron chock-full of limbs and salivating mouths. My attention darts from face to face, table to table and fork to fork, and my stomach churns.
Ignorant. All of them. So content with themselves. Unaware they owe their comfort to the TMC's ruthless profit-making. They pretend to be better than the Ticks, dedicate their lives to do things differently, but the very food they gorge themselves on comes from the Ticks' plunder of the Dorylinae's food processing tech. Spoils of their genocidal conquest of Tau Ceti.
I look at these people, at how they eat and banter, oblivious of their hypocrisy, and I hate each and every one of them. If it weren't for our common goal of taking out the TMC, I'd never willingly share the same air supply with them. My hands start shaking and I press them flat against my thighs.
I lower my eyes and make for the self-service food counter running along the wall. I grab a casserole, pick up a vitamin juice, and some cutlery. I make my way between the tables and see Denise and Viktor sitting with two kids I don't know. So I head toward them.
"Pull your head out of your ass next time," Vik tells the blond boy next to him. "It's just a simulation, but it's fucking serious to me."
The boy doesn't look older than fifteen. But he's apparently training to become a combat pilot. He looks frail, sitting next to mountain-sized Vik with his square shoulders, clean-shaved head, and perpetually motor-oil stained fingers.
Did Vik always look like this? Did anything here look as it does now? It's like I've landed in a parallel dimension, where things appear the same but they're fundamentally different. Or maybe I'm the one who's changed. I don't much like either prospect.
Denise gives me a hug. She's the only one who tried to befriend me since I joined Preston's crew, apart from good old Jade. Didn't work though. I don't feel close to anyone here. That's not likely to change either, not with this link fucking with my mind.
I sit down.
"I hope Preston's not giving you a hard time," Vik says with a smile.
"Not yet."
I inspect the casserole in front of me. Protein extracts and bio-engineered vegetable stew, with dry crackers and algae concentrate. I don't think I'm hungry after all.
Denise is slurping a cream soup that looks like gobbet-filled tar, and Vik is sipping something thick and yellow through a straw. It reminds me of Dorylini blood. And there goes my attempt at breakfast.
"So how was it?" The blond boy leans over the table to gawk at me. "The rumor mill here's already grinding stone. Let's get the story from the source."
"I heard they experimented on you." The other boy spreads a buck-toothed grin at me. "Is it true? They probe you?"
Denise scowls at them. "Don't, guys." But her voice is meek. She's curious too.
Vik minds his own business, pretending not to pay attention. But I know he's dying to hear it. They all are. Let the freak talk about her alien abduction.
"I heard they tortured you," Blondy says. "Rigged your synet with some alien subroutine. But you hacked your way out and ran."
Vik grunts at him. "Yeah, she ran all the way here through space."
"The Ticks will definitely think you're a spy," Hamster-Face says from across the table. "They'll hunt you down and pick you apart, cell by cell."
"Like they did to that Ashmore guy on Procyon, remember? They'll process your body through the fungi food-farms to get rid of all the evidence. And the colonists will have no idea what's in their food!"
Vik slams his hand on the table. "So that's why you scored so bad on target practice—your brain's full of shit."
"Stop it," Denise says. "Leave Taryn alone, she's had a rough time."
"She doesn't need your help," Blondy throws back. "She's an alien infiltrator. She can just kill us all if she wants to."
"You're such an asshole," Denise says.
I stare down at my untouched food. Blondy has it all wrong. I can't kill anyone if my life depended on it. I could try stabbing people, but with my luck that'd just get me linked to everybody and my head would explode.
'Scatterbrain', my post-mortem nickname.
My heart climbs into my throat, and my hands turn cold and sweaty. "Let them speculate," I tell Denise, and rub my jittery fingers under the table. "They can imagine whatever they like."
"I think there's a grain of truth in every rumor," Hamster-Face says snottily.
"So it's true, then?" Blondy asks. "They turned you?"
I try to think of some witty response, but my pulse is drumming loudly in my ears. I shouldn't have come here. I'm not just the outsider anymore, the favored target for harmless practical jokes and uncomfortable questions. Now I'm the one who spent three weeks alone with the aliens, selling them who-knows-what to save my hide.
"Excuse me." I stand up, turn around and plow between the tables.
I hurry between the countless smacking lips and grinding teeth, between the slobbering maws and sweating bodies—out, out of this hell contracting around me.
I trail between the chairs and random legs of people, my vision narrowed into a tunnel, my throat constricted. The room throbs around me like a full stomach trying to digest. My heart drums loudly.
Thunk—thunk—thunk—thunk.
The exit. It's right there. A million clicks away.
I stumble and bump against a shoulder. Someone grabs me and pulls me along. I swim through the thickening air, trying hard to separate reality from dream—from Amharr's memories.
I'm dragged into the corridor to lean against the wall, bending over, swallowing back the acid.
"What happened? You okay?" Jade's face is a blur, his voice a distant echo. My chest tightens into a painful knot. I feel like I'm going to die. He touches me, but I slap his hand away. My heart has climbed behind my eyeballs, inside my ears, inside my tongue. It's beating so loud, so close, drumming faster and faster inside my skull.
THUNK—THUNK—THUNK—THUNK.
He's here.
I drop to the floor and claw at my shirt. Panic swallows me like an avalanche.
"Taryn?"
I know this kind of heaviness. I remember it. It's been part of me my whole life—his whole life—this is Amharr—I'm in Amharr's mind!
"Taryn!"
Something strokes my face in the darkness, ripping me out of his consciousness. I jerk back. "What the hell happened?" Jade y
ells, shaking me.
I start to cry, unable to help myself.
"Are you alright? What's going on with you?"
I want him gone. I want everything gone. Every single thing around me—gone.
Are these Amharr's feelings? Or mine? I don't know.
I'm having a panic attack. Hallucinations. PTSD. Neurosis. Whatever. It's a normal reaction. I'm fine. I'll be fine.
"It's nothing," I mumble and get up.
People have gathered in the doorway of the mess hall to gawk at us.
"Can you walk?" Jade asks.
I nod and flounder into the corridor, not caring where I'm headed as long as it's away from here, away from what just happened.
9
"You have to get me an unregistered synet," I tell Jade as soon as he closes the door to his room.
"You sure you're fine?"
I nod vigorously. He throws himself on the bed with his feet stretched out into the room, and crosses his arms under his head.
"So will you help me?"
"You know what you're asking me."
"The aliens fried my synet, Jade." He sits up, wide-eyed. "I can't be a no-tech, not for another second. My cyber skills are all I have. They're what's kept me alive and free this long. I need a new synet—one that I can control, not one of Preston's crawler-ridden hackwares."
"Yeah, about that synet of yours." He frowns. "What happened to you out there?"
I shrug and look for a place to sit, but there isn't one except next to him. So I cross my arms instead.
"I'm not helping you unless you tell me what's going on," Jade says. "What happened to you on that ship, Bug-Nut?"
My shoulders sag, and I drop on the edge of his bed. I try to recount the facts as dryly as possible. Some things I keep for myself, though. I can't talk about Amharr, not really, and I don't say a thing about the ship still being out there either. Not after what Bray told me. I don't want anyone getting wild ideas about trying to reason with Amharr, and I don't want to be involved in it. Sure, I was the one all riled up about getting some powerful aliens on our side, given the size of our challenge with the Ticks, but this is definitely not what I signed up for.
Jade listens to my story with a serious face, then thanks me for telling him. I feel a bit guilty for the many things I haven't said, so I get back to the synet issue.
"I can't stand this, Jade. It's like being an amputee. I can't even use the intercom right. And I don't want to stay here any longer, either."
"Why not?"
I tilt my head toward him. "Like I've ever been welcome."
"Want me to welcome you more warmly?" He lays a hand on my thigh, and I see the sarcasm blooming in his eyes. I try to smile. And he smiles back. "I don't believe you're fine. Sounds like some nasty shit you've been through."
"Just help me get a new synet, Jade, and I'll be fine. I promise."
"Let's say I can find one. Do you plan to swallow it, or what?"
"You'll implant me."
He straightens and looks me in the eyes. "You're crazy."
"I don't have a choice. I don't want Preston or some fucking metal monkey poking around in my head."
"I'd have to break into the storage deck and search through a gazillion secure units, then sneak you into the medical bay and use the medroid to implant you. For which I'd have to hack into the medroid first, then calibrate your synet correctly, and implant you too. And I'm no doctor. We're going to get caught."
I stand up and rub my itching palms. "Come on, Jade. I need this."
"What about me?"
"You'll be fine. You're a roly-poly."
He sighs. "Just to be on the same page here." He stands up too, a head taller than me, one eyebrow crooked up. "You actually want me to implant you with a stolen synet. Not just smack you over the walnut until your senses comes back."
"Smart guy." I wink. "Preston must have some synets hidden somewhere. You find me one and we'll see from there."
He ponders it for a couple of seconds, hangdog, then blurts, "We can use the emergency equipment on the Transiter! All we need to do is disable the AI. Oh, Amelia's gonna neuter me if I mess that up. It took her three weeks to get the AI back up and running. And it lost all its memory."
"That's great!" I mean the Transiter idea, but the AI's loss of memory is good news too. Preston doesn't need to know how good my hacking skills really are, or he'd have me monitored twenty-four-seven, even without a synet.
"We still have to break into the engineering and diagnostics bay," Jade says, thinking aloud. "And make sure no one finds us. You know this is still a really bad idea, right? I'm no surgeon. What if I screw up?"
"I can't get any worse. I'm practically seeing fairies dancing in the hallways. Next I'll be gnawing at my foot like a damn floathead."
He laughs. I've won him over.
But my last argument still rings noisily in my ears. A strip of all the lowlifes I've ever seen crosses my mind: all the narcos, VR bingers, and Dreamers, and of course the floatheads. Just thinking of them makes me shudder.
Backwater addicts who can't afford the luxury of high-class, low-risk drugs frequently end up shooting narcotics or running black market VRs. They get trapped in glitchy realities while levy robots suck their blood and spinal marrow for payment. The even more desperate ones turn into Dreamers, allowing rogue AIs to rent their brains. They spend weeks in a dream-like state, sometimes months, turning into babbling idiots with plummeting IQs and disintegrating nervous systems.
The floatheads are the worst though. They're my greatest nightmare, ever since I ventured out into Maza's colony alone one day when I was six.
Consciousness-to-machine uploads—C2Ms—are normally used to transfer the terminally ill into expensive databanks or holograms. But they've also created an underground market, where criminals buy off the bodies of addicts at ridiculous prices, promising them eternal life. Those who can still afford it buy whatever's available as a body-substitute to download themselves back into and live, if you can call it that, since the cheapest shells are organ-supply clones—lab-grown bodies unfit to carry healthy human minds, let alone distorted ones. The results are often grotesque zombies, insane and crippled by disease. Colonial services routinely root them out, but some manage to slip through the cracks. They crawl into the gutters and prey on vermin and each other, sometimes reliving horrible things, sometimes doing them.
Being dragged into a sewer by one of them as a six-year-old nipped my interest in C2Ms in the bud. I still have nightmares of floatheads clawing at me, trying to gut me open.
"Seriously, Bug-Nut." Jade lays a hand on my shoulder. "So many things can go wrong. You don't have to do this."
"Yeah, I know." I brush his hand away gently. "But yes, I do. With or without you, Jade, I need a new synet. I just stand a much better chance if you help me."
"Ah, what the hell. I'll get my hands on a clean synet. You go find out when the diagnostics bay is empty. Or maybe hack in some last-minute schedule changes or something. Wreak some havoc so we can get to the Transiter."
"Um... how do you propose I do that?"
"Oh, right." He scratches his head and grins. "Fine, I'll do all the work, you parasite. Go get some rest. It might be your last moment of clarity, what with untested wetware in your brain and me at the helm. So shoo."
-
By the time Jade picks me up from my room, I'm a bundle of raw nerves.
He programmed a fake decontamination into the Transiter's maintenance schedule, making sure no one would be in the bay to spot us. But since the gates are sealed, we have to break in through a ventilation shaft, past several filters. Jade's got a jam-packed toolkit strapped around his waist, and one around his ankle, and assures me it'll be 'a wink.'
The shaft is just large enough for us to wriggle through, but it still feels as if we might get stuck any moment. We crawl past several broken fans, their rotor blades glazed with burnt dust and organic residues, circuitry hanging behind them like spilled guts. The s
haft's irregular welding seams, covered in smut, scrape my hands and edge into my knees.
"Jade?" My voice sounds stuffy in the confined space. "Where did Preston find this ramshackle station anyway?"
He peers at me between his arm and leg, his headlight making me wince. "It's made of scraps. Rigged up from pieces of space stations and satellites from the first wave of colonization. Some of it's even pre-FTL, like the water recycling system. I think he stole most of it," he adds quietly.
"Damn." I crawl behind him, staring at his worn TMC-issued boots. "How did he get it out here? He didn't fly all the way, right?"
"Did too."
"No shit?"
He grunts as he squeezes into a narrow duct to the right. "The doc's real good with limited resources, and he's got the connections for it. That's why I joined him in the first place. If anyone's gonna find us alien allies, it's him."
"Jade, let's be honest. We don't make a very good impression in this rustbucket, or that flying egg-shell of a Transiter. Why would aliens want to have anything to do with us?"
He stops and peers at me down his chest. "Would you rather leave everything to the Ticks?"
"That's not what I'm saying. Look. All I mean is that Preston might have good intentions, but he sure as hell's doing everything he can to make sure it's going nowhere."
"What do you mean?" Jade keeps crawling.
"Isn't it obvious? Sending us out to make contact in a Transiter. Putting Bray in charge."
He snorts. "Cut the man some slack."
"He's a self-important prick with no clue what he's doing."
"That's what we're here for, But-Nut. That's why he recruited us."
"To get his ass out of trouble?"
He stops again, and squints at me. "What are you talking about?"
"He panicked out there, and almost got himself killed."
"Preston was never out there."
"Preston?" I ask confusedly. "I'm talking about Bray."
"Oh." He chuckles. "Of course you are."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Nothing."
"Jade!"
He snorts, and keeps pushing forward. I groan and try to keep up, crawling into the suffocating darkness on my stomach.
The Deep Link (The Ascendancy Trilogy Book 1) Page 6