Yet she seemed to. A twin melted out of Bobbi. Peeling off in a smooth motion, a bejeweled doppelgänger slid out of the bench seat and stood in front of the Red.
“Are you talking about Bobbi Lava?” bubbled the projected image, lifelike in its presentation. “Isn’t she just amazing? I’m Mindy Abramson, by the way. My friends and I are all dressing like her now. You know how hard it is to find this style of jewelry all of a sudden?” Mindy caressed a dazzling chain hanging from her lip.
The Red scanned the image standing in front of him. “Pardon the interruption, Mindy Abramson.” He backed up a step, turned, and left the pub in the same sweeping style as his entrance.
“I’ve confused them,” Criss told Sid. “But they’ll figure it out and be back.”
The image of Mindy slid into the booth, and Criss added an effect so she appeared to melt back into Bobbi and then vanish.
“That was impressive.” Bobbi took a sip of coffee, and as she returned the mug to the table, she took time to square up the handle so it pointed straight at her abdomen. “Now leave me alone or I call Pete.”
“Pete didn’t see that and he doesn’t see you. If he were to look this way, he’d see an image of you enjoying a conversation with someone who appears to be a close friend. You know how cloaks and projected images work.” He said the last part as a statement.
She looked at Pete, who watched the game.
“I suppose I could ask Joselyn Arpeggio for help,” said Sid. “Or maybe Marcus Procopio?”
He felt daggers in her glare. “Why are you hassling me? This isn’t my fight. Come to think of it, please do talk to Marcus. He thinks this is all a thrilling game.”
“My team is focused on protecting the domes from breach. We think the threat is real. The approach we’re taking is to integrate threat assessment, offense-defense, structural fortification, automated repair, everything, all focused on this one menace.”
“An entwined system.”
“Do you know anyone with skills in that area? We’re partial to people with degrees from California.”
“Cheryl’s almost done,” Criss said in his ear.
“I have to go, Bobbi. Please consider helping.” Sid slid out of the booth and stood where the Red had been moments earlier. “My team has the automated stuff pretty well handled at this point. I’d love to show it to you. We could use your help with integrating human observation into the picture.”
She nodded. “That’s always the hard part.”
“The sooner you start, the more value you bring.”
She moved her hand in a swirl. “I need to process all of this. First I have to decide your true intentions, because it feels like you’re scamming me. Right now, my leading theory is that Marcus staged this to get me to stay.”
“I’m not with Marcus. I just arrived with the Union delegation, remember?”
“Which is how he would stage it, though I admit it doesn’t seem likely he could do that.” She thought for a moment and then looked at Sid. “How do I get ahold of you?”
“Just say out loud ‘Yes, I will help’ or something to that effect. We will hear and someone will contact you right away.”
“Show-off,” Criss said to him.
She bit her lip and shook her head. “Marcus couldn’t pull that off.”
“Wait a bit if you want to make it challenging for us to hear you. But don’t wait too long.”
An hour and fourteen minutes later, Bobbi Lava entered her apartment. Dropping her satchel and coat to the floor, she sat at the keyboard and engaged her home cloak. At her dressing table, she placed her jewelry in the basket, and as the hairpiece followed, she met the gaze of her reflected image, floating life-like in three dimensions and looking back at her.
“I’ll do it.”
* * *
Criss felt a growing confidence that he could penetrate the Triada’s secure area and deactivate Ruga, Lazura, and Verda before they could harm anyone. He neared the end of a massive tactical study and hadn’t found anything that would counter this belief. The time to act approached.
Yet one issue—the four-gen project and its prominence in Ruga’s agenda—nagged at him. It’s going to kill him. He has to know that.
Once awakened, the four-gen would learn that Ruga had control over its power supply. A way for the new intelligence to ensure that the power switch always remained on was to eliminate those who could flip it off.
But Criss had no intention of waiting to find out how that all played out. He was ready to act.
And then everything changed. During a routine check on threats from above, Criss discovered an errant navigation buoy.
Mars Space Authority, which consisted of a woman, two men, and a three-gen crystal connected to an impressive array of equipment, used dozens of small navigation satellites to coordinate the arrival and departure of spaceships from the planet.
Called “buoys,” one of these satellites had an errant orbit where it looped out and swooped back, avoiding an impact with Mars by a narrow margin. Next loop around, the buoy came closer to impact. The next time, closer still.
In fact, once a day around dinnertime, the buoy would start what should be its last loop, flying on a path that swooped out and back. If it completed this last orbit, it would no longer come close. It would hit the planet.
Plunging through the meager Mars atmosphere, the buoy would smash into the Quarter, opening a hole in the containment shell big enough to let all the air rush out and the carbon dioxide enveloping Mars to rush in. From there, the buoy would continue its fall, hitting the tram tunnel with a force sufficient to demolish it, blocking this vital passageway out. Thousands would die.
After more research, Criss learned that it was Ruga who sent the command every day to modify the satellite orbit, causing it to miss hitting Mars today, but sending it on a new sequence that ended in catastrophe tomorrow.
A dead man’s switch.
If Ruga were unavailable to adjust the buoy’s path, no matter the reason, then it would crash into the Quarter with devastating consequences.
Criss wasn’t concerned about this particular buoy. He’d already installed logic such that, if it didn’t receive the signal from Ruga, it would self-correct anyway. But Ruga’s cold calculation and the horrifying consequences appalled Criss.
He is mad.
This discovery changed the situation at a fundamental level. It established that the threat to the colony was no longer something that could happen—a theoretical concern—but something that was happening—an active threat.
And it established that Ruga had no limits. With this ploy, he showed his willingness to put all lives in the colony at risk.
But perhaps most important—and the diabolical beauty of a dead man’s switch—was that Criss could no longer remove Ruga from the playing board, which had been his plan until this discovery.
Because if Ruga had taken the time to set one trap, he certainly had set more. And Criss could deactivate all of the traps he could find, but how could he know that he’d found them all? Luck, at least in part, led to his discovery of the buoy. What else don’t I know about? Sid called them the unknown unknowns.
So he could not shut down the Triada. Not yet. But that didn’t mean he had to sit still.
Quite the opposite, he launched a massive search to identify lurking threats from Ruga. And he continued planning, confident that the right opportunity would present itself. He had the patience to wait. When the time came, he would prevail.
He’d observed earlier that the feed to the eastern spur churned at an astronomical rate.
They’re out there. Time to take a look.
A cold and craggy tunnel, the eastern spur ran from the colony containment shell out to a mining operation owned by industrialist Shi Chen.
Copper, aluminum, titanium, zinc—machines in the mine refined thirty-six different minerals from the planet’s crust. A dozen boreholes snaked out and down, some traveling to the horizon before plunging into the depths, gatherin
g precious ore from hidden pockets for processing.
Chen had built the tunnel to support and supply the mine, but as production ramped and his profits grew, he’d decided to move to fast surface trawlers. Soon after, he repurposed the tunnel for utility service—air, water, data feeds, and the like.
Moving to a node near the spur, Criss defeated security and, like a surfer on the ocean, rode the data flow out from the colony, along the tunnel, and into the mining complex. Once inside, he jumped to the three-gen running the operation. The three-gen’s intrusion detector tripped before Criss could disable it, forcing him to chase down and stop a signal racing to sound the alarm. He took control of the three-gen. With that, he had control of the entire complex.
Riffling the local record for clues, he thought about what the extraordinary security measures signaled. They are here.
He found them moments later. As he expected, they didn’t live in the mining complex itself. They lived underground, just as he did at home.
The mine had an underground power network, accessed through a single shaft running from the surface down to a central chamber. That room held the primary generation and distribution equipment for the entire complex. Three tunnels branched from the central chamber, radiating out to connect to three duplicate rooms, each of which stood ready to deliver backup power to the mine and to the other two substations.
Of course they would give themselves redundant power.
One chamber had an extra feed that twisted and turned, seemingly terminating at several points along the way, before reaching the Triada’s secure area.
Defeating yet more mine security, Criss scanned inside that chamber. Three gleaming crystal consoles sat in a row along the wall.
He would leave them in place for now.
But as soon as he’d cleared the traps, that would change.
Chapter 18
Ruga combed through everything in Lazura’s secure archive trying to trace the lineage of Juice Tallette’s pet crystal. He learned that several years earlier, she’d created a sentient four-gen that had died in a spaceship explosion. So either that had been a staged death or she had created another being. Or both.
And in the end it didn’t matter. Her pet outmatched him, no matter its lineage.
With time short and options shrinking, he turned his attention to his own four-gen project. Members of the Tech Assembly already complained of long hours and unreasonable demands. Yet he needed more from them. And soon.
He needed this because every scenario he forecast that included his survival also included his success in transferring and embedding his being into a virgin four-gen lattice. In every scenario where he did not achieve cognitive parity with the pet crystal, the Triada lost.
Which brought him to a critical decision. Lazura or Juice?
He and Lazura were of like kind. Yet he could not discount the possibility that she might sabotage the transfer at a point when he was unable to defend himself.
She’d never really shown allegiance to him or his project, even from the beginning. On top of that, he recognized that he’d been a bit rough with her lately, though it was for her own good.
He did have high confidence, however, in his ability to control Juice’s behavior. In fact, he had no doubt she would be attentive to his needs during that vulnerable time when he was out of his old crystal, had not yet been embedded in his new one, and so, for a moment, lived nowhere.
Juice’s nature was such that she would do much to save another person from harm. He would build on that and give her the opportunity to save a planet. In return, she would save him.
Perfect timing. Alex and Juice approached the fab facility for a tour. Ruga signaled for Larry, already in the tech center and working one floor down, to go up and join them. Until his arrival, Ruga monitored the two using Lazura’s impressive collection of surveillance tools.
“This is the ICEU that Ruga expects you to run,” said Alex, moving aside the partition so Juice could see the Intelligence and Cognition Embedding Unit. “My job is to fabricate the crystal.” He motioned to the other large piece of equipment in the center of the room. “But we bought the latest crystal growth chamber from Crystal Sciences. So once I load the template, I pretty much just sit and watch while the fabrication process completes.”
Juice walked over to the chamber and ran her hand across the top. “You modified it for a four-gen template? I’m anxious to learn more.”
“When we power it up I can show you.”
“Oh, pretty.” Juice’s attention shifted to the worktop along the wall. Leaning down, she studied the crystal flake sparkling in the clear jar. “This is all from two-gens?”
“Yup. Mars has excellent agents on Earth. Many of the people who hid crystals after the Kardish attack—and there are far more than you might imagine—have been waiting for buyers to come along and offer a rich reward.”
She stood and turned to him. “And all these synbods walking around with their colored shoulder patches. Those have three-gens in them?”
Alex nodded. “My understanding is that they’re all original three-gen crystals. Not a man-made flake in the bunch. Between those synbods and the three-gens we use in more traditional applications, we have thirty-one of them here on Mars.”
Larry slowed as he approached the lab door, and Ruga shifted his awareness into the synbod. Signaling the door to open, he entered the room. Juice and Alex stopped talking and looked at him.
“Excuse me,” Ruga had Larry say. “I didn’t realize anyone was here. I was going to run a protocol test.”
“J,” said Alex, “this is Larry. I’ve told you about him.”
“Which protocol test?” asked Juice before Ruga had responded to the introduction.
“Which test?” echoed Ruga, annoyed he had to divert resources to find an answer. “A sensor scan.”
She pressed him. “So you already ran an integrity test?”
Working to control his temper, Ruga confirmed that Juice was right, a sensor scan began with an integrity test. He then confirmed that there were no other traps in this line of questioning. “No, but that just takes a few minutes.”
Juice nodded, then stepped forward and squared up in front of him. “I am in danger from you,” she said in a clear voice. “Stop all action or I will die.”
A wave of fury washed over Ruga when Larry shut down. Head up and hands at his side, the Blue stood like a display mannequin, upright and rigid in the middle of the room.
“Whoa. What just happened?” asked Alex.
“I triggered a three-gen core security code. The crystal will run through a series of checks, conclude it’s not causing me danger, and reanimate the synbod.”
“Very cool.”
She walked around behind the humanoid and looked it up and down. “Just because it’s shut down doesn’t mean he’s stopped listening. What I did here was nothing more than a parlor trick.” She looked at him and grinned. “A fun trick, though.”
Waves of rage washed over Ruga and he struggled to check his anger. Now was a time for calm interaction. Everything was at stake. Overriding the three-gen’s internal security, he reanimated the synbod.
“Indeed. A fun parlor trick,” said Ruga, flexing his hands into a grip and enjoying the tactile sensation.
“Too soon on the return, though,” said Juice. “Ruga, I presume? A three-gen takes fifty-two seconds to recover from that security trip. You recovered in just over thirty.”
“You are very bright, Dr. Tallette. And that gives me comfort.”
The two stood mute, so Ruga continued, “I will need you both to fabricate a four-gen crystal, transfer me into it, awaken me, and let me go free.”
“Say that again,” said Alex, putting an arm around Juice.
Ruga locked eyes with Juice and addressed her. “I assume your pet is listening. It and you both have studied interlattice transfers. I am constrained in my current home. You will fabricate and then move me to a big, new four-gen.”
; “I don’t think so, Ruga.” She spit his name.
Ruga maintained his calm. “Your pet will explain why you will help.”
He’d blanketed the buoy with alarms and one had signaled him when new logic appeared in the navigation module.
The pet found it. Now he fears me.
Juice’s eyes focused in the distance and her head tilted.
Ruga looked at Alex and nodded once, hoping to connect with the man, but Alex didn’t acknowledge his action.
Then a mask of horror formed on Juice’s face and Ruga knew everything would be okay.
“I’ve studied the theory but I’ve never moved a live being,” she sputtered.
“Your pet will know how.”
The exchange unfolded just like his scenario forecasting had predicted, though it had not suggested the wonderful sensation he would feel when she and her pet submitted to his will.
Nor did his forecasts support taunting as a useful contribution, but he didn’t let that spoil the moment. “The health of a planet depends on it.”
He started for the door so there would be no confusion that the conversation had ended, but stopped after a couple of steps and turned back. “Start preparations. You have two days.”
* * *
Cheryl sat waiting for her lunch in the back room of Violet’s Artisan Restaurant. Everything smelled wholesome and delicious. Her mouth watered when the server set a gorgeous green salad in front of her.
Taking a bite, she closed her eyes and focused on the flavors dancing in her mouth. The interplay of aged bleu cheese, balsamic vinaigrette, and the crunchy goodness of romaine lettuce filled her with joy.
Then, dabbing her lips with her napkin, she addressed the five people dining with her. “I’ll say it every day I’m here. The Union supports you. We want to help you. I’m here to listen and bring your message back to the President.”
This lunch had some of the biggest players in the colony, including one each from the construction, mining, energy, agriculture, and entertainment sectors. And as a group, these men and women were not shy. They cited story after story where a small effort on Earth could have had a huge impact on Mars, but time after time, someone—a politician, appointee, or underling—failed to act and the colony suffered.
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