by Ginger Booth
Then a small hard object clattered into the wizard’s plate, spattering blood. Cope tossed a bloody knife along after it. Ben glanced to see his arm sliced open to remove the…whatever it was. Schauble certainly looked annoyed.
Fortunately, Ben thought quick on his feet, especially when insane things came at him rapid fire. “Rings,” he reminded Copeland. Surreptitiously, he and Wilder passed all the confiscated jewelry to their chief engineer. Ben clicked his comms open. His earpiece operated hands-free. “Zan, talk to me!” Zan piloted Prosper at the moment.
Dead silence, no line.
Ben clicked to Thrive. “Remi!”
“I see. I text you, captain,” Thrive’s engineer replied promptly. “And Zan. No reply.”
Ben didn’t bother with excuses. “The…olive…is projected from umbrellas at the base of the city wall.”
Schauble paused by the airlock, smiling in satisfaction to watch him flail. Ben frowned in puzzlement. What made this rego bastard tick?
Clay and Cope had rather different life experience. Clay caught Anders around the neck and squeezed until he passed out. Cope drew the stunner from Ben’s pocket and shot the prince.
Remi replied, “Captain, Prosper’s propulsion is offline. Milo says no EM works inside the…nullity. If I shoot the projectors, she fall and split like a melon.”
Ben suppressed an image of what that might do to his people within. “Right. Get out of range.” Just this afternoon, the poor engineer reminded Ben how very much he hated being left acting captain. Not his skill set at all. “And Remi? Use your people. You can handle this. Acosta out.”
Ben hoped that was true.
Sass roused groggily from her arms at Kassidy’s poke. They’d been stuck in the interrogation room all day now, chained to the table except for the unhelpful medical exams. Earlier Evi Lieder had gloated about what she expected to happen during Ben’s supper with Schauble, though she didn’t share details. Now she left them to stew.
For the time being they were alone.
Kassidy took Sass’s hand and drew it to her own at her separate hitching loop, and grasped her fingers. Sass cocked an eyebrow in question. Not that Kassidy could answer, under surveillance as they were.
Not a real answer anyway. “I just want you to know how much your friendship means to me, Sass. All these years, your weekly calls have been the highlight of my life.” Kassidy excelled as an actor. Sass almost bought it, despite the fact she’d vanished for over a decade of those years. The squeezed tear was first-rate.
Then she felt it. Her weight vanished just for an instant. Since both women were sitting still, they didn’t move. Then her weight returned.
Kassidy managed to lift her grav generator from their luggage. Sass thought back. Maybe she did it while they swapped on the odious visit to the stirrups. Or maybe it was during the bathroom breaks.
“You’ve always been my very dearest friend, Kassidy,” Sass assured her, randomly. The captain didn’t much call the starlet when she could, either. The urb and the settler champion appreciated each other. But they weren’t close.
They only had the one grav generator. They nodded to each other in understanding. It did them no good caught in here. But opportunity would come.
“This room is so claustrophobic,” Sass shared. “She promised to treat us well. We need food and water. We need to lie down and sleep.” She shot that last to the mirror. Not that the mirror understood English.
Or perhaps it did. About ten minutes later, a couple of the Polizei arrived. They detached Kassidy from the table, and reaffixed her handcuffs in front of her. Sass cast her eyes down lest they glow in delight. The cop proceeded to do the same to her, while his buddy stood back, thumping his stun baton on his hand. Then he jerked his head and led them into the hall. The other cop rolled the hand-cart of their stuff into the corridor behind them, bringing up the rear.
The two men carried on a conversation in German, with only half an eye to the docile captives. From long experience, Sass assumed they were grousing about somebody.
This should be rush hour at a police station. But not so for the Polizei of Deutschland. The corridor was empty. The door hung open to the room beyond the mirror. Sass glanced in as they passed – empty. They continued on to the staircase and headed upward. Four stories in this building, Sass recalled. Maybe five. This district held shorter buildings, a few blocks inward from the structures abutting the towering city walls, plus the botanical gardens. The police station stood out among its surroundings.
The ‘Brit’ Kassidy would stick out, too, though perhaps Sass could blend in if the cops weren’t in active pursuit. If I can –
Kassidy decided for her. She waited only to see that the staircase was empty, then flipped to the underside of the stairs above their heads. This astonished the guy behind them. Sass’s roundhouse kick surprised the guy in front, and sent him crashing into the inner handrail. He bounced back swinging his shock baton. Sass hopped to the other foot and kicked up to send the baton flying. She likely broke a toe doing it, but she could ignore that. Levering up a step on her unbroken foot, she straight-kicked him in the sternum, back to the railing. As he gasped for breath, she got her handcuff chain around his neck and squeezed until he passed out.
Then she had a moment to check on Kassidy. Unlike Sass, the gymnast never could fight worth a damn. But she sure could dazzle with fancy footwork. She’d also snatched a rebreather mask from the cart full of loose belongings and empty luggage, her purple pterodactyl beak. The beefy cop was trapped behind an inexplicably somersaulting captive, and the cart, which stood precariously balanced on two wheels between Sass and himself, halfway up their current half-flight of stairs.
When confronted with Kassidy’s insult to the martial arts, by now Clay or Cope would have decked her. Sass’s lesser reach advantage made this more of a challenge. She usually kicked the shorter woman in the ass. The cop would likely reach the same conclusion in about two more seconds. Sass snatched up the fallen stun baton in one.
She stunned him behind his ear, and suddenly took on the full weight of the cart. At the same moment he crumpled, she paused to wonder, Why didn’t he cry out for help? “Kassidy, catch him!”
The other woman flipped back to normal gravity on the stairs, and prevented him rolling further. She toed him in the gut. “OK. Why?”
“He was more scared of asking for help than letting us escape.”
“So?”
“Felt bad for him.” Though not bad enough to prevent a second stunning, to stay on the safe side.
She jockeyed the cart up to the half-landing, and started stuffing her backpack with the essentials, strewing clothes onto the staircase. Kassidy started to do the same, but tried to save her underwear. Sass plucked a camisole from her hand and ruthlessly pitched it onto one of the two cops below them. “Check him for keys.”
Kassidy soon bore those back in triumph, after cuffing the bossier of the pair to the railing. She quickly got the cuffs off Sass, and accepted her much-lighter backpack as Sass chose to pack it. The blood analyzer, camera drones, and guns were gone, alas. Evi Lieder took those, though not the drone controller.
“Change,” Kassidy insisted. Their own clothes hadn’t survived the medical exam. Both now wore Polizei navy pants, too large, and orange smock tops. Kassidy stripped the men of their Polizei-emblazoned shirts, and their cash. But Sass vetoed wearing the too-big shirts for now, on the grounds that all Polizei seemed to be men. Sass packed the shirts for later. From their wardrobes pouring down the steps like a waterfall, Kassidy collected a nice fitted jacket for Sass and a black long-sleeved T-shirt for herself. They pulled them on quickly.
“Up,” Sass said. “Quiet.”
They didn’t bother to check the next floor, continuing until the staircase ended. The corridor’s floor was thick with dust, clearly unused. Sass hung a right, toward where she remembered the botanical gardens. She tried a few locked doors at that end before she squared off to kick one in.
This let them into a pitch-dark empty room. They left the door ajar for light, and checked the window. Or rather, the hole in the wall, because with no weather inside the dome to protect against, no window was installed. Yes, they were above the botanical gardens, dark and creepy in the long night, with a few weak golden glow-bulbs scattered through. They looked straight down onto a short round leafy tree, maybe a maple.
Sass pulled out her comms. “Collier to Prosper.” Dead line. “Collier to Thrive. Clay?”
“Captain, thank God! Remi here.”
“You have my location?”
“I do. But captain –”
“We are about to jump into a tree. We are free. We have breathing masks.”
“You – ah! The dome, she will break?”
“Thank you, Remi,” Sass purred.
Kassidy stepped onto the sill first, then made herself small, cranking down her gravity and balancing her weight on only one foot. Sass clambered out beside her, crouched double. Then Kassidy grabbed her by the arm and jumped
On the grav generator’s max output, they floated into the top of a maple tree. Brilliant blue green mining lasers, Thrive’s biggest guns, ripped across the dome to their right. They swatted leaves and twigs out of their way until they hit a branch strong enough to walk on – at 0.1 g. They probably would have survived jumping to the street. But they had no people problems in the tree.
While they worked their way to the trunk, air emergency sirens screamed through the district. The few people in the park fled. Sass and Kassidy donned their goofy-looking rebreathers, and sat perfectly safe on their bough.
“Down?” Kassidy inquired.
Sass shook her head, and took to her comms again. “Remi, we’re out. Status report.”
Was she ever sorry she asked.
45
Less than an hour ago, the Sagamore engineer Remi Roy accepted delivery on a furtive-looking middle-aged woman. Then Ben’s crew chief Judge flew the shuttle on to Prosper with his other two test subjects. Ben placed Remi in command of Thrive during his dinner party, with precious few crew aboard. As acting captain, the closest Remi had to another officer was Corky the housekeeper, and Aurora, once-envoy from Denali to Mahina.
He delegated hosting the hapless Deutsch woman in med-bay to lovely fellow hellbelly Elise, and Milo the squirrelly Parisian wizard’s apprentice. The ship AI served as Deutsch-French translator. Milo translated between Cantons wizardry and honest science. Not ideal, but Elise was brilliant, and Remi left them to it.
Because he had his own work to do. Now that he had his test subject plugged into an auto-doc, Thrive was to fly a search pattern over Deutschland, hunting for the beacon from Sass and Kassidy’s comms. The city-state was the largest on Cantons, a squashed octagon containing close on 300 square kilometers and over thirty thousand citizens.
The comms beacons were weak, and the dome high.
But they knew Cope was sequestered near the Checkpoint Bravo gate, not far from the great train station that served the northeast monorails to Benelux, Scandia, Polska, and Zentrum. Remi sat to his work in the bridge. He planned out systematic arcs radiating from the train station. Flying with his attached containers a mere twenty meters above the dome, and allowing 30% overlap of coverage… This will take all night.
But he intended to be thorough at this first urban enclave. Because his captain was most likely right here. He’d feel better once he located Cope’s beacon. Calibrating by that signal strength, through walls and roofs and dome interference, Thrive might be able to fly higher, and cover wider swaths more quickly.
Quailing as always, he piloted Thrive to the starting position, then laid in the navigation programming for the first sweep. His heart pounded as the ship obeyed as intended. He blew out a massive breath of relief he hadn’t realized he was holding.
Remi had piloted skiffs and shuttles in space for decades. Precision was second nature as an engineer. But space was spacious and shuttles were small. Driving their home ship a pebble’s toss from a dome was a whole different –
Gah! A warning alarm beeped from the console. The dome had protuberances. He approved the computer’s recommended zag. Then he studied the dome surface carefully. He updated the navigation programming with permission to dodge as needed, and verified that such dodges wouldn’t likely exceed his built-in overlap.
“What are you doing?” Aurora inquired from the door.
“Busy.” He scowled at the sensor readout. Still no sign of Cope’s comms beacon. Cope was at the dinner party, and wasn’t wearing his comms. Of course, for all Remi knew, his comms could have been sent by express courier to Iberia. It could be anywhere.
Aurora helped herself to the gunner’s seat. “You’re a superb engineer, Remi.”
“Because I focus.”
“Have you considered Sylvan? The career challenge of taming a beautiful new world?”
“Dome-bred,” Remi replied absently. “Agoraphobia. Sylvan, she sound awful.”
Aurora switched tack. “Loki would make a powerful ally in developing Sylvan.”
“Loki is a canon,” Remi allowed. “Be careful how to aim this gun.” There! Was that a hint of a signal? Yes, but not a Mahina signal. “What do you want, Aurora?”
“I want…” She leaned toward him and traced a finger along his jaw. He recoiled in distrust. “While we have the ship. Elise and I would like you to look the other way. Just for a little while.”
Remi’s brow lowered. “You…” His brow flew up. “No!” He jabbed his comms. “Elise, report! Where are you!” No response. “Computer, where is Elise?” She should be in med-bay.
The computer replied calmly, “Elise Pointreau is in the ship’s office.”
“Computer, where is the Bloki box?”
“The computer holding the AI Bloki is in the ship’s office.”
Merde! This was why he hated acting captain! The damned crew took advantage like school brats with a substitute teacher. He couldn’t concentrate on a damned thing while they misbehaved. He punched the ship-wide hail. “Bron, Joey, Carp, report to the office!” Then he jumped out of his seat, and pointed to Aurora. “You! Watch that! You are searching for comms signals for Cope, Sass, Kassidy.”
Aurora sighed and leaned languidly over the search display, which showed no progress. They’d probably fly right over the signals he sought and she’d never notice. He leaned over the seat and tapped in instructions for the computer to record everything. Which he should have done in the first place anyway.
And that was the other thing he hated about acting officer. Spending all his time kicking himself for not doing a perfect job, when officer wasn’t his job, and what made a perfect job herding brats, anyway?
The office was six steps from the pilot’s chair in the bridge. He yanked open the door. And yes, Elise had out the carefully air-gapped computer where they’d imprisoned the AI Bloki. Another computer box lay on the desk as well, a cable running between them.
“What have you done!” he gasped. “No, no, no!” He yanked the power to the two server boxes.
The ship’s ventilation came on rather strong. Which was odd. He paused a moment. Maybe Corky burnt something in the kitchen. But he had more pressing concerns.
“You’re insane!” he told Elise in French. “This AI was air-gapped to keep it out of the ship’s systems! We spent all day scrubbing the computers!”
“I didn’t plug it into the computers!” Elise denied. “I’m simply making a copy for Hell’s Bells! You know what Loki could do for us!”
Remi leaned forward into her face. “This desktop is a computer! Complete access to the entire ship! Place your comm tab on the surface. In two minutes it’s recharged and its data backed up.”
“I…oh.” Elise’s face fell. “But that’s OK, right? You unplugged it.”
“You called us, Remi?” Joey said from the door. The three guys he’d summone
d hung in the doorway.
“Yes. Carp!” The acting captain selected one of their new crewmen, a Denali hunter. “Elise is prisoner. Put her with Nico.”
Elise’s jaw hung open in outrage. “Hell’s Bells will hear of this!”
The two traded choice insults in French as Carp drew her away.
“Wait, is that Bloki?” Bron asked. The teen who led the Sanctuary student revolt against Shiva, hung over Joey’s shoulder. Joey was Thrive’s sole surviving ordinary crewman from their decade-long trek to Sanctuary. The Mahina farm equipment mechanic was the ship’s senior crewman, through no particular merit or experience.
“She makes a copy, the fool!” Remi confirmed. “Help me air-gap these!”
“Two Blokis!” Bron breathed, and hastened to help. “Hey, putting them on the desktop. Wouldn’t that?”
“Yes!” Remi hissed at him. He hauled the original box off the desktop and set it on its Faraday cage wrap on the floor. Which wasn’t big enough to shield two computer cases. “I need more, Joey.”
“On it!” Joey left on the trot.
Bron helped Remi get the original Bloki box taped into its signal-blocking wrap and stowed on top of the cabinets. Elise’s new box they left on the floor for the moment. Remi could only hope the copy hadn’t gotten very far along. The AI was a complex creature to clone, with a vast program, directives data, memories, and data banks, stored on assorted devices within the chassis. He was surprised Elise had the expertise to attempt a copy.
Although unlike Sass, Remi knew Elise was an agent for Hell’s Bells. Originally Remi was, too. But a decade out of touch rendered him useless as a spy. On his return, after being wined and dined by several competing interests, Remi chose Thrive Spaceways, though not especially Sass.
Elise knew that, damn her.
“Did I teach you to wipe a processor with magnets?” Remi asked Bron.
“No, chief.”
No, he’d never taught Joey either. “Never mind.” He sat to the desk to run diagnostics, to see if any rogue threads of alien AI were romping about. The captain’s desk wasn’t ideal for this. His presets were on the engineering console down in the hold.