by Jael Wye
Exactly two minutes later, Bianca would break through one of the service bot locks. She had designed her hack so that all the other access points would show alerts at the same moment hers did. No one monitoring would be able to tell which particular lock had been compromised. Once she was in, she would immediately hack into the car’s GenIe and trip the Crowd Control gas in the air exchanger. The CC gas would render everyone on the car unconscious within seconds.
The CC was one of the few commands known only to the top execs at StarLine. Bianca had learned it as soon as she became eligible, though the notion of being able to drug a car full of people against their will never sat well with her. But she would use the power now, without hesitation. And it wasn’t the only weapon she had.
She moved her hand over her hip pouch, feeling the lumpy shape of one of the charge guns Angelo had handed out to each of them pressing against her side. She had never even touched a gun before, let alone shot at someone. But she would, if she had to.
If she could just get to the car’s GenIe, she wouldn’t have to.
Victoria’s changes to the firewalls and commands were certain to be a problem. Her father’s wife might be an evil puta, but she was no slouch as a comp tech. But even if Victoria had managed to corrupt the GenIes as she’d claimed, she couldn’t have destroyed them entirely. The basic structures still had to be intact beneath any new layers. And if the original GenIes were still there, she could talk to them. Or so she hoped.
Bianca shut her eyes briefly. So much of this plan relied on fragile hopes.
She simply had to have faith. Faith in her abilities.
And she had to have faith in her allies too. She opened her eyes and turned toward Mehmet. He was standing near the orbital’s docking lock, monitoring all of them as they geared up. Over the quiet shushing of the air in her helmet, she asked, “You understand exactly what you and the others have to do?” Not the slightest thing could go wrong for this cracked plan of hers to work. Everything had to be timed just right.
Mehmet’s nut brown face was wrinkled with tension, but his eyes were gentle on hers. “Ay, we...”
“Ay!” Angelo growled over the cabin com. “For the last time, we have the codes and we know what to do with them. We’ll get the car stopped. You just get my brother!” Bianca knew it had to be killing Angelo that he couldn’t go get Cesare himself. But he was the only pilot they had. For this cracked scheme to succeed, he was going to have to play his own part and leave Cesare to her.
Once again, she had to choke down a surge of panic.
Mehmet smiled wryly at her. “Don’t fear. We’ll be ready.”
Bianca bowed her head to the old man and turned toward the lock. There was nothing more to be said.
“Rendezvous in one minute,” came Angelo’s voice over the com.
She might not survive. She might be going to her death. Would her father miss her? she wondered. Would anyone miss her?
Did it even matter? If she failed, if Victoria succeeded in taking over the elevator, untold numbers of Martians and Earthers could be in danger. Against that, one person’s life hardly seemed important.
She found herself staring down at her rigid, jointed gloves. Rather small hands to be holding the fate of an entire planet. She lifted one hand up to the viewport, where she could see the great red curve of Mars far, far below her. She pinched it between her fingers. Fought down a bubble of hysterical laughter.
Then she saw a glint out of the corner of her helmet specs. Down the cable, the car holding Cesare captive was on its way up. Suddenly, her world was steady and clear once again. Get to Cesare. That was the one thing she had to fix on. The one thing that was important.
Angelo’s voice sounded over the com. “Rendezvous in ten seconds.”
The inner door slid open. The five of them filed into the lock.
“Go with Heaven,” Mehmet said as the door closed behind them. The gasses emptied, and the outer door opened silently, the vacuum of space stealing all sound.
The EA-2 platform access hatch was less than three meters away. They couldn’t risk coupling with the lock without tripping the alarms, but Angelo had compensated for that. In an astonishing display of skill, he had nearly dry-docked his orbital with the platform.
Bianca shot a magnetic tether to the bulkhead, and latched herself on. Then she stepped out into space.
She fired her thrusters for the short jump, and shot across the gap. She reached the lock without incident, twisted open the manual access, and pulled herself in. Turning, she readied herself to catch the others as they made the jump across the void.
Over the shortrange, she heard the harsh breathing of the Earthers as they followed her. One by one, they latched onto the tether and awkwardly fired their thrusters toward the platform lock. She steadied each of them as they landed safely, peering into each of their sweat-stained faces to make sure they were all holding steady. Once everyone was in, she pulled the door closed. Through the tiny viewport she saw Angelo’s craft pull away. They were on their own.
They floated in the main service corridor, five bulky phantoms in the dim glow of their suit lights. Above them, an access tube snaked upward to the auxiliary lock. Maintaining com silence, she signaled to Iqbal, who was, surprisingly, the member of this team with the most military experience. The other woman signaled back, a stiff, short movement of her gloved fingers. The four Earthers immediately began pulling themselves up to the secondary entrance.
Bianca had a different goal. She took a multitool out of her sleeve pouch and set to work dismantling the nearest bot console. Once she had the panel off, she squeezed through the conduit space and into the maintenance shaft.
The bot tracks stretched into the darkness before her. Quickly, she began to pull herself along them toward the service bot hub just ahead. In the tall, narrow chamber, the bots loomed in black tiers, monstrous shapes under the wash of her dimmed suit lights. She wedged herself between the access door and its nearest bot, bracing to wait.
She patted the composite flank of the bot. “Don’t worry boy. Everything will be just fine,” she said, her voice trembling inside her helmet.
The seconds flickered in the corner of her visor. The car would be here within minutes. If Angelo managed to stop it.
The grinding tension went on, fraying her nerves one by one. Still no sign of the car. Angelo’s team should be at EA-3 by now, forcing the emergency stop. But there was no indication that the car was stopping. Something must have gone wrong. Something—
All the emergency lights suddenly flared on around her, and she nearly screamed in relief. Angelo did it! The car is stopping! She could feel it now, the slight shimmer of the platform all around her as the approaching car braked, preparing to dock. Just a few more minutes to endure before she could go get him.
Hold on. I’m coming.
* * *
Breaths tore through his lungs. His nerves were on fire, his skin like the surface of the sun. But what was happening inside him was even worse. Even though every cell in his body cringed in revulsion and rage, a black neediness was steadily creeping over him. He was getting hard.
It was the drugs. Whatever the puta had shot him up with was doing this.
He blinked, trying to focus. Her face loomed above him, cold and perfect and deadly. Tendrils of pale hair writhed around her head like a nest of snakes. The car had begun rising out of Mars’s gravity well, he realized. He felt himself drifting against his binders. Underneath the searing pain and the unnatural lust, he felt a familiar lurch of vertigo. Great.
She said, “You’re nearly ready for me, I see.” The tip of the shocker grazed over his rod and up his stomach. “I suppose I’ll take pity on you and end your suffering. But I want to hear you beg first. Beg for my yin.” The shocker traced little patterns on his skin.
“Right,” he panted. �
��May I please have a bucket of rotten rat guts?”
That earned him another long shock.
His vision was swimming with unnamable colors. His skin felt too tight, stretched like a drum over his bones and over his rod. Her voice hissed in his ear. “Darling boy, after I’ve had you, you’ll bite your own tongue off for saying such idiotic things. If I don’t bite it off first.” He saw the shine of silk as she twitched her fingers in her gown. It started to flow up around her legs, rippling like oil, baring her smooth, pink sex. She shifted slowly. She was going to mount him.
His eyes hazed over. He squeezed them shut and tensed, ready to thrash, futile as it was. There was a high ringing in his ears. Maybe he was going to get lucky and pass out before she drilled him.
He waited. Nothing happened. The ringing went on. He opened his eyes very slightly.
The puta was looking toward her vidscreen, the pink shockrod dangling from her fingers.
Emergency stop... Cable integrity breached...
She whirled on him, her hair flying, eyes burning. “Unbelievable! The rat wouldn’t dare!” She took two great bounding strides and was across the room at that hideous fecking vidscreen of hers.
He drifted. Tried to ignore the throbbing in his groin. Tried to figure out what she was talking about. Maybe Angelo was fecking with her somehow. Wouldn’t surprise him. He hoped Angelo wouldn’t get himself killed trying to rescue him. Wasn’t worth it. Besides, Angelo had to protect Bianca.
Bianca... Anguish wrenched at him, threatening to break him more than anything else had. He had lost her for good this time.
Blackness had started surging around him again. Tempting to let it sweep him away. But he couldn’t. Something was happening. Had to hold on.
* * *
The second the docking lights flashed the full-stop signal, Bianca forced the servbot through the access. She saw that someone was trying to override the emergency protocols, but she used the bot comp to parry every strike.
She was in. The lock slid open and the bot trundled down the service shaft. She squeezed in after it. A comp node blinked its green lights a few meters down the shaft. She pulled herself up next to it and opened up her sleeve pouches. Quickly she unspooled ten e-threads and strung them into the finger ports on her gloves. Then she took out a bot interface slip box and bundled the ends of the e-threads into it. She stuck the bot box on the comp node port, and with a few movements of her fingers, she sent a simple data request through the box. Status data from the car comps scrolled over her suit visor. She was drifting over the dense shell of the car’s StarLine security. Immediately, layers of fire blazed up around her probe, ever shifting waves and walls of it beating at her.
Someone was there hiding in the fire, closing off avenues and tangling threads. Victoria. It had to be her. “Do your worst, you huli,” Bianca muttered.
Precious seconds leaked by as she scanned for the path through the maze. She slipped and twisted the data, sliding through the Cloud, forging a path to the car’s master control. She worked the data with a ferocious intensity, even more than she had when the Noctis drill was collapsing. She couldn’t fail.
She set up a decoy, slid around a sim blockade through the recyc refresher algorithms, and there it was. She was at the edge of the car’s GenIe.
It was a huge shape of memory and extrapolation, the outlines shifting by the nanosecond as new information was assimilated and new probabilities were realized. It slid around itself in waves that were as familiar to her as her own name. But something was wrong.
Victoria had indeed meddled with the GenIe. The deceptively simple elegance that characterized her mother’s programming had been spiked and pitted with treacherous routing, knotted with ugly traps.
But the original structure of the GenIe was still there, unbroken beneath Victoria’s disfigurement. It had to be.
Very carefully, Bianca began probing around the edges, feeling for a way into the heartflow of the data. But she was running out of time. Victoria was scrambling her firewall to catch up to her. Bianca set a quick logic snare, holding her off, but it wouldn’t last long. She had to make a decision now.
She steeled herself, and with a flick of the e-threads, she shot a simple base command into the comp matrix, one of the very first, clumsy routes she had made as a child to access the car networks. For a heart-stopping nano, the command glanced across the surface of the GenIe. Then it caught, the progressions falling into place like the notes of a familiar song.
Elation surged through her. The GenIe had been twisted and diverted, but it still recognized her.
She instantly tripped the CC.
* * *
Victoria was shrieking in rage. Warning chimes sounded as emergency protocols activated. He could hear the click of blast shields closing over the doors and ports, the sigh of the backup atmo filtering though the room.
Hope and fear tore through him in waves almost as bad as the shocks. Angelo, you fecking idiot.
* * *
It was working. The sensors showed about twenty motion and temp points indicating the sec and techs on board. All of them had gone motionless. Only four points were active, just inside the secondary lock. The Earthers were in! As she watched, their signatures showed them starting up the central shaft toward the control center at the top of the car. Bianca was to meet them there, where they would finish taking control of the car and locate Cesare. She gathered herself to move.
Then something caught her attention—something she should have been looking for from the outset.
There was a hole, a blank spot in the sensor map of the car encompassing one of the state habsuites. She probed it, and came up against walls of isolation fire. She tried to diffuse it, but it slipped away from her. She couldn’t even get the GenIe to acknowledge its existence. It was set wholly apart, an alien presence in the web of the car’s awareness.
Bianca drew back, her fingers frozen in midspace. Victoria was awake and active behind that shell. And Cesare was with her. She couldn’t see their signatures behind the fire, but she knew that was where he was. She knew it.
Victoria had to be neutralized, before she got the chance to wrest back control of the GenIe, or hurt Cesare.
Couldn’t risk contacting the Earthers. Victoria might hear. Couldn’t waste the time it would take to break down the firewalls from the outside. She had to go in.
Shove the fear aside. Just go.
Her hands began to move, almost without thought. She abandoned her bot box and e-threads, tapped into a nearby server bot and slaved it to her cuff. Within minutes she was pulling herself through the bot conduits toward the state habsuite, the bot she had jacked tracking obediently along the wall next to her. The right panel was only a few dozen meters up and over. Hand over hand, jointed gloves gripping the emergency holds. Swing up and around a corner.
There it was, the statehab’s server bot access. The blast shields were down, seemingly impenetrable. But Cesare was behind that thick black panel. She had to get through. She summoned the bot and inserted another e-thread. The instant the bot was interfaced with the door, she jacked into its control, taking it over. Through the bot interface, she began to demolish the door comp, electron by electron. A few seconds and she would be in. She dug into her hip pouch and clutched the gun. Just a few more seconds, she chanted to herself.
* * *
There was a tiny chime somewhere to his right. He slid his eyes that way, looking through his lashes. There. The low, unobtrusive panel of the server bot access.
Victoria heard it too. With a curse, she scrabbled for a few objects in the console below her vidscreen and shoved across the room. She caught herself on the bed frame near his head just as the bot panel snapped open. A bulky white figure swung through the dark hole, the glow of ivory skin visible behind the gold of the faceplate.
No! It co
uldn’t be! His throat closed on a desperate moan.
The shocker suddenly pressed hard against his temple. “Not one mil closer, or I’ll fry him.”
The figure went still. “Let him go.” Bianca’s voice buzzed through her helmet com, her tone icy calm. She lifted the charge gun clutched tightly in her fist, and floated back against the wall, her movements small and controlled as she navigated the zeegee. “I’ve locked down the car and triggered Crowd Control. Your sec is knocked out. I have a team taking control of the elevator GenIes. It’s over.”
“Nothing’s over, fool,” Victoria snarled. She brought up her other hand, clutching a bright red orb engraved with a small apple. “Does this look familiar?” She smiled at Bianca’s sudden stillness. “That’s right. This is a version of the gremlin that cut you down in the Outback, armed and ready. I touch this to any comp in here, and the whole car goes dead.”
“You’re lying. You’d be trapped here with the rest of us.”
“I have an escape route set up for just this situation, you tab. I’ll be fine, but you’ll be dust. And he’ll be cooked.” The rod jabbed his head. “Now put your gun in the wall recyc behind you, or I’ll melt his brain in his skull.”
Bianca’s eyes were huge in her pale face. He saw the gun tremble slightly. “All right. I believe you.”
“The gun. Now!”
Slowly Bianca turned and put the gun in the recyc slot. With a snap, it was gone.
Victoria relaxed slightly. “Good. Now take off the helmet.” She flicked her rod down at his shoulder and sizzling pain racked him again. Then the rod was jammed back against his skull.
“No! I’ll do it!” Bianca unlocked her helmet and pulled it off, letting it float nearby. Her black hair flowed around her head. “This standoff can’t last forever, Victoria,” she said, her voice clear in the filtering air. “My team will be here in minutes.”
“Those pathetic Earthers you brought with you? They’re less than a nuisance. When my gremlins shut off the CC, my sec will dust your squats and take back control of this car.”