by M. D. Cooper
Esther tilted her head at that and then sighed. “Well, we’ve done all we can for them.” She cocked her head at him. “Are you certain your friends in Proxima will know what to do with that cryptic message you sent?”
Lysander drew his gaze down from a cloud that was scudding across the blue sky to the AI beside him and smiled. “Oh yes. Rhys Andrews will know exactly what to do with that message.” He returned his gaze to their surroundings.
“He’s a well-respected part of the habitat community. When the C-47’s governing council realizes that Prime is an imminent threat, but that a special operations team with an intimate working knowledge of this particular criminal mind is onboard, they’ll listen to him.”
“I can understand why they would be motivated to assist, but are you certain the man will have the authority it takes to enact your plan?”
“Absolutely. I was embedded with him for many years, Esther,” he reminded her mildly. “You have to understand, humans have different relationships with their offspring than we AIs do. No matter how old they grow, a child is still something you protect with every fiber of your being.”
He bared his lips in a feral smile. “When Rhys learns that both of his children are at risk, stars help the person who gets in his way.”
THE FINAL KEY
STELLAR DATE: 03.11.3192 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Tolgoy Mining Torus
REGION: Proxima Centauri System
“Hold up,” Jason called out as he leant against a bulkhead along Tolgoy’s main concourse and pretended to adjust his boot. As he did so, he sent a sizeable packet of nano burrowing its way into a node a few meters behind him.
Playing along, Terrance rolled his eyes and called impatiently, “C’mon, the faster we dump this load, the sooner I can get a beer."
Jason grinned. “You just want to spend all those credits I found, burning a hole in my wallet.” He’d accessed his old Proxima credit account days ago, just after the ship resynched its clock to Adjusted Gregorian. This was the largest time correction he’d ever made after a transit; almost ten days by his reckoning.
When he’d accessed his account, he’d been surprised to see his Proxima ID status registered as current; it shouldn’t be—at least not until he cleared customs again. He suspected Eric’s counterpart down on Chinquapin had given them an assist with that.
But since it was current, he’d made use of it to enter as a local. He knew what torus security saw when their Auth & Auth systems pulled up his ident: a young, for-hire freight hauler who had stepped foot on Tolgoy more than once in his travels.
“Got it,” Jason said, stomping his foot once, just as Terrance began to adjust the balance of his ‘produce delivery’, stacked upon the maglev he’d been pushing. In reality, they were both just killing time, waiting for Eric to let them know he’d successfully hacked into the torus’s security system. The nano Jason had just deposited was the last batch they needed before Eric had complete control of the torus.
He bent to ‘help’ Terrance with his load just as Paula, who was hidden in the small service-bot frame Landon had used back on Krait, piped up.
Calista’s avatar rolled her eyes at him.
Terrance’s eyes slid to his, and the exec raised a brow, while the corner of his mouth ticked up a notch. Jason shot the man a black look, daring him to say anything, and the exec just gave him a slight shrug.
The message was clear: ‘what can I say, Eric runs a tight ship’.
Jason coughed to cover a laugh as Eric signaled he was in position. He clapped Terrance on the shoulder and sent him a jaunty wave, then turned and walked off in search of the Barrington Mining Company’s main offices, while Terrance pushed the maglev—and Paula—toward the entrance just outside the torus’s main operations area.
Both men were being very careful not to act in a way to draw attention to themselves. Their base layer armor was hidden beneath shipsuits, and both had lived and worked in the civilian world long enough to know how to fit in. Unlike the Krait facility, Tolgoy was built to a much larger scale, and a larger population meant a crew complement that included several squads of police to keep the peace on-station.
It even boasted a moderate amount of defensive armament, which was why Calista had been using the Icarus fighter to randomly seed the inner torus with small explosives.
Calista groaned.
He laughed out loud, causing a woman to stare at him strangely as he passed. He just nodded pleasantly and kept walking.
He knew he shouldn’t needle Calista, but it was just so much fun to tease her. She was one of the most skilled pilots he knew, well versed in stealth maneuvers, which meant she looked for every opportunity to mask even the slight puffs of air the Mirage’s thrusters would emit as she maneuvered amongst the spokes of the torus, and was not easily distracted by his jibes.
She snorted.
He knew Eric planned to use Calista’s little bomblets in one of a few ways. Distraction was at top of the list, but he didn’t discount the commodore’s ability to use them as a combination of threat and deterrent—should their presence be discovered before the team launched their attacks.
Calista sent the team a thumbs-up on the main combat net.
The explosives were planted, and he saw from her icon that the Mirage had pulled back to a location where she could still provide covering fire, should the Eidolon need to make a hasty retreat.
He sent Eric a ping as he neared the front of the Barrington sector. Nodding to a vendor manning a food cart, he strolled over and purchased a bag of crisps. Popping a few of the local delicacy into his mouth, he wandered down the street, using the snack as a cover for the conversation he was engaged in.
Jason finished the crisps, crumbled the bag in his hand and appeared to search for a recycling unit. Spying the one he knew was next to Barrington’s entrance, he began to walk toward it on Eric’s one-minute mark.
He slapped the bag into the unit and wiped his hands to clear the crumbs off them, then turned and entered the building in time to see several dozen employees exiting a bank of lifts.
Timing was everything.
He stepped up to the security kiosk, placing his hand near its sensor. He was no AI; this wasn’t nearly as easy for him as it was for Tobias, or even Paula. He didn’t begrudge Terrance the ESF soldier’s presence, though; the exec had Eric to protect—plus, he didn’t have Jason’s augmentation.
Nano filaments threaded their way from his hand down into the system as he triggered the hackit Shannon had given him. To his relief, it turned green, admitting him past the lobby area.
The lift began to drop, stopping at a restricted access level. Jason drew a steadying breath as he ordered the nano to hold the doors shut as he placed his hand on the control panel and once again ordered his nano to spin out a filament with another one of Shannon’s hackit packages. He waited…and waited some more. Finally, the hackit returned an amber with errors. Toggling the hackit’s error message, he saw that the package hadn’t been able to take this level’s surveillance offline without alerting security that it was down.
Dammit.
Okay, then. He’d have to make this a fast trip. Surely, Barrington would send someone to investigate an outage. He figured he had five minutes or so to get in and out undetected.
I can do this.
He retrieved the nano filament he’d deployed, and exited the lift. Commanding it to hold for a fast exit, he set out at a brisk walk, following the path outlined on his HUD down the corridor and to his left.
The layout for Barrington indicated their information technology area to be just ahead of him, through a set of sliding doors. He stopped just before them and deposited more nano on the door’s security controls, ordering the filaments to bypass the door’s lockouts.
He entered into an area that appeared unoccupied. Ambient temperature in this section was noticeably cooler than the rest of the building, and the lighting had dimmed in the absence of human workers.
As he approached the nearest console, he reached out to deposit nano onto one of its data ports. Just as his hand landed on the port, he felt the cool, hard surface of a weapon pressed against the base of his skull.
“All right, hands behind your back, nice and slow like,” the security guard said, and Jason chanced a glance back at the guard. The man had a good fifteen kilos on him, he saw—and then the man shoved him forward against the console, twisting his arm viciously upward.
“Another move like that and I’ll shoot. Got it?”
Jason nodded.
“Good.”
Jason felt the cool metal surface of a set of maglocked cuffs encircling his left wrist. “Now the other hand,” the guard instructed.
It was now or never.
Slipping deep into his altered state, Jason pivoted, sidestepping the barrel of the weapon that had been digging into the back of his skull. At the same time, he brought the palms of both hands up, one on either side of the weapon the other man held.
He positioned his right hand along the barrel, his left just above the man’s inner wrist. Bringing both hands together in a lightning-fast move, he grabbed the barrel, twisting it inward, as his other hand knocked the man’s grip loose.
The man’s hand must have spasmed as his thumb broke, for Jason experienced a moment of excruciating pain as the weapon fired and the slug exiting the weapon superheated the barrel he held in his right hand.
Shit! The security here carries projectile weapons?
Stepping back, he quickly transferred the pistol to his left hand, ignoring the magcuff dangling annoyingly around his wrist, and aimed it at the guard’s head.
The man grinned unpleasantly at him as he cradled his broken hand against his chest. He jerked his head downward at Jason’s burnt hand. “I’d say sorry, but I’m not. Bet that hurts like a bitch.”
Ignoring the man, Jason gestured for him to turn around. “Sorry man,” he said before knocking him unconscious with a blow to the head.
Setting the weapon aside for a moment, he grimaced as he used his burned hand to drop nano onto the magcuffs to release them.
The guard was right; it hurt like a bitch.
He used his good, left hand to cuff the man’s hands securely behind his back, and then he reacquired his optic and multitool. That completed, he hooked the man under the armpit and dragged him one-handed behind the console and out of immediate sight.
He reached out to Eric, but was met with silence. His Link to the team’s combat net had been severed. Swiftly, he sent nano filaments weaving into the console, dipping into L2 speeds to sift through data as quickly as it was fed to him.
Ahhh, stars. The schema the intelligence office at Chinquapin had sent were inaccurate; the AI was indeed within the building, but she’d been moved to a more secured area.
Finding the firewall the security guard had erected around the room, he hacked it and was rewarded with a strong signal to the torus’s network.
He brought the team up to speed as he raced down the corridor, past the lift—which he was gratified to see was still open and waiting for him—and down to the other end.
The nano he’d dropped on the console had provided him with company-wide top-level access, and the doors automatically opened for him as he approached. Racing through them, he navigated unerringly to the alcove that housed the shackled AI, while ordering the company’s network to bring Barrington’s backup NSAI online and reroute all systems through it.
Jason reported as he ordered the NSAI to send the network into an automatic systems check and reboot.
With that, the combat net went silent.
Pulling out the multitool, Jason waited until all power had been cut and the shackled AI was in no danger, before severing all leads and placing her into a shielded insert within his base layer.
I hate that we can’t even connect with her until we’re back on the Eidolon. She’ll have no idea this is a rescue.
He flexed his burned hand as he raced for the lift; the skin was pink, the blisters being replaced by new skin as his mednano worked to heal the burnt tissue. As the lift rose to street level, he caught a fuzzy reflection of himself in the brushed metal doors. Ordering the lift doors to remain shut for a moment, he ran his hands through his hair, straightened his jacket and tucked his still-healing right hand into a pocket where it would remain unnoticed by passersby.
Then he triggered the lift doors, nodded to the people waiting patiently for the lift, turned, and exited the building.
BEARER OF BAD NEWS
STELLAR DATE: 03.11.3192 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Chinquapin Scientific Labs, C-47 Habitat
REGION: Proxima Centauri System
“Rhys….” Lysander’s image stared back at him on the holo, and the physicist sat back to watch, bemused. “I suspect you are wondering why a message with the seal of El Dorado’s Parliament House has made it to your personal queue, instead of being routed directly to Chinquapin’s General Council. The appended message i
s for them, but first…you need to know something.”
When Rhys Andrews had seen the ident of the message’s sender, and that it was marked both urgent and private, his thoughts had immediately turned to his kids. But then he’d remembered Jason and Judith were at Proxima’s heliopause, scheduled to dock at the habitat’s spire in just a few days. Plus, whatever Lysander had sent was now five weeks old.
And yet he’d spent too many years with the AI, sharing his headspace, to believe the Weapon Born had suddenly turned alarmist. So he’d excused himself from the team of researchers poring over data collected from the most recent series of flares that had accompanied the coronal mass ejection, and retired to his office, behind closed doors.
Staring at his holo image now, Rhys realized there was something about Lysander’s demeanor that made him think the AI was carrying a terrible weight.
“What I have to say is very time-sensitive. It’s imperative that you get the appended message into the hands of the Chinquapin Council immediately. But before you do so…I need to tell you first. I owe you that much, my friend.” The figure in the holo paused briefly, and then continued.
“You know of the serial killer we’ve been battling here on El Dorado, and that he targeted both Jason and Judith. It was the reason we sent them away—though, truth be told, Jason’s work for me would have taken him to Proxima anyway.”
Lysander’s face took on a pained look.
“I…. Stars, Rhys. How does one begin to tell a good friend that they’ve allowed a dangerous killer to escape, and that he’s headed your way? Worse, that he’s on the same ship as Jason and Judith?”
Rhys paused the holo, his blood running cold. Immediately, he reached out to his wife. Jane needed to hear this. She wasn’t someone to faint at the first sign of trouble—as the daughter of Cara Sykes, Jane’s will was forged of steel, like the rest of her lineage.
He pinged her, and then let the recording play out. He would watch it again when she arrived.