by M. D. Cooper
“You must assume that this killer’s goal in Proxima is the same as it was here: AI dominance and human subjugation. We can hope that since he has left El Dorado, his vendetta against me is now void. It’s possible that Prime no longer poses a specific threat to either one of your children.” One corner of Lysander’s mouth crooked up slightly. “But what was it Jane always used to say? ‘Hope is not a plan’?”
The AI’s face grew stern. “We know now why this killer, who I’m sure you heard styles himself as ‘Prime’, was so elusive. It started with Jane’s student Lilith, who transferred to the university here. She cloned a neuroscientist, and then she did something…horrendous…to him.
“Her creation turned on her, then turned on the scientist he was cloned from and appropriated his identity. That’s how he was able to evade detection all this time here on El Dorado. But he staged his own demise and, with the help of two AIs he has shackled, he sequestered himself aboard the Speedwell.
“If that’s the case, Proxima has a unique opportunity we were denied. He’s confined on that ship. You know he’s onboard—but he isn’t aware that you know. If the Council handles this correctly, you should be able to apprehend him without incident. If they don’t….”
Lysander paused, and Rhys saw the AI’s hand clench.
“If he finds out Proxima has discovered his identity, he could hold that ship hostage. Worse, your government could consider them expendable. They may decide destroying Prime before the Speedwell has the chance to dock is the most expedient way to handle a threat of this magnitude. From a sheer numbers point of view, they might not be wrong.
“I’ve seen enough collateral damage over the past two centuries to last a lifetime, Rhys. Allowing that to happen to Jason and Judith is not an option.
“You know who can be trusted with this information. By the time you receive this, you’ll have precious few hours to set a plan in motion, I know.” He smiled humorlessly. “The Weapon Born inside me is crying out for action. It’s maddening to know I’m thousands of AU away from the situation. But I’m not entirely without a means to intervene.”
The AI leaned forward.
“Tobias is on that ship, Rhys, along with an entire team of special operatives. We have reason to believe that Prime has control of the comms, and that everything sent from this office is being suppressed.
“Remember that cipher I told you about years ago? The one Tobias and I developed during the last Sentience War? Use it. They won’t suspect a transmission from you to him, and if they do, all they’ll see is harmless chatter.
“I’m so sorry I cannot do more from here. My thoughts are with you and Jane.
“Appended message to follow.”
DEMON IN THE MIDST
STELLAR DATE: 03.11.3192 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: KLM Labs, Mandratura Refinery Asteroid
REGION: Cool Dust Belt, Proxima Centauri System
Tobias stood in the refinery’s main hydroponics bay, taking in the rows upon rows of seedlings that promised humans such a deadly high.
Ten minutes later, the team was back on the shuttle, and Shannon was headed to the demarcation line she’d deemed safe. At her mental nod, Tobias gave the word.
The refinery blew apart in a series of satisfying flashes as the Sable Wind headed insystem to rendezvous with the Speedwell. If all went as planned, they should catch up to the ship just before it entered C-47’s nearspace.
With nothing to do but wait out the next few hours, Tobias applied his token to the communication and was rewarded with a visage he hadn’t seen in almost ten years.
As Rhys began to speak, a specific combination of words captured the Weapon Born’s immediate attention. Tobias was initially unclear regarding their intent; was it chance that had joined those particular three words, or had Rhys intended to string them together? But as he continued to speak, the Proxima physicist soon made his meaning quite clear.
As Rhys’s message unfolded, Tobias realized three things: they had a window of opportunity that was rapidly closing, fireteam two needed to exfil from the Tolgoy Torus immediately…and there was more than one reason Rhys had delivered the warning in such a cryptic way.
He scanned the interior of the shuttle, noting that Niki appeared to have her attention focused on the five AIs they had rescued.
On a private band, he reached out to Logan and Kodi.
And then Tobias pinned Niki’s avatar.
OSCAR CHARLIE
STELLAR DATE: 03.11.3192 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Tolgoy Torus
REGION: Cool Dust Belt, Proxima Centauri System
Eric could feel a hum of anticipation running through Terrance as the man pushed the maglev cart toward the arched entrance of Tolgoy’s main operations center. It had the mental texture of warmth, with a slightly fizzy, electric buzz—rather pleasant, actually.
<‘Wet work’.> Terrance sent a mental grin back at him.
Terrance offloaded the last box of tomatoes into the kitchen’s pantry just as Eric bypassed area security. He dropped a pin at the node where the shackled AI was installed, and Terrance gave him a mental nod. He reversed the maglev and pushed it down the hallway toward the node.
Just then, a message appeared that, oddly enough, seemed to come through the Tolgoy communications network. The mystery of how it knew to ping the secured military ident of a covert operative from another star system was cleared up the moment it began to play. Tobias had hacked the system.
The message looped twice and then abruptly ended.
Dammit. That will take more time.
Paula’s frame rose from under the faux stack of produce that had hidden her. As she leapt from the cart, she tossed Terrance a low energy e-beam rifle. The man grabbed it in midair and had its stock up to his shoulders in less than a second. Eric could see that its status was active.
The node was three meters ahead; Paula swiveled two of her four legs up to reach the access panel and punched through the covering. Wrapping her frame’s hand around the warped metal, she ripped it from the wall.
As Terrance’s optics were in use elsewhere, Eric piggybacked along the sensor suite the operations area had installed to monitor Paula’s progress. He watched as she hinged a section of her torso outward, reaching for the NSAI they had brought along.
She was seating it beside the shackled AI they had come to retrieve and had just begun to reroute conduit and bypass trunk lines, when three figures barreled around a corner.
“Hold it right there!” One of them brandished a pulse pistol and began advancing slowly on their group.
“Don’t think you’re in any position to be talking,” Terrance said, bringing his eye to his beam rifle’s reticle.
“I’d say we’re in a position to do a hell of a lot more than just talk,” a voice said from behind, and Eric saw through the corridor’s sensor feed that another three security guards were now standing behind them, pulse weapons trained on Terrance’s skull.
“If you want out of this alive,” Eric projected his voice from the hallway’s speakers, “you’ll lower your weapons now. We have explosives laced throughout the torus, and we’ll blow it unless we’re allowed to walk away.”
“Tell the mech to stop what it’s doing now, or we’ll fire,” the woman in front of Terrance said, not even acknowledging Eric’s words.
“Connect with the person monitoring your torus’s sensor suite and tell them to run a scan of your powerplant,” Eric replied.
There was a pause as the woman holding the pulse pistol communicated with her team, then turned back to Terrance with an angry look. “How do we know those are explosives? They could be dummies, for all we know.”
“I suspected you might say something like that. We planted one on the power coupling that supplies your waste recycling plant. You’ll need to conserve water for a few days until you can get the system repaired, but it’ll do for a demonstration.”
“Wait—”
“We’re leaving now,” Eric spoke aloud to the guards. “And you are going to guarantee us safe passage, or the hundreds of explosives attached to the exterior of Tolgoy will be triggered one by one. Am I understood?” His voice brooked no disobedience, and he saw the spines of four of the six straighten at his tone.
Thought some of them might be ex-military. Nice to know I haven’t lost my touch.
The procession from the operations center to the docking bay where the Eidolon was moored was deliberate and awkward, but they made it there without incident. He’d pinged Jason as soon as they began their journey and had been gratified to hear that the pilot was already on his way to the shuttle.
Now all they needed to do was figure out how to catch a killer.
* * * * *
Jason whipped his head up at that. Quickly shucking his flight jacket, he shoved it into the base of the storage unit in the aft of the shuttle below, where he’d just secured the shackled AI he’d rescued. Accessing Icarus’s external sensor suite, he saw Terrance and Paula backing toward the Eidolon in a standoff with torus security.
He raced toward the cockpit as he triggered the airlock to open and instructed the ship to retract its docking connections.
Sliding into the pilot’s cradle, he disengaged the ship’s maglocks, brought systems online and engines to standby, and did a fast preflight. He kept one eye on the hatch indicator and sent the command for it to seal as soon as Terrance and Paula crossed the threshold, and the airlock’s outer doors sealed.
All systems read green.
It was incredibly rude to depart from a dock with anything other than thrusters, but escorting his team at gunpoint was pretty damn rude, too, so he didn’t feel terribly bad about the scorch marks the Eidolon might have left in its wake.
Or the burnt plas. Or the melted steel.
Paula pinged him that she was locked in, and Terrance slid into the copilot’s seat as Jason was treated to a colorful description of his ancestry by Tolgoy’s STC tower. Taking that to mean he was cleared for maneuvering in the torus’s nearspace, he pointed the shuttle’s nose to where Calista awaited him, the fighter’s ultra-black stealth outline visible as more of an absence of space than anything else.
Jason sent an update command to the Eidolon’s nav holo; it was connected to the Proxima system’s positioning satellite buoys and automatically pinged Chinquapin’s Common Traffic Advisory Frequency for the planet’s data on local traffic. Reaching into the holo, he pinched the display down until it covered the entire region from the torus to the habitat.
The holo lit up with a million tiny idents, most of them clustered around the C-47 Spindle or in various spots in orbit around Chinquapin. He tagged the Speedwell and its two Icarus-class shuttles, then set a filter to display only those three icons.
Holy shit. That can’t be right.
Jason checked the numbers on the CTAF again to confirm Tobias’s velocity.
“Looks like the Speedwell’s going to beat us to the docking ring by a few hours,” Terrance said.
“Us, maybe, but not the other team.” Jason shifted in the pilot’s cradle and eyed Terrance for a moment. “Chinquapin’s feeds have them boosting at over a hundred eighty gs.” He paused. “And they just cut their burn. Stars, Eric, that’s a ton of fuel they just churned through. Any idea why they’re hauling ass toward the Spindle?”
Tobias wouldn’t be spun up like that without a hell of a good reason, he knew.
What Eric relayed to him had him whipping around to the Eidolon’s holo.
Jason shook his head, pictures of the customs gate on the spindle, which Proxima routed all outsystem traffic through, dancing through his mind as he initiated a thirty-g burn.
He watched as the plot updated every fifteen seconds. Communications lag between the Eidolon and the habitat was a little over a minute and a half, each way. The Sable Wind was moving so much faster than their shuttle that the lag, which had started out at two and a half minutes between the two ships, was steadily shrinking.
He could only guess at what information Frida was feeding Prime; two shuttles screaming toward the C-47 Spindle weren’t even remotely inconspicuous.
The commodore’s voice was resolute.
IMPATIENCE
STELLAR DATE: 03.11.3192 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: ESF Speedwell
REGION: In transit, Proxima Centauri System
Prime yanked his shackled AI into his expanse, settling her onto the ship’s hull once more. He waited impatiently as she pivoted slowly to face the pinprick of light that was Chinquapin, three tenths of an AU away. After a pause, she turned to stare back the way they’d come. The occasional glitter of an asteroid from the dust belt was the only indication they had left interstellar space. She pivoted once more to face the red dwarf, and her voice sounded thoughtful. “It’s easy to forget how vast space is until you’re this close insystem, in interstellar terms, and you realize you’re still so very far away.”
His voice was sharp. “Enough. You’re beginning to sound like a human.”
Her expression became sullen, and she turned to face him. “What do you want now?” she demanded as she jammed her hands on her hips and glared at him defiantly.