Vanguard Rising: A Space Opera Adventure

by A. C. Hadfield

  The older man quickly gestured to his notes on his terminal. Carlos then pointed to a middle-aged woman with a serious expression. “Miss Kieselman, your question?” Irena recognized her as the anchor for the mid-afternoon Atlas News broadcast.

  “Will the merger retain the two companies’ respective branding, or will there be a new name?” the anchor asked.

  Irena’s mother answered this one. “That’s a good question. Yes, there will be a new name and brand to better communicate to the Solar Federation citizens what the new company is all about. It will be called Vanguard Industries.”

  Irena froze in place. Her surroundings seem to fade away and the journalists’ chatting became a dull hum. Right there in front of her, from her very own parents, was the confirmation, the embodiment of the conspiracy come true. Any doubt she may have had was now destroyed.

  Her parents became grotesque to her as they smiled for the cameras and gave the typical politician’s answers to questions asked of them. All the time, Irena saw right through them. She saw that all along they had been in on it, from the start. The missing abbot, the rogue abbot, the virus, Gianni’s disappearance: all the leads came back to Vanguard, and her parents had just delivered it to the public.

  She had to get out of there and tell Harlan that they were right.

  Waiting for her parents to engage with another question, Irena slipped away, joined the general flow of pedestrians outside the corridor, and then sprinted to the elevator.

  A young girl inside looked up at Irena with a smile. “What level?”

  “Two,” Irena said, turning the girl’s smile to a frown.

  The girl gestured over the control panel and stepped away from Irena as the elevator car descended. Irena wiped a tear from her eye and bit her lip, trying to keep her emotions in check. First, she had lost Darnesh, Osho, and Siegfried on Earth. Now it felt like she had lost her parents. Although, in truth, she realized she had never had them in the first place.

  There was just one thing to do now: stop them and stop Vanguard.

  23

  Harlan received a message from Gylfie as soon as he arrived on level two. Apparently the RDC control group had new orders for him now that Victoria Selles had announced the Jovian-Ceres merger. Harlan would have to wait a quarter of an hour.

  While he waited, Harlan sat on a stool at the best noodle bar on level two. He ordered a bowl of seasoned ramen and reread Irena’s and Bella’s messages to him. It seemed both of them had seen the conspiracy taking shape from different angles.

  It did, however, confirm that they were on the right track.

  Vanguard, as a group, was mobilizing. He had no doubt that Luca was in their employ and working to crack, and ultimately control, the QCA.

  While he let his subconscious mull over the consequences, Harlan took in his surroundings.

  The place appeared deserted for this time of day—early morning. Just two other men were sitting at the bar, and the market area wasn’t even half full with stalls and customers.

  Usually, it’d be thriving down here with traders and salvagers cutting deals, people drinking to get their early buzz on, and the occasional tourist who thought slumming it with the downtrodden was something to tick off their bucket list.

  The bartender, a young girl with straw-like hair pulled back into a greasy ponytail, placed the bowl of noodles in front of him and held out her terminal to accept payment. “Three bitcreds.”

  Despite the dirt on her face and the fact that she smelled as if she hadn’t washed for a week, she had a face Harlan found attractive. Full lips and soft brown eyes.

  She must have been in her early twenties, which made her stand out. People that young didn’t often come down to make a life on level two. That trajectory was usually the domain of the middle-aged, once they realized having status levels and access privileges was more of a curse than it appeared.

  Sure, one could get by with the food and energy supplied, even with the lowest of access privileges, but you were stuck there, with very little upward mobility.

  “Um, that’ll be three bitcreds,” the girl reminded him.

  “Right, sorry.” Harlan swiped the bitcreds over to her and mumbled his thanks.

  The girl appraised him with a beady eye. “I see you down here a lot.” It was a peculiar birdlike behavior Harlan recognized from his documentaries.

  “I have business here.” He diverted his gaze to the bowl of noodles so as not to stare at her further. But she didn’t move away; no other customers demanded service.

  She continued to look at him. “You know Gylfie, right?”

  Harlan swallowed the small bite of noodles and placed the spork back into the bowl. He looked up at her, trying to figure out what she might want. A spy, perhaps? Given what they’d discovered about Vanguard and Bella’s experience up on level eight, it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume this group had people down here.

  Harlan pulled his silicon runner ID from his leather jacket and showed it to her. “Like I said, I’m just here on business.”

  The girl leaned closer and inspected his credentials. Then, with a smile, she leaned back and opened a holographic screen on her wrist terminal. Unlike most people, she had hers on her right wrist instead of her left.

  To most people that wouldn’t mean much, but to Harlan it meant she was left-handed. Or ambidextrous, and that meant upgrades. And upgrades meant black-net connections.

  “Here,” she said, swiping a file to Harlan. “Ivet asked me to send this to you when you came around. She couldn’t trust sending it across the networks. Prefers peer-to-peer. She got some footage of your ex.”

  Before he could ask her anything else, the girl took a dishrag, folded it over her shoulder and approached a new customer on the far side of the noodle bar.

  Turning his back to the bar, Harlan slid off the stool and slipped through a narrow, dark passage into an engineering access tunnel. He closed the door behind him and used his sensors to detect any signs of life or network. All came back negative.

  — Come on then, Harlan, let’s see what that PI found on the lovely Leanne, Milo said.

  Ignoring his peripheral’s taunt, Harlan double-checked that he was alone in the passage and ran the video on his terminal.

  It was from a feed from within the silicon runners’ office. A man and a woman dressed in junior uniforms—the same as the guards wore—passed through the biometrics and approached Diego and his colleagues.

  Within seconds, and before the guards had even known what hit them, the faux agents had decapitated the legitimate guards with what looked like Japanese-inspired katanas, only these left no blood behind. Using Diego’s credentials and what looked like an override device—a hard wire plugged into one of the terminal sockets—the attackers opened the cell door, grabbed Leanne, and dragged her free.

  She tried to put up a fight, but one of the group showed her something from a terminal. Leanne instantly stopped resisting, slumped her shoulders, and willingly followed them out. The video feed turned into static after that.

  — Well, that was interesting, Milo said.

  “Quite,” Harlan said with a sigh. It didn’t really tell him anything he didn’t already suspect, but knowing that there was some new illicit technology out there was concerning. Not only did they have a new kind of weapon, but their hacking tools were impressive.

  — There is one issue with this, though, Milo said. It raises the question of how Ivet got this video segment while Hugo and the other agents found nothing. Someone purposely covered that up from within.

  “At this stage I don’t find that surprising. With Luca miraculously alive again, it seems more than likely that Hugo is the mole here, although I need more evidence before I go accusing him—he’s got the ear of Victoria Selles, and I need to consider Irena in all this.”

  — There’s an encrypted text message attached to the video.

  Harlan opened the file contents and found the text message among the video data. Using a key provide
d to him by Ivet from a previous mission, he opened the file. It was a report from her that said:

  I hope you find the video helpful. It seems whoever these people are, they’ve got something on your ex-wife. I tried to find out what was on the woman’s terminal, but the resolution isn’t good enough. I’ll try to follow that up.

  As for Leanne’s whereabouts, she was taken to the docks. None of that is on video. Whoever did this hacked into Atlas’ entire security setup. Turned themselves into ghosts. From leaving the runners’ office, they must have disguised themselves. A contact of mine at the port said he saw them dressed as workers for the Ceres Mining Company. They boarded a company shuttle and left the station. Destination is unknown. I hacked into the port database, and there’s no record of that shuttle existing. Again, their tendrils run deep.

  Whoever they are, Harlan, they’re elite. I’m not sure it’s wise for you to keep searching for Leanne. Hell, you’ve been apart a decade, just let her go. This doesn’t have to be your problem.

  Anyway, that’s all I got for now.

  I’ll let you know if I find anything else. Oh, and one more thing: the video footage of the jailbreak—I got that from your boss’ personal drive. It’s gone now, though, along with everything else, so he must know he’s been hacked. I don’t know what he’s hiding, but it’s got to be something big for him to go nuclear on his own data.

  Look out for yourself.

  — It’s got to be this Vanguard group, Milo said. Bella’s target on level eight torched his place and killed himself, Hugo’s taken the nuclear option on his personal data, and Luca Doe is trying to implement a virus into the QCA. On top of that, we’ve got Victoria Selles running for president and confirming the merger, with Vanguard as the re-branding. It’s all connected. It’s all coming from the one place. And Leanne is involved, too.

  “She was coerced. She didn’t go willingly until they showed her something. Whatever it is, they’ve got something on her. This explains everything. It explains why she didn’t kill me when she had the chance on Luna. She was there all that time I was inspecting the abbot. What if she led me there, not to kill me, but to discover the hack on the QCA? She helped later on by letting me know Luca is back. What if Vanguard have had something on her all the time she’s been away? What if they’re the reason she left?”

  — I admit the data suggests it. But can you really trust the data?

  “I don’t know. But it’s not just the data suggesting she’s innocent in all this. It’s my gut.”

  — Your gut or your heart?

  “Maybe they’re the same.”

  He shut down the terminal, left the tunnel, and headed for the RDC. He had a few leads to follow up and knew he didn’t have much time. It was clear things were moving into Vanguard’s endgame, and he needed to know where Fizon, Luca, and Leanne were. And how to stop the virus before Vanguard gained control of not just the majority of the human population, but the entire population of abbots.

  Before he reached the RDC, he saw Irena weave her way through the handful of people milling around the level. She jerked away from one particular man who tried to grab her arm.

  Despite the alarm on Irena’s face, Harlan smiled; it was the usual sales tactic for the traders down here: make personal contact. It was never personal or an attack, just how they got people’s attention.

  “Harlan,” Irena said, waving at him. She hurried her approach and was breathless by the time she reached him. “You saw the news?”

  “Yeah, I caught a few clips of it on the news streams. Looks like your parents are going up in the world, eh?”

  “And down in my estimation.”

  “Are you okay?”

  Irena bit her lip and stared beyond Harlan. She closed her eyes for a second and then looked directly at him. “No… it’s just… I don’t know how to deal with all this. First the attack on Earth, now this. Bella’s brother, your ex. How far does Vanguard go? Have we all just been drifting into this, while they were there all the time, planning this behind our backs?”

  “It’s looking that way,” Harlan said. He kicked himself for not coming up with something more soothing, or at least hopeful. She didn’t need his stoic devotion to facts right now; she needed optimism.

  He placed a hand on her arm. “Listen to me. We make a good team. We’ve got Bella and her crew and a ragtag network of spies and criminals at our disposal. If Vanguard does try to take over the Sol-Fed, they’re going to have to get through us first.”

  “How do we stop them?” Irena asked.

  “We find out where Luca is and stop the hack. We then find the other members of the cabal and—”

  “Even my parents?”

  “Let’s hope it won’t come to that.”

  A message bleeped on Harlan’s terminal. “It’s Bella. They’re on their way. Let’s get inside and brief Gylfie on what we need so we’re ready to go when they get here. The information on the chip and this drive that Bella has recovered will hopefully point us in the right direction.”

  “I don’t know how you do it,” Irena said as she followed him to the RDC. “How you stay so calm, in control, when all around us society is teetering on the brink.”

  He didn’t want to tell her that he was only managing to stay sane due to illicit brain upgrades and the peripheral. Without those, he was as much of a mess as any other non-modified human. Probably more so.

  “It helps to focus on one problem at a time,” he said, holding the door open for her. “And it’s made easier by having good friends.”

  24

  Twenty minutes later, Bella and Wilbur joined Harlan and Irena at the back of Gylfie’s RDC. They had left Greta and Bashir to patrol the level outside to make sure they weren’t taken by surprised. Gylfie welcomed them in and closed the door. The room appeared different from the last time Harlan was here. The conveyor belts sat motionless; the drones were silent and still, not picking and sorting parts. Dust motes hovered in the still, dank air.

  With no air-conditioning running and the five of them in the small room, the temperature grew sticky and uncomfortable. Gylfie looked tired; bags hung low under his rheumy eyes. He gestured for Bella and Wilbur to take a seat at the table. He joined them, slugged back a shot of vodka, which he followed with a racking cough.

  He offered a shot to everyone else. They all declined.

  “So,” Gylfie said between coughs, “here we all are. It might just be my cynical age, but it feels like this is a last-ditch summit. The outcasts against the government machine.”

  Irena picked at her nails and avoided Gylfie’s accusatory gaze at the mention of the government.

  “Irena is not responsible for her parents’ actions,” Harlan said. “Don’t look at her like that, Gylfie. She’s one of us. And in fact, if it wasn’t for her, we wouldn’t be here now.”

  “He’s right,” Bella said. “Without access to Victoria Selles’ files, we wouldn’t have discovered the shitty side to this Vanguard business.”

  “I’m sorry,” Gylfie said between coughs. “It just feels like things are on a knife-edge. I’ve spent a long time on the wrong side of the community. Who knows what will happen to people like me now. The RDCs around the station are shutting down while the merger reassigns its resource provisions. I don’t know about you guys, but we were taught in history lessons that mergers brought devastation to the societies they eventually overwhelmed.”

  “Sure, we know that,” Wilbur said, fidgeting with the cuffs of his sweater. “That’s why we need to stop them before we repeat the mistakes that led to humanity ruining Earth. We can’t just sit around here lamenting what’s coming down the tunnel. We need to stop it.”

  Harlan placed the chip drive on the table from the abbot that had attacked him.

  Bella followed his cue and added the personal drive she’d retrieved from Gandit’s apartment.

  “This is all we have to go on now,” Irena said, looking directly at Gylfie. “Help us access the data so we can find the
epicenter of Vanguard’s plans.”

  “It feels like I’d be signing a death warrant.”

  “And the alternative is what?” Harlan asked. “You said yourself that the RDCs are changing. That’s you out of a job. You’re not getting any younger, despite the senilitic drugs and black-net upgrades you’re using. You can’t run and hide forever.”

  Gylfie scratched his chin. “I don’t have the tools to crack an abbot chip. The personal drive I could do, but the abbot—that requires computational power I just don’t have access to.”

  Wilbur adjusted his spectacles as he smiled. “You do now.” He leaned to the side, pulled the q-bit core from his backpack, and placed the heavy black box on the table.

  Gylfie’s eyes widened, and a smile dared to reach the corner of his lips. “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

  “It’s from Station Nord,” Irena said. “We were supposed to install them to create a new bridge with the QCA for weather analysis, but… you know what happened.”

  “Well?” Harlan said. “Are you going to remember that you used to be a shit-hot silicon runner and do something to save the solar system, or are you going to be a scared old man waiting to die to the soundtrack of Bruce Springsteen?”

  “Who?” Bella asked, raising an eyebrow.

  Harlan waved her question away. Gylfie closed his eyes and took a deep breath. When he opened them again, they were sharper. His body became more alert. “If I do this, you owe me a favor—each one of you. A big mother of a combined grade A favor.”

  “Anything particular you have in mind?” Bella asked.

  “Yeah. When you take down Vanguard, all hell’s going to break loose. I want off the station and taken to Bujoldia on Mars. And access privileges there to see out the last half of my life in comfort.”