Spectra Arise Trilogy

by Tammy Salyer

  There’s a crash inside followed by immediate silence. Seconds later, Venus’s explosive laughter splinters the air. I take a deep breath and walk in.

  “Hey.”

  “Aly! Jer was just showing me how to convert these broken-down com monitors into signal magnifiers.”

  The sharp smell of burnt electrical components stings my nose and a full-sized VDU lies shattered at Venus’s feet. She sees me looking and says, “I got a little carried away with the testing, but you should see what the sound of radio feedback looks like! It’s the craziest wave pattern you can imagine.”

  “It carried a little more vibration than I expected, but these monitors definitely aren’t junk yet,” La Mer tells me, a lopsided grin on his face. Wearing that expression, he looks like a kid barely old enough to shave, and I laugh at myself for how much of a battle-hardened harpy I’m starting to sound like—at only thirty.

  La Mer is tall, taller than anyone else in the Beach except Desto. His skin is the sable, silky hue of strong black tea, always seeming to glow with a moonlit sheen, even in the day. His eyelashes are long and flirtatious, arrayed around his tranquil green eyes like a corona. It’s not in the least difficult to see why Venus fell for him the instant he’d suggested a recode of the Sphynx’s engine sequencers to help increase reaction speed. His quiet yet contagious enthusiasm is an excellent counterpoint to her nonstop energy, and his Cimmerian tone is an elegant backdrop to her colorless, nearly transparent paleness. The only surface similarities they share, in fact, are their youth and their brilliant green eyes.

  Mason had found La Mer stowing away aboard the Sphynx after we’d escaped the Fortress, and his story is an interesting one—which is fortunate for him. It had to be to keep Desto from throwing him out of the airlock. I’m still not certain I believe it, but I have to admit, the sheer unlikelihood of why he’d been taken prisoner is what makes it plausible.

  The Corps picked him up on Eruo Pium, one of Spectra 3’s habitable moons, and arrested him for treason two weeks before we’d hijacked his prisoner transport. He’d been on the run for six years, and in that time they’d identified him as a member of a network of programming techs and citizen wire-rats who had worked together before the Soldier’s Rebellion of 2719, developing, testing, and, eventually, unleashing the software virus that completely wiped out the primary records database for all Corps personnel, then hunted down and erased more than half the data backup logs before the Admin had stopped it. The system-wide manhunt started right after the Soldier’s Rebellion and had been going on since. In the Admin’s eyes, wire-rats like La Mer are the single biggest threat the government has ever encountered.

  They’re both smiling at me and I realize I’ve been standing in the doorway silently for several seconds thinking about all the things that have happened since I’d deserted the Corps. In a way, I have this shy, boyish wire-rat to thank for most of it. If the Corps’s records hadn’t been destroyed, they’d have probably tracked David and I down a long time ago. La Mer and Venus don’t seem to be concerned at my awkward entrance and merely wait for me to come in. I guess they’ve gotten used to the way I disengage, easily distracted by my own thoughts. It’s been this way since Rajcik shot me—surviving a death sentence tends to make a person more thoughtful than they once were. Sometimes I wonder if I’m getting soft.

  “Desto radioed us. Said there’s a poker game at his and Karl’s place. Rob’s there. He’s an old friend of yours, right, Aly?” Venus asks as she carefully toes the shards of the VDU screen aside.

  I walk around the mess toward my bedroom door. “You could say that.”

  “You’re not interested in a hand? I know Desto’s insanely competitive, but he really sucks at poker.” Venus is the only person in the system who could think Desto isn’t a savant at poker. Her ability to read people is almost preternatural. It’s a good thing for the rest of us she’s too high-strung to play. “You’d probably be able to win a couple hundred dollars, or at least make him take some of your shifts in the grow rooms.” My dislike for gardening is well-known throughout the settlement.

  “Nah, I’m a little tired. Just going to turn in early tonight.”

  La Mer’s thoughtful eyes are pinned to my face and I catch his gaze. He does me a favor by changing the subject. “Bodie and I should be able to wire in the last pieces of the transceiver in the next couple of days. If Vitruzzi and Brady say it’s a go, we could test it by the end of the week. Pretty exciting, huh?”

  “That’s great news.” With my concern over Vitruzzi’s plan to ask Cross to help test, I can’t quite summon the enthusiasm I know he’s feeling.

  “Using Admin tooders to transmit to and from the Sphynx? It’s not just exciting.” Venus takes an almost condescending school-marmish tone that is comical coming from someone who’s too guileless to be anything but puppy-dog friendly. “It’s brilliant! They’ll never know, and our link ups will be almost instantaneous! No more days of lag between the Beach and the rest of the system. We’ll finally be able to communicate and coordinate in real time. Just what they don’t want.”

  Tooders, aka TDRSs, or Tracking and Data Relay satellites. The Admin builds and controls the only reliable satellite network in the system. Therefore, they control the air-to-ground communication throughout. If you control coms, you control everything. Private individuals, mostly citizens, have built and dispersed a handful of open-link satellites in out-of-the-way pockets of space, but they’re so distant that messages take from hours to days to get from sender to receiver, and if either party is on the move, it takes even longer.

  La Mer’s expression is somber. “If it works. We can’t be sure—I still don’t know if my programming will override their lockouts until we test it.” He bends down and slowly begins collecting some of the broken hardware on the floor. “It’s actually a big risk. If they catch us trying to boost their coms…you know, it could be bad.”

  “Don’t worry! You’re a genius, Jer. I know it will work,” Venus says.

  “V is thinking about using Cross to help us run the test,” I comment, hoping they’ll come up with a reason it would be a bad idea, maybe something that can help me convince Vitruzzi of it.

  La Mer turns sharply to face me. “What? Why?” he asks. “I mean, we could use another ship in orbit to test the transmission, but he’s not, not really—I mean he’s Admin.”

  Finally, another person who gets my concerns. “That’s what I told V, but she thinks he’s trustworthy.” I sigh.

  “She wouldn’t take any risks she hasn’t already calculated. Rob and V go back a few years,” Venus muses. “Seems like you and he have too, Aly. You really think he’d turn us in for something like this?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just—shit, never mind. I’m going to turn in. See you in the morning.” It’s a done deal. Worrying about it isn’t going to change Vitruzzi’s mind, and La Mer is right. The thing needs to be tested. It doesn’t do us any good if we don’t know if it works reliably.

  “Night, Aly! We’ll try and keep the noise down.”

  To Venus, keeping the noise down means trying not to make anything explode, and I lie awake for another couple of hours while they continue their experimentation. It’s not a problem. I have a lot on my mind.

  FOUR

  In the morning, I run four laps around the settlement, about nine kilometers, grab a quick, tasteless breakfast of watery fortified grains, and head directly to the mine. It’s still early—Algol A is draped along the crest of the Torarua Range, not quite high enough yet to beat the planet into smelt-hot submission, and the glittering debris belt around the distant red dwarf that comprises the third star in our system, Algol C, can still be faintly seen in the southern sky—but there is no shortage of early risers in Agate Beach. People here seem to naturally sleep less, having grown accustomed to the five short hours of complete darkness at night during the fall, and less in the summer.

  I’m supposed to be working underground with Desto in the weapons vaul
t today, doing overhaul and maintenance. Even in the fall, it gets hot out there, and being underground is usually a respite welcomed by all. A quick ride down the mine tunnel on my sandbike takes me into the main cavern, ready to get busy. The mine’s central room is gigantic and the Red Horizon sits neatly on its tripod landing gear beside the Sphynx. Built for long hauls transporting heavy-volume loads, the ’Rize is a bigger ship by a factor of about two. Next to it, the Sphynx looks barely fit for cross-continent hops.

  The ’Rize’s cargo-hold ramp is down, leaving the ship open to anyone who might want to wander aboard. Curious, I stop my sandbike in front of it and try to get a look inside. No lights on, just a dark hold, even after I pull off my thick, tinted riding goggles. Oh well. I throw the goggles in my back carrier and reach out to kill the bike’s engine and park.

  “Hey, good morning!” Cross calls, coming down the dark ramp.

  My first instinct is to keep going, but there’s no reason to be rude. Could I still be harboring some resentment for the way he’d just dropped off the map when his unit was reassigned? After eight years? Being this uncomfortable around him is starting to get on my nerves and I make an effort to answer amiably. “How are you? Sleep well?”

  He runs his hand through his tousled black hair, leaving thick sheaves of it standing on end. “Honestly, I always sleep better on the ground than when I’m in the sky.”

  “You’re probably in the wrong profession then.”

  He looks at me oddly for long enough that I think he must have misunderstood me. Then he says, “Yeah, but the money’s good in what I do.”

  “Which is?”

  The crooked grin that spreads across his face embarrasses me slightly. I’m giving him the third degree and I don’t know why.

  “Same sweet Aly. You’ve never let anyone off the hook, have you?”

  “Sorry,” I answer, tossing my leg over the sandbike saddle and dismounting.

  Footsteps clang off the ramp and we both turn to see who it is. Baker—I hadn’t caught her first name—the ship’s navigator, is approaching. She’s taller than me, and lean in a featherweight boxer’s way. Her long brown hair is tied back and she wears a utilitarian sleeveless shirt that shows off her wiry arms. The straight-legged pants tucked into her high black boots give away her former Corps status as clearly as if she were wearing rank. Her unflinching blue eyes weigh down on me as she addresses Cross. “We still have some work to do on the reversals.” She says it flatly, like a command.

  “Yeah. Get started. I’ll be right there.”

  She hesitates for another second, still trying to stare me down and fronting a distinct attitude of dislike. I don’t drop my eyes, far too used to this game. Finally, she reverses and heads back into the belly of the ship.

  Cross turns back to me with a slight what can you do? lift of his eyebrows.

  “So, you and Baker?” I ask.

  “What? Nah. We just work together.”

  “We just worked together too, back on the Hammer.”

  “Yeah, but that was completely different.”

  In what way, I want to ask, but leave it alone. It’s none of my business. In any case, if she wants to be jealous of something that doesn’t exist, that’s her own problem.

  “I’ve got work to do. I’ll see you later.”

  “Okay.” I feel his eyes follow me as I push the bike over to a paddock where several others are parked.

  Before I make for the vault and a day guaranteed to leave me sooty, oily, dirty, and tired, I do a quick search inside the Sphynx, hoping to find Karl. He’s not around, so I wander into the control room and find Bodie standing by a table-sized electron microscope that is known, for reasons I’ve never been able to put my finger on, as Medusa. His eyes are pressed firmly against the viewing lenses, probably indulging in his favorite hobby, i.e., analyzing anything he can fit under a lens or in front of a reader. His recent obsession is trying to splice the staple crops the settlement usually grows in underground greenhouses and grow rooms with the hardier local plants that are adapted to the harsh dry environment of Spectra 6. If we can do a better job of acclimating ourselves and our food sources to the local environment, there’s a better chance of the settlement remaining a viable and independent long-term home. He doesn’t look up when I come in, totally absorbed in whatever he’s staring at, until I get his attention with a gentle tap on his shoulder.

  “Oh, hey, Aly. You looking for Desto?”

  “No, actually, I was wondering if you’ve seen Karl? I thought he might be working on the Sphynx with Venus today, but neither of them are there.”

  “He and Doug left on the Rover awhile ago. I think they’re taking some of the new parts out to the transceiver.”

  A brick of disappointment lodges in my stomach. Until I moved in with Venus, Karl was at my infirmary room first thing every day to wish me good morning. Since I’ve recovered, we’ve kept up the tradition, always getting together for breakfast or to exchange a few quick words before the day’s work takes over. So what’s changed with him? Is he really jealous of someone I haven’t seen since I was twenty-two years old? He’s always been a hothead but this is just irrational. Between him and Baker, it’s almost hard to believe there isn’t something going on between Rob and me. The idea is absurd, and my disappointment starts to morph into a feeling I’m much more used to: anger.

  “Want me to send him to the vault when they get back?” Bodie is staring at me the way he’d just been looking through the scope lens, and I wonder what he’s seeing in my expression.

  “No, I’ll catch up with him some other time. Thanks.”

  “No problem.”

  I don’t have time for this hassle; I have work to do. If Karl wants to sort this out, he knows where to find me.

  When I pass by the ’Rize this time, no one’s outside. There’s a hydraulic lift built to handle bigger pieces of cargo at the far end of the cavern where it finally dead ends at the heart of the mountain. I take it down past the midlevel subfloor and its network of grow rooms to the lowest subfloor. The lift is a wall-less platform and it settles to the floor at the bottom of the shaft into a dusty, barely lit room no bigger than a closet. The original miners who’d dug up this mountain to extract whatever the Admin was looking for had blasted one last shaft down here before giving up and going home—or dying off, whatever happened to them. Maybe they’d found something, maybe not, but this room is only an antechamber to a tunnel that was once about twenty meters long and five or so wide. Now, all a person standing where I am can see is a rock wall three meters in front of them. It feels uncomfortably like being inside a grave.

  There’s no sound down here but that doesn’t mean I’m alone. The electronic door hiding our ammunition vault—an airlock hatch salvaged from a derelict that a hawker had been piecing out in Hell’s Gate—is thick. Any sound on the other side would have to be as loud as a symphony for a person on this side of it to hear. It’s controlled remotely by a twelve-digit code, transmitted via the wrist VDUs we all wear. I enter the sequence and watch as the rock in front of me splits along a left seam and begins to slide to the right. Small puffs of pulverized dust shake from the ceiling and rain into the lighted opening.

  Rectangular overhead lights hang in meter intervals along the chamber’s ceiling. When they’re all functioning, they flood the room with blazing white light, sucking a lot of juice from one of the generators in the mine’s main chamber. Most of the settlement’s power is derived from an array of photovoltaic heliostats that cover an acre of hard desert nearby, and with our three stars, they’re never in danger of going dry. Two of the ten light rigs are down right now, but the chamber still incandesces like the center of a fusion bomb, making the cold surfaces of rows of missiles, rifles, thrown projectiles, and assorted electronic surveillance and explosive devices gleam. It’s a tomb for contraband military hardware. Vitruzzi thinks of the transceiver as an insurance policy against surprises, but to me, this room holds the real insurance.

>   “Twig, how are ya?” Desto calls, standing before the open housing of a Glower missile, where he’s testing its navigation mechanism.

  I move over to the gun racks and start pulling down rags and cleaning compound. “Please don’t call me that.”

  “Why not? It’s perfect! You’re short, skinny”—a devious smile replaces the frown he’d adopted to feign insult—“and sometimes a little sharp.”

  “Forget it, okay? That’s what my mom use to call me.”

  “Yeah? Why’d she call you that?”

  Irritated, my voice gives off sparks as I answer. “I don’t know. She took off when I was a kid.” The past is over and I don’t like to think about it.

  “All right, all right. But if even half those stories Cross was telling us last night are true, you haven’t been a kid in a long time.”

  “Jesus, Desto! Can you just drop it?” I’m a little shocked that Cross would have much to say about our shared past, but then, what else do men have to talk about when they’re drinking and playing cards?

  “Don’t freak, babe, I’m not talking about anything naughty. I’d prefer you showed me that yourself.” He winks. “Cross and David were talking about some of the work you all did for the Corps. Back before you grew an unauthorized conscience.”

  Feeling foolish, I try to ignore him, but Desto’s directness and total lack of tact are all part of his appeal. That and the fact that he can quote you exactly what kind of blade, firearm, bomb, or tactical missile you’ll need to get the job done to specification for any, and I mean any, situation.

  “We’ve all done shit we wished we hadn’t, huh?” He doesn’t respond, doesn’t need to. Desto’s had his own taste of the Corps and its explicit antimercy policy. I’d like to get on with work so I can stop wondering about Karl’s strange behavior and forget about Cross’s unexpected reintroduction into my life. “So, what’s on the agenda?”