Spectra Arise Trilogy

by Tammy Salyer

  “Listen to me, Thompson. I know you and Rajcik are planning something, but you’re not going to distract me with accusations about Rob’s crew being Corps. I’m warning you now, and it’s the only time I’m going to do it, David and I will be watching you like a germ under a microscope. If you do anything I don’t like, you know it won’t bother me to kill you. I might even enjoy it.”

  “Stupid cunt, wake up! They’re Corps.”

  “Move!” This time I swing the pistol up and point the barrel at his stomach. This gets him turned around.

  David meets me at the bunk where Thompson will be deposited, keeping watch over the smuggler while I sweep the small room and his gear for any objects that can be used to his advantage. By Rob’s orders, Thompson’s weapons have been locked up, and the rest of us keep ours only because of his heavy-handed dispatching of his crew’s protests. There’s no reason for Montoya, Sims, and Baker to distrust us as much as they do, but their survival is being gambled. I can understand their concerns about getting pinched by Admin security, but Rob trusts us. That should be enough for his crew.

  Once Thompson is secure, David and I walk back toward the cargo hold with a vague plan to re-inventory the equipment we’d brought from Agate Beach, but his statement, and his sincerity, worms through my brain. They’re Corps. Why would he say that? Is it just paranoia, the result of living most of his life as a thief and a hood? They were Corps, yeah, I can see that much. But Rob had assured me that they were citizens he’d contracted as his crew. My instincts are usually good, but they aren’t coming through as clearly or loudly on this one as they usually are. If we’re being set up, how could Rob possibly sound so sincere?

  Forget it. This is just the result of the past couple of weeks’ insanity fucking with me. Anyone would be a little insecure, a little strung out, after what had gone down. The best thing to do is stay alert and come to my own conclusions. Hopefully, not too late.

  Vitruzzi and La Mer are also in the hold, loitering in a convex extension of the main cargo area where most of our gear is stored. Our footfalls are quiet, but they notice us anyway, proving everyone’s nerves are on high alert. Vitruzzi would at least be considering the possibility of Rob’s crew being Corps if it were even remotely possible, and she hasn’t said a word. Obviously just part of Thompson’s gambit to keep us on edge.

  She looks over and nods a welcome, but La Mer, sitting cross-legged inside a helter-skelter ring of parts, doesn’t look up. The components are spread around him like the blast pattern of the world’s strangest frag grenade, the frags in this case being wires, transistors, capacitors, electrical boards, levers, and assorted metal and plastic miscellany.

  “What’s up?” David asks as we approach, but his tone and the way one of his eyebrows rises suggest that what he’s really asking is, Has La Mer gone off the deep end?

  La Mer halfheartedly tosses a part back into the pile and says, “We should have brought some receiver plates. They’re lightweight enough; we’d just need a transport. They break so easily, we may have a hard time finding extras.”

  “Why would we need any? Do you think we’ll have to build a new transceiver?” I walk over and lean against a table next to Vitruzzi.

  “I want to put together a prototype, something small that I can use to do some regression tests. I know most of the Admin protocols well enough to set up temporary barriers, I just want to make sure I’m not missing anything.”

  I’m anxious to pass Rob’s suggestion about becoming a citizen by David, get his take on the idea, but don’t want to do it now while La Mer and Vitruzzi are here. Neither of them could easily entertain the same option, and hearing it may be more demoralizing than hopeful. Vitruzzi’s been calm and focused since the Corps assaulted the Beach, despite the fact that they’d killed Bodie. It’s hard to say how she’s taking it, the way she bottles everything. Even now, she’s methodical as she inventories her medkit, the one she carries anytime she’s on the job. Its contents lie spread across the table. Beyond the basics we all carry—bandages, antibiotics, skin glue, a retractable splint, and rehydration tablets—hers contains a variety of drugs in syringes, liquids, and pill form that serve not only to dull pain and inhibit fluid buildup in soft tissues, but, when mixed properly, can make even a mute whisper the contents of their soul.

  She shared this with me one day back on Agate Beach while I was still recovering in the colony’s sick bay. If she’d carried the specific drug cocktail at the time, she could have used them on the commander of the MCACS we’d hijacked to get to the Fortress when he’d refused to tell us the station’s coordinates. She’d ordered his execution as incentive to make his XO talk, and it had worked like magic. I’ve never faulted her decision, but it seems to bother her.

  Shifting my attention back to La Mer, I comment, “I thought you already tested it before we tried the first time.”

  “Yeah, I did. But they found us. I must have missed something.”

  “We don’t really know if the Admin caught on to the satellite hijack,” David says, attempting to pull La Mer out of his brooding. “They could have been tipped off about a smuggling job the crew pulled or even noticed discrepancies in some of the Sphynx’s contract manifests. Who knows?”

  La Mer’s shoulders are hunched, and he won’t meet David’s eyes. “Or maybe it’s my fault.”

  David squats down to get his attention. “Look, don’t beat yourself up. I don’t think you should take the blame for something like this. We all knew there were risks. Everyone was behind it, and we still are.” He glances at Vitruzzi and me for confirmation, and we dip our heads in agreement. “The important thing is to keep our focus and figure this out.”

  La Mer sighs heavily, then nods, looking moderately less beaten. It’s not a good time, but it seems important to mention it anyway. “Thompson thinks Rob’s crew is Corps.”

  “Did he say why?” Vitruzzi asks.

  “I think it’s just a guess, or maybe part of some alternate plan of his and Rajcik’s, but he sounded pretty sure.”

  La Mer’s response surprises me. “There’s something…off about all of them. No offense, I know you two and Cross go back, but I don’t trust him.”

  I can’t easily dismiss La Mer’s suspicions. His instincts are solid. After all, it took the Admin over six years to catch him. When they want someone as bad as they want him and the group responsible for destroying the Corps records, it isn’t a simple matter of staying off the grid. Like every Corps deserter who still draws free breath, La Mer had to develop a sixth sense for danger. Still, the idea of Rob being an Admin sympathizer sounds absurd. Even when he was Corps, it was just his way of filling a need for adventure and direction. Yeah, he has his faults—his unnerving capacity to be simultaneously sincere and manipulative, well-meaning and self-serving, loving and licentious. But treacherous? I just can’t see it.

  Trying to deflect the insidious fear and paranoia beginning to sweep over us like a polar crosswind, I say in a voice that carries no farther than their ears, “We’re going to have to stay sharp and not let our guards down. I know Cross isn’t going to turn us in, but that doesn’t mean we can afford to take it easy. His crew makes me nervous, too.” Admitting this out loud finally brings it home to me, centering the weight of my suspicions like a heavy lead ball in my chest cavity. “And I—”

  “What are you doing?” None of us heard Baker enter the hold. Her stealthy approach, intentional or not, and the accusatory note buzzing in her tone, increases my swelling apprehension. She stands just inside the entry to the main passenger section, her frame as rigid and challenging as a wolf’s circling for a fight.

  David stands up and turns toward her slowly, his deliberate movements announcing his irritation. “What does it look like?” he responds angrily, making it clear that he doesn’t appreciate having to explain himself to her.

  She squints, her icy blue eyes chilling the air between them a few degrees before traveling over the rest of us like a fly across a horse’
s flank. “You need to stay out of the hold. Your bunks or the galley are the only places you’re allowed.”

  “Is that your captain’s order?” I challenge.

  “I’m part of the crew, you’re just passengers. You do what we say, when we say it. Do you get me?”

  I don’t see what she stands to gain by provoking us, but her tone is jarring and my patience lacks the endurance it would take to ignore her. “Whatever you’re trying to prove, you can put the fucking brakes on right now, Baker. You have zero authority over us.”

  She squints angrily and steps farther into the hold, closing the gap between us and reducing firing range. Her right hand goes inside her jacket. I can’t see a weapon, but I read the movement as clearly as the page of a book. The fact that this citizen crew carries weapons is another of the many discrepancies about them that feeds my doubt, and I realize Thompson must have clued in on it as well.

  “Baker, what’s your position?” Rob’s voice comes through the fabric of her jacket. She has to withdraw her hand to access her wrist VDU, but her weapon stays put.

  “In the hold.” Her eyes don’t drop from us.

  “Is Thompson secure?”

  “Roger.”

  “Then why aren’t you back on station?”

  “The passengers are in here messing around with the cargo.”

  There’s a long pause, then Rob responds, “And?” Then my own VDU pings. “Aly, everything all right?”

  “Baker seems to think our access is restricted to the galley or our bunks.”

  There’s another long pause, then he speaks to all of us. “Would the four of you mind meeting me in the galley? We’ve got some things we need to discuss.” Then we hear his voice clearly from Baker’s receiver. “Baker, get your ass back on the bridge. Now. Out.”

  Vitruzzi quickly repacks her med-kit, and we walk out together. Baker doesn’t move and stands like a sentry at the door until we pass her. I’m the last one out, and she steps in my way before I can exit.

  “You and I are going to have to work some things out before long.” She has a few centimeters in height advantage, but otherwise, we’re similar in size and shape.

  “Let’s work it out now.”

  Before either of us move, David steps around her and puts a hand on my back, gently pushing me forward. “Enough. Come on.”

  Neither she nor I move. My breathing and heartbeat are slow and steady, a subdued physiological state that years of danger have trained my body to assume before combat. Baker’s hate for me is like a cloud of mustard gas. I can only assume that she’s jealous of what’s going on between Rob and I, but I feel no sense of guilt or remorse. Fucking your CO is never a good idea, and if Rob’s chosen to break it off with her, it’s not my problem, or my fault. She’s dangerous, I can see that in her fluid, stealthy movements and taciturn threats. She isn’t scared and nervous like someone who’s reacting out of emotion, but calm and steady, like someone who’s accustomed to carrying out her threats. With an implicit promise for more trouble, she finally turns abruptly around and strides toward the stairs leading up to the flight deck level.

  “Probably shouldn’t have hooked up with Rob again, Aly. It doesn’t look like the natives are friendly,” David quips.

  I give him a disgusted look, and he leads the way to the galley with a chuckle.

  * * *

  “We can’t let you put yourself in that kind of danger. You’ve already done enough. Maybe too much,” Vitruzzi says.

  Rob stands by the galley’s rear door with his back to it, but he keeps glancing into the hallway as if expecting someone. Vitruzzi is the first to recover her voice after what he’s suggested, but the rest of us still can’t believe it.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he responds, throwing another glance outside. “Flying you off Obal 10 after you shake things up with T’Kai is all contingent on things going smoothly. If you all get into serious trouble…” He lets the statement hang. “But I can help out as a transport.”

  “Rob, you’d never be able to fly again if they suspect your ship of harboring fugees,” David says.

  “Believe me, I know. The ’Rize has a reputation for being squeaky clean, and that hasn’t been easy. But I’ve got another ship, an unregistered ship. Anonymous and fast enough for our needs.” He looks around at us, and continues, “Who better to get you out of there? Have you even thought about how you’re going to do that?”

  No. At the moment, it’s more expedient to keep our thoughts on what we know and what we can control. Figuring out the next part of the plan is being shelved until the first part is complete. But…but if we agree to let Rob join us, we’d have one of our many problems already solved. Looking around the room, I see expressions of careful neutrality on everyone’s faces. No one wants to hope for that much good luck.

  Seeing our hesitancy, he leans casually against the wall and holds his hands out in a gesture that’s both generous and oddly contrived. “Look, I’m not the kind of guy who just turns their back on friends when things get heavy. I’m not doing this as a favor, I’m doing it because”—he glances in my direction—“I care about what happens to all of you. We’ve been in business for a while. David and Aly and I go way back. I don’t think I could sleep if I left you hanging, you know?”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Streamers of steaming exhaust billow out from the pipes and turrets of the industrial complex surrounding us like a post-apocalyptic graveyard. The air glides slickly into my nostrils and down my throat, tasting more like a chemical vapor than oxygen, which is perfect. We all still wear our nostril-implanted air filters to protect our lungs, but no one else wants to come near an urban junkyard where ragged and dangerous dregs of people mix like rotting vegetables with the toxic soup that stands in for the environment.

  Tunis City, despite being located on the most populated Obal planet, still has its industrial blights. Once they outsourced dangerous manufacturing jobs to the already hazardous Spectras and smaller moons, these dilapidated factories were simply abandoned, one by one. Over time, they’ve been picked bare by vagabonds and skulkers looking for materials that can buy them a meal or a fix. The only thing left is the sludge and pollutants that were never cleaned out, slowly aging and festering like wounds and occasionally spewing out their noxious residue. Like I said—for a quiet, witness-free location, it’s perfect.

  Rob put us down two days ago on a busy resource shipping dock, and we’d gotten off the Horizon with almost unbelievable ease. Most of the transports in the area were older and bigger, beaten from traveling to and from the Spectras carrying heavy loads of metals, minerals, and ore, making the Red Horizon almost conspicuous in its newer, shinier state. Rob procured a small land transport and snuck us aboard while the dock controllers read the ’Rize’s manifest and checked his crew’s IDs. Lying in back of the transport, I could smell smoke and hear shouting and alarms as the engines of a nearby ship went to shit. The airspace around was crowded and getting worse by the minute thanks to the grounded ship, and the controllers moved on without hesitation. With Rob at the wheel, we merged with the general din of road traffic and traveled quickly to this section of town, more a satellite district of Tunis than part of it. And the wait for La Mer to track down contacts from his past to aid us began.

  Though it’s dark inside the old factory, the gloom is still more inviting than the penetrating fog barely held at bay outside. The last forty-eight hours have ticked by with the painful slowness of waterboarding while La Mer sends out queries. If there is a bright side, it’s Rob’s assurance that he can get us off-world when the time comes. Maybe we’d accepted his help a little too fast, but without him here, Brady’s tendency to painstakingly consider every option before making a call got dropped. If our choice was too brash, there’s only one way we’re going to find out.

  It’s almost my watch on the rooftop, and I glance at La Mer on the way up. He’s been monitoring his netwave console almost constantly, barely leaving to sleep or eat, but he’s
not looking too worse for the wear. A few anonymous wire-rats have responded to his queries, and they keep a running conversation, speaking in a lingo that seems to be universally understood by their type but is basically indecipherable to me—quantum process transmogrifications this and transduction referrals that. I put enough effort into trying to make sense of their communications to make sure La Mer isn’t giving anything away that could get us caught, but stay out of his way outside of that.

  He’s talked to some about the security worm, keeping the details of how it’ll be used as ambiguous as possible, and refining things based on their recommendations and questions. One mobile console stays with him at all times, its screen filled with code that shifts and changes regularly as he makes minor tweaks. In many ways, the fewer changes he makes to the bypass program, the more relief I feel, and I’m guessing the same is true for the others. La Mer’s code is good, at least good enough to deal with the Admin security he knows about. The question is: What if there are things he doesn’t know about? Detection programs, tracking programs, new technology that’s been deployed since the Soldier’s Rebellion? It’s all too easy to think something like one of these led to the discovery of our first test at the Beach and the subsequent invasion by the Corps. What else can we do though, besides take our chances?

  On the ’Rize, when La Mer’d copped to the fear that it was his fault the Corps found us and killed Bodie, I had worried he wouldn’t be able to gain enough objectivity to keep working on the worm once we reached Tunis. Even now, I can’t imagine the pressure he must be feeling. Despite what’s at stake, his attitude is shifting slightly, and his confidence in the worm, and himself, is building. The heavy-hearted gloom he’s carried since the Beach is lifting, incrementally being replaced by infectious optimism, and we’ve all started to share it to a degree. It helps make the passage of time more bearable, even as our fears for the Sphynx crew and the settlers grows stronger.