Spectra Arise Trilogy

by Tammy Salyer

  Turning to Quantum, I ask, “So how do you want to do this?”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  When we enter the warehouse, it’s hard to tell if La Mer’s nervousness has more to do with the fact that he’s meeting Quantum in person or the fact that our group has nearly doubled—and all of us, including Quantum and his compatriots, carry weapons. When the impasse downtown had tilted in our favor, Vitruzzi had gambled they wouldn’t be dumb enough to shoot us and expose themselves, so we hadn’t disarmed them. If we’d been stopped by Admin security before getting back to the industrial district, this mission would have been over. We’re in the middle of the hornet’s nest where even the tiniest shake will cause the entire hive to erupt.

  After Vitruzzi helped Quantum adjust his perspective, he and his men must have liked the odds less than I did. As the maintenance team descended the stairwell, Quantum led us out of the room through a service tunnel filled with banks of power-storage units serving the downtown area, out through a storage closet for the city’s zip-rail line, and topside through the zip-rail station. Without citizen ID, none of us from Agate Beach could take the underground transportation, but Quantum and Rob were able to return to the garage and retrieve their vehicles, just as if they were average citizens on their way home after a day of work. The rest of us waited at a bench outside the station, sheathed in cold sweat and feeling completely naked. All of us but Vitruzzi have been criminals for too long to be at ease standing on the street corner of one of the settled planets, knowing that everyone around us has implicit or explicit authority to detain us, place us under arrest, or if they’re security, outright shoot us. V appeared much calmer than I felt, and I couldn’t tell what was going on inside her thoughts. I’m not really sure I would have wanted to. In less than half an hour, they returned with both vehicles, and we mixed our teams and drove back here to the decrepit factory.

  While La Mer sets up the video feed with Rajcik’s footage, I pull Rob aside and ask quietly, not wanting to draw the others’ attention, “What are you doing here? You weren’t supposed to get involved until we were ready for an outbound ship.”

  Basking me in a fawning smile, he answers, “Involved? Is that what I am?”

  I stare at him blankly, knowing he’s misinterpreting my reason for asking. After a pause, he says, “Yeah, I guess that’s what I am. Vitruzzi pinged me and said you needed my help. What was I supposed to do?”

  “We can’t trust these wire-rats. They could turn you in.” I don’t add the fact that I’m relying on him to stay in the clear in order for David and I to get new identities. “I know you know that, so…”

  His smile tightens as he realizes that what I’m really trying to figure out is his angle. What’s he getting out of this?

  “Losing you again would be worse than getting compromised, “ he says. He catches the way I wince and continues, growing defensive, “Jesus, Aly, why are you still pushing me out? Don’t you trust me?”

  “Okay. I get it. I just…I just don’t want to be responsible for what could happen.” That came out wrong. “I mean to you,” I add hastily.

  With a derisive shake of the head, he walks past me, not bothering to respond. Dammit, I really have a way with people. I hadn’t meant to…to what? Hurt his feelings? I’m too raw, still aching from Karl and the way things had ended. Whatever feelings I’d once had for Rob are part of the past. Right now, all I want is a clean break, a new life, and an escape.

  La Mer has set up a monitor for viewing Rajcik’s footage and Rob joins the others around it. Thompson is the only man absent, keeping watch on the roof. Night has fallen around us now, the darkness close and dangerous, more like the walls of a prison than a cloak of anonymity. I see David lean toward him and say something, and Rob responds with a sharp shrug. Feeling small and mean, like child who has cruelly pulled the wings off a butterfly, I stay where I am, keeping my distance.

  “Aly, will you make sure all the window and door covers are tight?” La Mer asks. “We don’t want any sound to carry outside and draw attention.”

  I make a circuit around the small room—once used as an office or file room—checking on the panels we’d placed over all the openings, then give La Mer a nod to let him know things are good to go.

  He stares at the screen as he places a disc in the connected console. “T’Kai made the transmissions using digital blocking codes, but Rajcik recorded everything with a nonlinked camera disguised inside part of his ship’s nav console housing.” His tone is neutral, but the shake in his hands shows he’s grappling with a bad case of nerves. He actions the video and the monitor switches to life, showing us an image of T’Kai’s face staring out of the communication display in the Temptation’s cockpit. The camera’s perspective is odd, capturing the scene from below and slightly to the side, turning T’Kai’s tan features and narrow, almond-shaped eyes into a hatchet’s profile. This is the first time I’ve seen the man, and though his skin is flawless, the rigid, distinguished posture and wash of gray in his eyebrows suggest he’s an older man, maybe early seventies, but it’s hard to know for sure.

  The video plays.

  T’Kai: “I want the entire place destroyed. You’ll have entry access near the weapons labs, hangar zero-one. There will be plenty of items there that can accomplish this task.”

  Rajcik: “Is that where I’ll find the Nova?”

  T’Kai: “The Nova and any number of other useful pieces of equipment you can turn into profit. Just remember that your first directive is to destroy the Fortress. Concentrate on that or you’ll see no reward. Understand?”

  The camera never captures Rajcik’s face, but the low-pitched growl in his voice makes his disgust of T’Kai clear. “What will it take to override the airlocks?”

  “I have a man on the inside. Command Major Sydney. He’ll be at the helm when you arrive to grant you access and open the airlocks. However, he specifically will need to be disposed of once his usefulness to you is complete. I assume that won’t be an issue.”

  Rajcik doesn’t bother to respond other than to say, “Send me his direct link.” He pauses, and we can see T’Kai’s hand moving to cut the transmission, but Rajcik halts him with another question. “This is more than we originally agreed on. I’ll assume this replaces your claim to anything I make.”

  T’Kai: “Yes, you can assume that. The Fortress has become an unexpected liability. It’s costing me too much to keep the personnel quiet and I have intelligence that there may be an attempt to expose the cause of the Soldier’s Rebellion. Experimentation on our fine military was, perhaps, an overly ambitious enterprise. Three weeks, Rajcik. If you haven’t completed the mission by then, you can also make the assumption that our deal is null and void.”

  The image on Rajcik’s monitor flicks off and La Mer disengages the disc.

  “Motherfuh…” Rob’s voice fades out. Besides him, I’m the only one who hasn’t seen this footage, and I’m just as speechless. I thought I’d stopped Rajcik by forcing him to detonate the Nova inside the Fortress. I’d been happy to see the station destroyed, but knowing that had been T’Kai’s intent all along sucks all the joy out of the event.

  I feel sick. The Soldier’s Rebellion was rumored to have been started because of an Admin-created virus, the Crowers Croup. People said it got loose and the Admin didn’t do enough to control it or to protect the soldiers whose job it was to quarantine its victims. What T’Kai just said proves that those rumors were partly true, but that the whole truth is much, much worse. The virus had come out of Admin labs, and they’d been using it, and probably other biological experiments like it, on soldiers from the very beginning. Vitruzzi’s daughter and husband had died because of T’Kai’s god complex. Human experimentation, not only on non-cits, the supposed waste and by-products of the species, but the soldiers who volunteered their lives for the Admin and the Corps. Used like lab rats, and for what? Did T’Kai hope to achieve some kind of bug-resistant soldier, or was he merely using them for his own demented scien
tific curiosity? The more I learn of the Admin’s schemes, the more I start to believe that even the best in humanity can never hold a candle to the worst in us. Does power make you lose perspective the way T’Kai and those monsters posing as scientists did?

  Vitruzzi catches my eye and says, “Now you see why we kept Rajcik close. This is big, bigger than the data we got from the Fortress. This paints the full picture and gives us what we need to settle the score.”

  I’m not sure if it’s the slight catch in her voice or the way her eyes jerk away from me as she says this, but I can see that she doesn’t just mean settling the score for the Beachers. She’s talking personally, settling the score for herself and her dead family. She’ll never admit it, but this time, it’s about revenge.

  And I’m all for it. Working with Rajcik is dangerous and unpredictable, but no more dangerous and unpredictable than letting a murderer like T’Kai, a murderer with the power of the entire government backing him up, run loose. It’s gone beyond simply wanting to be left alone. At this point we have to do something to try and restore some fairy tale of balance to the social order of the system, at least make T’Kai accountable for what he’s done. That, and only that, is the mission.

  “What’s it going to be Quantum? Is this information worthy of your help?” Vitruzzi asks. I can tell she’s rattled; it’s unusual for Vitruzzi to use sarcasm to make her point.

  The wire-rat looks more off center than I’ve seen yet, but there’s also a subtle look of sly contemplation shrink-wrapping his features and pulling his eyes into slits. He’s thinking hard about how to play this and about what he can manipulate to his own advantage. Finally, he says, “Is this all you have?”

  His flippant dismissal of the video’s potential impact surprises me. “All we have? What more could we possibly need? We’ve got a Ministry director on video admitting to using soldiers for human experimentation and paying off scientists to keep their mouths shut about it.” David gives me a look, warning me to calm down, but I ignore him. “He caused the goddamn Soldier’s Rebellion for chrissakes! This is enough for the Admin to burn him at the stake!”

  Quantum gives me a look of mild contempt. “The Admin will not punish him.” He walks toward the back of the room, his shoulders slightly hunched and his head down, as if deep in thought. “They will do nothing except shield him and alter the story for citizens to make this all appear to be nothing but a hoax, a terrorist attempt to launch another rebellion. The Admin will be quick to point out that it was a rogue virus that decimated so many citizens before the Rebellion, that it spread too fast to contain, but that their quick quarantine response saved millions of lives. They will repeat the rhetoric that the soldiers who died were a regrettable loss, but they were good men and women who died for everyone’s safety.

  “Then they will say that those noble heroes’ dignity and honor are being sullied by you malcontents who have bobbed up from the muck of the far-flung backwater Spectras—that you were given a chance at a better life but chose to spit on it.” He faces us again, his eyes blazing with dreadful intelligence. “They covered the Rebellion up too perfectly when it occurred, and now they hold that possibility as a threat over the heads of the citizens as a representation of how easily all of our rights and safeties can be taken away if these kinds of antisocial actions are allowed to flourish. They will show that your supposed proof of T’Kai’s treason is nothing but a false rendering by deserters that have not yet been caught. And then—then they will find you and squash you until you are nothing but a stain on a lab table.”

  “Then what, Quantum? You don’t think we should blackmail T’Kai?” La Mer asks.

  “You’ll be wasting your time.”

  “There’s more,” Vitruzzi says.

  He looks at her, raising one eyebrow.

  “We have several drives of data on the experiments they were running. Tests, results, types of viruses, strains of disease—we have the proof to backup his admission. The digital signatures tie it all directly to the Admin.”

  “And you want to go to T’Kai with it, use it to threaten him into releasing your friends. And then what will you do? Go back to living on the rock you came from?”

  She doesn’t respond.

  “You don’t get it. You don’t know, do you?” Seeing our confused looks, Quantum shakes his head. “All you Spectres are nothing but ghosts anyway. You’re already dead.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  The next half hour is a surreal nightmare of information overload as Quantum launches into an explanation of what the Cabinet of Directorates of the Political and Capital Administration of the Advanced Worlds has been discussing—vehemently and thoroughly—for the last three months.

  Quantum wasn’t merely theorizing when he said the Admin will have no problem selling the public on the idea that deserters and malcontents are flourishing and threatening everyone’s safety; they’ve kept that message on slow-drip through the media for some time now, every new “catastrophe” instigated by non-cits feeding the public’s fears, slowly building their resentment, indifference, and intolerance toward the inhabitants of the Spectras, commonly called Spectres. First the Soldier’s Rebellion and now the destruction of the Fortress have rattled the Admin much more than we knew, and their decision to rescind transport contracts and limit travel into and out of Obal airspace is a strategy to serve a more sinister purpose than simply controlling criminal activity.

  They plan to completely wipe out the populations of non-cits living on the Spectras.

  Quantum’s network of wire-rats have had spy-hacking ears and eyes on the Admin since before the Rebellion; he says that it’s become clear that the Admin has been prepping for a showdown and just waiting for an excuse for carte blanche freedom to implement total dominion over the system. According to Quantum, their plans focus specifically on the Spectras for the simple reason that non-cits are harder to track and control. Then he brought up something that surprised us all. The Admin has the perfect weapon for the job: the soil amendment compound.

  As Quantum lays out the puzzle pieces, I know I’m not the only person in the room whose stomach does flip-flops at his description of the soil compound. The missing piece that Bodie needed would have killed us. Originally called the “C-virus,” the compound is a terraforming additive that, indeed, converts marginal soil into a more fecund, life-sustaining earth, but it’s first phase is pure poison that kills everything it comes into contact with. It takes between five to ten years for it to become totally inert, during which time the chemical process slowly alters the soil, supercharging it for new growth. The Admin can effectively kill two birds with one stone if they deploy it on the Spectras; clean out the troublesome settlers and provide fertile new grounds for food production and resource development.

  * * *

  Quantum gives us a few minutes to digest all of this, then says, “What if I told you that I know a better way to use this information you acquired from the Fortress?”

  “It’s our show, Quantum. We just need your transceiver.” Vitruzzi’s face is an iron mask, inflexible and resolute. Quantum could tell her he is the Messiah in the flesh, but she is finished listening to his stories and machinations. Despite the feeling in my gut that he’s not lying, I still try to convince myself he is, and I think she’s doing the same thing. He’s perceptive enough to realize it and shakes his head slightly, but presses on.

  “Can you think of another reason the Admin would be taking a census of Spectra settlements?” He pauses, letting the question taint the air with its obvious implications. “They need to know the numbers they’re dealing with, of course. In order to prepare.”

  I turn to Rob. “You’ve been working as a contractor for a few years, Rob. Does any of this sound real to you? Have you heard anything about it?”

  Rob looks like I feel, sick and angry. “I’m just a contractor, Aly, what could I possibly know?”

  Quantum continues, “There are others who want to see an end to this kind of tyranny. If
you can truly tie T’Kai to this information, this data, enough people could be convinced of the Administration’s duplicity to force the entire regime to its knees. There are many that want this…revolution.”

  “You’re saying there are people looking for a reason to overthrow the Admin?” David asks.

  “Not just a reason. The reasons exist all around us. No, people need proof. Maybe this is the proof.”

  I’m trying to hold back my bitter laughter at his absurd idea. “Do we have to remind you that they’re the ones with most the guns? How can you realistically imagine trying to fight them?” I look at Vitruzzi for confirmation that this guy is nuts, but her expression is surprisingly contemplative. She holds Quantum’s eyes with her own, and I get the sense they’re communicating on a level I can’t quite grasp. “V?”

  “How many are there?” she asks.

  “Many.” He doesn’t drop her eyes.

  The rest of us are silent, watching this exchange. Hirota, thin and wiry, and the other man, finally identified as Faisal, bigger and mugging like an angry rhino, scan us with busy eyes, though they don’t move. “V, you’re not seriously—”

  “Quiet.” She looks at me sideways, speaking sharply. Her attitude is serious, as serious as I’ve ever seen it. It’s enough to make me shut up, at least for now. David and I exchange a glance, his expression mirroring my own wary curiosity.

  Vitruzzi continues, “Let’s say, for the sake of conversation, there was a possibility of starting a rebellion, something substantial, organized, equipped. You say you know of others, but what do you know about them? I’ve seen from the experience here with La Mer that your type wouldn’t know each other if you met on the street. With that being the case, how would you mobilize? What would be your plan of attack? How would you initiate this rebellion?”