by Tim Pratt
“How goes it, Ashok?” Callie said.
“Just doing a few last checks, cap.” Something about his voice was strange, like there was a buzz under the words. She’d heard it before, over the comms, but had assumed it was an artifact of the communications system. Apparently not. “More emulations and simulations and all that. I’m pretty sure I’ve got the generator’s travel history figured out, so we should be able to bounce back to wherever it came from.” He turned around and paused when he saw Elena.
She kept her face perfectly blank. She’d seen all sorts of injuries in the bad old days on Earth – assorted deformities, mutations, and teratogenic anomalies treated with varying levels of success or failure.
She’d never seen anything like Ashok, though: most of his face was a curved silver metal mask, and instead of eyes he had an array of lenses, and instead of a nose he had a brass thing shaped a little like a nose, but more like a dolphin’s dorsal fin, with no visible nostrils. He wore a sort of thick metallic collar around his throat, the color of brass, covered in small holes, like a speaker grill.
He smiled, and the lips were human, though his tongue was black and the teeth were various jewel-tones. The lenses over his eyes twisted and spun, but then he pushed them up on his forehead, and she realized they were glasses or goggles. His eyes underneath were bloodshot, but human, peering out of that smooth metal mask. “Hey, Doctor Oh, nice to meet you. It’s OK, you can stare. I know it’s a lot to take in. My face had a serious disagreement with some acid when I was working on a mining ship way back when. These aren’t even my original eyes – they got jellied, but the muscles were pretty intact, so they fitted me with transplant eyes. They could have done reconstruction and made my face more face-like, but I decided to just embrace the cyborgism.” He held up his right arm, and it was mostly metal, too – maybe entirely metal – apart from a crystalline window in the forearm that showed the mechanical musculature underneath. Instead of fingers he had a bloom of various delicate manipulators. “Why not go full machine-man, right?”
He pounded on his chest, and there was a clank under his coverall. “I’ve still got my heart, but there’s a redundant backup system in there too, and my liver and kidneys are way better than yours, being bioengineered, and I’ve got some great stuff going on in my Achilles tendons and knees, we’re talking major piston stuff, you should see me lift with my legs, and as for my–” He stopped, coughed, and said, “Sorry, never mind. See, cap, I remembered about how there’s a line I shouldn’t cross, right?”
“Ashok is into self-improvement,” Callie said. “I think he aspires to be fully modular so he can swap out any body part as needed. They’ve written him up in medical journals, and they weren’t even all called Abnormal Psychology Today.”
“My brain is still mine, though,” Ashok said. “I mean, mostly. I won’t say there aren’t any augmentations. I’m not a barbarian from barbarian times. Crap. I mean, I didn’t mean–”
“It’s wonderful to meet you, Ashok,” Elena said. “You have a deep knowledge of mechanical-human interfaces, I assume?”
He nodded. “I’m way ahead of you. Whatever weird metal brain-spiders attached themselves to your friends’ heads? If there’s a way to get them out, I’ll find it.” He paused. “But if the implants do anything interesting I might mod one up to use myself. Never turn your back on innovation, wherever it may be found, that’s what I always say.”
“I have literally never heard you say that,” Callie said. “It’s not even a saying. It’s barely a sentence.”
“It’s what I always meant to say, then. When do you want to fire up the magic box here, cap?”
“I’ll let you know. I want to get beyond even a whisper of Meditreme Station traffic. It’s better if nobody’s around to see, even at a distance, when we wink out of existence. I’m going to take Elena upstairs to meet Drake and Janice–”
“Oh, no,” Shall said, through the ship’s PA system. “Oh, everyone, I- I’m so sorry.”
Callie’s eyes narrowed. “Report,” she barked.
“Meditreme Station,” Shall said. “It’s gone.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean someone just destroyed it.”
Chapter Eleven
Callie always went cold in emergencies. “Show me.”
“This footage was taken by our sensors. You can’t see much from this distance, but…”
The screens all blanked, showing star-dotted blackness, and a faint shimmer that was probably Meditreme Station, getting incrementally dimmer in the distance as the White Raven moved farther away. Then light suddenly bloomed on the screen, a radiant flash of bluish-white that gradually faded into sparkles, and then, blackness.
“The comms are all lit up,” Janice said over the PA. “Every ship in the vicinity saw that.”
“We have to go back. Drake, get us turned around.”
The ship extruded jumpseats from the machine room’s walls, and there was a clunk as Ashok sealed his boots to the hull. His physiology was adjusted to handle acceleration.
Callie numbly strapped herself into a seat, and Elena followed suit. “Janice, check the station security frequency, see if there’s any chatter.”
“Dead silent. The civilian comms are full of chatter, but there’s nothing you’d call official.”
Callie groaned. “Warwick called in all the security patrols.” Warwick. She was gone. So was Hermione, and the customs agent on the dock, and everyone else Callie knew on Meditreme, the place she’d called home for the past decade. She tried to tell herself there might be survivors, but that explosion, that spray of glittering dust… she couldn’t believe anyone had made it through that intact. “What the hell happened? Could it have been an accident?”
“I don’t think so,” the ship said. “I think it was an attack, though I haven’t identified the weapon. Usually that sort of thing is easy to identify, based on the nature of the debris field and any radiation signatures left behind, but this data is unlike anything I’ve seen before.”
Callie gritted her teeth. “If someone attacked the station, that means there’s a ship, and if there’s a ship, there’s someone to chase.”
“Uh, cap, if they have weapons capable of blowing up the station, do you really want to go after them? Respectfully.”
“Someone just killed fifty thousand people, Ashok. We might be the only gunship representing TNA authority for thousands of kilometers. No way we’re letting the perpetrators get away.”
“Understood,” Ashok said. “I’ll get the defensive systems online.”
“Go faster, Drake,” Callie said. “I want to feel my brain trying to climb out the back of my head.”
The pressure of acceleration increased, and Callie sank back into the jumpseat, trying to focus on the task at hand: find the perpetrators, secure or destroy them, and see justice done. She was just a contractor, more bounty hunter than policeman, but right now it was entirely possible she was the whole of the law, and she intended to represent the Trans-Neptunian Authority to the very edge of her abilities.
Except Meditreme Station was the Trans-Neptunian Authority. The two were basically synonymous. The station was the center of the corporation’s organization and power. There wasn’t much else to the TNA but a few asteroid outposts, research stations, mining operations, and some articles of incorporation floating in a database somewhere. The CEO was gone, the CFO, the board, all the senior management, most of the employees… The TNA was a giant in the region, but its head had just been blown off.
Callie couldn’t think about that, any more than she could think about all her dead friends and colleagues. Do the job in front of you, and then think about what comes next. “Ship, do an intelligence analysis. Who had the means and motive to do something like this?”
“Ah. I’ve been working on that. Ask anyone in the system and they’d say it must be the Jovians, probably funding mercenaries or pirates or terrorists to commit the actual attack. The Jov
ian Imperative has joint projects with the TNA, but the TNA has been getting stronger, upsetting the balance of power. With the TNA crippled, the Jovians could invoke emergency clauses to seize control of all those joint operations around Neptune and Uranus. The loss of Meditreme Station is the certain ruin of the TNA, so the Jovians could snatch up all their property for next to nothing, and then everything from the asteroid belt to the edge of the solar system would be under the Imperative’s control.”
“That’s monstrous,” Callie said. “Corporate espionage is one thing, but they blew up a city. There are sure to be investigations, Earth itself will get involved. It could even lead to war. It’s an insane risk.”
“It is,” the ship agreed. “If we believe it was a deliberate attack, though, it’s the only plausible explanation. Only, I don’t think that’s what happened. I don’t think this is the Jovian Imperative’s fault.”
“Then whose fault is it?”
“It’s gotta be ours, cap.” Ashok spoke softly.
Callie stared at him. There were tears running from under his lenses, down his shiny metal face. She hadn’t even realized his tear ducts worked. Then she understood. “The bridge generator. That’s what changed. That’s the new variable.”
“We brought the bridge generator to the station,” the ship said. “We showed it to My Cousin Paolo, who became agitated, even terrified, and fled. Soon after that, all the Liars fled. Not much later, the station was destroyed. There is a plausible chain of cause and effect.”
“You think someone was trying to get us?” Callie said. “To destroy the bridge generator, and Meditreme Station was just collateral damage?”
“It’s a hypothesis worth exploring,” the ship said.
“An alien device like this, as powerful as it seems to be?” Ashok was still crying, but his voice was calm. “It’s going to attract attention.”
“I also find it interesting that the Anjou was destroyed,” the ship said. “I accessed the station database when I heard you tell Elena about the loss, and retrieved the data before the station… went offline. The passing security ship picked up the same odd radiation signature I’m seeing here, and noted the same uniform level of devastation in the debris. It’s reasonable to assume that whoever blew up Meditreme also destroyed the Anjou.”
“But why? The generator was already gone–”
“The navigational data wasn’t,” Drake said. “Anyone who looked at the Anjou’s computer would have a record of where it came from.”
“They aren’t just trying to destroy the bridge generator,” Callie said. “They’re trying to erase any evidence that the generator was ever in this system, and to make sure no one else can find the place where Elena picked it up. Gods.”
“This is my fault,” Elena murmured.
“No, we need to put aside that guilt and blame shit for now,” Callie snapped. “It’s not any of our faults. It’s the fault of whoever fired the weapon. But who could that be? Nobody knew we had the generator, except the Liars.”
“The Liars don’t blow things up, though,” the ship said. “There’s not a single record of the Liars ever engaging in violent action. We know they have weapons – some of those weapons are installed on this ship right now – but they’ve never turned their guns on humans, or one another, as far as we know. In the face of confrontation they always try diplomacy, in their own dishonest way, or bribery, or they simply run away. They’ve hurt people, certainly, but always by accident, to the best of our knowledge. Even when the Liars have clashed with pirates, they’ve always fought back with non-lethal means. That’s part of why humans feel safe letting the Liars onto their ships and stations and planets, even though they fundamentally can’t be trusted: the Liars have always been resolutely pacifistic.”
“So it wasn’t the Liars,” Callie said. “But the Liars knew something was coming, or why else would they run off? So the attacker must be someone, or something, the Liars fear. A different race of aliens? Lurking out in the Oort Cloud somewhere? But how would they know we have the generator? Does it produce some unique radiation signature they could track?”
“Not that I know of,” Ashok said, “but there may be a signature when it’s used. It opened a bridge from wherever the alien station was to here, so maybe that lit up someone’s sensors? Or else… maybe someone followed Elena all the way from the alien station when she escaped. Someone trying to recover stolen property.”
“That station put the bridge generator on her ship. Why take it back when they gave it to her in the first place?”
“Maybe someone realized they messed up and gave the wrong candy to the wrong baby?” Ashok shrugged.
Callie tried to drum her fingers against the seat but the acceleration gravity was strong enough to make it difficult. “So we could be going after a ship controlled by unknown aliens, who were willing to kill fifty thousand people to destroy a black box they gave to us in the first place. It doesn’t seem to track.”
“I don’t know. Sometimes people make mistakes and go to pretty serious lengths to cover them up, if the mistakes are bad enough,” Ashok said. “I just don’t know who else it could be. If it wasn’t the Jovian Imperative, and it wasn’t the Liars, then–”
“I’ve got something on our scanners,” Drake interrupted. “It looks like– Shall, would you confirm?”
“Confirmed,” the ship said. “Position and trajectory fit the available data. That’s either the ship that fired on Meditreme Station, or it was close enough to see who did. And… it’s a Liar ship.”
“I give up,” Ashok said. “I don’t know what the hell is going on.”
“Go after them,” Callie said.
“That is, ah, very not necessary,” Drake said. “They must have noticed us, too, because they’re coming around, and pretty clearly setting a course to intercept us.”
“Are we sure it’s a Liar ship?”
“One of their classic starfish configurations,” the ship said. “Though I don’t know for sure there are Liars inside it. By design those ships are difficult to pilot for anyone with fewer than six or seven appendages, but some augmented human or a very well-coordinated team could–”
“Hail them, Janice. Let’s see what they have to say for themselves. They’re either the perpetrators, or they were witnesses, and either way, they’re persons of interest.”
“They aren’t saying anything,” she said. “They pinged our transponder, so they know our designation, but that’s it. They’re ignoring us otherwise. And before you ask, no, they don’t have a transponder of their own. They’re not registered in the TNA database, or the Jovian Imperative, and nowhere farther afield, either.”
Callie grunted. Unregistered Liar ships were common – Liars were pretty laissez-faire about rules and regulations, and it wasn’t like you could trust their paperwork even when they appeared to be in compliance – but information asymmetry always bothered her. “If they are after the bridge generator, and they know we’re the White Raven, and they know we’re the people who found the Anjou… We’d better get them before they get us. Ashok, let’s talk tactical options. I want them disabled rather than blown to bits. I’d like to have an intimate talk with them.”
“We’re in luck. The TNA wanted us to take over Glauketas, not annihilate it, so we’ve got some fancy new EMP torpedoes. We blast them at the ship, they set off a pulse that disables their electrical systems, and it’s supposed to work even against hardened targets.”
“Do it.”
Ashok ran the tactical board, which was normally Callie’s privilege, but she wasn’t usually in a spare jumpseat in a machine shop when things got nasty. “Torpedoes away. At this distance, impact should take about ten minutes.”
“Are they shooting at us yet?”
“They are now,” the ship said. “As soon as we fired, they responded.”
“Missiles?”
“Honestly? I have no idea. They launched half a dozen projectiles, but not like any I’ve seen before. Th
ey’re large and spherical, and look more like drones or probes than missiles.”
“Huh. Why shoot robots at us? Well, who cares. Janice, you’ve got our defensive countermeasures running?”
“That’s what my board says,” Janice replied. “If it works the way it’s supposed to, whatever they fired should miss us by a kilometer.”
“The things they fired look almost like escape pods,” the ship said. “Big enough to be manned by a Liar, anyway, with some sort of rudimentary thrust and directional systems.”
“Wait. You think it’s a boarding party?” Callie said.
“Makes a certain degree of sense,” the ship said. “They blew up Meditreme Station, but now they know we got off the station ahead of them. They probably don’t know how long we were gone, or where we went. As far as they know, we could have stashed the bridge generator somewhere. Maybe they want to get direct confirmation that the device is here before they turn us into a cloud of sparkling dust with their mystery weapons. Otherwise, they’d have to vaporize every object between Jupiter and the Oort Cloud to make sure they got rid of the generator.”
“Fuck that,” Callie said. “Shoot their little pods out of the sky, Ashok, and then we’ll board them.”
“Targeting.” Ashok was silent for a moment, then said, “Uh. Shall, what just happened?”
“The ballistic cannons seem functional. The error wasn’t on our end.”
“What error?” Callie said.
Ashok made a buzzing sound of consternation. “I shot metal projectiles at the pods and the bullets veered away and spun off harmlessly through space, like… I don’t know what. Like they were pulled off course by a big magnet, except they’re non-ferrous, and also I don’t see any giant magnets floating around out there anyway.”
“Target them with the energy weapons,” Callie said.