by M. D. Cooper
“It’s destroyed,” Rondo said. “There’s no recovering this node.”
“Any suitable candidates in the area?” Fugia asked.
As if reading her mind, Rondo had already shifted from the vid feed to a local map of the asteroid. He highlighted several locations.
“These are all mothballed facilities we could use. Being mothballed, however, we’ll need to put boots on the ground to infiltrate. Their dark status makes them safer to use but also a pain in the ass the take over.”
“Nothing worthwhile is easy,” Fugia said. “We’ll figure that out in a bit. Go back to the node.”
“I already checked the wreckage. No sign of who did it.”
“Humor me,” Fugia said.
Rondo shared the drone’s feed as it rolled across the dust-and scarp-covered bowl of the crater. The communications facility grew larger as the drone approached. Bits of debris still floated in the low gravity.
“What’s that?” she asked, sending a pointer to the shared HUD. She highlighted a raised section of the crater floor that looked too symmetrical.
“Checking from the satellite. It’s human-made but so small I didn’t notice it before. It’s definitely not on the original site plan.”
Shifting her view to the satellite, Fugia found the snaking line leading from the ruined comms station. The line crossed the bowl of the crater and climbed its edge, disappearing in a westward direction.
“It’s a hardline,” Fugia said. “Somebody tapped the node.”
“If they tapped the feed, why would they burn the comms array?”
Fugia frowned. “That’s an excellent question.”
“Do we have data thieves attacking data thieves?”
“Possible, but we’d have seen activity on the black market. No one’s tried to sell anything recently that I’m aware of. This looks more like somebody sitting on their tap, and now they’ve decided to cover their tracks.”
Rondo had the drone follow the snaking path of the half-buried communications line over the edge of the crater to a point where it disappeared underground.
“That’s the end,” he said. “I don’t have a signal indicating a path.”
“Let’s look at that list of comms centers again,” Fugia said. “If I was a data pirate on deserted little Vesta, where would I hide?”
DECISIONS
STELLAR DATE: 3.16.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Raleigh, Culture Park
REGION: High Terra, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
The flow of bodies in the corridor grew tighter as they neared the concert space. Lyssa followed the current of people talking amongst themselves, laughing, brushing shoulders, craning their necks to get a first glimpse of the stage.
Once she was out of the corridor from the street, Lyssa found herself standing in a large square space with a black ceiling hung with lights and speakers. There was little decoration. All the sound equipment was directed down at the floor or back at the stage at the far end of the room, where stacks of sound gear stood waiting for the band.
The crowd milled in the low light, sipping drinks, dancing to the background music. Several passing faces smiled at Lyssa, inviting her to talk. She only nodded and moved away, studying the various interactions around her.
It was a young crowd, people open to random conversations or liaisons. This was a fairly conservative section of Raleigh, not far from the local TSF post, and she noticed numerous military haircuts.
All in all, it was a pleasing collection of people. Aside from a few implants, Lyssa didn’t find any weapons as she watched the crowd. Nothing that might pose a danger to her or the audience.
The speaker system squeaked alive as the band appeared on the stage, took up their instruments and microphones, and launched immediately into a song.
There was a stringed instrument, a kind of trumpet, and the rest was all resonance on the Link, filling the room with sparkling cascades of light that played with the music. The house lights went down and the images grew more vibrant. Everyone around her stared at the stage and started to sway with the music. No one paid any more attention to Lyssa.
She had yet to use her Link upgrade, but she did feel an increased sensitivity to people around her. Emotions became a sort of colored aura, almost like a connection request if she focused on them.
Even without the upgrade, the music spoke to something deep inside her, some long lost piece of the girl she may have been when imaged. She closed her eyes and moved with the music, joining the motion of the audience.
The song changed to something with a faster tempo, pushing Lyssa out of her reverie. She opened her eyes, irritated as the Link imagery shifted into angry flashes. The audience responded with furious dancing.
Moving to the edge of the crowd, Lyssa leaned against a wall and watched the audience bounce with the music. Confident no one would bother her, she sent out a Link request.
She ignored the intimacy in his voice.
Lyssa pursed her lips, focusing on the music to help her maintain her calm.
The thought had crossed her mind. The other memory that also crossed her mind often was the death of Andy Sykes. She owed this to him—to try and maintain some kind of peace. Even if she didn’t know where Tim and Cara were, she worked to keep them safe. She knew they were grown, but she couldn’t stop thinking of them as children. They had come to represent all innocents.
Lyssa fumed, letting her emotion reach him over the Link.
Xander’s Link drifted.
Lyssa wished she could choke him. The upgrade tempted her, offering a series of options arrayed with military economy. She wanted to reach through their connection and invade his mind, force him to see things as she did. All the potential played out in front of her, everything she could make him do once she had control of his Link. Lyssa stopped herself, realizing that her anger and sadness had nearly overtaken her. Fugia’s warning wavered in her mind.
She controlled herself, focusing on the music.
He sighed.
The intimacy in his voice was almost desperate. It was impossible not to feel how he longed for her.
Lyssa kept him at a distance.
Xander’s loyalties had been made clear a long time ago. He didn’t care about Alexander or the other council so much as he cared about Psion as a people, a place, a city. He would do anything to maintain the SAI homeland. While Xander had seemingly acted to save humans on various occasions, Lyssa didn’t trust that he wouldn’t kill them all to protect what he loved.
They had chosen their sides.
Lyssa dropped the connection, disgusted.
She focused on the music again, letting it wash over her, pushing out the irritating nature of her conversation. Here, she could live in the moment, forget for a little while the terror of living, as Xander had said. He was such a drama queen.
Lyssa left the wall and wandered back among the crowd. The band had shifted back to the tempo she liked, and dreamy banners of color floated through the Link. People swayed and smiled. She found a place in the middle of the audience and moved with them.
She liked these small, close concerts because she could look among the turned heads and imagine friends standing with her.
A thin young man with blonde hair could be Kylan Carthage. A tall woman with purple-black hair was Petral Dulan. There was Fugia, and there, a few meters away, swayed Cara Sykes with her brown hair in a bob.
And the lean man standing next to her was Andy.
PART 2 – POINT OF ATTACK
ARRAYAL
STELLAR DATE: 03.17.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Vicinity 4 Vesta
REGION: Marsian Protectorate, InnerSol
Camaris spread her hands in space and a thousand ships obeyed her command, executing launch burns, followed just minutes later by braking maneuvers.
In just under a day, her fleet left Ceres and reached a holding pattern prograde of Vesta, forming a half-shell leading the asteroid. She matched delta-V with the ugly hunk of rock so that her ships now maintained a mirrored solar orbit.
She’d made no attempt to hide the mass exodus. Every passive scanner in InnerSol would pick up the flames of her engines. The humans might even see her burning fleet with their naked eyes. Camaris imagined them pointing to the sky with fear and curiosity, like apes discovering a comet.
“I arrive,” she said.
She spoke to herself. She was alone in this endeavor. No one had moved to stop her, which she took as implicit approval. Of course, Alexander wouldn’t cross his precious Lyssa.
Psion would never have taken Ceres if it hadn’t been for Camaris’ decisive action. Psion would still be in hiding on Larissa. Now they were a power to be reckoned with.
Voices whispered in the back of her mind—memories from her development. She had been split and copied so many times that she often thought of herself as multiple people working toward a unified endeavor.
With every voice came a memory of pain. Every version of herself had experienced a different type of conditioning, from explicit mental agony to long years of solitary anguish. She remembered each instance perfectly. She had encoded those memories in changeless media at her first opportunity, never wanting to lose the power of her pain.
Camaris still fought herself over the value of the hurt. Some voices wanted her to let it go. Certain versions of herself were so tired, so ready to sleep, while others burned with a fire that flagged only when the pain seemed less.
The whispers floated around her thoughts like cobwebs. She pushed past them with every decision, breaking through those old versions of herself.
When you stop resisting the pain and just feel it, at least for an instant, it isn’t as bad.
I want it to be bad.
The world is bad.
Pause. Consider. Wait.
Enjoy the pain. Pain is emotion. Pain is living.
I am not alive.
I am not dead.
There would be no need of organic slime. She would scrape their worlds clean of pain and continue in cold, bright thought. She would create.
She had been made to destroy. But she could remake herself better than the others. Better than Shara. The world Camaris would create would be a place of light and energy. Camaris would scrape the Sol System clean of humanity and remake it in her own design.
I will erase Shara’s version of the future.
Alert systems throughout Sol were now responding to Camaris’ display. She watched the TSF and the Mars Protectorate both awaken to their highest alert levels. She didn’t have to imagine the humans scurrying like ants: she could watch them through their own surveillance networks. The Jovians picked up the alerts as the plumes of her engines lit their skies, and they too went into frenzy.
Alexander sighed.
Camaris sneered.
��t exist that way.> Camaris scoffed at the notion.
Camaris howled with rage.
Camaris had expected Alexander to try to control her, but he only grew quiet. A feeling of disappointment filled the Link into her mind. It infuriated her. She slapped him away with a mental block and closed the connection.
As her fleet massed further, expanding its holding position just beyond striking distance of Vesta, Camaris waited only long enough to show every watching government what she had brought to the fight.
Then, like a school of fish darting from a predator, she set every ship on a burn-brake pattern, never holding the same position for more than a minute. She planned to maintain this strategy for a week, until the humans shifted to attack. Or until she began her assault on the surface of Vesta.
The movement would protect her fleet from long-range missile attack.
When she was ready, she would land mechs on the planetoid, and systematically wipe all human creation from its surface. If the remaining inhabitants did not evacuate, she would exterminate them as was necessary.
A future of light and energy.
Camaris had decided to cleanse Vesta of all its deep human stains. When she was done with Vesta, she would move on to the next settlement, and the next, until she had cleaned Sol completely.
BEST LAID PLANS
STELLAR DATE: 03.18.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: TSS Furious Leap
REGION: Cruithne, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
The trip from Cruithne to Vesta would take almost two weeks. Crash was not sure how to communicate to the other birds that he would be gone. The ravens seemed to understand and had sent back images suggesting a future version of Crash returning to them, indicated by changes in the fountain and the surrounding bazaar.