by O E Tearmann
"Not your honey. So? Where do I put in an order?"
Kevin gave a sigh that Aidan couldn't quite class as theatrics or real irritation. "You come to me after breakfast." He emphasized the last two words. "And I start looking into it."
Tweak turned like a cat. "Not you," she stated flatly.
Kevin met her eyes with an expression that Aidan hadn't seen before: distant, blank and completely disdainful. Damn, Aidan thought to himself, feeling a shiver run down his back. He hadn't known Kevin got that cold. He looked like an exec staring down a CPS worker, all human empathy genetically removed.
Aidan had been afraid to see an expression like that when he told Kevin the truth. But Kevin had looked like a surprised kid then. Nothing like this.
"Yes, me," Kevin stated, just as flat. "Because, for your information, I'm the logistics and requisitions officer here, and you have yet to earn so much as your specialist rank. Therefore, you will be polite and you'll come to my office to discuss this after breakfast."
Tweak stared at him for a heartbeat. Then she pushed her bowl away, stood, and stamped out of the canteen.
"What the-" Dozer began to say, when Aidan's tab dinged. Glancing at it, he read
Message Handle: TheTweak
Message: Here's your list. The asshole can get it from you and go fuck himself.
Down his screen, text scrolled in multicolored lines. Aidan resisted the urge to groan.
"Kevin, Yvonne, Jim," he managed eventually. "I guess we're having a meeting after breakfast."
Four hours later, his logistics team had covered his desk in plans, timetable windows and tabs whose cooling fans felt like they were slowly cooking the room. He glanced at the clock on the nearest tab and repressed a curse. How had they been doing this four hours?
Kevin idly tapped the table as he stared at the list. He'd put an X beside everything he had figured out how to acquire. Only one red line still blazed unmarked.
"That holoboard's the worst. It's out of production and… Well, there's always the TechoCo dump, I suppose," Kevin stated finally.
Yvonne sucked a breath between her teeth. "Kev, last time…"
Kevin nodded slowly, fingers fiddling with one leg of his glasses absently. "Yes, that was a problem. Maybe the team needs to be smaller. And if we take an older model truck, one with fewer trackable parts…"
"Any older and you'll have to get it off a Fringer," Jim muttered.
Kevin nodded. "I imagine Burl would sell us that 'antique' he's always-"
"That gamma piece of garbage can't drive!" Yvonne cut in indignantly, and Kevin gave her one of his looks over the rims of his glasses.
"For your information, it can and does."
Yvonne shook her head. "You're nuts."
"Pot and kettle, my dear."
Aidan sat back. Great, another one of these conversations. He was still sitting outside looking in.
Then Kevin glanced at him, his sly smile softened, and he reached over to bring up an image. "Sorry, Aidan. This is what we're discussing."
Aidan blinked at the picture of the ancient rust bucket. "So, that thing runs? It looks older than Dissolution."
"See?" Yvonne shot tartly.
Kevin sighed. "It runs on diesel and has only the tiniest electrical parts. Most drones read it as a particularly ferrous rock, and the satellites don't tag it. Unless a human actually takes the time to read the feeds, it'll be completely ignored when it's parked and only noticed by a particularly alert security drone when it's in motion."
Aidan blinked. "Huh, okay. If you think it'll work."
"Now that's settled," Kevin remarked with a pointed glance Yvonne's way, "let's plan out the schedules. This is going to stretch us thin. We really need to pick up food for the base, and there's that medical shipment that we need to handle and hand off. Oh damn, and we promised we'd pick up the Sector shipment of coolant…"
Kevin brought up six windows with a practiced flick of the fingers, pushing time slots here and there around the trajectories of three layers of surveillance that blanketed the Dust. Finally, he sighed. "All right, that works, provided I head to the dump on my own at seven in the evening, arrive at ten and keep to a time window of-"
The rest of his team drowned his words in dismay before he'd finished.
"Alone, are you gamma?" Yvonne demanded.
Kevin held up his hands. "I said a small team was better for-"
"Small means two people, not alone, you ass!"
"Yvonne, for once, will you remember that I technically outrank you and listen when I tell you I can-"
"Oh, and we go get your body later? No thanks," Jim snapped.
Kevin's voice took on a harried note. "Oh come now you guys you know I can run worse than this by-"
"Hey. Everybody?" Aidan asked, but the noise continued.
"If you think I'm letting Mister History go out spelunking in the dump again, you-"
"We got exactly what we needed last time. It was not-"
"You got your finger dislocated!"
"Yes and it popped right back in. Will you-"
Aidan inflated his lungs. Naomi used to say he could break glass with his voice when he wanted to, and that had been before he'd started on T.
"Guys!"
Three heads snapped around. Perfect silence fell.
"I'll go," Aidan stated in the quiet he'd made.
Yvonne bit her lip.
Kevin drew back a little. "Um, are you sure that's wise?"
Aidan smiled wryly. No, he wasn't sure. But they needed those parts, and this arguing wasn't getting them. And he didn't want Kevin going alone.
"I grew up helping out with supply runs like any Dust kid does. I still know how to drive and shoot." He shrugged. "It'll be nice to be somebody's backup again."
Kevin watched him warily. "Sir, I can… Really, I-"
"Get the truck." Aidan put as much firmness as he could scrape together into his voice. "And we'll go tomorrow night."
Forty-eight hours later, Aidan shifted in the cracked seat and listened to the desert silence. The stars were incredibly bright overhead. He glanced at the tab Kevin was manning, cradled in a little tripod Kevin had set on the dash.
Still twenty miles to go, and they were only able to go around twenty miles an hour. Damn. Glancing over at Kevin, he smiled tightly.
Kevin gave him a quick smile. "We're still in very good time."
"Yeah, if this thing makes it another twenty miles."
Kevin chuckled. "Pessimist."
The desert rolled away.
"Er," Kevin began quietly. "Mind if I put something on?"
"Sure," Aidan murmured, watching the terrain.
A beat later, a song began with rhythmic drumsticks clacking and a fierce voice.
“Sort of the base anthem, this,” Kevin remarked as the music played. “I really should have played it for you before now.”
Aidan smiled crookedly as he listened. “Yeah, this sounds like you guys.” He tipped his head, listening.
"We're not gonna take what?"
"General bullshit, I assume," Kevin quipped. "Rock's usually more about emotion than concrete information, I'll own up to that." He shrugged, smiling.
Glancing out of the corner of his eye, Aidan watched Kevin sing along to the entire thing under his breath, then to the next one.
"You know the words to all this stuff?" he asked, unable to stop his incredulous grin.
Kevin ducked his head, smiling sheepishly. "Yes, well. My dad used to play it. Billy Joel, The Who, Styx, Rush, all the classic musicians. He used to pile us in the car for the trip up to Vail, and we'd sing all the way up. It drove Mom nuts."
Aidan grinned at the image, until he heard more than the half remembering, half embarrassed tone in Kevin's voice.
"Wait. You guys could afford the Vail Complex?" On the tab, a new song started in a weird wail Aidan hadn't
heard before.
Kevin cleared his throat. "Not ourselves, no. It was a Corp perk for the kind of work Dad did. He and Mom used to save up their commendations and perks and pool them into vacations and Mom's garden. Mom bred roses to deal with Colorado summers as a hobby. She met her best friends trying to get cactus genes into rose roots. She had this yellow shrub rose that could take a hundred and twenty degrees without water. It was gorgeous, Dad used to call her The Red Queen because of it. He had a lot of jokes like that." Kevin smiled: a lopsided, unconscious expression.
"My dad… He was kind of amazing."
Aidan grunted, watching the road.“Lucky you. Mine was a complete asshole.”
Kevin didn’t say anything to that.
The song filled the cab. The singer put notes to words about secrets that he wished he could forget and things he tried to hide from. His voice cut through the air, aching and fierce. Aidan felt as if the singer had taken everything he was feeling and wrapped it in music. He could almost understand why Kevin liked this stuff as he listened. One line hit so close to home that it hurt.
Code of silence. No kidding, Aidan thought as the words went on and that weird instrument wailed. Code of silence was right. There was so much he couldn’t talk about. Even here. Even now.
Kevin changed the song.
Aidan glanced at him. "How long since…"
"Nine years," Kevin replied quietly. "Three days before I joined up actually. We're getting close. I'm going to give the suits one last check over before we arrive, make sure that dodgy one doesn't act up."
Carefully, the logistics officer wormed into the backseat and started checking over pieces of slippery fabric. Aidan didn't know what to say, so he focused on driving.
Aidan's boots hit the ground in a cloud of gritty dust as he slid out of the old wreck of a truck. He gingerly closed the door. If he slammed it too hard, the noise might attract security drones. Or the door itself might fall off. The truck had barely made it the fifty miles from base to this junkyard on the edge of the Grid. Hopefully the journey would be worth it.
"Well, this is the place." Kevin rounded the front of the truck, data tab in hand and bag slung over his shoulder. Sticking out from under the holographic hood of his slick suit, Kevin's bright red hair looked almost purple in the starlight. He looked at Aidan and adjusted the ancient spectacles on his nose. "Might want to get the hood up. Heat sensors will be on us the minute we're inside."
Aidan hated wearing the skin-tight suit instead of a slick poncho. The tech-laden fabric didn't breathe, and once it activated, the entire suit needed to be shut down to get a single piece off. But Kevin had traded specifically for them, and it was their best chance at sneaking into the TechCo junkyard, grabbing what they needed, and slipping out again without getting shot.
He reluctantly pulled the hood up over his head and cinched it down around his face. "Security's still running on circuit forty-two, right?"
Kevin tapped at his tablet a moment, gloved fingers nearly silent, then nodded. "Best shot is alpha setting."
Aidan flipped down the face screen of the slick suit and waited for the sensor feeds and settings to pop up on the HUD. It felt like it took hours for the blue text to flicker into life against the backdrop of the junkyard fence. Once it did, Aidan took a moment to double-check the suit's functionality and settings. Alpha setting was the default, so he was good to go.
As long as the suit didn't malfunction. Base 1430 had said it sometimes did. But it was the best they could get in time.
"Ready?" Kevin looked fuzzy with his own slick suit activated, but Aidan could still make out where he stood.
Aidan nodded. "Let's go."
They slipped from the truck to the fence, and Aidan frowned at the fine black net stretched between the electrified struts. They'd been prepared for the nanomesh, but he always hated it. If they didn't get the EMP and the virus right combination right, the nanobots making up the fence would recover from the power surge, heal whatever hole they made in seconds and send up an alert.
Aidan crouched down beside the nearest strut. He held his hand out to Kevin. Kevin dropped the palm-sized EMP into Aidan's hand. Aidan carefully set the black plastic unit against the strut. A soft thunk reverberated through his hand as it latched onto the metal. When Aidan pulled away, Kevin ducked his head and hit a few buttons on his tab.
The small-voltage EMP shuddered and whined. The hairs on Aidan's arms stood up. He hoped like hell Kevin's team had calibrated it to avoid shorting out the slick suits, too.
A ripple flowed along the nanomesh fence, as if a breeze had blown through. The suits remained active.
Aidan pulled his knife from his boot. He hesitated as the knife touched the mesh rather than pressing the blade through and beginning to cut their way into the junkyard. They needed to get in there and find all of the equipment on their list before the Corps noticed their presence. If they failed this run, their base might not survive the month and a half it would take to legally reroute new parts. But, if he was too reckless with cutting the fence, failure was certain.
"Precision rather cedes to haste in this circumstance," Kevin muttered.
Aidan took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Kevin was right. They didn't have time to worry about every little thing if they were going to get in, get what they needed, and get out before they got caught. He jammed his knife into the fence and began sawing away at the mesh.
Every second he spent cutting through the fence felt like an eternity. He knew Kevin was watching for guards or drones, but if they were spotted they were dead.
Finally, he completed the upside down L-shape in the mesh. He pulled the knife away and carefully pinned the material back. The hole was just large enough for them to squeeze through, but making a larger opening would waste too much time.
Aidan waited a heartbeat to make sure the virus would prevent the nanobots from repairing the fence. When it showed no signs of fixing itself and no alarms went off, he took a breath and squeezed through the opening.
The junkyard was only a quarter of a mile square, but, inside its shadowed ranks of junk, the space felt larger. Aidan and Kevin were dwarfed by piles of scrap metal, broken tech and anything TechCo had labeled as general salvage grade. Nothing in here was any more valuable than its weight in metal and plastic. Of course a lot of the broken pieces were perfect for filling Tweak's list. The trick would be finding them. Before they got caught, hopefully.
They sifted through the nearest pile as quietly as they could manage. This was going to take forever, but there was no alternative: nobody bothered to keep a catalog on salvage grade parts that could be hacked. Not when it was all going into the smelter. They'd just have to depend on their suits' scanning and image recognition tech.
Kevin compared pieces to the list on his data tab. Most of what looked promising turned out to be the wrong make or model for the equipment they had. The data chips could be overwritten and the slick fabric could be patched into the base defenses for a few weeks, but they needed to find that holoboard to repair the base's camouflage long-term.
They moved onto another pile. Aidan's suit showed a green arrow on his left glove, pointing up. He climbed the mountain of metal, sharp pieces poking his palms through the gloves. He tossed down more data chips and a twisted grav-lift that looked like it could still be salvaged. Then he glanced up, and grinned. What looked to be the model of holoboard they needed sat half-buried in debris just out of his reach. He shifted his footing and stretched upward. The suit's HUD backed up his guess, outlining the piece in green.
Something gave way beneath him. He yelped as he fell, rolling down the metallic slope. Smaller pieces of scrap followed in a jingling imitation of an avalanche. He landed hard on his back, feeling the slick suit's battery compartment crunch beneath him and his knee shoot fire up his leg as it slammed into something. Red text flashed on his HUD:
<
br /> -Battery compromised. Suit operation at 50%-
Aidan cursed as he gingerly pushed himself up to sitting position.
"Are you all right?" Kevin rested a hand on Aidan's back, helping support him.
He nodded and wincingly bent his aching knee. It flexed. He let out a breath of relief.
"I'll be fine. Suit's crapping out, though. Pick up the pace."
Kevin's tab beeped in his other hand and he froze. He cursed under his breath and shoved the tab in the pouch at his waist. "Drones incoming."
Heart constricting, Aidan jumped to his feet, grabbed Kevin's arm and yanked him around another massive pile of junk.
There. The rusting hulk of a Go car. He shoved Kevin toward it without a word and scrambled after him. They lay under the chassis, shoulders pressed together. Their breath was loud in Aidan's ears. His heartbeat thumped in his gut.
Had the drones been alerted to the hole in the fence? Had they made too much noise in their search? Or was this just a routine sweep?
The whir of rotor blades broke the night. Only one drone by the sound of it.
Aidan held his breath. Blue text flickered over the inside of his face screen, almost too fast to read. But one string of characters made him hiss a curse. "Kev, they're scanning on all security circuits. They'll find us."
Before Kevin could respond, something exploded not far away. Metal rained down on the shell of the dead car. Something hit with enough force to bend the floorboard dangerously close to Aidan's head.
"Move!" Kevin hissed. He squirmed out of their shelter.
Aidan whispered commands into his suit as he followed, desperately trying to start it cycling through all of its settings. A bright red warning flashed across his vision.
-Suit operation at 40%-
Shit.
The sound of the drone's rotors grew closer.
He stumbled. Kevin steadied him and kept running. Bullets peppered the pile of junk right beside Aidan. A sharp edge cut through the side of his slick suit. The red text flashed across his screen again. The suit briefly tightened around his torso and let loose a soft warning beep, as if the text wasn't enough.