“Yes, do what you can to get some intelligence from him.” Tippins glared at Jarak. “Remember, these are humans, not androids. Don’t get carried away.”
“I won’t.”
“I’m at the jump station for an inspection before the invasion. I want you to come back here and guard my ass. The other ships are being called away.”
“Why?”
“Earth found some more crew without implants and are engaging our forces near Saturn.”
“It’s too soon. The bulk of our fleet is still on the other side the Kuiper Belt. We need to be stealthy, not conduct a frontal assault. Can we step up the timetable?”
Tippins shook his head. “No, the station is not complete yet. We need a few more days, then we can bring the fleet through.”
“What about the Renault?” Jarak asked.
Tippins rubbed his chin. “I’ll send the extra ships to pursue and destroy her. The other ships are not in the Kuiper Belt yet.”
Jarak nodded. “Roger that.”
“When you get here, I want a full report on what you get out of Colonel McKenna. Tippins out.” The three-dimensional flashed and resumed the picture of the stars surrounding the Courage.
Jarak turned to Farrah. “Get the prisoner prepped for interrogation.”
Farrah nodded. “Yes, sir.” She hurried off the bridge.
Farrah should have gone down one more flight towards the brig, but she had to make a slight detour. She placed her hand on the black plate next to the door. As soon as it slid open, she stepped into her quarters. Being an XO, she had no roommates and a private communicator, which was meant for family communications and emergencies. There was a large bed along the corner and a desk directly under the porthole. Farrah tapped the small control panel on her desk and a screen rose from the center. She slid her thumb across the screen and the screen lit up. “Set Encryption to Gamma Nine.”
“Order accepted. Encryption has been reconfigured to Gamma Nine protocols,” the computer said.
Farrah tapped a few more controls.
“Trying to connect. Stand by.”
“Come on. Come on,” Farrah said as she kept glancing over at the door.
“Connected.”
“Sir, are you there?” Farrah said.
“Yes. You know this is a direct line. Calm down. Your emotion right there is why implants are so much better for you humans,” the computer-generated male voice said.
Farrah sighed. “There’s been a change of plan.”
“Oh?”
Lea sat at her desk in her quarters. She held a small picture, one that she rarely looked at, but now she couldn’t take her eyes off it. She and Cain were both O3s (navy lieutenant and marine captain). They hooked up one night after drinking too much. Unlike most one-night stands, they’d stuck together and quickly fell in love. In the picture she wore a long silk wedding dress with a veil, and Cain wore his dress blue uniform. She had wanted to wear her dress uniform as well, but her mother had insisted on the wedding gown. That was nearly sixteen years ago.
A tear rolled down her cheek. Ever since that wonderful day, she’d gotten more and more into her career, caring more for the next mission and her next rank over him. Had Cain? No, no way. He’d turned down a promotion and permanently capped his career, all because he wanted to stay with her. Did she show him the same respect? No. Only now, after he was gone, did she realize that she had been taking him for granted for years. She continuously promised him a child, but never found the time. Something was always more important. What was that something? Her career or her love for space? She wiped the tears from her eyes. Lea would give up everything just to hold him again, to feel his heartbeat next to hers. Even though she hoped to see him again, experience taught her that he was probably not going to make it.
The door slid open and Nine entered the room. “Permission to enter, Captain.”
Lea’s red eyes glared at Nine. “What do you want?”
“As political officer, I need to speak to you.”
Lea wiped the tears from her cheeks. “What? Can’t your cold tin heart see that I am grieving? I just lost my husband.”
“I know.”
Lea looked away. “Get on with it.” Her disdain for that infernal machine couldn’t be any clearer.
“You have to continue. I realize that you had a significant personal loss, but you have to show the crew your strength. He may not be dead. There is always hope.”
Lea blinked. “Hope? Yeah, I hope he is alive. I hope that we can rescue him, but my experience tells me otherwise. Besides, we’re dealing with aliens here.”
“Our scanners couldn’t penetrate their hull enough to identify the species, but they do breathe oxygen, same as humans. I did the scan myself.”
“At the science station?”
“Yes. I dismissed your science officer because I am more efficient than that human. You need me more than ever. Besides, you have to clear your rescue attempt through me. Why not have me on the planning team so we can skip that step?” Nine asked.
“For a tin man, you’re showing a lot of human qualities.”
“Like what?”
“You want to be included. Part of the team.” Lea approached Nine. “Will you help me get my husband back?”
“I will approve the mission as long as it is secondary to getting the virus and destroying the station. I did send the request for reinforcements to fleet HQ. Maybe the admiral will help us in our mission and help you in yours.”
“Thanks.”
“Good night, Captain,” Nine said.
“Good night.”
Lea watched Nine leave her quarters. A machine with a heart? If a cold machine like that could change, maybe there was hope of finding her beloved. A small chance was still a chance. She tapped the controls for the communicator on her desk. “Bridge, this is the captain.”
“This is the bridge,” Bill’s familiar voice said.
“Send my XO in here. We’ve got some planning to do.”
“Aye, Captain.”
“Out.” Lea clicked off the communicator. She glanced at the stars through the porthole. Hold on, my love, I’m coming.
20
Cain’s eyes popped open into the darkness. Screams. Yes, screams filled his ears. It was as if someone was being tortured right outside his door. Couldn’t be … could it be his marines? Yes, who else? The cold steel floor sucked the confidence right out of him. An error in judgement, overconfidence at best, would end the lives of his marines, and his own.
He closed his eyes, bringing forth his latest recollection of them snuggling in bed. Her warmth filled his heart. It was something that was drastically missing now. He had to get out, but how? He pulled his arms and legs apart. He felt no chains or cuffs or restraints. Good. Cain checked one thing off his mental list. His stomach wasn’t grumbling, so he must not have been there too long.
Cain rose to his feet, hugging the wall. There must be a door or window or something. They had to have put him in this dark hellhole somehow. His hands became his eyes as he felt up and down the bulkhead. After not feeling anything, he moved around the room clockwise. Slowly and meticulously, Cain searched the dark room for that damn door.
His head jerked as another scream rang through his ears. The scream; it came from … above him. Were they fake? Hopefully. Cain stretched towards where he thought the ceiling should be, feeling every square inch with his hands. There was … something. Tiny round holes were in the wall above him. Speakers embedded in the bulkhead? Another scream let out, but this time he felt the vibration under his fingers. Yeah, they weren’t not real. Maybe it wasn’t his marines.
The door slid open. Cain slammed his eyes shut as the bright-white light impaled his eyes. He blinked, trying to focus.
“Over there,” a woman said.
Cain felt a huge hand clamp down on his shoulder. “Where are you going?” the man asked.
Cain blinked again. His eyes were starting to adjust. They appeared fuzzy at
first, but the two guards in black jumpsuits soon came into focus.
“Come on, or I’ll drag you down the hall,” the male guard said.
“My eyes are still trying to adjust,” Cain said.
He laughed. “That’s the least of your worries.” The guard pushed Cain towards the door. “Go!”
This is going to be a long day, Cain thought as he left his cell.
Cain entered a small room with no portholes. A chair with restraints on the armrests and around the legs sat in the very center of the room. A woman with black hair and a dark complexion wearing a black jumpsuit smiled at him. “I can guess what your job is,” he said as the two guards put him into the chair.
“I’m Staff Sergeant Amy Melendez.”
Cain looked down at his wrists as they fastened the restraints. He smiled. “I guess you don’t want me to go anywhere.” He tried to recall his training about situations exactly like this, but nothing came to mind. There were no hot pokers or trays of knives or even an oven to roast him in. No, she had nothing. Well, nothing he could see, anyway. Perhaps this won’t be too bad. Perhaps the best way to minimize his discomfort would be to humanize with his captor. Cain forced himself to giggle.
Amy motioned the guards out of the room. “What’s so funny?”
“How wrong we were. Our intelligence said you were aliens trying to invade Earth.”
Amy frowned. “Yes, your marines said that, too. You heard my work, yes?”
Cain swallowed. “That was real? I found the speaker playing those … those screams.”
“Yes, they were all real. True, we looped the results of our … discussions in to all the cells. It helps to break those with less to lose. You see, officers like yourself ruined the Marine Corps. You totally forgot the true meaning of Semper Fi. We were supposed to be faithful not only to the government and each other, but to the people we were charged to protect.” She moved behind him and whispered into his ear. “No, officers like you turned us into a hit squad of innocent people.”
“Not true. I never did that.”
“Are you saying that it never happens?”
“No, I—” Cain slammed his mouth shut. “There are bad apples in every organization, at every level. I can’t say that I know all the reasons for my missions, but sometimes I don’t need to know.”
“Don’t you?”
“No, I don’t. If you were really a marine, you’d know that, too.” Cain felt a tiny prick on his neck. “What’s that?”
“This is going to aid in our discussions. You see, I won’t harm you at all. But, it won’t matter. I use a combination of drug and nerve-stimulated interrogation techniques. Ever hear of it?”
“No.” Cain bit down. He’d been through this before in SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) school. He’d never spoken about it to anyone. Oh God, help me. He had to focus on something. Lea. That’s it, he’d focus on seeing her again, someday. Maybe that thought could keep him alive long enough to get out of this mess.
“I like to start out by giving my patients a little taste before I get started.”
“Sadistic?”
“You kind of have to be, if you want to be a good interrogator.” She moved directly in front of him, holding a small tablet. “You see, I hit the button on this tablet and that device stimulates your nervous system to make you feel anything I wish. Hmm, what to start with?”
Cain felt his heart beat faster. The more she prolonged the promised pain, the faster his heart raced. Maybe that was the point.
“I know. Rolling in broken glass.” With a sick smile, she press the button.
Cain began to feel small cuts on his back. Shallow at first. The pain wasn’t as bad as he remembered. Maybe he could handle it better than he thought. As if on cue, it felt like knives were being driven into his back, not once or twice, but thousands of times. Cain screamed. It was all he could to. The stabbing began to spread. It moved to his chest. Each stab sent pain throughout his body as if that one out of the thousands he was feeling would be the deathblow. But, death never spared him. He screamed again.
“You see, sampling can be very effective. Do I move the pain to your balls next?”
Cain’s twisted face looked at her defiantly.
“Oh, a tough one.” She slid her finger along the small screen. “I’ll save that for later.”
“What do you want?” Cain asked. If he gave them something, nothing operationally relevant or completely true, perhaps he’d survive this.
The door slid open and Jarak came inside.
Amy snapped to attention. “Sir, I wasn’t expecting you.”
“At ease,” he said. “Wait outside. I want to talk to the colonel alone.”
“Aye, sir.” Amy left the interrogation room.
“I’m Colonel Jarak Zeger, and we don’t have a lot of time, so we can forego the games. I know you’re Colonel Cain McKenna, commander of the marines on your wife’s ship, the battle cruiser Renault.”
Cain frowned. “I’m not going to confirm any of that.”
Jarak smiled. “You don’t have to. As I said, I already know that about you. I also know that you don’t have an implant.”
“So?”
“Our agents on Earth tell us that people like you are being rounded up and put into internment camps. Were you ever at one of them?” Jarak asked.
Should Cain answer? There was no intelligence to be gained, right? “Yes, both of us were.”
“I grew up on the mining colonies on dead moons, asteroids, and wherever they moved us in the Kuiper Belt. We didn’t mind, because we were primarily left alone, as long as we made our quotas. Like everyone else, my parents worked for Benton Enterprises. You see, at first they asked for volunteers to try out their new implants. Many died because of them.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“In a minute—or I’ll call the staff sergeant back in.”
Cain tried to smile. “I’m listening.”
“Eventually, people stopped volunteering. That’s when the security forces started ripping families from their homes. When they came to my family’s home, they killed my father and took my mother away. I never saw her again.”
“I’m sorry,” Cain said.
Jarak waved it off. “It was a very long time ago. I was eighteen. I don’t know why I wasn’t taken. I joined a group that was fighting back.” Jarak laughed. “The government was so corrupt that they called us pirates and sent the military after us. They never seemed to figure out that we could disappear on nearly any mining colony because the people there protected us. They did that because they knew we were fighting for them. We were not pirates or anything of the sort.” He looked Cain straight in the eyes. “I know the Renault was there when our base on UK126 was destroyed.” His eyes began to well up. “My wife was there, getting ready to have our first child.” He glared at Cain. “You and your wife killed them both.”
Cain gritted his teeth. He understood the rage. Hell, if Cain had the architect of Lea’s death in his grasp, he’d kill him. No questions asked. Was it strength or weakness that he was still alive? “Yes, that was our last mission before they stripped us of our commands and sent us to one of those camps. I did fight pirates, but they didn’t have the ships that you do. If you are just miners fighting back against Benton Enterprises, why do you need a jump station?”
Jarak nodded. “Okay. We had way too many losses. We knew we had to go far away to build up our forces to fight back. There was a science station working on faster-than-light travel, but it was too big to go inside any ship. We stole their technology and brought the scientists and their families with us.” He smiled. “It turns out, miners weren’t the only ones that had no loyalty towards the corporation or Earth’s government. If they aren’t the same thing.”
“Not possible. Our scanners couldn’t penetrate your hull, otherwise we would have known you were human all along.”
“Who was doing the scanning? We know you have an android onboard.”
/>
“How do you know that?”
“We have our sources.”
Who was doing the scanning? In the shuttle, Kyle said Nine did the scanning. What about during the fight at the space station. It wasn’t Nine. But, maybe he didn’t have to. Scanners were very temperamental things. The right tweak within parameters could—no, Jarak must be playing with his head. Loyalty from an android to the government was absolute. If AI was truly AI, why would they subscribe to blind loyalty? They wouldn’t. It wasn’t logical. If that could be said about Nine, what about GIS?
Amy came back in. “Sir, Major Farrah said to tell you that we are almost to the jump station.”
“Okay.” Jarak turned back towards Cain. “I’m only going to ask this once. What is the plan to attack the station?”
“We don’t know. Honestly, we were repairing when we saw your ship coming to the station.”
Jarak turned towards Amy.
“All the other marines said the same thing after … more intense questioning,” she said.
“I believe you. But, I have to hand you over to my superiors for further questioning. They won’t be as kind as we’ve been. You need to decide how loyal you truly are to the government that sent you here.”
Cain watched Jarak leave the interrogation room. What now?
21
Anna Zahrof scrolled her thumb along the tablet. Soon, everyone would demand that the government, mainly her, force everyone to take the implant. No more trying to “convince” people that what she was proposing was truly best for the people. The people? Ha! Who cared? They were always just a means to an end, just like Benton Enterprises. No different. When no one contradicts you or opposes you, then you have achieved the ultimate power.
Anna smiled. Yeah, that goal ensured unending power and luxury off the backs of the little people. Death would be the only thing that would interrupt her earthly paradise. Hell, with Benton Enterprise’s cybernetic implants and replacement parts, she could be immortal. Anna looked up. Why stop at the Earth Empire? There must be more systems to conquer and people to influence.
She leaned back in her office chair. Her dreams could be a reality; all she needed was time and the people’s obedience. That would happen whether they wanted to give it or not.
Cyber Invasion (The A.I. Conspiracy Book 1) Page 14