Lyssa's Run_A Hard Science Fiction AI Adventure

by M. D. Cooper

  “They’ve gone weapons hot,” she said. “The commander has taken my presence into consideration and decided the shuttle must be recovered at any cost.”

  “Any cost,” Petral repeated. “That’s too bad.”

  “Shut your mouth,” Pierce shouted. “I’m sick of listening to your idiotic blather. This is my life you’re making jokes about.”

  Petral looked unfazed by the outburst. “You haven’t been in combat yet, have you?” she asked.

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “I would make perfect sense to you if you had.” She nodded toward the controls. “Are you going to fly this thing or should Cara just shoot you and have me take over. She looks twitchy over there.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Pierce demanded.

  “Evade those drones. We need to hold off for another two minutes until our friends make it into our ship’s main cargo bay. Then we’re clear to follow. You dump us off and you’re free to go.”

  “We can’t evade them.” Pierce looked back at the holes. “The self-sealing hull seems to be working but another few salvos like that and we’ll be hitting our reserve air tanks.”

  “Fly the shuttle,” Petral said.

  Pierce twisted the controls and sudden velocity pushed Cara back in her harness. In the holodisplay, the yellow Sunny Skies jerked upward and then fell out of view, leaving her with no reference on their movements. Blurring lights shot through the display as the shuttle swung back toward the Ring and then looped around again.

  They took more fire, near the door this time. Cara covered her ears against the clattering projectile rounds and nearly let go of the pistol. Sergeant Pierce seemed to have forgotten Cara was supposed to be ready to shoot her if she didn’t fly the shuttle. Petral had the distant look that meant she was monitoring something over the Link, her brow creased with concentration.

  “All right,” Petral said abruptly. “We’re clear. Take us to the ship.”

  “You sure you want to do that?” Pierce said. “You’re going to have the entire Protectorate on your ass. You’re never getting out of here.”

  “We’ll solve that problem when we get there,” Petral said. “Strap in. It’s about to get rough.”

  Cara scrambled into one of the harnesses along the back of the troop bench.

  Pierce pushed the controls forward and everything on the holodisplay shot upward, swung to the right, and then Sunny Skies appeared again. The yellow shape of the ship grew more quickly than Cara expected.

  “Hold on,” Pierce said. “I’m braking.”

  With two quick maneuvers, the shuttle flipped around so its main thruster array faced the Sunny Skies.

  “You got the lock on the cargo bay?” Petral said.

  “I see it.”

  Pierce activated the thrusters and Cara felt like her eyes were going to burst as she was slammed back into the bench.

  The crushing power of the braking thrust seemed to go on forever. Her ears hummed, pounding with her heartbeat. Then it was gone, followed by a downward burst from the dorsal thrusters, and then a breath of silence and a heavy scraping sound as the shuttle hit the floor of Sunny Skies’ cargo bay. The magnetic lock system kicked in, stopping the shuttle, and Cara found herself adjusting to the feeling of hanging sideways when she was upright in relation to the ship.

  “Damn,” Petral shouted. “That was some damn fine flying, Sergeant Pierce. Are you sure you’re not a pilot?”

  “Go to hell,” Pierce said. Her forehead was covered in sweat.

  Petral pulled her harness off and slid around the edge of her seat. She turned her back to Pierce and, bracing one foot under the bench to keep from floating back, reached for the buckle on Cara’s harness.

  Once Cara was free, Petral put her finger under Cara’s chin and lifted her face so they were looking at each other. Their faces were nearly hidden by Petral’s wild black hair.

  “You did good,” Petral whispered. “I forgot to tell you. Your dad isn’t planning on going to Ceres but that’s where you need to go. You need to find Fugia. She’ll help. Call her Fug, she hates that.” Petral stretched her neck. “Now finish the job and play along.”

  Cara frowned, unsure what Petral wanted. The woman only smiled and gave Cara a soft push toward the door.

  “Come on,” Petral said, louder this time. “Get the door open. You’re getting out of here.” She kicked over to slap the panel beside the door and so it started its unlock sequence. Cara had barely regained control of her momentum when Petral gave her another push toward the exit. As the door slid open in front of her, Cara sucked a deep breath of the familiar stale—though less stale than before Fran signed on—air from Sunny Skies’ overworked environmental system, struggling to refill the cargo bay.

  As Cara passed through the shuttle’s exit, Petral moved around her and reached for the pistol in Cara’s right hand. The movement happened so fast Cara wasn’t sure exactly what had occurred until it was done. One hand pushed the body of the pistol against Cara’s hand and out of her grip, while the second movement sent the pistol spinning toward the front of the shuttle where Sergeant Pierce was turning to look at them.

  Cara floated backward through the open door as Petral raised a hand in farewell. She turned her head slightly to smirk at Cara before the door closed.

  Cara stared at the shuttle, unsure what to do. She thought she heard shouting from inside the shuttle but couldn’t be sure. She was about to move back to the door control when a hissing sound spat from the shuttle’s main thruster and the cargo bay control system sounded its thirty second warning. The main door was about to open.

  Cara clenched her fists, unsure of what to do. Did Petral want her to try to get her out? She could override the main bay door and lock the shuttle inside.

  Ten different options shot through her mind, all of them countered by Petral’s final trickster smile. Petral was going back with the shuttle, which almost certainly meant she was going to get caught.

  Not knowing if she was doing the right thing, hating the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, Cara kicked off for the interior airlock.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  STELLAR DATE: 09.19.2981 (Adjusted Years)

  LOCATION: Mortal Chance

  REGION: Approaching Ceres, Anderson Collective, InnerSol

  Ceres gleamed like a grey-blue marble with a band of green around its equator.

  Wrapped around that small oasis, floating in the black, was the dark grey band of the Ceres ring, called the Insi Ring by the people of the collective. Compared to rings like High Terra, or Mars 1, Insi was small, only four hundred kilometers above the dwarf planet’s surface with a width of only eighty kilometers and circumference of just over six-thousand, it was the smallest planetary ring in InnerSol.

  Another distinction from rings elsewhere in InnerSol—one Brit didn’t understand—was that the Anderson Collective had never created a terraformed inner surface on the ring. Instead the collective focused all its energy on terraforming the surface of the planet—something that was still ongoing.

  The one benefit was that ships docking with Insi were able to land on the inside surface of the ring, rather than docking on the bottom like with Mars 1 and High Terra. Hanging off the outside of a ring moving at several thousand kilometers per hour had always unnerved Brit.

  Of course, dropping onto the ‘top’ of one moving at a healthy clip wasn’t easy either. It was like flying into a valley where one hillside was rushing toward you while the other was constantly receding into the distance.

  Flying the Mortal Chance to the Insi Ring was made more difficult by the construction of a second ring, this one two-hundred kilometers further out from the world. Her nav charts labeled it the Impo Ring, and the construction work had rendered many approaches to Insi as no-fly zones.

  Luckily, the Anderson Collective didn’t trust every ship docking on their ring to pull off the maneuver either. Once Brit had managed to maintain a position one hundred
kilometers off the ring, a tug latched on and pulled them in the rest of the way.

  As it turned out, having someone else haul them in only made Brit feel marginally better about the whole affair. She kept a hand near the emergency separation controls, just in case the tug did something stupid and slammed them into the surface of the ring.

  As they drew nearer to the ring, what had appeared to be a smooth, featureless surface from a distance, resolved into a complex web of circumferential supports, ridges and valleys. The bottoms of one of the valleys was where the tug finally deposited the Mortal Chance.

  Once they were locked into the cradle, the tug released them, and Insi’s umbilicals extended to the ship.

  Brit announced over the general shipnet.

  Rina replied.

  Brit unstrapped from the pilot’s harness, and shook her head at being the only one on the ship’s small bridge. Rina should have been present, but didn’t show, and Harm was probably puking somewhere from all the vector changes.

  It felt nice to walk for a change, and Brit stretched her shoulders as she strode to the main airlock where the umbilical had connected. When she arrived, Brit was surprised to see the captain waiting in the passageway.

  “Good flying, Sarah,” Harm said.

  “Thanks. Tug did the last of it. What are you here for?”

  “AC will have an agent here to inspect us. If there’s one thing these people love, it’s a good inspection,” Harm replied, wobbling slightly as she spoke.

  “Noted,” Brit said and opened the airlock’s outer doors. Sure enough, she could make out a man waiting outside. Once he entered the Mortal Chance’s airlock, she cycled it. The ship’s pressure wasn’t too far off from the stations, but Insi regs did not allow wide-open airlocks until all inspections were complete.

  The cycle completed, and the inner airlock door opened, revealing a disgusted looking Anderson Collective customs agent.

  “Your ship smells like beer,” he said.

  “We’ve got a yeast infection in one of the filtration systems,” Brit replied.

  Captain Harm burped in the corridor behind her.

  In the week and a half since leaving Eros, Harm had nearly emptied half the beer tank. She had been drunk continuously, leaving Brit and Rina to argue their way through most operational decisions. Chafri seemed to enjoy switching his vote between them in a way that might have been based on a coin toss.

  The Anderson Collective loves their uniforms, Brit thought. They seemed like a mix of ancient Japanese Edo-period robes, straight-cut American suits integrated with armor inspired by Israeli designs. She only knew about most of these sources because her mother had made her watch documentary vids with her to prepare for her classes.

  The customs agent wore a suit of subtle panels with reinforced shoulder epaulets and a skull cap in a matching grey. A stylized crimson ‘V’ stood on the front of his cap, spreading like thin wings. It might have served as an antenna.

  “Well, you won’t be able to have your lock wide open ‘til you get that fixed. It’s rather unpleasant.”

  Brit sniffed. “I can’t smell it anymore.”

  “True, I’ve been in worse,” the agent said with a long sigh. “Some crews are just disgusting. I wish they’d send a drone in for the initial air quality check.”

  “Wouldn’t you be out of a job, then?”

  He shrugged and wrinkled his nose as he pulled himself through the battered airlock.

  “I’d be given another assignment. Everyone works in the Collective.”

  Brit led the way down to the cargo section, where the agent started searching among the crates and checking tracking tokens.

  “What do you do with people who don’t want to work?” Brit asked as the agent hmmm’d and made notes on the holo pad hovering in front of him.

  “Suitable tasks are found. Someone who refuses to work might be given a binary task.”

  “You mean like turning a light on and off? That seems like a waste.”

  “Everyone works for their bread,” he said, as if it were some euphemism she should recognize.

  “Don’t you have AI for most of the basic tasks?”

  “Artificial labors subvert the dignity of human accomplishment,” he said, like it was a verse of scripture he had memorized by rote. “My hands are the tool of my mind.”

  “What if you don’t have hands?” Brit said, unable to help herself.

  The agent gave her a sour look.

  When he completed his task, they returned to where Harm waited. When the agent provided the passage tariff, Captain Harm only burped again, releasing an armada of tiny spit globules.

  With the tariff handled, Brit pulled herself back up to the command deck and checked the departure sequence for the Ceres Ring. Harm hadn’t given her an explicit timeline, but based on the Heartbridge shipping manifest, she knew when they needed to reach their delivery destination in just over weeks. That meant they had about twelve hours on Ceres before she needed to execute another burn.

  Brit wondered what life on the Ceres ring was like. Though it was smaller than most others, it had been built by a single group, not a multi-government effort. Every new experience was an opportunity to broaden her understanding of the world around her. Though she wouldn’t have time to get much further than the freight terminal, she decided to sate her curiosity.

  Rina came in through the crew quarters access hatch.

  “Did we clear?” she asked.

  “Customs is done. I’m attaching for fueling now.” Brit smirked. “I was thinking about refilling Harm’s beer tank with near-beer.”

  While Rina Smith and Brit would probably never like each other—there was some unspoken competition between them—they seemed to share enjoyment in messing with the barely functioning captain.

  “What’s near-beer?” Rina asked.

  “It tastes just like beer, but without the alcohol.”

  Rina didn’t seem to get the joke. “I’m going onto the Ring. Do you want to come with me?”

  Brit raised an eyebrow, giving Rina a quizzical look, unsure what Rina really wanted. “You want me to come with you?”

  “You’re going down, aren’t you?”

  “I was thinking about it.”

  “Have you been before?”

  “No.”

  “I have. It’s not a good idea to travel alone. They have groups that like to grab lone travelers. You wake up in one of their education camps and they’ll put you on the terraforming project.”

  “They’re using slave labor?”

  Rina’s expression didn’t change. “They don’t call it slave labor. They call it ‘joyful contribution to something greater than yourself’.”

  “You sound knowledgeable about this.”

  “I’m not trying to pull you into some rescue mission. We don’t want to go alone, that’s all. You might be able to fight your way out of something but I’m not interested in that. I want to do some shopping, that’s all.”

  “All right,” Brit said. “I’ll go with you.”

  “You can’t take weapons. You should know that.”

  “Most places have rules like that for visitors.”

  “Why do you want to go, anyway?”

  “I’m a curious cat,” Brit said.

  Rina smiled. “As long as you’re not a duck, right?” she said, referencing the captain’s lame joke.

  “I wish she’d shut up about sucking ducks,” Brit said. “We should take Chafri.”

  “You think the captain will let us all leave at once?”

  “I think I don’t want to leave him alone with Harm. She’s been watching him a lot lately with this weird, hungry look. I don’t think he knows any better.”

  Rina shrugged. “He’s an adult. Let him learn his own terrible lessons.”

  “Terrible lessons,” Brit said, shaking her head. “I’m going to have that put on my urn.”

&nb
sp; “Learned or didn’t learn?” Rina asked.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Of course, Chafri wanted to go with them. He smacked his head on a corridor rib when Rina offered him the invite—he had been giving her his own hungry looks of late.

  “Isn’t it all weird priests and work gangs?” he asked. “I’ve only seen some of their shows pirated on the feeds. They don’t let anything else get out.”

  “I’ll let you find out for yourself,” Rina said. “Don’t go running off. It’s safer if we stay together.”

  “What are we going to do?” he asked.

  “I’m going shopping. Then we can do whatever Brit wants to do, and if you find something that interests you, we might do that, too.”

  “We’ve only got twelve hours,” Brit said.

  Chafri nodded excitedly. “Sure. I’m in. There are women there, right?”

  “There are women here,” Rina say dryly. “And no, I’m not waiting around for you in some love house.”

  “I’m not looking for love,” Chafri said. He did a double-take. “Oh, you mean that’s what they call their red-light? That’s weird. Why would you associate love with getting off?”

  “I guess you’ll find out someday,” Brit said.

  Brit tried to contact Captain Harm over the Link but only got an offline response. The captain was probably passed out somewhere. Brit checked the automatic fueling operation one more time and set up a few override notices in case anything strayed outside norms. Then she left the captain a message saying they’d gone into the terminal to pick up some personal supplies and to contact Brit or Rina if she needed anything.

  During the trip down to the terminal in a cramped maglev, Brit couldn’t stop thinking about Andy, prompted by Chafri’s dumb questions about love houses. She was tempted to pull up a vid file on her Link but she didn’t want to get caught in the loop of going from file to file, watching the kids and remembering life on Sunny Skies.

  Like so many times before, she told herself she was doing the right thing, and she felt closer to the end of her task than she had been in a long time. She was on a ship with Heartbridge supplies bound for a location that could only be another one of their hidden outpost-clinics.