by M. D. Cooper
“All right,” Fugia said. “All right. This is good. I’m sending a drone cargo pod your way. It will match your delta-V in five hours. You need to get yourself and your cargo inside that secure storage. Port Authority will ping you as soon as you cross the SolGov boundary. Tell them exactly what you’re here to do. Get fuel and continue your flight plan. Did you file at M1R?”
“Yes,” Andy said. “Our final destination is Kalyke.”
“Good. That will work as cover. I’ll tell you more when I’m on board. You’ll take the first berth you’re offered and refueling is your first priority. Don’t stall anyone who comes onboard—you will be boarded—but be ready to launch. I’ll get onboard as soon as I can. You’ll know I’m coming because something terrible is going to happen in the docking terminal.”
“Something terrible?” Andy said. “What kind of something terrible? I’m going to be in the dark during all of this.”
“It’s not your problem to worry about. I’ll get on your ship. There will be a distraction, and we’ll get the hell out of Ceres space. How fast can that hulk burn?”
“Not fast enough to outrun military craft.”
“I figured as much. I’ll think about that. In the meantime, you take care of my cargo pod.”
“What if your pod picks up followers?”
“It won’t.”
“What if it does?” Andy pressed.
“Then you might as well kill them before they reach you,” Fugia Wong said. “Because nobody will make it out of here alive.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
STELLAR DATE: 09.15.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Mars 1 Guard Sector 985 Garrison
REGION: Mars 1 Ring, Mars Protectorate, InnerSol
The cell door closed behind the Heartbridge guards who were carrying Petral, making a hissing sound as it sealed. Cal Kraft nodded to the detention sergeant. The transfer order had arrived later than he’d expected, which had required some tap-dancing on his part to keep the staff entertained. He didn’t mind listening to complaints about hazardous duty pay and missed leave opportunities—he nodded, smiled, and visualized suffocating each of the M1G personnel as they talked—until the release was finally verified and the sergeant said, “Here you go.”
Now they only had to make it across the garrison to the M1G terminal where his shuttle waited. An operator like Petral might have been impressed at how little maneuvering had been necessary to bypass the garrison commander and secure her release. The commander was actually responsible for all prisoners, but the directive from Heartbridge had bypassed the chain-of-command via a bribe. Of course, the sergeant on duty wouldn’t know that.
Petral was shackled at hands and feet, with a dampening band at her temples to cut-off access to the Link. Kraft had applied the handcuffs himself, setting the gel layer inside the steel bands to tighten far more than necessary so that she winced before her face went flat again. That had been an enjoyable moment.
Dampening bands weren’t illegal, but they didn’t make any friends. Using one was akin to lobotomizing someone until it came off, and even then it could take hours to recover.
“What have they got planned for her?” the sergeant asked, eyeing Petral with distaste.
“Kittens and candy,” Cal said with a half-smile. “Hell if I know.”
He left the detention block with the two Heartbridge security guards dragging Petral between them. They boarded the military maglev and sat in the dim car, light flashing from regularly spaced openings along the tunnel, showing sections of terminal or housing blocks. Cal spent the time watching Petral’s slack face. She had shut down as soon as the dampening band had gone over her temples and it was like seeing someone hobble a racing horse. The light had gone out of her bright blue eyes.
He was certain it was an act, and he wondered what she was planning. How did she expect to get out of this?
Based on the story from the maintenance tech she’d kidnapped, Dulan had made the trip out to the old cargo ship to drop off Cara Sykes, then forced the soldier back toward the M1R where they were promptly intercepted by the drones. Their reluctance to kill one of their own servicemembers had been the only reason they hadn’t vaporized the shuttle.
Petral Dulan was now guilty of a handful of local crimes, not to mention a dozen SolGov felonies. In piecing together the many governmental files he’d found associated with her, it had become apparent this kind of behavior was nothing new for Dulan. The only question was what she hoped to gain. In other cases, she’d typically escaped or had been released on some technicality that, upon review, he recognized as the result of file hacking.
She had been based on Cruithne for the last twenty years, at least. She also had files on High Terra, Earth, Luna, Callisto, and several with corporate entities she’d wronged in one way or another. The motives weren’t always clear. Profit certainly played a role, but she seemed to enjoy making big people feel small.
Cal could certainly appreciate that, but it wasn’t his job currently to appreciate Petral’s actions. Once Jickson had executed the breach, it had become Kraft’s job to recover Heartbridge property. He had tracked Jickson to High Terra and then Cruithne. From there the trail had seemed to burst in a hundred directions, until Riggs Zanda had led an expedition of Weapon Born to a ship called the Sunny Skies.
Cal hadn’t approved that attack. He would rather have let the ship go and picked them up somewhere safer, like the M1R—where he figured they would end up eventually. Ships need fuel, people need food. These were facts that subverted most clever plans. He hadn’t been surprised when Zanda had turned up dead in the vacuum outside Cruithne, along with the shells they’d deployed with him.
That discovery had piqued Cal’s interest in Andy Sykes.
Kraft used his Link to pull up the registry records for the Worry’s End, the ship that had obviously been registered as the Sunny Skies before reaching Cruithne. He found the joint ownership between Andy and Brit Sykes. Each had attached TSF files that were classified above his current search level. Based on their pictures, they weren’t brother and sister. Kraft spent a minute remembering Ngoba Starl’s club on Cruithne, where Sykes had been sitting beside Petral Dulan looking like he’d swallowed a live fish.
Tilting his head, Kraft studied Petral’s face across from him. Her lids were half-closed, only allowing slivers of her brilliant blue eyes to be seen. Her face was a classical beauty, with high cheekbones and full lips. He imagined her hair’s black ringlets carved from marble. If he had to kill her, he decided he would take the dampener off so she could look at him with her full fury. He would appreciate that.
He ran a query on the Worry’s End’s flight plans and found one filed for Kalyke. He studied it for a minute, thinking about what kind of range a ship like the Worry’s End/Sunny Skies was capable of. He couldn’t see them reaching Kalyke without a full loadout, and based on the terminal records they hadn’t refueled on M1R.
So anywhere they tried to run to was going to be local.
Cal paused, making himself reverse his thoughts. Was the Sunny Skies a screen? For the thousandth time, he went over his information on how Ngoba Starl had gained control of the AI from Hari Jickson, planned the flood of ships leaving Cruithne and then highlighted four ships, all fast pirate frigates with enough firepower to fight off a TSF patrol craft. Instead, Zanda had played a hunch and taken his team to a little cargo scow called Worry’s End and turned up dead. None of it made sense, and he couldn’t escape the idea that he was wasting energy on what was going to turn out to be a bad hand. Starl wasn’t stupid. He was a man who understood force and wouldn’t make a bad bet against the odds. The Worry’s End and Andy Sykes were definitely losing bets.
There was still the question of how Petral had ended up on the M1R in the first place. He couldn’t equate Cara Sykes following her around the Ring as proof that they had left Cruithne on the same ship. He had surveillance imagery of Petral Dulan fighting alongside Sykes which ended abruptly in a concrete
ceiling falling on top of her. Again, the obvious information pointed to Dulan helping Sykes. But that was what she would want him to believe.
It would be easy enough to fire off long-range drones to determine where the Worry’s End turned up. Ceres was most likely and a little harder to operate on because there was no Heartbridge presence in the Anderson Collective. If they made it to Callisto, he had agents who could pick them up for him. And if they made it to some tiny little station in the belt somewhere, he’d send a swarm of attack drones to ruin their day.
The maglev came to a stop and Cal stood and stretched. The guards hefted Dulan between them and followed him out into the open expanse of the shuttle bay. The air was cold and smelled like freon from refueling operations. He walked directly across the central area, forcing technicians to get out of his way and ignoring the sideways glances at Petral, who was drooling on herself—her long black hair was full of strands of saliva, glistening under the over-bright hangar lights.
Inside the shuttle, Cal waited until his two helpers sat Petral down on a bench along the side facing the access door. Once she was secure, he sent them outside to conduct pre-flight checks.
“Once you’re done, go find yourself some food somewhere…for six or seven hours,” he said. “I need to call some people.”
One of the Heartbridge guards gave him a salute and Cal waved the gesture away.
“You’re not in the TSF anymore. Just check on the shuttle. I don’t want to get stuck here.”
When the guards were gone, he closed the access door, which left the interior of the shuttle dim under its own lighting. Cal went to pilot’s station to check systems status. When he was satisfied everything looked good, he powered down the communications and internal recording systems.
He turned back to the middle of the shuttle where Petral sat slumped on the bench, her lower lip hanging.
“I’ve got a surprise for you,” he said.
Behind the navigator’s seat was a reinforced crate. Cal tapped its mag controls and pulled it to the middle of the shuttle’s cabin, almost directly in front of Petral. Moving so he could access a panel in its lid, he entered a security token that activated a series of indicators. The crate sank to the deck and its sides folded back to allow an alloy couch to extend parallel to the shuttle’s walls. Cal nodded to himself as the autosurgeon activated in perfect working order.
Petral grunted as he slid her from the bench along the wall to the couch. Restraints snaked around her chest and legs, affixing themselves to her shackles. A silver globe extended at the head of the couch, just above Petral’s nest of black hair. The globe seemed to ripple then slice apart into hundreds of articulated arms.
The surgeon’s main panel asked him if he wanted to proceed. Cal placed the system in pause as he turned to a cabinet and entered another token. The cabinet swung open to reveal a rack of slim silver canisters the size of test tubes. He counted the cylinders with a finger, checking serial numbers, before choosing one near the middle. He placed the cylinder in a receptacle above the surgeon’s control panel.
Petral Dulan hadn’t made a sound since entering the shuttle, but now she squirmed against the restraints. Cal raised an eyebrow, trying to find her face inside her hair.
“Did you want to say something?” he asked.
The urge to struggle must have emerged from some deep part of her brain like a pre-sleep tremor. She didn’t fight, only stretched her legs and then relaxed. The dampening band had an insidious feature that increased strength with alpha-wave activity. The more its wearer fought, the more it turned their thoughts into soup.
Cal activated the autosurgeon. The couch raised a half-meter and rotated horizontally so Dulan hung limp against the restraints while the body of the couch enveloped her. Her head dangled below her chest, black hair hanging like a mop, as sections of the couch gripped the sides of her head. The silver assembly of arms spread like spider’s legs behind her pale, exposed neck, measuring and adjusting their alignment with her spine in thousands of micro-movements.
The first incision was along her spine, with two cuts angling up toward her ears. The silver arms drew her skin back and quickly made deeper cuts, working their way around her vertebrae before angling upward toward her brain.
Cal understood the basics of the procedure, which was essentially spreading a filament mesh from her brain stem, up around the cerebellum to the various lobes. The filament net would then penetrate to the neuron, infiltrating the brain at its most basic level.
While the process was highly sophisticated, employing a mix of therapies that had been in use for nearly a thousand years, other aspects of the process would have horrified anyone who adhered to an oath to do no harm.
One of the reasons human subjects tended to reject implanted AI was because the procedure was so barbaric. They were allowing the installation of symbiote in their brains. No matter how optimistic researchers might be, the truth was that the procedure was currently irreversible. Cal had watched hundreds of the surgeries now, watched the recordings of subjects stating they were ready, only to be followed by madness days later, people smashing their heads against walls, tearing their hair out, trying to gouge out their eyes—all in an attempt to remove the interloper.
After watching so many clinical failures, Cal had a theory that the less a subject knew about what was being done to them, the better. It was better to wake up with the AI’s voice in your mind, believing you were still an individual, than to enter the game knowing the truth.
The researchers called their failures “regrettable.” They hid their guilt behind contracts and subject agreements, never giving much thought to why someone who agreed to their studies might be willing to make such a bargain.
And the kids—the kids couldn’t legally enter into such a transaction, so they were never given the choice.
Cal sat for hours, watching the autosurgeon do its work with speed and delicate precision, as beautiful as an ancient timepiece. Membranes were laid over filament mesh, held in place by thousands of micro-sutures so intricate Cal barely smelled Dulan’s burning flesh.
When the silver arms closed the skin at the back of her neck and ran connective tissue up the incision, the wound healed almost instantly, leaving no mark he could see from where he stood. The arms even laid her wild hair back over her neck, still matted with spit.
The couch righted itself, flattening under Dulan. She was snoring lightly as the restraints pulled away. Cal stepped forward to ease her off the autosurgeon and back onto the shuttle’s hard flight couch along the wall. She turned her face against the wall, mumbling something incoherent, but didn’t wake as Cal tapped the console on the autosurgeon and it folded back into its unassuming crate.
Cal pushed the crate back behind the navigator’s chair, then remembered to re-lock the cabinet filled with numbered cylinders.
When everything was back in place, he made himself take another look around the shuttle’s spare interior for any evidence of the surgery. He bent to pick up a long strand of Petral’s black hair. He stuffed it in a pocket.
Cal bent back to Petral and removed the dampening band from her temple. She continued snoring.
Turning the band in his hands, Cal sat on the opposite bench and watched her sleep for a few minutes, then activated his Link.
A long moan crossed the link, more emotion than sound. A voice that started as disconnected flutters built into words, and then the answer:
Cal sighed. He glanced at the access door. The guards would be coming back soon, wondering why he was taking so long.
He could take as much time as he wanted, really. What bothered him was the
fear in Kylan’s voice, sounding more like a scared kid the more he talked. Cal didn’t have the patience or desire to entertain or comfort a child. He didn’t want fear from Kylan. He wanted anger.
Cal cut him off.
The emotion drained from the AI’s voice.
Kylan said, and went silent, waiting.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
STELLAR DATE: 09.18.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sunny Skies
REGION: En route to Ceres, Free Stellar Space, InnerSol
Lyssa did her best to ignore Andy’s elevated vital signs. He was sitting on a bench inside Sunny Skies’ safe room, trying to watch a nature vid on a small screen on the wall. The subject was the Francis Marion Forest on the Atlantic coast not far from Summerville, where he had grown up. Images of deer and squirrels flashed on the screen, alongside a painting of Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox from the American war for independence.