Beta Testers

by Joseph R. Lallo

Garotte raised a finger. “Regarding the network access—”

  “Shh. I’m talking to the lady here about hot-wiring explosives,” Dee said. “Why the hell would you do all of that crap instead of just carrying the right bore launcher or an adapter rig?”

  “Because a battlefield isn’t a laboratory. I have to actually carry that stuff. Anything I can rig up in situ is better than hauling equipment I don’t need. Plus, who knows what sort of ammo the enemy is going to use. With those tricks I can usually even raid a downed autodrone and adapt the ammunition inside.”

  Dee stared at her for a moment.

  “Ma, bring up the security scan on this lady. I want to see if she’s still completely made out of meat.”

  “Loading scan results now. Processing. With the exception of titanium pins on one shoulder, Ms. Lowell/Ms. Winters appears to have retained her organic components.”

  “So you’ve been rooting around in the guts of RPGs and pneumatically launched grenades and you’ve still got all your thumbs… Where the hell have you been all my life? You’re exactly the kind of person I want on my beta-testing squad. Meanwhile. Ma! Legal pad! There’s some design to be done.”

  A mobile gripper zipped into the room with almost no delay, indicating it had simply been waiting outside with its yellow pad of lined paper and mechanical pencil awaiting deployment. Dee snatched them and threw them down on the table, sketching out with his left hand while he stuffed his face with his right.

  “Seems to me the market is screaming for a workable ammunition-agnostic grenade launcher. Probably coil accelerated. We can probably manipulate the magnetic field to autocenter…”

  “I’ve tried a universal launcher. They’re like any ‘universal’ gadget. Doesn’t work half as well as the dedicated version.”

  “That’s because I’ve never designed one,” Dee said. “I can probably have the Mark I of this sucker ready for noodling around with in about three weeks. Get your butts back here around then and I’ll pay you to put it through its paces. Until then… Ma! What’s the ETA on the ship’s upgrade?”

  “At the present rate of upgrade, the ship will be complete by the time the requested cargo can be loaded inside,” Ma said.

  “Okay, good. Get going. I’m done with you.”

  Garotte interjected. “But on the subject of network access, if you—”

  “Whatever it is you want, you can’t afford it. Go. Now.”

  Any further attempts to distract the engineer from his sudden obsession were met with vague grunts and angry hand gestures.

  “You may now begin your departure preparations,” Ma said.

  A pair of grippers rolled in to remove the lid from the wall and begin patching the hole it left behind.

  “I imagine we have exhausted our patron’s patience,” Garotte said. “Best not to press our luck.”

  “Dr. Dee’s patience was, in fact, expended prior to your arrival. Based upon observation, there is no clear indication that his patience has ever been in anything less than a fully expended state.”

  “Shut up and get out!” Dee barked.

  Garotte and Silo stepped through the door only to immediately sidestep to avoid yet another trio of arms. One of them carried a replacement door and slide mechanism, another was equipped with a set of tools, and the last carried a replacement leg.

  The pair continued until they were well out of earshot of the impatient owner of the establishment. In fact, for good measure, they made it nearly to the exit, and thus their waiting ship, before Silo ran her fingers through her hair and spoke her mind.

  “Let’s go over this, hon. When you went looking for someone to supply and fund our mission, you found us a partially mechanical, completely maniacal bundle of hostility and instability and thought, ‘this is the man for the job.’”

  “We’ve both served in the military long enough to know there’s always someone like that somewhere along the food chain.”

  “Sure, but he or she is usually outnumbered by enough levelheaded people to take the edge off their insanity.”

  “And thus there are enough people to know a mission like this needs to be carefully planned out in order to succeed, and thus are likely to spin their wheels and get the planning jammed up in a committee of people long enough for it to be moot. As you might imagine, I was not spoiled for choice and was in rather a great rush. All things considered, with the possible exception of the bit of culinary apparatus that very nearly punched through my head, the entire endeavor has gotten off to quite a good start.”

  “You and I have different definitions of a good start.”

  The doors hissed open and they stepped out into the frigid, reduced-gravity surface of the planet. A legion of somewhat more ruggedly built mechanical arms was just putting the finishing touches on the unauthorized upgrade, and likewise the final rack of equipment was rolling into place in the cargo bay. Silo stepped inside the ship and pulled a string of grenades from a bin, each round as large as a beer can.

  She ran her fingers over them. “Then again… I could get used to this…”

  #

  A small, rundown ship shuddered through the void of space. Advances over the centuries had shifted the scope of the venerable profession of “service crew” for the communication industry. In the past, this lightly trained job would at the lowest end involve simply sending out a van with a single employee, a set of crimpers, and a list of excuses for why he or she couldn’t narrow down their arrival time to something less than a six-hour window. At the high end, a crew might be expected to climb a utility pole to maintain some overhead wires.

  In the modern era, particularly around a planet like Vye-7, the maximum altitude a service crew was likely to have to visit had been extended from the top of a pole to a geostationary orbit. Space travel had been rendered so simple, and communication satellite designs had become so modular, that most systems could be maintained by automated drone. When something particularly troublesome or simply outside the design considerations of a drone went wrong, a two-person crew with a combined total training and job experience of four months could take a rust bucket of a ship up to investigate.

  The ship in question was labeled with the confidence-inspiring Bug-Shooterz logo, a third-party maintenance vendor that had underbid VectorCorp for the last-mile contract. The ship, which was so boxy and simplistic it may well have been purposely patterned after the utility vans of old, fired retro thrusters and matched orbital velocity with the temperamental satellite in question. The door popped open and two spacesuit-clad maintenance workers drifted out.

  Their silvery suits, like their ship and most of the other technology on the planet, were not representative of the state of the art, but they were at least form-fitting enough to allow good mobility. Mirrored visors hid their faces, but name tags labeled them “Sue” and “Lou.”

  “Let’s see what this pile of junk is complaining about now,” muttered Sue through short-range communication, her voice betraying her to be either of a rather advanced age for this type of work or else an extremely heavy smoker.

  “The fault codes were the proximity alert, then a communication failure to the transmission array,” said Lou, who had a voice a few decades younger and less wise. It also revealed her to be one of the rare women named Louise who chose to go by the name Lou.

  “They always say that. I think the engineers only put in one fault code,” Sue grumbled. “But it sounds like a collision with some space junk knocked something loose.”

  She drifted forward with controlled bursts of her suit’s thrusters. The satellite was a hulking monstrosity by modern standards, but part of that was by design. It handled the bulk of the communication traffic for a whole hemisphere, rather than the more expensive and reliable method of scattering the load across a much larger constellation of units. The device was actually considerably larger than their ship.

  When she was near enough to the maintenance section of the satellite, it became immediately clear that something was am
iss. The main panel was sticking up much farther than it should be.

  “Who the hell was the last one to maintain this?” Sue growled. “They didn’t cinch down the hatch!”

  “Beats me, it was probably one of those robots.”

  “Robots don’t forget to tighten hatches. If the robot screwed up, the stupid hatch would be missing. This was a person who did this. I blame Smith.”

  “Yeah, Smith would do that sort of thing.”

  Sue reached down and retrieved a powered bolt-driver and latched it on to the bolt, bracing it against the hull of the satellite with a deployable strut to avoid the comical but vomit-inducing “newbie spin” that tended to result from people forgetting gravity wasn’t there to hold them in the same orientation while the driver did its work.

  She loosened all four bolts, then tried to pull the cover off. It rigidly refused to pop free. “It’s jammed,” Sue said. “Definitely some idiot on their first day.” She grabbed tight to the panel and tried to rock it loose. “Probably overtightened the bolts.” She grunted. “Then tried to get the hatch off and realized what they did. Then they just left it here. Lou, get over here and help me get this off.”

  Lou drifted over and grabbed the other side of the hatch. The two of them struggled for a few moments. Then a peculiar sound distracted them. It was an audible crackle across their short-range radios. A moment later, an unfamiliar voice rang out in their helmets.

  “Ah, there we are. Simplicity itself,” said Garotte.

  The two women turned to find a man in a pressure suit suspiciously similar in color to the satellite’s paint job. He was sitting behind the controls of their ship.

  “What’s going on?” Lou asked, panic in her voice.

  “What’s going on is you ladies lamentably didn’t give a visual inspection of the satellite prior to approaching. Had you done that diligence, you would have seen me hiding in the directional array. Incidentally, I would prefer in the future you arrive in a more timely manner. I’ve only got twenty minutes of oxygen left and the suit was getting uncomfortably warm up there.”

  “You are meddling with private property!” Sue warned.

  “In point of fact, I am meddling with private property and public property, which tends to have a far greater penalty attached. Won’t be a moment, though. I simply need to nick a few of the access codes and protocols from your system here. Shouldn’t be more than a minute or two.”

  “Get out of there, you can’t do that!” Sue announced, jetting toward her ship.

  “I can indeed do it. Quite easily,” he said, casually drawing an energy pistol from a sheath at his suit’s belt.

  Both members of the service crew reversed their suit thrusters and held their hands out.

  “Easy, easy,” Sue said. “We’ll do whatever you want.”

  “Just keep your distance. Shan’t be long now.”

  He pulled a Velcro flap on the front of his suit and withdrew a palm-sized drive with his free hand. A few other bits of paper and debris floated out as well. He plugged the drive into the ship’s system and tapped out some commands.

  “I must thank you for remaining logged in when you left the ship. Had you not done so, I would have had to coax one of you into logging in for me, and it is just so difficult to be truly motivating in a vacuum without potentially puncturing a suit. A waste of human life and a missed opportunity for the desired data.” He glanced to the device. “Ah. That covers it.” He sheathed the gun and pulled out what looked like an unlit glow stick from another pouch. “I would recommend you both close your eyes. Those visors should darken to filter this out, but if your employers went the low-bid route, you can probably expect to be seeing spots for a while.”

  He gripped the stick tightly and snapped it with his thumb before tossing it toward them. It flared brilliantly to life, blasting the area with incredibly intense light. The safety systems in their suits blared UV warnings and tinted the visors to the point of becoming nearly opaque. They remained so for the better part of three minutes, leaving the women drifting blind in space. The only sound they heard was the crackle of the intruder’s radio disconnecting from their system.

  The UV blast finally ended, and the workers slowly regained their vision. Once again they were alone. The ship was empty and seemingly intact, but the intruder had vanished.

  Sue and Lou jetted up to their vehicle.

  “We’ve got to call the boss and tell them. I… I don’t think there’s even an entry in the procedures book for this. I mean… trespassing? Is this trespassing?” Lou asked, frazzled. “And who do we even tell them did it. I couldn’t see his face, could you?”

  Sue looked about and snatched a bit of debris out of the air. “I couldn’t see his face. But I’ve got a good idea of who did this.”

  She held up the bit of paper. It was a generic RFID entry badge. There was no indication of identity written on the card, but a clear Broadline Syndicate logo was emblazoned across the back side.

  #

  Garotte navigated the tight interior of his ship until he reached the cockpit and strapped himself to the seat beside Silo. She was at the controls.

  “Everything go according to plan?” she asked.

  “Yes indeed, my dear. Yes indeed.”

  He sounded particularly pleased with himself, and as quickly as possible removed the bulky gloves to better manipulate the stolen goods. While the women were distracted by the blinding light, he’d taken the liberty of pocketing a few of the more difficult-to-acquire network maintenance tools.

  “This should give us full access to all broadcast streams,” Garotte said. “Which means all we need are the encryption keys and we’ll have access to any bit of data that utilizes any of the satellites in the planetary net.”

  “All two of them,” she said. “I’ve never seen such a lousy job getting a planet started.”

  “You’ve never been out on the fringe. This is par for the course, I’m afraid. Ah, there. Loaded in. And with the local service encryption already in place. Brilliant. Let us tune in and see what our maintenance friends are up to.”

  He tapped out a code and routed the audio to the ship’s internal speakers.

  “…sabotage or not, but somebody was up here,” said Sue.

  “Would you repeat that?” said a male voice.

  “We had a—” Sue began.

  “A trespasser!” Lou added.

  “Yeah, fine, whatever,” Sue said. “It was someone from the Broadline Syndicate. The guy lost his ID card. I don’t know what they were monkeying around with, but if you want someone to get this satellite back to full capacity, you can get someone else, because I’m not dealing with a bunch of gun-toting idiots just for two thousand credits an hour.”

  “You get two thousand credits?” Lou remarked.

  “Show the card please,” the man said.

  “Right here,” Sue said, evidently showing off the card on a video feed Garotte had not felt the need to tap into.

  “Yeah… yeah, that’s Broadline. Listen, you get down here, we’ll get the next shift to check that out. In the meantime, I’m flagging any Broadline systems until we can get answers about why they had someone up there. They better not be trying to undercut our prices…”

  Garotte cut the communication and tapped at the stolen device a bit more. “Entering monitoring mode… and…”

  The built-in screen scrolled a lightning fast list of network addresses.

  “There we have the flagged addresses of everyone in the Broadline Syndicate,” he continued, “and they’ll be locked out of main communication pending investigation.”

  Silo gave him a condescending pat on the shoulder. “You should be very proud. Your way-too-complicated plan worked just how you wanted. I still say we should have blown the thing up…”

  He gazed over the list.

  “And this assumes the Broadliners have registered everything under their own names,” she added.

  “I dare not assume such a thing, but this nar
rows down the number of surveillance targets to something manageable. And more to the point…”

  Garotte fed the list into a program with a decidedly unpolished interface, then filled in some geographic data. A map popped up and slowly populated with gradients of color. Much of the map was devoid of any color at all, but stripes of green and orange connected massive clumps of red.

  “And here we have the locational history to all network devices on that list…” Garotte said, scrutinizing the data. “We already know that here, here… and these six sites are listed in their records as official business addresses. These all look like sublocations. Offices and the like… And wouldn’t you know it, there are quite a few out-of-the-way areas with loads of employee traffic that don’t seem to be on any official roster of locations.” He clucked his tongue. “What naughty fellows.”

  “Again, Garotte. We’re all very proud of you and your espionage, but if this is going to go our way, we’re going to need to figure out where they’re keeping the goods they’ve got, and how to keep them from getting more.”

  “Those are the same task, naturally,” Garotte said. “Despite considerable effort, the best I’ve been able to detect coming in on the sly is some assorted proprietary computer chips. If the supplier wanted the general public to know what they were sending and where, the cloak-and-dagger never would have come out. Shining a light on their little stash, or even lighting a candle nearby, should be more than enough to scare them away from replenishing it and thus risking having official ties made known.”

  “Fair enough.” She tapped at a secondary screen and started flipping through some video feeds.

  “What are you up to?”

  “Going through public news to see what’s been happening with any combat.”

  “Anything worthy of note?”

  “At first blush, it seems like there was a pretty serious rash of attacks against some urban hard targets. Or at least as hard as targets get with a disorganized force like these Piranha boys. Not a strategic thinker among them, but they’re getting down and dirty with guerrilla tactics.”

  “Splendid. That should buy us some time. A well-devoted guerrilla force is bloody difficult to soundly defeat.”