by Tarah Benner
Suddenly, I feel a whoosh of air on my face. Dim bluish light filters into the compartment, and I’m able to make out the dark shape of the bots to my left and the black-and-yellow tape around the doorway of my cell.
Buford’s silhouette appears in front of me, and I see him fiddling with a keypad on the wall.
“I really am sorry about this,” he says, not sounding remorseful at all. “If you would have just minded your own business, none of this ever would have happened.”
My heart starts pounding again in my throat. It sounds as though he’s preparing to execute his plan for my demise.
“Everything appears to be in order,” he continues. “These bots were decommissioned like the rest of them. The scheduled maintenance was postponed, but I just overrode the system.”
I let out a furious scream, but it just comes out sad and muted around the wad of fabric between my teeth.
“In twelve short hours, you will no longer be my problem.”
I’m beginning to hyperventilate. This is it. Twelve hours. In twelve hours, I’ll be dead.
“At twenty-one hundred, these doors will open, and you won’t be able to tell anyone whatever it is you think you know.”
At those words, the blood turns to ice in my veins. Buford isn’t going to kill me himself — he’s going to set me afloat in the endless vacuum of space.
“Not to worry,” he says. “I’m told it’s extremely quick — not instantaneous as it is in the movies, but relatively fast. You’ll only have about fifteen seconds before you pass out. Within a minute, the water and gas in your bloodstream will form bubbles in your veins, effectively stopping circulation. Soon after that, your body will cease to function.”
I think I’m going to be sick. Hot scalding fear is rising up in my chest. I’m going to choke to death on my own vomit before the airlock even opens.
“I am sorry it had to end this way,” he says. “But you should have minded your own business.”
I’ve never considered myself a violent individual. I never thought I’d be able to kill someone . . . until this very moment.
I want to kill Buford. I want to tackle him to the ground and beat him with a crowbar. I want to hear him beg for mercy, and then I want to end his life.
“Ah, well,” he says. “Enjoy your last few hours. I’m sorry that I couldn’t make them more comfortable.”
I hear a series of mechanical beeps. The airlock door slides shut between us, stopping the flow of air from the station to my horrible cramped death cell.
My panic intensifies. I pull and tug on my restraints, but they don’t loosen one bit. I scream and cry around my gag, but it’s no use. No one can hear me.
I’m trapped in a colony with five thousand other people, but I might as well be floating out in space. No one knows where I am. No one is coming to rescue me.
33
Jonah
The next morning, I’m running on pure unbridled fury. I didn’t sleep more than a few hours. I’d lain awake stewing over Maggie and racking my brain to figure out how the hackers got their hands on my data.
When I get to the latrine, I make the water as hot as I can stand and try to rinse myself clean of everything that’s happened. Last night I learned that Maggie had been lying the entire time. She’s been lying to my face ever since I’ve known her, and I don’t know whether I should believe her now.
I’m not working with my squad today, but the captain called us in for another emergency briefing. The only news is that there isn’t any news. Representatives from the FBI, the NSA, and the Department of Homeland Security will be docking tomorrow, and they’ll be combing our surveillance records and questioning everyone.
I’m not sure what it is they’re hoping to find. Maverick Enterprises maintains that they have no idea how the bots were hacked. They’re launching their own full-scale investigation, but if anyone at the company knows anything, they’re keeping it awfully quiet.
I don’t know why the FBI or Homeland Security would want to talk to the rest of us. It’s not as though we have any contact with the people inside Maverick — unless they know about the SPIDER data.
Callaghan repeats what he said last night: we need to cooperate with the feds and bring anything suspicious to his attention.
That’s exactly what I plan on doing, but I’m giving Maggie until the end of the day. After that, I’m gonna turn her in myself and let her worry about the consequences.
After the briefing, I ping Maggie’s Optix. I want to tell her that she has until seventeen hundred to come clean, but the call doesn’t go through. Either her device has been disabled, or it’s completely dead.
Not being able to reach her gives me an uneasy feeling, but I put it out of my mind and head to the dining hall for breakfast. Maggie can avoid me all she wants, but there’s nowhere on this space station for her to hide.
When I get to the dining hall, I see Ping sitting at a table with Kholi and Davis. He’s wearing an Orlando Magic jersey and a pair of high-top sneakers.
He flags me down, but I shake my head.
Ping ignores my obvious “don’t fuck with me” signals and calls out for me to join them anyway.
Reluctantly, I turn and head for their table. Ping grins broadly, but Davis and Kholi exchange uniform looks of dread. I can tell that they don’t want to sit with me any more than I want to sit with them.
“Whassup, sarge?” says Ping brightly, standing up to offer me some weird secret handshake.
I clear my throat. “Not much.”
I should write his ass up for what he’s wearing. Guys aren’t allowed to wear tank tops even when they’re off duty.
“Have you seen Jones?” I ask.
“No,” says Kholi with a scowl. “Why?”
There’s an accusatory note in Kholi’s voice, but it takes me a minute to understand what she’s implying.
I clear my throat, trying to play it off. “No reason . . . I just thought she would be hanging out with you guys.”
“I haven’t seen her since training yesterday. She didn’t come home last night.”
“She didn’t?”
My shock must have shown on my face, because Kholi seems to realize she’s misread the situation. She shakes her head in a panic. “I’m not trying to get her in trouble. I bet she just fell asleep in the lounge.”
“Jones isn’t in trouble. I was just curious.”
There’s a long awkward silence, and I wish I hadn’t asked.
“Ping,” I say, shooting him a look. “Can I borrow you for a sec?”
Ping looks as though Christmas just came early. “Sure, boss. Only, aren’t you gonna eat first?”
I shake my head. “I’m not hungry.”
Just as the words leave my mouth, I realize that Ping isn’t finished. But he jumps to his feet and dumps his tray without so much as a second thought.
As we’re leaving, I see him turn around and shoot a double thumbs-up at Kholi and Davis, who look absolutely baffled. Clearly I don’t have to worry about blurring the boundaries between me and the squad. I don’t think any of them except Ping want anything to do with me.
“What’s goin’ on, sarge?” he asks, quickening his pace to follow me back to the barracks.
“I need your help with something.”
“Cool.”
“Can you . . . uh, can you keep this between us?”
“Sure thing.”
I take a deep breath and lower my voice. “Can you locate someone by pinging their Optix?”
Ping looks taken aback, but his surprise passes quickly. “Uh, yeah. Yeah, you usually can . . . unless they have their location set to private.”
“How?”
“Do you really want to know?”
I consider this for a second. “No, not really. So how can you tell if someone has their location set to private?”
“You can’t . . . at least not until you try to ping it.” He shoots me a knowing glance. “Who’re you trying to locate?”
/> “Somebody on this station.”
“A Space Force somebody?” he probes. Judging by his tone, he knows I’m trying to find Maggie.
“Maybe.”
“Well, that’s easy,” says Ping. “As an officer, you should have access to every lower-ranking Space Force operative in Elderon.”
“It’s . . . It might be more complicated than that.”
“Sarge?”
“You told me this’ll stay between us.”
“Yeah, of course.”
“I need you to ping Maggie’s Optix. It might not be registered to the Space Force. Remember?”
“Oh, right,” says Ping, as if he’d totally forgotten about Maggie’s secret double life. He stops at a T in the hallway. “We should probably do this from my room, then . . . unless you subscribe to a VPN.”
“A what?”
“Virtual private network. If I’m going to color outside the lines, I’m not doing it on an unprotected connection.”
“Okay . . .”
Whatever he’s talking about sounds borderline illegal, but I don’t care. I just can’t shake this bad feeling about Maggie.
We turn down the hallway toward the privates’ barracks, and Ping scans us into the room he shares with Davis. It’s surprisingly tidy — spotless, actually. Everything seems to be a hundred percent regulation until I sit down at the end of his bunk.
The bottom of the upper bunk is covered in cutouts of naked girls. I get up and move to stand by the door.
“Should we be expecting Davis anytime soon?”
“Nah,” says Ping. He switches on his desktop, which he has propped up on the chest of drawers. “You want to tell me what this is about?”
“What?”
“Well, yesterday I told you that Maggie Jones is really Maggie Barnes, and you just ran off like you had somewhere to be.”
I don’t respond. I know what he’s asking, and I don’t really feel like getting into it.
“You don’t have to tell me,” he says after a few seconds of strained silence.
“Okay.”
More silence.
“I mean, it might be nice of you to tell me . . . since we’re breaking the law together and all.”
I roll my eyes. I should have known I wasn’t going to get off that easily. Ping is a nosy son of a bitch.
“I think . . .” I take a deep breath. I don’t know if I can tell him. I can’t even bring myself to say it out loud.
“You think Maggie is a double agent who might be working for the hackers.”
For some reason, having Ping guess it without me having to put it into words fills me with a sense of relief. “Yeah.”
I wait for him to start off on one of his long one-sided conversations, but he just shrugs.
“Well?” I say, surprised that I want to hear Ping’s opinion.
“I don’t see it.”
I scowl. “You don’t see it?”
“Yeah. I mean I just never got that vibe from her is all.”
“You never got that vibe from her?” I repeat. “She’s a liar . . . maybe a spy. You’re not supposed to get that ‘vibe’ from a spy.”
“You’re dreaming,” says Ping, stifling a laugh. “Maggie isn’t a spy. Aren’t spies supposed to blend in? And why would she plant herself at the lowest level of the Space Force? It doesn’t make any sense.”
I raise an eyebrow. Ping makes some good points. Maggie definitely doesn’t blend in.
“I think she might have leaked some important data,” I say quietly. “Data the hackers used in the bot attack in New York.”
Ping stops what he’s doing and turns to look at me. “What sort of data?”
I take a deep breath. I don’t know why I’m hiding it from Ping. He’s the only one I trust to help me with this.
I launch into everything I know about the SPIDER and tell him about the training session I had with Maggie. By the time I finish, Ping’s brows have inched so high that they look in danger of permanently freezing in that position.
“Wow,” he says.
“What?”
He shakes his head. “I mean, I’d heard that BlumBot was developing some sort of technology to enable rapid motor learning, but I had no idea that they had a working prototype!”
“You’ve heard of this?”
“How have you not?” he says incredulously. “It’s, like, the holy grail of artificial intelligence.”
“What do you mean?”
“Think about it!” he says. “This technology would change robotics forever. If bots could learn to do things the way we do them just by downloading the muscle-memory data . . . It would be a game changer.”
Suddenly, my head is spinning. If Ping is right, then it isn’t something BlumBot would want floating around. Applied to their bots, the technology would be worth billions. But in the hands of their competitors or a group of hackers . . .
“Who else knows about this?” he asks.
I shrug. “I don’t know. You think Maverick gave the technology to the Space Force after it acquired BlumBot so that they could use our data?”
“Nah,” says Ping. “Whatever data that thing collected on you would have been stored in one of our secure servers.”
“Whoever reprogrammed those bots had to access my data somehow.”
But Ping is already shaking his head. “Not unless that person had access to confidential Space Force data. All that stuff is siloed off. No way to access it unless you have pretty high-level security clearance.”
“How high?”
He shrugs. “I’d say lieutenant or higher.”
I let that idea float around in my head. If Ping is right, then this goes much higher than I thought.
“Maggie couldn’t have done it,” he says, finishing my thought. “Not unless she was working with an officer.”
Just then, a black map with green outlines of the sectors overtakes the screen.
“Hmm . . .” says Ping. “That’s weird.”
“What is?”
“It’s showing that Maggie’s Optix is completely disabled. I can still see where her device went offline, but —”
“But what?”
“I’m not sure how accurate this is . . .” He zooms in on the sector where her Optix was last emitting a signal. “That can’t be right.”
“What?”
Ping shakes his head. “It’s showing that her Optix was in a restricted area. That was at oh seven hundred this morning.”
34
Jonah
We’ve been holed up in Ping’s room for the past eleven hours. Upon finding out that Maggie’s Optix was last emitting a signal from a restricted area, he’s been doing everything he can to access the security feed.
Unfortunately, hacking a protected feed on Elderon isn’t easy — even for a pro like Ping. The goal is to find out what Maggie’s been up to and whether or not she’s involved with the officer who stole my SPIDER data.
“Well, that’s disappointing,” says Ping, sitting back in a chair he lifted from the lounge.
“What is?”
He takes a swig from a can of Ener-G. There are already five empty cans scattered across his makeshift desk. “The area where Maggie’s Optix went down is kind of a dead zone for cameras.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.” He finishes the can and crushes it against his head.
“That can’t be a coincidence.”
“It would be a pretty lucky one if it was,” he agrees.
“Shit.”
Eleven hours in, and we’ve hit a dead end. I know what I have to do, but something inside me is resisting.
I should have turned Maggie into Callaghan hours ago. And the longer I wait, the more suspicious it looks. I feel as though I’m in too deep now. I need to find out exactly what she’s been up to.
“I could pull the cameras from the area just outside the restricted zone,” Ping offers.
“You can?”
“Sure.” Ping reach
es for another can of Ener-G and cracks it open with a hiss. “I’m already in the system.”
“Do it.”
Ping’s fingers start to fly again, and he lands on a list of what appears to be camera locations throughout the space station. I had no idea that there were so many hidden cameras, but it seems as though there isn’t a single hallway or public space that isn’t heavily surveilled.
The restricted area where Maggie’s Optix went dead is somewhere in Sector J. Ping locates the camera just outside the area and scrolls through the digital timeline. He stops the footage thirty minutes before she went offline and speeds up the video.
The camera is located in a hallway that doesn’t get a lot of traffic. Not a single person traipses through the frame in the entire half hour we watch.
Then I see someone — or rather, two someones. One of them is Maggie, but she isn’t moving on her own.
I can only tell it’s her because of her long curly hair. She’s slumped over a man’s shoulder, and she doesn’t appear to be conscious.
“Ho — ly shit,” says Ping.
“Who is that?” I ask, pointing at the man. The camera is too far away to make out the man’s face, but something is definitely wrong.
Ping zooms in, but the feed just gets grainier. The man’s features are completely obscured, but I recognize his outfit. He’s wearing Space Force fatigues.
“Can you go back?” I ask. “Retrace their steps?”
“Hang on.”
Ping flips back to a map of the middle deck and pulls up the camera from the hallway in the next sector. Nothing. He tries the end of the hallway that connects Sector K to I, but there’s no sign of Maggie or the man.
Finally, he locates the feed for the stairwell leading from the lower deck to the middle deck. The man is carrying Maggie up a flight of stairs, and she is most definitely unconscious.
“Shit.”
Ping retraces Maggie’s kidnapper’s steps to a hallway just outside of coach housing in Sector O. One of the cameras seems to be down for maintenance, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
I can’t believe this. Maggie didn’t go offline because she was hiding. Her Optix shut off because she was kidnapped.