One Jump Ahead-ARC

by Mark L. Van Name

  I took a drink of water. He had a reason for being here, and I had no desire to visit with him, so I said nothing while he got around to explaining it.

  He finally shrugged and sat down on a chair opposite me. "Mr. Moore," he said, speaking slowly and clearly, as if perhaps I hadn't understood him previously, "is there some reason you haven't answered me?"

  "Until now, you haven't asked me a question."

  "I most certainly did. I asked if you were Mr. Moore."

  "No," I said, "you said my name as if it were a question. You already knew who I was, or you wouldn't have been able to walk right over to me." I sipped a bit more of the water. Why is it fun to bait corporate types, even the innocuous ones? I know I should outgrow the habit, but these people have always annoyed me, so unless they're as surprisingly direct as Slake was, I annoy them back.

  I raised my opinion of this one slightly as he showed the intelligence to adapt his approach quickly. "My apologies, Mr. Moore," he said. "My name is Ryan, Ryan Amendos. I'm an auditor in Kelco's finance department on Macken. I of course studied Mr. Slake's video of your meeting with him before I came here, so I could waste as little of either of our time as possible."

  He paused, but this time he knew to continue when I didn't respond. I was still waiting for him to get to the point.

  "When any executive of Mr. Slake's level moves the amount of currency he spent in his transaction with you, we naturally notice. It's his money, of course, but all of our upper management is aware that for security purposes we monitor their personal transactions. I have to verify that this one would not violate any company guidelines. Perhaps you could confirm the amount Mr. Slake paid you."

  "No."

  He cleared his throat. "I see. Maybe we should begin by reviewing the assignment. Would you mind explaining to me what Mr. Slake paid you to do?"

  "Yes."

  "Excuse me?"

  "Yes, I do mind. Either you already know what he paid me and why he hired me, as I assume you do, in which case you're still wasting my time, or you don't, in which case you should ask him."

  "I apologize again, Mr. Moore," he said. He put his hands below the table to hide his fidgeting. "Let me be as direct as possible. Mr. Slake said he paid you one million plus jump passage for you and your new weapon, in return for which you retrieved his daughter, Jasmine, from her kidnappers. His video log shows that you returned her to the Kelco house on Macken, so you obviously succeeded. Is that all correct?"

  I said nothing.

  After a moment, he nodded as if we'd agreed on something important. "Now, for our files we need a little more information. How exactly did you get her away from the Gardeners?"

  I tried not to give away my surprise, but I'm sure my eyes widened a bit. When you work on a fixed-price arrangement and provide the types of services I do, corporations never want to know how you work. It's always quite the opposite: They want as much distance from what happens on the sharp end of any encounter as they can possibly get. Amendos had just mutated from annoyance to possible risk. I've kept what I am a secret for a very long time, and I had no intention of exposing myself then. I will not be some corporation's or government's lab rat; I suffered more of that kind of pain on Aggro than anyone should ever have to experience.

  "That wasn't the deal."

  He nodded again. "Of course, of course," he said. "I wouldn't be asking, you understand, if it weren't standard company policy. We naturally monitored your activities as best we could, but we were unable to follow you once you entered the forest. It seems the main satellite with coverage of the area was sending encrypted messages elsewhere." He waited to see if I wanted to add anything, but I had no intention of giving up Lobo's sat colleague, so after a few seconds he continued. "So, we don't quite understand what happened. Nor do any of the Gardeners we've been able to interview."

  He said the last word casually, as if Kelco staff had spent a few minutes chatting amiably with the Gardeners, but the conversations were far more likely to have been interrogations.

  "I don't care at all about your policies," I said. "Slake hired me to do a job. I did the job, and now his daughter is home safely. That's all there is to it."

  He was playing Mister Agreeable, nodding and smiling. "I understand. We would naturally compensate you appropriately for any time you might spend reviewing your assignment with us."

  "I'm not looking for any new work right now."

  He kept smiling. "Perhaps I should also point out that if, as we must assume, your methods involve tactics or weapons unfamiliar to us, we might be able to set up a rather substantial consulting arrangement for you, so you could train our security teams on your methods. At Kelco, we're always looking for ways to improve our performance." His voice rang with corporate pride as he ended the last bit—another of the true corporate believers.

  He wasn't going to quit without some kind of answer. I leaned back and spread my arms, doing my best to look cooperative. "As nice as that sounds," I lied, "I'm afraid I have to tell you that I have nothing real to offer. All I did was take one of the usual approaches for handling such a situation. I spread around enough of my own money to get the names of some of the Gardeners, then bribed a few into helping me and scaring off the others. When they did, I grabbed the girl and dashed to Slake's house. Nothing worth reporting, really, so you can save your money." I leaned forward and lowered my voice, bringing him into my confidence. He also leaned closer. "I can't give you their names, of course, because I have to protect them from the other group members."

  I don't believe he bought my story, but either he'd had enough or he simply realized he wouldn't get more from me. "I've left my contact information," he said as he stood. "I hope you'll call or visit if you recall anything else that might be of interest or use to us."

  I checked my wallet; his information was in active quarantine, under the usual scans by the wallet and awaiting my permission to add it to the main info store.

  "I can't imagine that I will—the entire assignment was all really quite boring—but if I do, I'll get back to you." I also stood. "My jump number is coming up soon, and I'm in a new ship, so I have to make some preparations."

  "Enjoy your trip, Mr. Moore. I'm sure we'll talk again."

  "I don't think so," I said as I walked past him. "I don't expect to be back this way anytime soon."

  It was definitely time to leave. If Kelco really wanted to know what I'd done, it wouldn't stop with Amendos, and the next person might not approach me so politely. I checked over my shoulder all the way back to Lobo and didn't relax until I was safely inside him and he'd sealed the hatch.

  Chapter 6

  Even though we were still far from the front of the queue, I had Lobo run us out of dock and far enough away from the station that another ship could easily use the slot we'd occupied. We hung in space, Lobo occasionally correcting for drift, the pale green of the gate winding above and before us. I was thankful that the relative safety of the station's lounge had kept my encounter with Amendos as nonconfrontational as it had been, but I was still jittery with the energy that comes from my body amping up for the possibility of conflict. I'm used to being alone when I'm coming down from such situations, but with Lobo available I decided to do something constructive with the time. I settled into a pilot's couch and asked Lobo, "How'd you end up on Macken?"

  "I told you," Lobo said, exasperation dripping from his voice, "the Frontier Coalition put me there."

  Talking to Lobo was sometimes like dealing with an incredibly bright but equally annoying child. "Yes, and I remember. Let me try again: How did you lose your central weapons control complex?"

  "In an action on Vegna," he said.

  "Tell me how it happened."

  "May I show you? I could play the key relevant points of the battlefield records. Nothing in them is classified."

  "Sure," I said.

  Lobo dimmed the lights, and a recording with time coding snapped into view on the wall in front of me.

 
* * *

  Four men and two women in close-duty battle armor paced around Lobo's interior. Faces brown with a sticky blend of dust and blood, armor scarred, they were fresh from combat, juiced on adrenaline, and holding energy-beam rifles.

  "Lobo!" said one whose still-readable name patch identified him as Franks.

  "Yes, sir."

  "Say again."

  "Opposition forces have retreated. No signs of life within twenty klicks. All the bodies within that radius are immobile and contain our transmitters."

  "Then let's go get ours," Franks said.

  "Lieutenant Franks," Lobo said, "protocol dictates we do a complete scan and individually check each body before bringing it aboard. As I'm sure you are aware, the Vegna opposition forces have a history—"

  "Shut it!" Franks said. "Those 'bodies' are—were—our friends, and we're getting them out of here. So don't tell me about history. Land, open up, and we'll get our friends. Those are your orders."

  "Yes, sir," Lobo said, frustration evident in his voice.

  As the recording jumped ahead, I wondered if Franks and his team had found Lobo's emotive programming as annoying as I did. At the same time, I appreciated the potential value of that programming more now, because if I had the presence of mind to note that much frustration in a teammate's voice, I like to think I'd take the time to determine the source of the feeling. Franks clearly hadn't bothered to do so, because in the next segment five stacks of bodies, each torn in some obvious way and most still oozing blood, filled much of one end of Lobo's interior.

  Two of Franks' team walked into Lobo, each carrying a corpse missing its legs, some low-height enemy round having sawed the victims in half. Lobo's hatch snicked closed as the men tossed the corpses onto the shortest of the stacks.

  Lobo spoke. "Something is wrong with those bodies, sir. We need to get them outside now."

  "Of course there's something wrong with them," Franks said, his voice on the edge of hysteria. "They're missing their legs, you freaking machine."

  "I understand that, sir," Lobo said, "but something else is wrong. They do not scan as they should. I do not read any significant objects in them, but their metal content is too high. We need to remove them until they scan normally."

  "Could your scanners be wrong?" Franks said.

  "Though any device can malfunction, that is extremely unlikely," said Lobo, indignation obvious in his tone.

  "Then they stay."

  Lights flashed along the top of all of Lobo's interior walls, and in addition to his speaking voice a second, deeper tone blasted from his speakers: "Internal attack alert. Abandon ship. Abandon ship." Hatches opened on both sides.

  Lobo's normal voice spoke below the warning alerts. "All the metal in each of those two bodies is merging, and at high speed. My best guess is semiorganic recombinant smart bombs. Estimated time of complete recombination is thirty seconds. Get those bodies out of here, or leave."

  Several of the team stared at Franks for a second, chose the second option, and dashed out the hatches.

  "Get back here," Franks said. "They're just bodies, not any sort of threat at all." He ran to the pilot's couch, pushed the button for manual override, and pounced on the controls as they projected from the wall. He opened the cover on the central weapons control complex to gain complete access to all of Lobo's defense systems.

  "Fifteen seconds," Lobo said. Armor slid down over everything else along his walls. "Abandon ship"—both voices said in unison—"and return my controls to normal operation so I can seal the central complex."

  Franks typed frantically and checked the displays in front of him. "We don't know—"

  The explosion filled Lobo's interior with noise and screamingly bright light, his playback system automatically adjusting and dampening the sound. The recorders must have sealed or melted, because the display went black.

  "The bombs killed Lieutenant Franks and all but two of his remaining team members," Lobo said. "My central weapons control complex was open, as you saw, so the blast also took it out."

  "Dumb bastard," I said.

  "In Franks' defense," Lobo said, "his rank was a battlefield promotion, so he was new at command. In addition, at that time no one in the Frontier Coalition had personally faced recombinant bombs. I had only minimal data about them in my files. Infesting the corpses with these weapons was a new tactic, though of course historically similar things have happened for centuries with more easily detectable devices."

  "You're right, of course, on all points," I said, "but none of them matter in the end. Franks and his team died, and you lost a vital part of yourself." Everyone in battle does, I thought, but not always so literally. I appreciated Franks' situation, but I was also glad I hadn't been on his squad. "What happened from there? Someone cleaned you up and repaired you after the blast."

  "The company that employed Franks continued to fail on Vegna," said Lobo, "and ultimately lost the contract there. The Frontier Coalition hired a new mercenary company, the Shosen Advanced Weapons Corporation, to deal with the situation."

  The Saw, my last employer. I'd left the Saw about twelve years ago, but the decade I'd spent with them would always be strong in my memory. The Saw was a good group—in my opinion, the best, of course, or I wouldn't have joined it—but my time with it was, by the nature of the jobs they took, full of actions I'll never be able to forget. When I could separate the people from the violence, I thought fondly of them, good folks all, especially our captain, Tristan Earl, one of the few officers I've ever trusted and both the craziest and the canniest leader I've ever followed. I could never maintain that separation for long, though. The memories of the battles that then roared into my brain dragged with them an almost overpowering self-loathing, as I all too vividly relived missions that I knew were necessary, that I would perform again in the same circumstances, but that I would never be able to forgive myself for taking.

  I realized Lobo was still speaking. "Please repeat that last bit, Lobo," I said, "the part right after you said the FC contracted with the Saw."

  "The minimal multitasking ability you humans possess," Lobo said, "always leaves me amazed that you are the owners and I am the owned. The Saw provided its own equipment, but its contract does not extend to Macken. The Coalition wanted me available for security on Macken, so they paid Saw technicians to clean me and repair me as much as possible with no significant monetary investment, then dropped me in that square in Glen's Garden. Because there was no active conflict on the planet, the Coalition was unwilling to invest the rather sizable sum it would have cost to replace my central weapons control complex. The Saw was not particularly interested in me as long as I was on a planet that was not on their contract. Since that time, a new generation of PCAVs has appeared, so fully repairing me has never been a priority for anyone."

  "It never is," I said.

  "I do not understand."

  "Repair of veterans past their prime is never a government's top priority, never will be," I said. "No obvious return on investment to the people with the money." I shook my head to clear away unwanted memories and focus on the topic at hand. "So were your systems frozen as of the cleanup?"

  "Of course not!" Lobo said. "I may not be current-generation, but I am also not some dumb manufacturing assembly ship or big-cargo hauler. I was built to maintain myself to the greatest degree possible. Even on Macken, Coalition systems upgrades of all sorts regularly arrived on government shuttles. I pulled my upgrades from each set as it hit the planetary Coalition net and applied them myself. I have also worked to the limits of my hardwired adaptive programming constraints to stay in touch with all relevant planetary intelligence sources, such as the satellite we used, and to apply viral and genetic programming techniques where permitted to extend and improve my abilities. I am as capable as possible within the limitations I am unable to remove."