Vigilante

by Laura E. Reeve

  To give his son credit, he tried. He drew himself up into a straight stance and Isrid saw him physically struggle to remove the resentment from his face. However, Chander was beginning adolescence and the self-destructive, emotional bedlam that pitted every youth against the world was too hard to hide. Already the anger ingrained in his mind showed in his body. Isrid sighed internally; it would be years before Chander purged the demons of his adolescence and became a thinking being again. If Isrid wanted to spend the time to concentrate, he’d see his son’s beautiful orange-yellow aura muddied with darkness.

  “I don’t need both my mothers along to babysit me.” Pride screamed from Chander’s face and body, despite his attempts for objectivity. His arrogant profile, golden skin, and green eyes came from Isrid, but his thick chestnut hair with burgundy tones was a faded imitation of Sabina’s. The combination was striking. Already Chander was catching looks from both females and males, and being the son of a Terran State Prince added to the curiosity. At this point, Isrid couldn’t give Chander enough of his attention. He now wished he’d added another male into his multimarriage, even though he and his wives hadn’t recovered from the trauma of losing his brother and potential co-husband.

  “Both your mothers have told me their reasons for visiting G-145, and they have nothing to do with you.” Isrid made sure his hand signals were precise.

  “Even Pri’mom?” he asked, referring to his primary mother.

  Of course, Sabina was probably behind this in some way. Her main hobby was being a master manipulator, while Garnet, his other co-wife, was almost boring in her lack of layers. With Garnet, what you saw was what you got. With Sabina, one never knew her true motives, which added to her spice. However, Isrid was tired and he wasn’t willing to speculate on Sabina’s motives, particularly with his young son.

  “Pri’mom hasn’t said you need oversight, but I’m sure she can’t resist critiques. Am I correct?” Isrid smiled as Chander ducked his head again. “And as long as she isn’t correcting you in front of others, perhaps you should note her advice.”

  “I can handle that, Dad.”

  Isrid waited.

  “Maria’s out there, you know.” Chander chewed his lip and shifted his weight from foot to foot.

  The shipwide announcement telling passengers to web in for the eventual N-space drop blared again and while it repeated, Isrid observed his son. How much should he tell the boy? Chander was old enough to know that marriage wasn’t for love; its purposes were for breeding approval, raising children, and, of course, serving as a political tool. If his son knew about Sabina’s obsession with Maria Guillotte, then he probably knew both his primary parents were Maria’s regular lovers. However, Maria could never enter a Terran marriage due to genetic damage she’d received near Tantor’s Sun. For Sabina, that made Maria an enticing morsel, especially because she could never fully own and control her.

  Isrid wondered if Sabina had thought he was jealous when he’d sent Maria away two months ago. But he’d assigned Maria to oversee the contractors in G-145 because of the sensitivity of the situation. Maria handled people and personality problems deftly, in addition to being his best analyst with a military intelligence background. Those Terran contractors had only a tenuous right to work on that moon—none of them knew he’d gotten the leases by kidnapping, torturing, and coercing Major Ariane Kedros.

  Kedros had seemed immune to their standard drug-induced torture and he’d had to threaten to expose her and her former crew as the destroyers of Ura-Guinn, at which point she’d signed the Aether Exploration leases over. Maria understood the double-blackmail scheme hanging over the leases, and how everything depended upon Kedros staying quiet.

  “Maria’s not the real reason she’s going, you know,” Chander said cannily, breaking Isrid’s train of thought.

  “And what is?” Isrid asked.

  “I don’t know, but I can sense revenge. I wanted to warn you.” Such adult words from a boy of eleven.

  Isrid looked for signs that Chander was lying or exaggerating. He wasn’t, which led Isrid to consider the idea that Sabina had underestimated her own son and let her guard down, something she would never do around Isrid.

  “Thank you, Chander.” Isrid inclined his head as if he were talking to an adult and added the signal, I am grateful.

  His response delighted the boy. Isrid sent him to his quarters. He called and placated the ship’s crew, who were worried about missing the departure window from Mars Orbital Two. Then he took his D-tranny and quickly webbed himself into the bunk in his private quarters.

  As he dozed, Isrid’s mind skipped to Major Kedros. His first action, when he woke, would be to order an intelligence report on her recent activities. Although the Feeds ecstatically proclaimed the Ura-Guinn sun had survived, his classified government sources didn’t project a good prognosis for the habitats in the system. Instead of going out quickly in a nova, his brother and family might have suffered a slow, agonizing death from cosmic radiation caused by flares or coronal mass emissions, which didn’t engender any sympathy in him for Kedros. He smiled as he fell asleep. He hoped Kedros had been dismissed or, at the least, suffered the wrath of AFCAW’s Directorate of Intelligence for opening G-145 to Terran defense contractors.

  CHAPTER 4

  The crèche-get in their city-ships aren’t like you and me.

  They’re always out of fashion after they get to their ar

  rival point, where they sit for a couple years, sucking up

  all the news they can and begging for spare gametes to

  keep their gene pool healthy. Makes me wonder what

  kind of agreements the Generational Lines make with

  the Minoans. [Reply not indexed.] They’re the only ones

  entrusted with installing the precious time buoys, that’s

  why.

  —Grant Iordanou, Public Node at XiCheng Crossing &

  Stephanos Street, Alexandria, Hellas Prime, 2105.99.17.02

  UT, indexed by Heraclitus 12 under Conflict Imperative

  N-space piloting was like steering a sensory deprivation tank through a canyon of indescribable terrors. The navigational “path,” different for every pilot, wound between shadowy maelstroms. Baleful furnaces whipped up flashes and discharges of energy. If a pilot turned away from the path or peered too earnestly into the storms, faces appeared and hungry flickers of energy reached out—but Ariane never looked into the maelstrom.

  As she’d tried to explain to Muse 3, human consciousness and concentration were required to steer a ship through N-space. Even though the maneuvers could be exhilarating, she felt the clash numb and separate her from what felt like submerged and instinctual terrors. Physically, she could expect weight loss, fatigue, and, after extremely bad drops, loss of hair. The clash helped her concentrate and got her through to the worst point: the transition back to real-space. Even under the best conditions, this was unpleasant.

  Ariane sent the transition command to the referential engine via protected connections that didn’t use processors. Each time she started the procedure to get back to real-space, she thanked Gaia that shielded analog circuits worked in N-space.

  Next came the nausea. Knowing that this intense feeling would pass helped her move to the next step, flip a switch, mark it off, and move on to the step after that. . . .

  The nausea abated and the sensations started. This was when the pilot realized how unpleasant light, sound, touch, smell, and taste could be. As usual, she smelled caustic cleaning lye, tasted something metallic, and felt deafened by the humming equipment. The console burned like ice.

  During the transition, she always tried to picture her mother’s laboratory and how it smelled. Her mother had been a designer botanist on Nuovo Adriatico, developing substitutes for popular spices, namely cinnamon and cardamom. There were always samples made into candies and sweetbreads; she remembered the sound of her mother’s voice: Try some, Ari, and tell me what you think. Her mother was the first to use her
middle name, Ahrilan, as her nickname, which had made her transformation to “Ariane Kedros” easier.

  Luckily, these were memories that Ariane Kedros could allow herself, since Owen had been careful to create her false records with a similar name and background. Ariane Kedros had also been raised by botanists on Nuovo Adriatico. Those particular botanists, now dead, might have been surprised to find they had a child and they weren’t buried anywhere near her real parents. This hadn’t caused her any difficulties, since she’d purposely avoided going back to Nuovo Adriatico.

  Her senses eventually calmed down. The air that circulated in the ship had the slight smell of ceramic dust. She started up navigational and real-space systems, seeing the destination channel blink on the console. The ship was right where it was supposed to be, in the system whose formal designation was a long and forgettable alphanumeric string. Everyone called the system G-145; the number was the generational mission and the Gamma indicated the Pilgrimage ship line, which had expended the years to drag a precious time buoy out here.

  She started the gravity generator and the incoming message signal beeped, making her jump. Someone sent a package to Matt before the ship entered N-space, and the Pilgrimage crew had allowed delivery through the G-145 buoy. After she acknowledged receipt, the envelope flared into the center of her display. She saw the seal of Athens Point Law Enforcement revolving above angry red text that said, “Positive identification of receiver required for service.”

  Uh-oh. That might indicate a remote subpoena. This package wouldn’t open for anyone but Matt, so it ended up on his queue. She shrugged and pushed the wake-up alarms for Matt and Joyce, even though they might have wakened naturally since the ship systems would have signaled their implants to stop the D-tranny.

  “Hey, Ari, you don’t look too bad. Must have been an easy drop,” Matt said when he eventually climbed up on the control deck.

  Meaning I still have my hair and I only lost a little weight. Ariane’s mouth twitched as she turned in her chair. In that motion, she realized how tired she felt.

  Matt’s shirt trailed on the deck from one hand while he stared at the in-the-round display above and in front of her console. His bare chest was exposed and she made herself look away from this close sample of a lean, muscled male abdomen. After all, Matt was crew.

  “An awesome sight, right in the middle of our front window,” Matt said. Of course, Aether’s Touch didn’t have real windows because of radiation.

  “What is that?” Joyce was dressed in crisp civilian clothes, though they somewhat resembled a uniform. “Hey, don’t you guys require shirt and shoes to work here?”

  “That is the Pilgrimage Three, one of the largest generational ships ever built. What a beauty!” Matt pulled on his shirt and padded over to the front console, ignoring Joyce’s barb about not wearing his sticky-soled shoes.

  “We’re on approved docking vector and our gravity generator is aligned.” Ariane looked up at the display. True, the Pilgrimage III was impressive. Currently configured in habitat mode, the generational ship looked like a fairy castle with spires bursting upward from her bulky engines and gravity generator.

  “Have you done voice check-in?” Matt looked at the console, examining the status.

  “No. I only sent our ship key and got our docking vector. If you want to formally check in, be my guest,” Ariane said.

  Matt tapped the console. “Pilgrimage Three, this is the Aether’s Touch on approach as directed. We’re carrying three crew members, with the following authorization keys.”

  The response was immediate and cheery. “Welcome back to Gamma-145, Aether’s Touch. Looking forward to greeting everyone. Pilgrimage Three out.”

  “What do they mean by ‘greeting’?” Joyce said suspiciously.

  “It’s tradition for everyone to disembark upon entry to the solar system, tour the controlling generational ship, and meet with the command staff. It allows them to catch up on Autonomist, or Terran, idioms and customs. A dinner is usually involved.” Ariane swiveled her chair around to look at Joyce. His dismayed expression didn’t raise any sympathy in her.

  “Is there a problem, Mr. Joyce?” Matt’s tone was acidic. “Please, enlighten us.”

  “I need to get to Beta Priamos Station. Quickly.”

  “Well, well.” Ariane saw Matt’s brown eyes flicker, then harden.

  Priamos was the moon with ruins of an ancient, but non-Minoan, culture; Ariane and Matt had first prospected it months before. Orbiting Priamos, Beta Priamos Station had an elevator down to that moon, as well as the best access to “the artifact,” as everybody called the possibly defunct buoy. Not only was the artifact firmly anchored in Aether Exploration’s claim, but Matt and Ariane had left their most expensive bot on it during their last prospecting season. They hadn’t deserted this bot voluntarily, which was another story entirely. Regardless, any research regarding the artifact or the ruins should generate wealth for Aether Exploration, so Matt was a bit protective about the commercial processes inside G-145.

  “Our business, as prospectors, is entwined with the generational ship lines and we will observe their customs. I’m including you in that statement, Joyce.” Matt abruptly left the control deck.

  “Is it me, or did he wake up on the wrong side of his bunk?”

  “Don’t worry, it’s definitely you.” She couldn’t miss a chance to needle Joyce, although she wondered if Matt had opened the message from Athens Point LEF. She swiveled back to face the console and display walls. “We’ve got light-speed data now, so let me introduce you to G-145.”

  Joyce sat down beside her as she adjusted the displays to first show the entire solar system.

  “We have your predictable system here,” she said. “The sun is slightly larger than Sol, but its radiation specs are right on. All the planetary orbits are in the same plane. For major planets, we’ve got three rocks toward the sun and three gas giants, one barely within the inner system and two far out. The divide between the inner and outer system is a huge meteor belt of junk.”

  “Nothing with Gaian-based life, or at most, nothing usable.” Joyce kept up with net-think.

  “Except for the ice ball named Sophia Two, but you’re right, G-145 appeared to be a bust.” She nodded. “It didn’t have exotic resources or seem worthy of colonization.When we checked in with the Pilgrimage for our first prospecting season, the buzz was that everyone would lose money; no one could recoup costs for this mission. Here’s our original claim.”

  On the wall in front of them, the image adjusted backward in time, the planets moving retrograde. Tapping, she laid a continuous three-dimensional swathe over the solar system image. This space-time slice went through the meteor belt twice and it swung by the inner gas giant close enough to extend their placer claim over one moon.

  “Laomedon and Priamos, its moon,” Joyce said. “I’ve done my homework. Laomedon is the innermost gas giant and Priamos is its second-largest moon.”

  “More importantly, our placer claim covers this point.” Ariane zoomed in on what looked like an empty spot of space near Laomedon, which only resolved to a dot with a designation string of garbled letters and numbers.

  “I take it that’s where the artifact sits. Is that a stable Lagrange point?”

  “No. It’s anchored, with no station-keeping propulsion to be found. The only example we’ve got of something that never moves with respect to planetary bodies is the Minoan time buoys.”

  “So that’s why we have a gaggle of scientists hired by contractors on all sides: Terran, Autonomist, and let’s not forget the Minoans. What a mess.” Joyce shook his head.

  She winced. Part of this problem had resulted when she signed over leases to Terran interests. Those leases had saved her life; they were her payment for Parmet’s protection of her and Brandon’s identities. If she and Matt didn’t protest the legality of her signatures, Parmet wouldn’t release information that Ariane was pilot, and the mysterious, rich Mr. Leukos commander, of the cr
ew that destroyed—that might have destroyed—the Terran Ura-Guinn Colony.

  On the other hand, Matt was the one who had balanced the Terran against the Autonomist against the Minoan contractors. He’d also tried to balance military contractors with purely commercial ones. It’d been tedious for him to get the right counteractions. When he showed her the lease and contracting structure, he’d emphasized that this was unavoidable and perhaps the best step forward for humankind.

  “Matt’s streamlining the reporting. He created a new matrix that’s been approved by the CAW Space Exploration, Exploitation, and Economics Control Board.” She couldn’t avoid using a defensive tone, still feeling guilty for all the work that Matt had to do for the SEEECB flunkies.

  “Don’t worry. Although he’ll never admit it to Mr. Journey, the colonel thinks he did the right thing. The colonel even admires the Byzantine snarl that’s resulted.” Joyce grinned.

  As if I care about what Owen Edones thinks. She wondered why Owen had sent Joyce here and immediately squelched her curiosity. She didn’t have a need to know, but she’d bet a hundred HKD that this had something to do with the Terrans. They were still the enemy, or at the least, they were the other side, no matter what lip service AFCAW intelligence gave to Pax Minoica.

  “There’s more to interest the Terrans than just the artifact.” She changed the display to zoom in on the third planet from the sun, labeled Sophia II. “They think the Builders—that’s what they’re calling this alien civilization—were terraforming this planet. They found what they think are inactive sensors on the surface.”

  “I thought they found nothing artificial on any of the inner planets during the second-wave prospecting.” Joyce picked up his slate and began making notes. “Sophia Two was staked by Taethis Exploration; why didn’t they catch this earlier?”

  “There’s a limit to what second-wave prospectors can find using telebots. The lessee now has contractors capable of surface exploration.”