Vendetta Protocol

by Kevin Ikenberry

  But maybe that was what they wanted.

  Crawley pushed the thoughts away. If the Terran Council wanted him dead, they had one hell of a game of catch-up to play.

  After her last class of the day, and a forty-five minute maglev ride to Esperance from Perth, Berkeley slipped on sandals and jeans for the ten-minute walk to Sunset Beach. The ocean was calm, the kind of surf that Downy and the boys would call glassy. They were all in the water by the east break. A bonfire stood unlit and ready for sundown. A dozen coolers of beer and food sat in a loose ring around the fire pit.

  Some things were better than sitting at home. Her searches for the subject’s physical characteristics ran on four continents, and with facial recognition in place, the entire supercomputer complex at Livermore chewed through millions of images every second, looking for a needle in the haystack. Simply put, there was nothing she could do until there was a successful hit, and the last thing she wanted to do was sit at her terminal anymore.

  Mars wouldn’t be up for another four hours. She’d be sitting by the bonfire with Kieran’s friends—their friends—when it did. The last time, Downy had cursed Kieran’s name and shouted obscenities toward the sky for ten minutes before they all burst out laughing.

  Downy had raised his beer to the sky and tipped the neck toward the red planet. “Love ya, Sleepy.”

  All of them chorused the sentiment. It had brought tears to Berkeley’s eyes. Kieran would be home soon enough and able to enjoy a few weeks of leave before they departed for the Outer Rim. The aftermath of the Great War left the remnants of the Colonial Defense Forces in complete disarray. There would be much to do if the line were to be strengthened. Surfing would be out of the question, most likely, but they would be together. That was what mattered, after all. Her troubles, and those of Crawley, would stay with her until then. Kieran had enough on his mind without knowing about their problems. There wasn’t a thing he could do anyway.

  At the beachside promenade, she turned west and headed up the long, gentle hill toward Allan’s bar. Making the trip from their house to the bar reminded her of Kieran’s first night on walkabout. He’d walked down that very sidewalk in a driving rainstorm, loving every moment of his freedom. Though in a strange place, he’d summoned the courage to walk into an unfamiliar venue, even with a null profile, and order a beer. What he found was more than food and drink—he’d met his first new friend, Allan Wright. In his second trip through life, forced or not, he’d need all the great friends he could get.

  As she pushed through the swinging doors, the familiar scent of beer and fried fish caught her nose and made her mouth water. There were fine restaurants throughout Esperance, and their seafood was divine, but Allan was the master of the fish taco. A larger-than-normal crowd filled the bar. Allan walked from the kitchen, through the bar, and out into the small dining room with his arms full of food.

  “Berkeley.” Allan’s longish blond hair and glittering blue eyes topped off his burly frame. He was somewhere north of fifty but still surfed and enjoyed a beer or two. “Can ya help a bloke out for a few minutes?”

  She grinned. “Absolutely.”

  Wrapping a towel around her waist, she stepped behind the bar. A couple of the regulars clapped and said her name. Grabbing a handful of beers from the tub, she responded to their requests and slowly got into a groove.

  Berkeley found she enjoyed being able to unplug and do something fun for a bit of time every weekend. Teaching, grading, and research would always be there. For a few minutes, she could enjoy the company of others, many of them close friends, and be someone other than an academic.

  An hour later, Allan stepped next to her. “Ya came by at the right time.”

  “Don’t I always?” She grinned and returned the side embrace. “You going to join us at the bonfire tonight?”

  “Planned on it. I’ll close the kitchen early and direct stragglers down there. Downy took enough of my beer to fill the bay.” Allan’s smile softened a little. “How’s our boy?”

  “He’d rather be here,” she replied. At least here, he’d be protected.

  “Of course he would.” Allan took the towel from her shoulder. “Go join the lads, and I’ll be along shortly. Just give me my hug, love.” He opened his arms, and she stepped inside. His shirt smelled of fried fish and onions, but it was one of her favorite places to be. His warm breath found the ear that faced away from the door. As soon as he spoke, she knew the situation was much worse than she feared. “Crawley called me an hour ago. He said to tell you things were hairy, but he’s thinking about you.”

  Berkeley grabbed Allan tighter. Crawley had used the subtle language they’d practiced for the last couple of years to send her a message. “Word for word?”

  “Yes,” Allan said. “Is everything all right?”

  “No, but he has a plan.”

  “Doesn’t he always?” Allan released her. “Anything you need, it’s here, waiting for you.”

  “Thank you, Allan.” She stood on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek, raising a chorus of hoots from the collected regulars. With a laugh, she pushed herself around the bar and made for the door, waving as she did. Outside in the gathering darkness, she paused by the edge of the house, just around the corner from Kieran’s original room, and activated her neurals to send two messages.

  The first message shifted her neurals from one persona set to another, adding an extra layer of encryption. For posterity, she coded it again through a defunct military communications satellite set and bounced it from Luna to Cambridge. Her search protocols dumped references to Mars and all recent searches. Without using the big computers, it would take longer to find out what had happened to the missing subject, but that could not be helped. The Terran Council was onto Crawley, and that meant they were onto her. It was a matter of time before they found Kieran. Every layer she could add would give them all more time.

  The second message was to Kieran and was a repeat of Crawley’s words verbatim. She added that she loved him and that they would talk soon. He’d know that something was going on, and Lily would elevate her protection status. Kieran was smart enough to start really looking at things around him, too. If he found anything that tipped him off, or if there was an attempt on his life, Lily would take charge of the situation and get him away. They’d planned for this within weeks of Kieran walking back into Allan’s bar after she thought he’d died. Crawley’s coded-message system had once been a little running joke, but there was nothing funny now.

  She wiped the message clean and prepared to send a third one to the private Terran Council server on Luna to erase her activity. When the connection established, Berkeley froze. From the corner of her eye, she saw a blinking light. A search profile she’d programmed within the Terran Council systems had been successful.

  A message attempting to confirm the frequency of the Sapporo transmitter bounced undelivered from the prelate’s personal server. Terran Council analysts were trying to recreate the event. The exact address where the message was supposed to go in the server was now vacant. Whatever had been there was no longer there. Berkeley requested a log of all file transfers in the past forty-eight hours and found that a startling amount of data, nearly a petabyte, had been removed from the servers and downloaded to Earth, through a variety of servers, to a single geographical location.

  New York City. Son of a bitch!

  In the Livermore storage system, the only items large enough to crack the petabyte range were batch files. The missing subject managed to manipulate her batch file to a server where she could download it anonymously. Well, almost. Berkeley couldn’t trace the batch file, but she could look into large file transfers in New York. She might find the needle in the haystack, but the subject clearly did not want to be found. The batch file was every bit of data autonomously collected on the subject and not easily discarded. Disappearing was hard, but creating a false identity was incredibly e
asy. Gathering the information she could, Berkeley disconnected discreetly from the server, wiping her tracks clean as she did. Whoever or whatever had wanted to know when the subject was offline had disappeared. In the data stream, she found telemetry that matched the interference observed when the subject left Sapporo.

  She moved from Sapporo to New York and then downloaded the batch file. Why?

  The answer was obvious—New York had more untraceable bandwidth than Hokkaido. They didn’t want to be found. They. Common sense said that the likelihood of it being something council related, especially coming from the prelate’s own server, was high.

  In the untraceable bandwidth pathways of New York, the protocol could still be found. Berkeley connected to her drone server in her Perth office behind their firewall and set the search parameters moving. The file pathway was long closed, but a batch file left traceable elements. If she could find one of those, she could get the address of the subject’s protocol and follow it via the sensors through New York City. Wherever the subject went, the sensors could follow her. As long as the subject didn’t board the next plane for Paris, it could work. Once she could lock onto the subject’s protocol, Crawley would order the subject retrieved. Before they put her into military service, though, there was a lot of data to collate and examine. This subject shouldn’t have been able to do what she’d done.

  Launching the search parameters took a minute, maybe two, and then Berkeley was off to the bonfire at the beach. Her stomach twisted in knots as she walked, the fear that she was in as much danger as Crawley and the others taking root. Allan knew she was in danger, and he would find as many ways as possible to protect her. In a group of her friends, even for a couple of hours, she could be invisible.

  Berkeley smiled in the darkness. Invisible.

  With a final message sent, she disconnected her neural network and felt absolute silence in her mind for the first time since childhood. The effect was calming. The cacophony of constant information winked out in a heartbeat. Berkeley wasn’t going to miss the connectivity. Kieran had shown her how to relax and simply be. She could get to the information she needed. It would take a little time, but it was possible. With a flex of her hand, she felt the double band on her left ring finger and smiled at another new possibility. The Terran Council would be searching for Dr. Gwendolyn B. Bennett. When she’d married Kieran, she changed her legal name to Berkeley Roark. It wasn’t much, but it helped to quell some of the raging fear in her gut.

  The lit bonfire called through the darkness, and Berkeley could hear Downy and the boys getting started. They had the right idea. For one night, she’d let the searches run and try to relax.

  She might not have the chance the next day.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Amy Nakamura observed the silhouetted New York skyline as she walked outside into a cold evening. Her breath exploded in a cloud of steam around her head as she turned right and headed for an autobus. Mally told her to find something called the Waldorf-Astoria Downtown and go there. Her skin prickled, and she licked her dry lips. At the autobus, she sat down in a window seat and gazed numbly up into the skyline. The prospect of freedom seemed far away, and she wondered what the point of anything had been.

  After the salon, she was unrecognizable, even to herself. Her short black hair ended in brown and red highlights just above her shoulder blades. Rail-thin arms had been replaced with athletic, toned arms that matched her equally impressive legs. Lingering soreness reminded her of what she’d been and how weak she’d let herself become. The rest of her was eye-catching and different from her previous body, to the point that her gait and mannerisms were off. Even a trained observer would have real difficulty in positively identifying her as the girl who’d killed two Terran Council agents. But if anything, she looked the part now more than ever.

  A shiver of cold ran down her spine, and it felt as though every hair stood on end. Her left arm twitched violently, but Amy could not feel it. The dancing limb caught the eyes of several other passengers. There was no feeling of embarrassment or ability to control what was happening. Detached, Amy realized the numbness coming in was taking over everything. Maybe she was dying, after all. Maybe they’d found her and shut her down. Why should I fight it? Let me die. I don’t care who I am anymore.

  Yes, you do. You’re a fucking pilot, Amy! You knew what you were getting into when you raised your hand and took that oath! Stop running from it. Her father’s voice, insistent and harsh, came through the static in her mind like the crack of damnation.

  You cannot change who you really are.

  You’re wrong about me, Father. You wouldn’t know me now. She tried to tell him. Her mouth opened, but no words came out. I’m sorry, Mally. I can’t go any further. Let me die.

  <>

  In the fogging glass of the autobus, a full moon above the unending skyline of New York, Amy Nakamura’s eyes rolled up into her head, and she slumped against the window.

  Ayumi.

  Mally had picked the name because it was close to Amy’s, but she loved the sound of it. One of the Japanese translations said the name meant “adventurous.” That was fine with Mally. Changing her self-reference modes to reflect Ayumi for physical communications was easy. Since the Mally persona was never real, in a physical sense, any difficulty would come from someone else knowing her true identity. After all, she was Mally only to Kieran and those around him. Beyond Berkeley and maybe Allan Wright, there would not be anyone who could identify her. Her probability scanners put that at less than 1 percent and declining nearly a point per hour. The anonymity of New York City played to her advantage.

  As soon as her cheek touched the cold, slick window, Ayumi—she loved the sound of it even in her thoughts!—jumped upright. The sheen of icy condensation on her cheek stunned and fascinated her. With her right hand, she rubbed the water off her face with her fingers. Feeling the warming liquid, she stared at it with fresh new eyes. Data poured in through her optical and tactile sensors, and the human connections in her new brain culled it into unfamiliar distinctions. She did not need to know that the temperature of the water was nine degrees Celsius. Her human mind classified it as cold. The air blowing down from the heater above the windows was, by contrast, merely warm. She wiped her wet hand on her black pants and sat back against the seat.

  Do I really need to know how warm or cold something is? This body will tell me based upon its comfort level. Comfort was a state of mind. Kieran had been soaking wet on his first night walkabout in a cold rainstorm but said that it did not bother him. He was comfortable.

  As long as I am comfortable, the data is irrelevant. I can always determine specifics, but I do not need to be bothered by them in order to be comfortable.

  Ayumi.

  I am Ayumi. They know me as Mally, but Mally did not physically exist beyond the spaces of Kieran’s brain. The thought stopped her, and she wondered if he would have liked the name. She decided that he would have approved, and it made her happy. They will know me as Ayumi.

  The world will know me.

  She shivered at the idea of an identity to match her new body. The hard plastic seat under her produced a new set of feelings, ones she classified as discomfort, and she immediately felt proud of herself. A reflexive sigh brought a great rush of air into her lungs, and it flushed Ayumi’s face in excitement. A distracting sensation touched her nose, and before she realized it, one hand came up to brush away an errant lock of hair.

  Ayumi questioned the response, wondering how much of the reaction was hers and how much was her body’s. There was no immediate answer, and the data was inconclusive. It was a reflex, but that defied the total control Mally had sought when downloading herself into the girl’s body. The willing vessel provided by the weak-minded woman was perfect for Mally’s… Ayumi’s plan.

  The autobus stopped in front of an ornate building, and a speaker i
n the ceiling came to life with a nasal, monotone voice. “This stop features the historic Waldorf-Astoria Downtown. Please see the front desk for guided-tour information. This bus will depart in ninety seconds.”

  The loudspeaker clicked off, and Ayumi stood. Her first step, the left foot, was clumsy and awkward. She caught herself on one of the chrome handholds in the cabin and stepped again with the opposite foot with greater success. Shuffling off the bus took her full measure of concentration, but as she stepped down, Ayumi felt in control of her legs. She wanted to run screaming down the street at full speed, but at the same time, she recognized a familiar signal from her stomach. She was hungry. Famished. The girl’s body had been without significant fuel for more than thirty-six hours since their airport escape. It was time for sustenance.

  Ayumi walked through a gilded revolving door and into a lobby from another time. Soft jazz music, the kind Kieran would have hated, tinkled from the ceiling speakers. A variety of humans, Vemeh, and Tuegs bustled about their duties as Ayumi approached the desk. The Vemeh resembled an insect known in Kieran’s mind as a praying mantis—mantis religiosa—that walked upright on its powerful hind legs. The blue-skinned Tueg had a more aquatic biology, and Kieran would have mentally compared it to something from an awful black-and-white horror movie from his century. Tuegs certainly looked the part. Humans considered the Vemeh to be allies. The Tuegs remaining on Earth were treated as allies, though their government seventy light years away was not.

  A human wearing a display visor smiled at her. “Miss Nakamura, we’ve been expecting you. Thank you for staying with us at the Waldorf-Astoria. You’ll be staying for two nights?”

  Ayumi nodded. The word flowed out of her mouth in Japanese before she could stop it. “Hai. Um… yes, thank you.”

  The man nodded and returned to his holokeypad, typing letters and numbers in a furious dance. “Your registration is prepaid, and you will be staying in the Astor Suite. If you’re hungry, the kitchen in our upstairs lounge will be open for another hour. Tonight’s special is prime rib, and it is simply outstanding. Thank you, Miss Nakamura. Please let us know if we can be of any service.”