Vendetta Protocol

by Kevin Ikenberry

  Aside from a particularly nasty flu strain requiring a second vaccination ten years before, Penelope Neige had never visited the Terran Council medical facilities in the catacombs under the L’École de Médecine. The elevator doors opened to a nervous blond doctor trying to use his anger to cover his shock.

  “Madame Chairman, I must protest the conduct of your personal security team. I—”

  Neige stepped forward, well inside the man’s comfort zone. “Dr. Berg, step aside now.”

  “Your team killed one of my nurses in cold blood.”

  She lowered her voice. “Has anyone else been inside the room besides that one nurse and my guard?”

  Berg shook his head. “No.”

  “Good.” She smirked. “My team has done their job, and no one else will be harmed. Your files regarding the patient will be sanitized and turned over to my staff in the next ten minutes. Is that clear?”

  “You—ten minutes? There are months of data to collect.”

  Neige stomped away, leaving him to watch the back of her expensive, fully mink coat. “Then I suggest you get with it, Dr. Berg.”

  Her guards had already cleaned the patient’s room of any trace that the nurse had been killed. Security—moreover, secrecy—was critical. Crawley thought he’d covered everything. But he had not planned on anything like this. The prostitute from Memphis had been a risk to acquire and secure, but given her brain damage and the relative lack of certainty that any substantive data would be retrievable, it had been a very low risk—one that appeared to be paying off.

  The petite blonde sat looking out the window. Part of her face seemed slack, but as she turned, there was an intelligent fire in her eyes.

  Neige nodded at her. “My security team tells me you can communicate. I understand you have information for me.”

  The screen beeped words scrolled across the lower portion. “Who the hell are you?”

  Neige laughed. “That doesn’t matter right now. What is his name?”

  “His first name was Kieran. He remembered nothing else.” She tried to sound out a set of words and gave up. The screen beeped again. “His protocol specifically disobeyed orders to report. And she did this to me.”

  Neige’s eyebrows rose involuntarily. “He had an artificially intelligent protocol—a test article. It would have done no such thing to another human unless he was in danger.”

  Beep. “You people tried to kill him, didn’t you?” The young woman’s bleary eyes were narrowed and angry.

  Neige had to smile. “Indeed.”

  Another beep. “She created a secondary identity through my channels to pay for Kieran’s bill. The pathway was not deactivated when she jacked me.”

  Neige consulted her own neurals. Being “jacked” was the equivalent for a forced network disconnection. The trauma induced on the brain and nervous system of a victim often rendered them completely vegetative, if not dead. A few rare cases survived with no apparent trauma. Appearances said the girl was progressing and would eventually heal, but that did not answer the larger question.

  “What woke you? Anything specific? Or something—”

  Another beep. “The pathway activated again. Different target but the same pathway sequencing.”

  “This Kieran is alive?” Neige asked, her voice rising.

  Beep. “His protocol is.”

  Oh, Adam. I knew you were up to something. She pushed away the thought and squinted at the girl. Thirty years in public service dealing with countless staffs and civilians gave her a unique perspective. Something about this girl did not fit. “You’re not a sex worker.”

  The girl made a sound like a choked laugh. The screen beeped again. “You try paying off technical-school debts during the cycle of a loan. I did, but I realized I was making a shitload more money doing virtual sex. All it takes is a little acting, and voilà. It’s like being a politician.”

  Neige snorted. “Very true. I’m sure you’ve been searching while you’ve been attached to this network. What have you found?” Neige crossed her arms and let a half smile cross her face. A good technician with great instincts could pay off in spades. “You’re looking for him, aren’t you?”

  Beep. “Of course I am. If his protocol is alive, I can find him and shut her down. There are seventeen men with the name Kieran in service. Six are Terran Defense Force, four are merchant marines, and seven are in the Fleet. Based on their ages, there are only four who are real possibilities. One in the Terran Defense Force and three in the Fleet.”

  Neige made a “give me” gesture, curling her fingers toward her own chest. “Keep going. What have you found?”

  Beep. “Based on travel records, there are only two I could have known. Both are Fleet. One is on Mars, participating in an exercise, and the other is on Ganymede as part of a science expedition. I have been unable to get a photo because of their locations.”

  Neige turned toward the medical screen as if consulting the data there. The carefully constructed gesture was part of her diplomatic repertoire. Her neurals working overtime, Neige contacted her staff and ordered reporting procedures activated on the two possible subjects.

  Queries came back almost immediately for more specific information. Closing her eyes against the rising anger, she composed a complete order.

  Effective immediately, all Terran Council assets are to identify, observe, and report on all Fleet and Terran Defense Force personnel with the first name of Kieran. Photographic confirmation ordered. Additional information will follow.

  She turned back to the blonde. “Anything else?”

  Beep. “There is a lot of miscellaneous information stored in Mally’s residual data. I’m attempting to sort it before I risk a real connection.”

  “We’ll connect you—”

  Beep. “No. It won’t work like that. Connecting with me now will only get you a bunch of unusable data and tip off Mally that I’m alive. Given her connection to me, I can compile the data and see if there is something useful. It will take time.”

  The answer was not unexpected, but it was troubling. Time and exposure were risks that she, and Crawley’s program, could not withstand for long. “We’ll see that you have the best care.”

  “Like my nurse?” The beep that preceded her typed words did not come. She was good.

  Neige nodded in admiration. The girl clearly knew the scope of things around her. “We have to limit those who know Kieran and what he may be capable of.”

  “He’s not the problem.” The girl shook her head, and the screen kept typing. “It’s Mally you need to worry about.”

  Neige nodded. “I want all of your files on her.”

  The girl smiled briefly and gazed out the window. “Will I heal?”

  Neige nodded. “It will take some time, and there are many obstacles you’ll have to overcome. We’ll do our best to treat you.”

  Time, though, was a variable that was not on the girl’s side. They would get the information compiled through her brain whether she was a willing participant or not. Neige smiled again. “Now, get some rest. I will come back and visit when you have the data prepared.”

  The girl glanced away. Neige was not a gambler but gave even odds that the girl already knew what the end result was going to be. Without a serious attempt to fix the shattered connections in her brain, the network technician-cum-prostitute would likely not recover all functions before her execution. Neige believed it would be a mercy killing, if anything. The poor thing had been in the right place at the wrong time. That the entity responsible for the girl’s predicament was of Neige’s causation was a moot point. Crawley’s original subject was likely alive. Or, more troubling, his protocol had managed to escape and had gone rogue in the Terran Council servers. Nothing would be safe.

  Outside the room, Neige turned to the two guards at the door. “No one goes in or out except the two of you. Se
e to her meals and her comfort level. If there is any change, or someone tries to get in there, notify me immediately.”

  There was one final bit of business, but she waited until boarding her autocar in a cool Parisian drizzle before calling. General Crawley, however, did not answer. Smiling at the game her old friend wanted to play, she used the immediate diplomatic connection line designed to get anyone in the world who was similarly equipped within five seconds. There was also the standard-issue emergency beacon implanted by the TDF in their leaders. A simple search would tell her precisely where he was. He’d avoided his prearranged transport to Sydney, but he would have to surface there soon. His eggs were in one large basket, after all.

  After two minutes, there was no response. Neige tried again, and a third time, with the same result. She lit a cigarette and took a long drag before pursing one side of her mouth to blow the smoke upward to be recycled by the onboard filters. She chided herself. Of course Adam wouldn’t answer. He knows that I know.

  The prelate asked her company for dinner in Edinburgh in two hours time. There would be just enough time to get ready before the short flight northward. If anything, the passing time would give her a chance to think.

  Oh, Adam, she thought with a smile. I only wanted a chance to say I was sorry.

  No, that wasn’t true. She was not sorry, nor could she ever consider herself apologetic when it came to getting what she felt she deserved. His place had always been in the services, while hers had been in the political spectrum. As youngsters, they learned that success meant they had to entwine themselves with the other side. Adam never cared for it, and thus, he’d fallen behind.

  Penelope Neige sat and smoked as the car sped toward her lonely apartment overlooking the city. The wide-open windows and polished-marble floors made her apartments perpetually cool, but she liked that. Her black cat, Onyx, would greet her at the door, and she would be happy. There was no need for marriage when the proper lover would come and go at the time of her choosing. There was no time for any of the domestic bliss her parents coveted. Especially not when so much power was at her fingertips. Her thoughts carefully disengaged from the interesting girl who would have to die and Crawley almost getting away with his greatest wish. For years, she’d tried to get inside his mind and get ahead of his plans. From her vantage point, she could now go after the prelate’s chair.

  The prelate never asked council members to dinner and a show. His motives did not concern her. The man was nothing more than a figurehead. But she could use the unconventional meeting for her own purposes. The timing could not have been better. Perhaps she’d share the Terran Defense Force’s lies and broken promises, if time permitted. Making a strong enough case for the prelate to intervene and halt all scientific programs would be easy. He would do whatever she told him to do out of fear.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Teaching in Perth presented a small problem for Berkeley. Long research hours, when needed, made it impossible to catch the last maglev for Esperance at 2200. Kieran had suggested she rent a flat in Perth, and she’d found one overlooking the Pacific for a reasonable rate. She accused him of having an ulterior motive when he’d spend several days a week there with her instead of surfing at Esperance. Having him in Perth, even when he’d sit in the rear of the lecture hall and make silly faces, was worth it. Vacating the small apartment in a mad rush seemed so wrong. She lingered there as long as possible, not wanting to leave.

  In the kitchen, she brewed a small cup of tea and looked out the lone southeast-facing window in the general direction of Esperance. The boys would be at the beach, hitting the waves while the surf was up but not dangerous. Another perfect afternoon in the seaside town that she would not be able to enjoy. Before he’d left for Mars, Kieran would have been out there with them, and she would have let him go. For a moment, the vision of his blue eyes and quirky little smile made her heart hurt. She missed him more than she thought possible. They were supposed to see each other in a few weeks and have almost a month together before he departed for the Rim. All those plans were now suspended, and the uncertainly left her staring out the window, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Crawley was missing, and she was left to follow his depressing instructions in case of compromise and hope for the best.

  Mid-sip, a neural indicator came to life, and she opened her messaging program. The teacup fell from her fingers and shattered in the sink, spraying a fine mist of Earl Grey across the freshly cleaned counters.

  Autonomous servers at Mountain Home recorded and sent separate videos, which she watched in a fascination that quickly became shock and horror. From a distance, she could see a female subject moving through the headstones and then speaking with Myron Brooks. She keyed the audio from Brooks’s communication gear just as the girl stopped at Kieran’s headstone.

  Why Kieran?

  Oh, fuck. Hands trembling, she raised them to her mouth as the girl pulled out a pistol and gunned down Brooks. There was no doubt the girl was Crawley’s missing subject, even with substantial microsurgical adjustments. Brooks had confirmed it, but the girl’s mannerisms were off. In a split second, she raised a pistol and fired. She looked into a camera and said, “You first. Then, it’s your turn, Berkeley.”

  “Oh my God,” Berkeley whispered. “It’s Mally.”

  Berkeley recoiled. Mally must have stepped in when the girl shut down her protocol. When she took over the subject, Mally’s original connection to Chastity had triggered. If Chastity had died, they would never have known Mally had returned until it was too late.

  Oh, no. Oh, God no.

  Pausing the video, she sent an urgent coded message to Livermore to stop tracking the subject, disconnect all subsystems, and prepare for hostile contact. The message was not acknowledged. Even Livermore had gone offline. Without Crawley and the protective umbrella of Livermore, she was alone. Her hands trembled as the first of her questions bubbled in and left her speechless.

  How did she get past the blood-brain barrier? Is the girl alive and a willing participant, or is this a protocol gone completely rogue? Can a protocol control the human body like that? There were more questions. Berkeley could rationalize some of what Mally had done, but other anomalies had no possible explanation.

  She pushed the questions aside and opened another window. Cueing the second video, she watched aghast as the girl gunned down more innocent people, threw one pilot out of an aircraft, and shot down another. An Enforcer with Terran Council markings shot away to the southeast. Berkeley did the math while she cleaned up the teacup and disposed of the trash. There would be just enough time to get the critical items she and Kieran possessed from the house in Esperance before her extraction. With emergency plans committed to memory, she could get it done, but just barely.

  She gathered her bag and headed to the autocar, directing it to the maglev terminal with all possible speed. She could just catch the evening train to Esperance, clean the house, and pack. The extraction team would pick her up at first light in the middle of a run along Sunset Beach. Once with the extraction team, she’d be on her way to the moon in hours. From there, she’d see Kieran sooner than originally planned, if all went well. Kieran felt so close, but she knew he was far away, which increased her sudden loneliness. Running through the terminal, she stepped aboard the sleek white train just as the outer doors started to close.

  As the maglev sped to the southeast, she reviewed the videos and tried to determine how Mally had been successful at taking over the girl. Nothing was impossible, but the data certainly leaned against the result. The girl’s protocol had likely been erased, which should have put the subject immediately into stasis mode. Like Kieran, she would have been “dead,” but capable of being resuscitated within an hour without permanent brain or tissue damage. Instead, Mally had found a way inside and bypassed stasis mode. That can’t be right.

  Mally would have penetrated the girl’s protocol during the emergency-shutdow
n sequence. The microsecond had been enough for her to get inside, download herself, and assume control. From there, Mally forced her out of Japan and directed her to New York, where she could take advantage of anonymous bandwidth to perform the download. A little genetic mapping to confuse facial recognition had been a good idea, but she’d used a similar payment structure to the one installed in Chastity. She’d slipped up.

  Mally figured Chastity would never wake up from the coma and would never notice the transactions passing through her own credit accounts. Berkeley chewed on her lower lip, a bad habit from childhood, and worked it out. In Columbia, Mally needed credits to handle the genetic procedures and connections in an off-the-grid way.

  This is all about revenge. From Mountain Home, her vendetta played out beautifully. Berkeley thought about it, and when she put herself in Mally’s position, it made sense. The crucial factor was speed. Mally would have gotten as much information as fast as possible to enact some measure of revenge. She’d gone to Mountain Home purely to retrace Kieran’s, and her, footsteps. Brooks would have said nothing, but there was enough connectivity there that Mally could follow it easily. With absolute certainty, she was coming to Esperance.

  Now it was a question of who would reach Crawley first—the Terran Council or Mally. The program’s collective information, she assumed, was in the hands of the Terran Council. With Crawley’s disappearance, it was reasonable that the council would be coming for Berkeley soon. They might already have her under surveillance. She glanced around the maglev’s passenger compartment and saw more than a few familiar faces. Her passive searches revealed nothing, but she upped her encryption levels and disabled the maglev’s internal camera systems. Next, she initiated a program in Esperance to alert her to searches or surveillance equipment in use around the house. While it ran, she winked off the data feed and stared out the maglev’s windows as the seaside terrain gave way to desert plains to the west of Perth. Flora and fauna rushed past, but she wasn’t really looking.