Duty, Honor, Planet: The Complete Trilogy

by Rick Partlow

  While they waited for air to be pumped into the small, bare chamber, she leaned over and touched her helmet to Franks’. “I still wish I had a gun,” she said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “If any bullets start flying, just make sure you stand in front of me.”

  She nudged him playfully, the thick pad on her suit’s elbow whacking solidly against his chest plate with a thump suddenly audible in the thickening atmosphere. The light went green and the inner door opened with a metallic grinding, throwing a fan of light from the airlock across the bare concrete floor of a cavernous freight handling area.

  She felt an initial shock at how dark it was in the room, but she quickly realized that you didn’t need lighting in an automated factory. She began working at the seals of her helmet, pulling it off and hearing the sounds around her take on a more full and natural tone, not amplified by her helmet speakers. She saw Franks moving in her suddenly-restored peripheral vision and then the overhead lights flickered on, bringing every corner of the freight bay into harsh detail. She glanced over quickly and saw Franks stepping away from a control board set into the wall beside the airlock, his helmet tucked under one arm. She raised an eyebrow at him and he shrugged.

  “The security system already knows we’re here,” he pointed out. “No use walking around in the dark if we don’t have to.”

  “Point,” she conceded. “Still feels weird though…”

  “Shit!” She saw Franks’ eyes go wide before she heard him curse, heard the clatter of his helmet hit the floor as his hands clawed for a sidearm he wasn’t carrying. She instinctively fell into a crouch and began glancing around for anything that could be used as a weapon, even before she saw what had startled him.

  That was when she spotted it. It was walking across the freight bay at a slow, steady pace; dressed in typical orange coveralls, pushing a palette jack loaded with plastic cargo containers. Its face was as devoid of concern or feeling as every other biomech she’d seen, and it acted as if she and Franks didn’t exist, eyes fixed on its path through the rows of palettes.

  “What the hell is that thing doing here?” Manning wondered, speaking softly by instinct even though she knew it was unnecessary. “This place is supposed to be totally automated!”

  “It is automated,” Franks said, relaxing but still keeping a wary eye on the biomech as he retrieved his helmet from the floor. “Those things are just cheaper to maintain and replace than traditional machinery.” He shrugged. “I hadn’t thought about it, but I should have known they’d be using them here. After all, it is the product they’re selling.”

  Another of the lab-grown workers plodded into the bay pulling an empty cart behind it, just as oblivious as the first. She knew there was no danger from the biomechs, that they were as single-minded as a cleaning ‘bot, but she couldn’t stop staring at the thing.

  “Let’s get to the control center,” she said quietly.

  “Yeah,” Franks agreed, his tone subdued. “I feel like a whore in church out here.”

  Manning couldn’t help it: she laughed. Quietly, but still she laughed. “Given our current relationship,” she murmured as they headed out of the bay, “I wouldn’t touch that one with a ten foot pole.”

  Walking beside her, Franks frowned as he considered the expression.

  “What the hell’s a ‘foot’ anyway?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Amanda Sanchez hated working with two-dimensional footage. She hated watching it on her home entertainment console and she knew most other people did too, which meant that fewer people would access news stories done in 2D from their home consoles, which meant less money from advertisers. Sure, millions would still audit the stories on their ‘links or their corneal implants, but advertising on those was limited by law so there wasn’t as much money to be made from those viewings.

  Unfortunately, the vast majority of people still had ‘links that could only record video in 2D, especially in a backwater like Fairbanks. So, she was stuck editing and cutting together hundreds of hours of 2D video from thousands of ‘links in the hands of witnesses to the Homeworld Guard excesses in their assault on the Russian crime families of Fairbanks. She’d already spent two days on the project and she knew she wouldn’t be getting a bonus for it because it wouldn’t pull in the extra advertising fees for which the network gave bonuses.

  So she cursed under her breath, popped another stim tab and kept wading through the amateurish footage, over half of which was unusable, and wished she had any employees competent enough to do this for her. At least, she thought with a sigh, she could do this at home in her sweats instead of sitting in the editing room at the studio, doing grunt work in a designer suit while being interrupted every two minutes by some idiot who couldn’t make a single decision without her.

  She reached a hand into the haptic display hologram and pulled down a clip that looked interesting, enlarging it with spread fingers until it reached maximum resolution in her console’s projection. It was shot from a low angle, through the glass of a storefront---she checked the identification information attached to the file and found that, like most of the files, it was anonymized, which meant she could come up with a plausible backstory about it being taken by a child hiding in her mother’s store…

  The chime from her apartment’s doorbell startled her out of her reverie and brought her head snapping around towards the front entrance.

  “What the hell?” she muttered. This wasn’t some public-assistance people box in the bad section of town, this was an upscale Capital City neighborhood, the kind where people with connections lived---people who valued privacy. There was no way someone should have been able to get to her front door without the security system in the lobby alerting her.

  She waved a hand across the video editing projection to replace it with the video feed from the security camera in the hallway outside her door…and saw nothing. She frowned, changing the view to a second camera, and saw an envelope laying on the stoop. She almost said “what the hell” again, but stopped automatically because she hated to repeat herself.

  “Security camera,” she commanded, “rewind recording to thirty seconds ago and play from there.”

  The image jumped back to an empty hall with the envelope missing, then proceeded forward at normal speed for about ten more heartbeats…before the envelope simply appeared, as if between frames, in the unoccupied corridor.

  Her eyes went wide, but not from confusion. She knew exactly what had to have happened. Someone with access to very advanced spoofing gear had just run the security feed back on a loop, ensuring their visit had not been recorded. She rose from the amorphous comfort of her seat and stepped to the entrance way, feeling her heart beating faster. She knew what sort of people had access to that sort of high-tech sensor spoofing gear…she’d won an award for her piece on them four years ago.

  She reached out for the touch plate to open the door, hesitated for a breath before pressing it. The door swung open silently and she stepped into the hall, checking both ways and seeing no one before she glanced down at her stoop. The envelope was small and unmarked, plain white and sealed at the mouth. She bent down, keeping her eyes up and glancing around her as she picked it up, then stepping back and closing the door quickly.

  The envelope was smooth and cold in her hands, with almost no weight to it, like it wasn’t even there. She stared at it for a moment, wondering how to open it. She tried to work a fingernail into the seal but couldn’t manage it. Finally, she gave up and stalked into the kitchen to pull a steak knife out of a block. She laid the envelope on a cutting board and carefully sliced across the top, cutting off a two centimeter long strip from the end of it.

  She set the knife down and picked up the envelope, pushing the sides together to squeeze it open, then holding it upside down over the cutting board. A small, plastic dataspike fell out, clattering softly against the surface of the counter. She raised an eyebrow. Dataspikes were old tech…the only places you saw them
used anymore were criminal enterprises and some military or government operations that required total data isolation with no wireless access.

  Someone wanted to get information to her without leaving a digital footprint…or even letting her see a face. That made whatever was on it dangerous, and she toyed for just a moment with the idea of destroying it and forgetting she’d ever seen it.

  She picked the spike up and turned it over in her fingers contemplatively, then glanced up at her own reflection in the shining surface of her kitchen processor. She had cut her hair short recently and dyed it from its natural blond to a deep black, but she’d never had any work done on her face. Often she’d thought about having her slightly-too-sharp chin rounded out, or bringing down her slightly-too-high cheekbones, but an innate stubborn vanity stayed her hand. Hair aside, she was who she was.

  And who she was, was a reporter.

  She took the dataspike into her bedroom and pulled an old, clunky tablet out of a drawer in her nightstand. It was the only device she had that still took spikes, and it had also had its wireless connections manually disabled. She stepped into her bathroom and closed the door behind her, then reached into the compartment beneath her sink, feeling around till she felt the small, round device affixed to the underside. She twisted it counterclockwise and felt it hum to life.

  If the shady, backroom vendor in Fairbanks from whom she’d bought it hadn’t lied, the room was now shielded from most electronic eavesdropping. She sat down on her vanity seat and plugged the spike into an outlet on the side of the tablet. The screen lit up and a 2D video began playing. It was jerky and unstable at first, as if whatever instrument was taking it was being carried at a brisk walk, but then the view stabilized abruptly as the camera was placed on a level surface.

  The image took a moment to focus, first showing her the distant, craggy mountains in the background before settling on the three men gathered on what appeared to be an open porch. All three were easily recognizable: General Jason McKay was standing in front of General Hikaru Kage and President Gregory Jameson, their faces grimly serious, McKay’s almost fatalistic.

  Then Jason McKay began to speak and her eyes went wide…

  * * *

  “Okay,” Franks murmured, “I think we’re in.”

  Tanya Manning tore her gaze away from the biomech guards that stood vigilantly outside the factory control center and looked at the display for the terminal where Franks was working. He’d smuggled a special penetration module with him to Roshni, hidden within the guts of a “spare” datalink that he could conceivably have claimed was a secure work ‘link if anyone had questioned it. Now the module was plugged into the ‘spike socket of the primary maintenance terminal and had finally pierced through the layers of security thrown up by the programming AIs in the orbital Quantum Computing Lab at McAuliffe Station.

  While Franks browsed through the system architecture, Manning glanced again at the pair of armored biomechs who stood outside the doorway to the chamber. Seeing them there had been a kick in the gut, a flashback to what had come to be known as the Battle of Toronto, even though it had actually taken place in upstate New York. The fact that these biomechs were carrying less-than-lethal weapons and wearing light, security armor instead of full battle rattle didn’t do much to ameliorate the unpleasant déjà vu feelings either.

  There were way too many of the damned things around the factory, too. She’d counted a dozen as they’d made the long walk through the complex from the landing pad and freight bay all the way through the production floor and the biomech storage areas. Those had been the worst: row upon row of clear, plastic cylinders, each with a dormant biomech suspended in oxygenated fluid. The whole place was setting her nerves on edge and she wanted more than anything to be out of there. She was too professional to mention it to Franks, who seemed irritatingly unaffected by their surroundings.

  “Yeah, here’re the security logs,” Franks said, grinning like a teenager who’d just discovered porn. “Let’s go back the month before the Houston bombing,” he narrated, snatching those files from a folder and stashing them in a temporary search profile. “Then we’ll cross-reference to when they’ve had human visitors here…” He entered the parameter and waited. Then frowned. “Damn. No one here in that time period.”

  She stepped closer behind him and looked over his shoulder. “When was the last time they had anyone up here?”

  He scrolled back through a series of reports until he came across the one for which he’d been searching. “The last one was scheduled for seven weeks before the attack,” he told her, “but there’s no record they actually showed up.” He cross-referenced another report, then scratched at the back of his head thoughtfully. “According to this, there was some kind of software bug that affected the atmosphere recyclers here and they cancelled the visit because they didn’t want to take the risk till they nailed it down.”

  “And we’re not supposed to be here either,” Manning reminded him.

  Franks shot her a glance, then shrugged and pulled up another file. “Here’s the security scans for the day they were supposed to have the maintenance visit…”

  She was expecting a video, or at least a summary readout, but instead the display went dark except for two words: “File corrupted.”

  “Well,” she commented drily, “isn’t that convenient?”

  “Huh,” Franks grunted. He tried reloading the file, but the same announcement popped up again. “Let’s see,” he mused, “maybe we can backdoor this…”

  He sorted through file systems faster than she could follow until she saw him come to the records for the production quality assurance systems. He brought up the video records for the date in question and…

  “File corrupted,” Manning read, shaking her head. “Someone was thorough.”

  “Damn,” Franks commented mildly. “Have to think outside the box on this one, I suppose.”

  “We don’t have video,” Manning said still leaning over his shoulder, “but what about the chemscanners? Wouldn’t they have picked up the hyperexplosives?”

  He grinned back at her. “Brilliant. You’re definitely officer material.”

  He dove back into the user interface, pulling up the records for environmental safety scans and focusing on the week after the maintenance team had been scheduled to visit. The environmental chemscanners were set to search for pollutants, but only to send off an alarm if the results revealed something that could affect the production process. Since HpE wasn’t a pollutant and the AI probably wasn’t programmed to recognize the security threat it posed, it likely hadn’t set off any alarms and whoever had erased the other records might have missed it.

  “And there it is,” he hissed, leaning forward. It seemed innocuous enough…unless you knew the chemical signature for HpE. “A buttload of it. All of it suddenly popping up with the maintenance visit that was mysteriously cancelled.”

  “Find out when the next cargo shuttle went out with a load of biomechs,” Manning suggested. “Check the readings again after that.”

  “You called it, Tanya,” he said after a moment. “Clean bill of health after the next shuttle left.”

  “Can you bring up the security videos from when they loaded that shuttle?” she asked.

  “Unless they erased that too,” Franks replied, bringing the security feed back up into his display.

  The video was two dimensional and low-resolution but it showed them everything they needed to see, even played at double-speed by an impatient Drew Franks. Nothing was loaded onto the shuttle except for the cylindrical storage tanks that held dormant biomechs. They watched the video all the way to when the cargo airlock closed and the cargo hauler blasted away from the pad before Franks shut it down.

  “So it had to be in the storage tanks?” Manning guessed, shaking her head.

  “That’s impossible,” Franks declared unequivocally. “General McKay had every second of video analyzed from when those biomechs were delivered to Houston’s dis
tribution center. Nothing was taken out of the storage tanks except biomechs. We all figured they must have offloaded the HpE at the cargo port when the shuttle landed.”

  “Are you sure they delivered all the tanks they loaded?” she asked.

  “They delivered all the tanks on the manifest,” he responded, looking back over his shoulder at her. “I guess they could have smuggled an empty tank on board…but then you’re talking about a lot of people that have to be involved, and the more people involved…”

  “The more people that could talk,” she finished for him, frowning thoughtfully.

  “Well, we have the shuttle ID from the video,” he nodded at the frozen image of the craft, “so we…” He trailed off as the terminal display abruptly went dark, followed closely by the main, overhead lighting. The control room was plunged into shadowy relief as only the emergency lighting remained active.

  “Oh, shit,” Manning murmured, looking around them, then glancing back with a growing sense of alarm and urgency at the biomech security guards.

  The two biomechs were stirring from their statue-like poses, beginning to turn…

  “Go!” Franks snapped, jumping up from the seat and shoving her towards the control center door as it began to slide shut.

  Somebody knows we’re here, part of Manning’s mind was whispering to her as she lunged for the door. They must have set up an automatic warning on anyone trying to access the security files.

  Then a two meter tall biomech was moving into her path, aiming the yawning maw of a backpack-fed crowd-control maser at her and there was no time to think of anything else. The only weapon she had was her helmet, still held loosely in her left hand, so she slammed it into the side of the maser, knocking the barrel away from her just as the biomech fired. The beam itself was invisible, of course, but there was a heat-mirage shimmering of ionized air and a flash of light near the beam emitter that made its passage obvious. It was just as obvious when it impacted the second guard, who’d been in the process of bringing around his own weapon.