Emperor-for-Life: DeadShop Redux (Unreal Universe Book 6)

by Lee Bond

  People believed Specters were suicidal. Zerr had to allow as how that was probably true, but what was also true was that when you told a Specter ‘No’ in any way, they immediately began thinking around corners.

  Which was why he was down here in the fir…

  “Oh for fuck’s sake, Tourmaline, put your goddamn pants back on. Jesus bleeding Christ, Rezek! In the fucking Quiet Room? Bad enough I caught you hanging from the fucking rafters in the training room doing … no, I still don’t want to know the name of that aerial goddamn position, but this is getting out of hand.” Zerr didn’t mind so much that most of his crew were fucking six ways from Sunday, or that most of them seemed to have some kind of weird fetish about being caught. They were all about three weeks away from one massive orgy and that was maybe something Zerr could get on board with, but until then, he had absolutely no desire to see everyone being naked everywhere.

  It was a thing that happened. You could try issuing orders or attempt to actively prevent everyone from doing everyone else, but the reality was that Specters were gonna plain old fuck, no matter the conditions, making your best plan of attack to be in the wings, waiting for the moment everyone got their clothes back on and started trying to kill each other for cheating, or enjoying someone else’s wang or whatever better.

  Then you stepped in with 'maybe we should all just take a break from junk-tickling and bit-kissing and get back to trying to murder the enemy, how about that for a change?'.

  Zerr watched Tourmaline put her pants back on, wondering what’d brought one of the ethereal-like Ponsoon Valerian to Specter; with her graceful purple skin kissed by beautiful patches of lightened whirls spiraling out from ears, eyes, mouth and lips and her piercing, backlit orange eyes, someone like Tourmaline was better off being a supermodel or spokesperson or … anything at all.

  Definitely not what you expected your average Specter to look like!

  But Specter she was, and in Zerr’s opinion, her ravishing Offworlder beauty was only enhanced by the terrible scar crossing from one temple down to the left side of her mouth. The old captain remembered the day she’d won that scar, remembered how she’d put a blaster into the terrorist’s mouth and pulled the trigger without hesitation, how she’d looked at him, bleeding, covered in blood, orange eyes gleaming, and told him in her crisp, perfect NorthAMC that she wanted the scar and planned on murdering anyone who gave her proper medical assistance.

  She was one of his best, his slumbering mad adder in the tall grass. People mistook her still, even with the scar. She was a vicious beauty, and he dropped her into the shit all the time, and she came up eating those fucking roses, thorns and all.

  Then there was Rezek. Plug-ugly madman from … some colony or other. Mostly IndoRussian stock, but with some early, pre-Trinity absorption genomods that’d made his entire race stocky as hell and stronger than three ordinary people. Body crisscrossed with scars well before he’d made his way to Special Services with a bounty on his head that’d make most assassins jump at the chance, everyone assumed Rezek was their coldest killer because he had that vibe. You just looked at the man and you knew that he had razorwire in his hair and blood in his mouth and that if you twitched the wrong way, he’d be gnawing on your jugular before sundown.

  But as Tourmaline had a vicious streak a solar system wide, Rezek liked poetry, was generally soft-spoken, and knew more about AI systems than was probably wise for the entirety of Specter. He’d picked that information up from one mad motherfucker by the name of Garth Nickels, and every day, Zerr was glad the man had spent a quarter-tour with their rampaging Specter.

  “Good. Everyone’s dressed! So wonderful.” Zerr dipped a head at Rezek and Tourmaline. “How are we doing today?”

  Tourmaline ran a hand through Rezek’s lanky, greasy hair. “Better, now the air conditioning is back on.”

  “I meant what I said, Tour.” Zerr jerked a chin at the Offworlder. “If I find you’ve got your room to freezing again, I’ll see what I can do about getting you some outside time. No suit.”

  Tour laughed throatily. “I’m willing to give it a go, Cap. Always wondered what that’d feel like.”

  Rezek opened his mouth, his uncharacteristically soft voice easily heard in the ‘Quiet Room’. “Rapid cooling, boiling blood, sudden swelling. Capillaries in your eyes will burst, your heart might explode. Might be different, a bit, because you’re an Offworlder. If you lived, you might experience cellular mutation from direct exposure to who knows how many of the weird things that’re in space. Funny story, space smells like overcooked meat.”

  Tour looked Captain Zerr in the eye and smiled. “You see why I’m with him? Heart of a poet, sensibilities of a slaughterhouse floor manager. Just opens his mouth and says the truth. That, and other reasons.”

  Rezek didn’t bother hiding the blush. “You came down here to catch us doing something we shouldn’t be, Captain, or is there another reason?”

  Zerr scratched at his jawline. The razor fine scar there –delivered by an angry Akshani warmaiden and her glass dagger- always bothered him these days. Maybe the rumors were true, that even the finest scratch from one of those pretty blades could kill you, even if it took a lifetime. Either that or he was stressed out.

  No matter which, both were irritating.

  “Well, now,” Zerr bounced a look between Tourmaline and Rezek, “I suppose that depends on if you’re ready to work. And if you’re up for trouble.”

  When he wasn’t spouting sonnets off the top of his head, Rezek could usually be found causing arguments in bars. Arguments that led to entire city blocks being burned to the ground, arguments that always had Rezek standing there in the ashes looking at least partially confused as to why things had happened that way.

  And Tourmaline? Well.

  “What’s on your mind, Captain?” It was Tour who broke the silence, orange lamp-like eyes gleaming with excitement.

  “See, it’s like this.” Zerr laid out the situation he was having, taking pains to make it very clear that he was not at all happy that there were command structures inside Alonso that they had no control over and how even more irritating it was that he ran the risk of having an Army rank associated –no matter it was temporary, and only in the mind of an AI- with his tour.

  “You want us to hack Al?” Rezek ran a hand through his thick, greasy hair. The only one he knew of that might could do something like that was Nickels, and no one knew where he was, except that he probably was out-system by now. “He’s a nine, Cap. He’ll do the whole ship in to protect himself.”

  Zerr nodded firmly. “This I know, Rezek, this I know all too well. Gave his housing a boot, he in kind gave a pretty little zap up the shin. Took about fifteen minutes for the feeling to return. Get the idea he only eventually told me what was going on because he realized I wasn’t going to stop asking and that I might get into my foolish old head to try something risky. No, no, Alonso himself is off the playing field, in the stands, eating free food.”

  Rezek was about to ask again what the Captain wanted when Tourmaline whacked him on the head and then pointed at the cast iron gray steel-VII boxes surrounding them on all sides. Behind each was an AI tasked with running the engines and shield arrays.

  Rezek pointed a finger at his illustrious Captain and started laughing. “You. You. You are a crafty one, aren’t you, Captain Zerr.”

  “Is it true?” Zerr pressed, jerking a thumb at the nearest almost-indestructible case. “Are the AI minds in this room completely free of personality?”

  Tourmaline smiled warmly, excited by this new prospect. “Absolutely, Captain. The earliest Specter Engineers discovered quite quickly that even a level 1 AI’s lumbering personality generated tremendous conflicts with the hardware. Lost four ships before they figured out why. They got up to some … activities … with their remaining spheres that would’ve found them, their ship, and possibly the entire planet dead as anything if they’d failed. Luckily, Trinity saw merit in these new engines. The spheres in
here are just that. Spheres. About as smart as anything you’d find, but like Reckless. All brain, no personality.”

  “It helped that we had about eighteen thousand of our vessels outfitted with the engines and shields before Trinity caught wind of what we were doing.” Rezek shook his head, remembering those days with only the mildest of terrors. Oh, they’d been up to all kinds of no good, back then. Eager and desperate to get their ships outfitted before Trinity figured it out, before Enforcers started showing up on their doorsteps.

  So lucky, they’d been, that the War against the Latelians had ignited, then.

  That, and they were Specters, long permitted to do things the other guys couldn’t.

  “Is the encrypted file worth the risk?” Tour held a hand up to quell the Captain’s rightfully acerbic comment. “Oh, I’m on board with this in every way, Captain, don’t you worry about that. I’m just playing Devil’s Advocate here. Say we do what you want done and the file turns out to be a grocery list or something stupid and Alonso finds out and loses his shit. Or it’s Omega-level commands from someone authorizing Al to kill us for random reason.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Zerr replied staunchly. “And doesn’t matter. I’m the fucking Captain of this stupidly named ship and we are all Specters. We do what we want, we learn what needs to be learned and if we get caught with our hand in the cookie jar, we’ll lie to whoever caught us while eating cookies. Grocery list or death sentence. And if Al catches us, well, Rezek, you can do that thing you do.”

  “Disabling a 9’s personality’d be a total bitch, Cap, but yeah, I could hit all the hardline switches, drop Al right back into that sphere of his.” Rezek nodded slowly. “We’d be in the weeds then, though. He automates an awful lot of stuff for us, and it ain’t stuff that can be done command line like the engines and the shields. But yeah, it can be done. It'd just take time, I'd need to upgrade some of the … deterrents we already put in place. Just to make certain, especially if we're dicking around with ultra-encrypted files and buried Trinity commands."

  “Good. Good.” Zerr sighed, pleased Rezek and Tourmaline were willing to do this, because if Alonso caught them, the least they could expect was death. Worse, they’d find themselves kicked out of Specter and then killed, which was a thing that Zerr couldn’t stomach. The only mitigating factor was their location and the necessity of their remaining alive. “How you think you’re going to do this?”

  “Oh,” Rezek said proudly, moving to the keyboard, Tour right behind him, “this is going to be a real easy trick, Captain. These bad boys are still connected to the primary systems, just not in any meaningful manner. Through those connections, I’ll just twin a copy of the file Al is slowly decrypting and bring it on down here. Once it’s secure in the engine servers, I’ll let these guys rip it to pieces. The actual decryption shouldn’t take more than ten or fifteen minutes.”

  “That’s … fairly quick. Alonso’s a 9 and he’s been at it forever, says it’ll take almost three more hours to get it done.”

  “Al is also running nearly everything aboard the ship, Captain, and these guys down here are responsible for creating and maintaining black holes and all that. They’re pure brute force equation-busters.” Tourmaline smiled at Rezek, who was already deep inside his own head, working diligently to crack into the primary systems from his console without giving Alonso reason to be suspicious. “Nothing better in the Universe for code-breaking.”

  “So I’ll have the data in hand in, what, half an hour?” Zerr liked the thought of that, liked the notion of sitting in his Captain’s chair, going through what Al would still be working on, liked the dream of telling that stupid AI he was no longer interested in learning what was in the file.

  And then going ahead and working on that mysterious piece of information as if it was something he’d come up with all on his own.

  The smile generated by that dream faltered into a slight frown when he realized both Rezek and Tourmaline had gone completely silent.

  “So, not half an hour.”

  Rezek looked up from his console. “More like two, two and a half.” He caught the Captain’s sour look and explained. “Look, I’m navigating through systems designed for AI minds only, Captain, using a keyboard and monitor. The directory structure of the ship’s systems are optimized for Alonso, not a person. It’ll take at least that long. With Tour helping, it might go a little bit faster, but the directory names start at eighteen digits long and aren’t named ‘this is where I am hiding the encrypted file I probably don’t want Captain Zerr to see’. More like a long string of senseless hash that might have some kind of internal logic that I could possibly understand. If not, it’s just us, poking around. If Al finishes before us, just tell him you don’t care anymore.”

  Zerr let the two lovers get back to work, toying with the notion of just how he’d tell their resident AI that he was no longer interested in discovering what was in the file, especially since he’d spent the last few hours doing exactly the opposite. He supposed he could just blame it on being a messily minded organic being who was oftentimes quite illogical.

  That was something that Alonso would buy.

  “I’ll be back later to check on you.” Zerr’s words fell on deaf ears, not that he minded; when you gave Specters a mission –whether it was to infiltrate a battlefield where two opposing forces were trying to murder one another or to dig deep into computer records- they buried themselves in the task within seconds.

  It was the Specter way of things. Rezek and Tourmaline wouldn’t come up for air until they’d either succeeded or determined beyond a shadow of a doubt that success wasn’t possible.

  And then they’d try again.

  ***

  Rezek was doing his best not to lose his temper, but frayed nerves and poetic temperament had combined to create a perfect storm inside his hairy skull. Not even sly glances from gorgeous Tourmaline and the occasional dirty look that usually fried his gonads kept him from growing more and more tempestuous by the second, which in turn upset the stunning Offworlder to the point where she couldn't focus on her task.

  “Cap’s gonna be back any minute now.” Rezek grumbled deep in his throat, eyes straining against the utter weariness of crawling through thousands and thousands of pages of pure alphanumerical hash.

  Not only had he not been kidding about the internal storage systems of an AI mind and the absolutely inelegant way the machinery connecting it to the steel-VI sphere handled the already messy format, he’d undersold that complexity by about … twelve million percent. Nothing made sense. It was just … all over the place.

  Rezek supposed that was the point, that this sort of thing was precisely why the orbs were considered artificially intelligent in the first place because after having spent the last two hours nose deep inside Alonso’s mind, he was convinced that their shipmind was just as crazy as everyone else.

  “Cap’s gonna be be here any minute now,” Rezek reiterated, running a hand through his hair for about the thousandth time, “and I ain't gonna be able to give him anything. Alonso’s brain is mess. It’s like trying to figure out what’s going on inside Reckless. You know for certain something is inside the skull because the man is walking around doing stuff, but when you talk to him, you’re … you’re convinced of the opposite. How Alonso … how any AI mind gets anything done with their brains like this is beyond me.”

  “Maybe,” Tourmaline kept working on her little side project, a bit of a brilliant idea she’d had about half an hour ago and believed might be the resolution to their problem, “maybe he knows you’re in there, and is moving the physical location of the file around?”

  “Thought of that.” Rezek took a deep breath and held it for a few seconds before letting it wheeze from his lungs. “First thing, in fact. So I spent twenty minutes doing other things inside his brain. Pulled up the Captain’s service record, activated some of the cameras in places where we turned them off, that sort of thing. You know. Actions that should've had Alonso flip
ping out.”

  “Nothing happened.” Tourmaline smiled at her lover. Using the personality-less AI spheres to gain backdoor access into their shipmind was a stroke of genius and she had very little doubt in her that if Captain Zerr had given them more lead time for this ‘side project’, Rezek would’ve found a far more elegant method of trawling through Alonso’s mind; he’d spent time with The Specter, after all, and that man’s lessons stuck to your bones.

  Rezek palmed his eyes until he saw blips of light and pinwheels on the backs of his eyelids. “Nope. Not this time. If only … I could’ve gotten bigger screens in here, could’ve written some programs to display Alonso’s mind in a visual way, traced the thought patterns, because I gotta tell you, working on something this big shoulda had the AI’s brain lit up like the Crellarian Cluster. Gonna tell the Captain we failed when he gets down here.”

  “Don’t count us down and out yet, loverboy.” Tourmaline crooked a finger at Rezek, who moved quickly to her side of the room, a curious look on his mug. When he settled in beside her, sliding a rough hand around her waist, she pointed at the little program she’d been working on. “I present to you, my idea.”

  Rezek pursed his lips as he read the code. “What’s this?”

  “I stole the idea from the Latelians, actually.” Tourmaline admitted freely. “It’s … they call their programs ‘avatars’. Semi-sentient code. They use them for everything from making phone calls to running their battleships. Never seen anything like it before in my life. Zerr had me trying to figure out how to code some destructive ones to upload into any system we found, but I don’t understand enough about the structure to make it work. Their coding language is exquisitely complex. I think it’d take about fifteen or twenty years’ worth of schooling to be considered 'mediocre'. Anyways, I’ve been working with AI systems since I joined Specter eight years ago and, like you, I know a fair bit. I think this little guy might be our ticket."