When Ayan tried to get a closer look at their ranks, the emblems on their chests and the letters on their backs they were a blur. All at once she realized she wasn't on the Triton. That, aside from some of the standard mechanics of the place and the transparent ergranian steel, it was a completely unfamiliar place.
A young man who stood a little taller than Jacob came from behind and gave her an affectionate squeeze. He was still in his mid teens, and she hugged him back. While she could see and feel what was going on, Ayan was not in control of her actions. When the tall, strong fellow released her she saw the skull emblem on his chest. It was green instead of white, and under the half cranium the letters spelled out CHALLENGER instead of Triton. Why she could read that one and none of the others, she didn't know, but there was too much going on for her to dwell on it.
"I didn't think you'd make it, Mum," he said with a big smile.
"I wouldn't miss it. This might be the last time I get to see you for a few months." Ayan could feel her eyes welling up and took a deep breath.
"Don't start gushing, it's embarrassing," said a slightly older teen from beside her. She was only a little shorter than Ayan, and had inherited the pointed chin and heart shaped face from her mother in spades. Her hair was just as curly, but had been colour shifted to deep blue. "We couldn't let ya go off without embarrassing you in front of the other local cadets," she said wryly as she took a couple of steps towards him and let herself be momentarily crushed under his arm.
"Your father wanted me to give you this. It's a combat coat like the one he used to wear," Ayan said, passing her son the long coat.
"With passive armour so it's still regulation," he said, accepting it with a wide-eyed expression that conveyed more gratitude than his quietly offered "thank you," as he admired it.
It was almost comical watching his much shorter sister take the jacket then hold it up high by the shoulders so he could shrug into it. “Figures, you get the cool dad, so you get the cool loot,” she said. They both had a British accent, though her daughter’s was more casual.
Ayan let her daughter’s comment pass. "Your father wishes he could be here too, it's from him," Ayan said before adding: "he's very proud of you."
"I'm sure," her son muttered.
"Good luck, don't let them turn ya into a brainless goon," his sister said as she gave him a quick peck on the cheek. She turned towards Ayan. "I'm going to meet Zoe in Dernsu, 'kay?" she said as she practically bounced away.
"Don't let me catch you in the clubs again, Laura. Zoe's older, you're not ready to go everywhere she does!" Ayan called after her, a warning in her tone.
"Yeah!" her daughter offered over her shoulder noncommittally.
"Gotta go, Mum," her son said.
"Remember, I love you whether you make it through or not," Ayan said, squeezing his hand. “But you try hard and use your head.”
He smiled and bent down to kiss her on the cheek. "I know," he said.
He was on his way through the airlock checkpoint before she was ready to see him go, but then she’d never really be ready to see her boy leave for Junior Fleet Academy. Even though she was saddened and nervous at the departure of her second born, the baby, all her hopes and best wishes went with him. She hoped to see messages from him soon, but wished for his safety and success even more.
At a thought, her messaging interface appeared and she said; "We did all right, Jacob."
* * *
Ayan returned to the present, standing beside Roman in the hospital room. Liam was standing beside her, praying quietly. Roman looked like he was sleeping peacefully, but the scanner results showing on her visor told a different story. He was in a deep coma, and wouldn't last more than a few days, even with his battered suit taking care of his immediate needs.
She looked at his peaceful, closed eyes. "Thank you, Roman. I won’t forget you."
“They sent me in to perform last rights,” Liam said quietly as he finished a prayer. “The Carthans don’t believe in keeping chaplains aboard, but the fleet warden didn’t put up a fight when he lapsed.”
“Is it a problem if I sit here quietly for a moment while you do that?”
“Not at all. I’m sure it’s a comfort to him.”
Perched on a stool, holding Roman’s hand in hers, Ayan gave all that she'd learned some careful thought. Liam went on with performing the last rites. It was the second time that day. She couldn’t help but weep quietly. Ayan’s best friend was gone. A hero few would ever know, Roman, was as good as gone, and she knew there were hard days ahead.
That would be the last time she could be afraid, or let it all catch up to her. She knew why Roman showed her an image of her possible future. It was something to focus on, to hope for: imperfect but beautiful. Even more than that, it was something she would fight for.
When Liam finished reciting the last rites, he reached for the front of the suit. “Now you have to leave, Ayan.”
“No,” she stepped in his way and pushed him. “Alaka!” she cried. Her proximity radio picked up her urgency and transmitted her voice. “Get Liam out of here, now.”
Alaka was in the airlock before she finished giving the command.
“I have to do this, Ayan,” Liam said. “This is exactly what I should be doing. I can take this burden and make things right.” He tried to get past her again, but she had the upper hand.
The extreme environment suit could augment her strength more than his vacsuit could his. He knew it, and didn’t test her again. “No, this isn’t for you,” Ayan replied. Alaka emerged from the airlock and wrapped his arm around Liam Grady, guiding him back into the airlock firmly. “Take him back to the shuttle and don’t let him leave.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Alaka said.
Ayan readied herself for a confrontation the instant she finished exiting the airlock and came face to face with Fleet Warden Harrison. The woman had surrounded herself with six armed guardsmen. “What was that?” she asked, pointing her thumb at Liam Grady, who was being escorted down the hallway.
“An averted self-sacrifice. His heart was in the right place, but I need him,” Ayan said.
“And the messenger in there?” the fleet warden asked. “The Victory Machine?”
The fleet warden’s guards were between her and her protection, Jenny Machad and Victor Davis. Ayan activated shield emitters hidden under the black horizontal slats covering her hostile environment vacsuit. The emitters glowed red. “He’s gone.”
Her guards did the same. Ayan’s comm display notified her that the seven other soldiers they’d left near the lift were alerted.
"You were only in there for twenty minutes, and the transmission we picked up between him and the Victory Machine were so compressed, we couldn't get anything but partial still images," complained Fleet Warden Harrison. "Did he pass any information on to you?"
Ayan eyed Victor and Jenny. "Tamber will be under siege tomorrow morning. You'll find information on the lead Order of Eden ship - the Leviathan - in the logs you copied from the Triton. I'd begin preparing right now," she stated.
“We need more information. Please come with us, you have to be debriefed," Fleet Warden Harrison said, inviting Ayan to enter a side room.
"I have more important things to do," Ayan said as she started walking towards the gap in the Warden’s guards.
Two of them stepped into her path. "I insist," Fleet Warden Harrison said.
With a glance at the optical controls in her visor, Ayan disabled the safeties built into the synthetic muscle woven through her armoured vacsuit and she began walking again. The nearest pair of guards raised their rifles. She took two quick steps and punched one guard just below the breastbone. He slid down the hall past Alaka, who cooly stepped out of the way.
Jenny tripped the other, took his rifle, and bent it in half effortlessly. She tossed it at another guard hard enough to knock him to the ground.
Ayan’s shield absorbed several shots from one guard across the hall. She closed the dis
tance between her and her attacker in two leaps and bashed into her shoulder first. Bones broke, and the soldier was sent flailing into the guard next to her. Ayan drew her sidearm next and pointed it at the fleet warden. "Let me leave without complications or I order all my cloaked troops to begin clearing a path between me and my ship," Ayan ordered calmly.
"We have cloak traps at the entrances-"
"You saw the logs from the Triton. We didn’t trip them on the way in. They need to be upgraded. You and your people are surrounded and I don't have time to spare."
Fleet Warden Harrison looked at the barrel of the particle weapon then back to Ayan's visor. "Let them leave," she ordered.
"I'll send you a report with all the information you need when I have time." Ayan holstered her weapon. "Right now, you should concentrate on preparing your orbital defences. According to what I just learned, you fail to keep the fighting off the ground. Consider it a challenge." In no great hurry, Ayan strode down the hall towards the lift at the end of the hall.
"I'm impressed," Alaka said over secure proximity radio.
"With that stand off? You should have seen some of the epic battles I've had with my mother, the Admiral," Ayan replied, trying to control the shakiness in her voice. The adrenaline and shock of her own actions were enough to make her want to hide out of sight until it passed. Following behind Alaka was almost as good. People didn’t notice her nearly as much when he was around.
Chapter 35
Fighting For Micrometres
“She’s waking up,” said a slightly garbled voice from nearby. Alice could feel that the bed she was in was rumbling, the smell of disinfectant was thick in the air.
She opened her eyes and was immediately greeted by the sight of an infirmary, seen through a screen filled with raw programming code. Something was booting up, and it was inside her head.
Alice’s hand went to her face immediately. In a panic, she felt for what changed. “What did you do to me?”
“Wait! Wait! Let me explain,” Lewis said, pulling his arms down around her from behind, trapping her elbows at her sides.
An android rushed into view, her mismatched eyes focused like micro-lenses pressed into layers of circuit board, examining Alice hurriedly. The ‘bot was a fantastic imitation of a human woman, except for the smaller appendages with finer tools on the ends that extended from her sides. They were constantly moving out of the way of her more human looking arms, except for one that was tipped with a small scanning suite. It waved in front of Alice, absorbing data from different regions of her body. “You are on Veers Nine,” it explained in a soothing voice. “This is emergency medical transport three-oh-eleven and I’m Seven C, but you can call me Seven.”
“What did you do to me?” Alice said as the frantically scrolling code finished listing and a targeting reticle focused on the android. It confirmed what Seven had already told her.
“Your eye and temple were destroyed. Your comrade Lewis brought you here and spent his medi-credits to have you treated. It was very expensive, especially considering the optics.”
“Optics?” Alice asked, relaxing a little, recalling her last memory – getting shot at and plunging into the freezing black water.
“Your eye was destroyed, so I took the opportunity to upgrade you with a combat implant. It has its own computer, long term storage, and it’s linked to your mind using a computing and communications package, just in case you lose the eye in a future engagement. It’s the perfect union between rugged and elegant cybernetic solutions. Epitech is the foremost manufacturer of cybernetic products in this region.”
Alice took a moment to look past the android. There were other soldiers resting in partitioned sections of the long cabin. A couple of smaller, dented, and discoloured robots busied themselves with cleaning a blood trail leading in through one of the battered doors. Hanging bags of supplies swung as the vessel moved. She’d never seen the inside of a mobile combat hospital before, and didn’t think she’d ever want to again. “You can let me go,” Alice told Lewis. “I’m not going to scratch my eye out.”
“Sorry,” Lewis said, releasing her. “Never know how people are going to react when you replace some of their bits with implants.”
“Some of my bits?” Alice asked.
Lewis held up his hands defensively and smiled. “Just your eye and the processor node, darlin’.”
“I tired to match your natural eye colour as well as possible,” Seven told her. “But it’s difficult matching old organic parts.” She projected a flickering hologram of Alice’s face. One of her eyes looked much like Seven’s, focusing in overlapping layers as she looked from one thing to another. Specifications began to appear as a list in her new heads up display, detailing zoom distances, maximum recording times in terms of centuries, impact tolerances, different vision types, and several other details. Technically the eye was brilliant, and her vision had never been clearer. It would take her time to get used to seeing it in the mirror.
“I know,” Lewis said. “I wish I could have gotten you to a hospital where they could grow you a human one, but this was the only place that wouldn’t turn you in to authorities the moment I carried you in. That, and I had credit here.”
“No,” Alice said. “It’s fine, we’re safe.” To her surprise, the idea of having a cybernetic upgrade didn’t bother her. The idea that her body was a fleshy temple didn’t overrule her logic, like it did with the majority of humans. “I like it.”
“Well good,” Lewis said, relieved.
“You should like it, it is our best ocular combat implant and I masterfully reconstructed your eye socket as well as the surrounding flesh, which is still perfectly human. I wanted to use bio-armour-mesh, but the lieutenant wouldn’t consent,” Seven said. “Now, I must tend to other patients.”
“Lieutenant?” Alice asked Lewis.
“Another life,” he replied. “I served on this battlefield for six years. Got off with most of my human parts, too.”
“What about the thing we were after?” Alice asked.
Lewis patted his jacket and nodded. “You had a death grip on it, saved us a trip to the bottom of the sea. This whole excursion would have been a wash if it weren’t for you, being honest. I’ve never seen anyone get through that kind of security without firing a shot.”
“Well, armoured suits and weapons would have tripped alarms, especially near a luxury suite,” Alice explained. She wasn’t used to the kind of praise she was getting from Lewis, who was every inch the war veteran. The medical transport, the little bit of story she got out of him about his past on Veers Nine, completed a picture of him that made all too much sense to her.
“I know there were separate layers of security, and you hacked them without a neural node, then snuck past more guards that we could fit into this mo-hos.”
“Mo-hos?” Alice asked, laughing at the sound of the term. She ignored his compliments.
“Mobile hospital.”
Alice sat up and made sure that everything was where it should be, then dug into Lewis’s jacket for the Amber Heart. She closed her hand around the bag and Lewis closed his hand around her wrist. “It’s mine, even if you spent a life’s worth of credits on fixing me up, this job and the rock are still mine,” she said.
“We never discussed my cut,” Lewis said. “You made your way through that maze like a pro, but still needed a hand in the end.”
“I was sure I could convince them to let me go,” Alice replied.
“Until you got shot,” Lewis said. “Needed some saving.”
“All right, how much?” Alice asked.
“Half, fully half of whatever getting this rock is worth, and I know what this is. It’s worth a lot.”
“Not in your wildest,” Alice scoffed. “The reward’s not cash, anyhow.”
“Oh?” Lewis said, smiling crookedly. “What are we earning?”
Alice regretted telling him as much as she had, but he saved her twice. Just the fact that she needed saving at
all was frustrating, but his mercenary attitude made it so much worse. He deserved a reward, certainly, but she didn’t think she could trick him into getting less than he deserved, and she desperately wanted to. “There is some cash,” Alice said after some hesitation. “You can have almost all of it, ninety thousand in Galactic Currency.”
“Ninety thousand?” Lewis whispered, recoiling a little. He let her slip the Amber Heart out of his pocket. “You’re kidding. That thing would go for over a hundred million on a black market auction. Probably a lot more.”
“You’re right, but you can’t auction this. It’s too hot. The chances of the word getting out and who knows what authority busting the event before you get paid are too high.” Alice checked inside the bag to make sure it was there, and her head’s up display verified that it was indeed the Amber Heart before she could request that it scan the object. She took her battered jacket off the hook and stuffed the precious object into a hidden pocket in the under-arm. “I’m not fetching this for a buyer, I’m working for its rightful owner.”
“Easy enough to look up,” Lewis said. “Wouldn’t take much for me to get it off you, leave you somewhere, like here, and bring it to him myself.”
Alice was stunned at Lewis’ matter-of-fact declaration. She stared into his face and saw nothing but self-assuredness. She was sneaky, and had gotten out of some nasty situations, but just at that moment, she was completely vulnerable. Not only that, but Lewis definitely seemed to have more experience at shady dealings. He just stared at her with an expectant, amused expression that was beginning to make her blood boil.
“But then,” Lewis said. “I didn’t meet with your employer, I only caught wind of the job you were on.”
“And shot your way into it,” Alice said. “I never invited you, and my employer chose me over anyone else who could do this.”
“So, there it is,” he said. “Somehow, you made an impression on this bloke, and he’s keen to see you at the finish with his bauble. My two saves are still worth a nice slice though.”
Spinward Fringe Broadcast 7: Framework Page 33