by M. D. Cooper
Aaron shifted. “It’s, ahhh, not data. Not exactly.” He stood, and the expression on his face had Katelyn shaking her head.
“Shit. You’re the package?”
UNWITTING TRAITOR
STELLAR DATE: 3227466 / 05.27.4124 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: MicroWare Industries, Raleigh, High Terra
REGION: InnerSol, Sol Space Federation
“You didn’t tell me you’re a Disker.” Peter’s harsh accusation sliced through the silence of his darkened office.
Urdon shrugged, his figure drawing a sharp silhouette against the night sky, as it always did during these meetings. “You didn’t ask. “
“I might not have any love for a bunch of over-augmented Marines, jacked up on mod-enhancers,” Peter ground out, his hands fisting as he stepped closer to Urdon’s shadowed form standing at the window, “but I’m no traitor to the Hegemony.”
Urdon straightened, willing his mass and obviously greater physical strength to register in the other man’s hind-brain. “Then you’ll be motivated to keep what happened quiet.” He let an unspoken threat creep into his tone.
Peter stumbled to a stop, but Urdon could tell the man’s anger still burned hot.
“I spoke the truth, the individual working for IntelliCorp did want out. The codes you provided allowed him to make a quiet exit without anyone the wiser.”
Peter shook his head. “I heard through backchannels that the person who left, the AI, was a mole placed there by someone high up in your organization.”
Urdon’s discipline kept him from jerking in reaction, but shock radiated through him at this revelation. How did Peter find out?
There must be a leak somewhere within his own ranks.
Damn those MICIs. Looks like I’m going to have to do a little internal audit of my own.
Peter’s angry outburst continued. “You people had him steal their IP. You plan to put it to use in the Scattered Worlds.”
Urdon heard the conviction behind Peter’s words. He didn’t bother to deny it.
“I don’t expect a Terran to understand,” he said after a moment. “But we have a right to live free and independent of InnerSol’s control. That’s all we want. It’s all we’re fighting for.”
“So all that bullshit about wanting vengeance for Toro?”
“Oh, that was a nice perk, don’t get me wrong.” Urdon turned and looked out at the vista before him, the vast expanse that was High Terra, and the motherland below. “I spoke the truth when I said I held a grudge against the Butcher of Toro. My grudge just predated that incident by a few decades.”
He didn’t bother to enlighten the confused look on Peter’s face. Instead, with a thought, he engaged his shimmersuit, the equipment’s tech rendering him invisible to the man before him.
“Forget I was ever here, Peter. Savor the knowledge that you managed a bit of hard-won vengeance against those who damaged your career, and move on.”
He pulled a lightwand from its sheath, built into his forearm. Igniting it not five centimeters from Peter’s eye, he followed the man’s involuntary jump back.
“I know who you are. I know where you live. And I will hunt you down and end you if I find you’ve breathed any of this to anyone, for any reason. Do I make myself clear?”
Urdon was close enough to the man to hear his convulsive dry swallow. He held the lightwand steady until Peter gave the slightest of nods.
Then he deactivated the weapon and returned it to its subcutaneous sheath before striding from the executive offices, leaving the former spouse of one of his greatest nemeses behind.
COMING IN HOT
STELLAR DATE: 3227474 / 06.04.4124 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: SDMS Damus, Approaching Venus
REGION: InnerSol, Sol Space Federation
Rory sucked in a breath. “He’s right, Kat. TSF has the place locked down.” Her tone was laced with concern, her sentiments echoing Aaron’s as she stood, looking over Katelyn’s shoulder.
Katelyn hated to admit it, but they both had a point. The feed provided by the ship’s sensors as the ship approached Venus painted a daunting picture.
The planet hung before them, the night side of its blue and green orb drifting through the brilliant space near Sol. Beyond the world, igniting the surrounding darkness with radiant light, lay the baleful orb itself. It was a far cry from how humanity’s home star appeared out in the Disk, and seeing it this close always filled Katelyn with a sense of fear and wonder.
How do people live with it raging so close by?
The display was made even more impressive by the sheer number of ships around the planet. The Terran Space Force had declared a no-fly zone that stretched out more than a hundred thousand klicks from Venus’s surface. Only ships with the right clearances—and that translated to a precious few spacecraft—were making it through.
“Well, this is a right freakin’ mess.” Katelyn’s voice was thoughtful as she surveyed the situation, seeking a solution.
She snorted. “Hello, pot. Meet kettle,” she muttered under her breath.
Aaron calling her devious was more than a little ironic, after what he’d done to them on Cruithne.
“That was kind of the point.”
She proceeded to ignore the AI whose core was currently tucked inside the overlarge NSAI node behind her.
Curious thing, that node. It had a TSF insignia emblazoned on one side, and a label with the logo for some company called IntelliCore stuck to its base. Whatever it was, whatever it contained, it was Katelyn’s duty to get it down to the surface and into the hands of the SWSF soldiers awaiting its arrival.
That the smooth-talking spy seemed nervous about the blocAaron before them didn’t bother Katelyn overmuch. It was apparent he had no military experience, and his piloting skills, although sufficient for most standard travel, were neither inspired nor inventive.
Katelyn sure as hell wasn’t going to hand the controls over to him in order to defeat this blocAaron.
Her fingernails drummed a short rhythm against her teeth as she rested her chin in her palm while studying the layout of nearspace. Tens of thousands of ships hung in high orbits beyond the no-fly zone, thousands more were stuck at the space stations closer in, and others were drifting in the Sol-Venus L1 point, conserving fuel while they waited for the conflict to end.
In the midst of it all, crisscrossing the globe in overlapping orbits, were five hundred and twenty-three Terran Space Force warships. Another thousand were stationed further out, policing the civilian traffic that was balling up more and more around the planet.
“It may be locked down,” Katelyn said, glancing back at the NSAI cube that was maglocked to the sole of the deck, and then back up at her sister in the Damus’s small cockpit. “But that’s going to work to our advantage. Look at that mess out there. I mean, they’ve blocked all access to Venus, just to control one city on one continent.
“However…looks like the senate is already holding hearings about granting access to other planetside ports, and the Venusian Governor is appealing directly to the president for reprieve. They’ll open up a planetside port, and when they do, that’ll be our in.”
Rory looked at Katelyn, and then shook her head. “You’re too optimistic. Our cover won’t hold out against that sort of scrutiny.”
“As usual, you worry too much.” Katelyn tossed her sister a grin before an alert coming off the local Space Traffic Control relay caught her attention. She sat up straight and took a deep breath. “See, R
ory, no worries. The STC just opened up two ports on Venus’s southern pole. Ships low on fuel, or with emergency supplies, can apply for clearance.”
Rory let out a rueful laugh. “Well, we are low on fuel. Of course, that’s aided by the fact that you dumped most of it an AU back when we swapped out our ship’s registry.”
Katelyn reached out and grasped her sister’s shoulder. “There’s no better emergency than a real emergency. Transmit our status; let’s see how quickly they’ll let us get down.”
The result was not as efficacious as Katelyn had hoped. The sentient AI managing the emergency landings tried to route them to a space station in high orbit three times, until Rory finally managed to convince it that they also needed repairs that those stations couldn’t facilitate. Four hours later, they had a lane and were on their assigned vector.
“Venus, here we come,” Katelyn cried out in victory as the ship skirted around the edge of the TSF blocAaron angling toward their designated port.
Katelyn shot the cube some side-eye while Rory unbuckled her harness.
Rory spared the AI a glance as she rose from her seat, hunching over as she pulled herself through the small cockpit. “Seriously, Aaron. You’d think this was your first mission or something.”
Rory ignored the sardonic riposte, turning back to Katelyn. “You want anything? I’m dying of thirst here.”
Katelyn looked up at her tall sister, the woman’s dark hair framing either side of her face, drifting aft with the ship’s thrust. “Yeah, do we have any more of those pizzas? The ones with the pineapple on them? That stuff’s the best.”
Rory snorted. “You mean Hawaiian Pizza?”
“That’s a dumb name. No one gets pizza from Hawaii, and no one is harvesting pineapples there, either,” Katelyn replied. “I refuse to use that name.”
Rory pushed herself off her seat and drifted out of the cockpit, looking back at Katelyn as she went. “You know, for someone who grew up on Makemake, you have a strange dislike of Polynesian words.”
“You need to bone up on your history, Ro. Hawaiian pizza is about as Polynesian as those TSF cruisers out there.”
Rory pulled herself through the passageway back toward the Damus’s small galley, calling back, “You want it cooked or frozen?”
“Har har!” Katelyn responded before turning back to her console.
A wisp of her red hair had come loose from her ponytail, and she pulled it back, re-fastening the band around her hair. Rory may like having her hair loose in zero-g, but Katelyn couldn’t bear it.
It was a strange incongruity—Rory was the one who was normally strait-laced and by the book, whereas Katelyn did everything by the seat of her pants. Rory always claimed that she just didn’t like the way a ponytail or bun made her scalp feel. Katelyn, in turn, liked to joke that it made her sister look like some sort of space medusa.
They had to find their sources of amusement somewhere out in the black.
Katelyn double-checked the calculations on the braking burn, and reworked them to save a little more fuel. They needed as much extra as they could manage since the Damus wasn’t actually going to land at the polar spaceport, they just had to make it look like they were. Their real target was Tarja.
In their original mission brief, Katelyn had thought they wouldn’t even need to land; they’d just fly by and transmit the data packet to the resistance’s leaders on the planet and be on their way.
Then they’d discovered Aaron was the packet. That meant they’d have to set down at the spaceport to make the transfer. The low-on-fuel ruse was the best way to make that happen, though it created a whole host of other problems.
Refueling on the surface and then boosting off Venus without getting caught was nuts; even Katelyn admitted it. The odds of slipping past the blocAaron were slim, to say the least. Even so, she’d rather have the fuel to try it than be dead in the water.
“What you thinkin’ ‘bout?” Rory asked as she floated back into the cockpit and handed Katelyn the package containing her pizza.
Katelyn unsealed it and breathed in the delicious aroma. “Just wondering how we’ll get back off-world again.”
Katelyn ignored him.
Rory cocked her head to one side. “You mean park the Damus at Tarja’s spaceport and go hole up ‘til this thing is over?”
Katelyn took another big bite as she turned Rory’s last comment over in her mind.
“Define ‘over’,” Katelyn said at last, around a mouthful of pizza.
“Well, hopefully just until Tarja’s government can get the TSF to back off and hold a proper plebiscite,” her sister said, and then her voice turned heated as she gestured at the ships blocking Venus. “These fuckers just try to beat everyone into submission when people try to leave the Sol Space Federation, but that’s not going to hold forever. Either they let the federation dissolve peacefully, or they get their asses kicked. Terra can’t stand against the rest of Sol on its own.”
Katelyn was surprised to hear such vehemence from her sister. Rory rarely espoused the Cause’s views with so much passion. Granted, the way the TSF was behaving on Venus was disgusting. If the people wanted to separate, they had that right. The Federation couldn’t be held together at gunpoint.
“I don’t hold out as much hope for the Venus operation as you do,” Katelyn replied, tucking back the wisp of red hair that had gotten free again. “The whole point here is to pull the Jovians into the conflict. If they can see that the Terrans are acting like crazy people, and that resistance is possible, they’ll join in. The Marsians, too.”
Rory nodded slowly. “Yeah, I get that; we’re turning hearts and minds against Terra, here. Win or lose for Venus, its win-win for the Cause. I just would like to see the Tarja mission succeed.”
Katelyn nodded. She would, too, but as she looked out her window at the hundreds of TSF cruisers, she feared that there was only one possible outcome for the city of Tarja.
Aaron’s thoughts mirrored her own. the AI repeated, and then he lapsed into silence.
That silence remained unbroken for several minutes, until Katelyn executed the command to rotate the ship and begin its braking burn. They would have to come in hot—the blocAaron’s presence wouldn’t allow them to loop around the planet and aerobrake before coming down. They’d have to shed relative v in space and then fall to the surface as gently as possible.
“You secure?” Katelyn asked as she tucked the pizza’s container into a refuse pouch.
“Yup, ready to rock,” Rory replied with a resolute nod.
“Then let’s do this,” Katelyn said as she implemented the burn.
The Damus, whose transponder was currently transmitting a registry ident that claimed the ship was the Kestrel out of Jovian space, rattled and shook as the burn shed their delta-v, and the ship fell deeper into Venus’s gravity well. The completion of the braking maneuver required the engines to face the planet, and Katelyn watched the lights of the other civilian vessels through the cockpit window as they waited to get past the blocAaron.
She wondered what their purposes were. Why they had come to Venus, what they were doing with their lives. Once, she had flown without a cause, without a reason to be in the black—other than money, of course. It had been empty, pointless. All the while, the people of the Scattered Disk worked and slaved so that their profits could go to InnerSol and the Terrans.
Here in InnerSol, the Terrans built their great rings an
d lived in their high societies, basking in delights that were never known in the Disk. Katelyn knew what it was like out there—so far from Sol that only a fraction of the star’s light reached it. The deep black was a different place; every bite of food, every photon that hit one’s skin…it was earned. Bled for. It was real.
An alert flashed on her console, and Katelyn realized it was the AI handling the approach vectors for ships being allowed past the blocAaron.
“Here we go,” Katelyn told Rory and Aaron. She received a resolute nod from her sister.
Damn straight, it will, Katelyn thought as she double-checked that they would indeed pass over the continent of Teka.
Katelyn looked at Rory and held a hand over her mouth. “She’s gonna rescind our clearance! Oh no!”
Rory shook her head. “Just get ready to break away if they start shooting.”
“They’re not going to shoot, at least not yet,” Katelyn replied before responding to the AI.