by M. D. Cooper
Everything was on schedule. Most of the ships had already left Matria and the L1 zone, collecting at the Earth-Luna L3 point. Two of his cruisers were undergoing final restock, and once they were loaded, he would take the rest of the fleet to a rendezvous point and head for their picket locations around Venus.
The voice that entered his mind was that of Colonel Amhurst, commander of the flag wing still at Matria.
Yarnes sent a feeling of agreement while reviewing what was above the stellar plane. There were several targets, but one stood out: Pallas.
The third-largest asteroid, Pallas was currently at the apogee in its highly inclined orbit, placing it an AU above the rest of the asteroid belt, and equidistant between Jove and Terra.
Before he even had a chance to respond to Amhurst, a new connection came into his mind. It was General Karla, the six-star in command of CenComm.
Yarnes bit back an utterance of surprise.
He blew out a breath he’d been holding for the entire conversation.
A GRAND SIPHON
STELLAR DATE: 08.20.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Lowspin Docks
REGION: Cruithne Station, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
Finding Tim didn’t change the fact that Fugia hadn’t cracked the data pipe between Lyssa’s location on Mars 1 and the ruins of Mercury. The bounce on High Terra simply added another point of complexity.
The network schematic hung superimposed on a slowly rotating map of Sol in her holotank. Petral stood beside her, scratching an elbow as she studied the data.
Petral was dressed in a cobalt blue bodysuit, her black hair pulled back in a ponytail at the base of her neck. A utility harness covered her torso, with two pistols on either side of her waist.
Finally, Petral shook her head. “The connection on High Terra doesn’t make any sense. It adds complexity. I think there’s also a good chance the pipe to Mercury is a false link.”
“Why even leave Mars 1? Is that what you’re thinking?”
“Exactly. Camaris obviously has no qualms creating shards. She already left one of them on Mars 1. Just leave another one in charge, and keep your feed in one place. She’s drawing a giant arrow in space telling people her location.”
Fugia tapped her chin. “Maybe that’s the point.”
“What do you mean?”
“What if this is Proteus all over again? Camaris could have fully split from Alexander and Psion. As long as the other AIs aren’t going to move against her, she can siphon off SAIs to join her. There are still millions of sentients throughout Sol that never joined Psion, as well. We’ve never had a good number on how many were created, and now Psion AIs have been replicating and building new generations. Ceres created a safe place for them to pursue their own evolution.”
“It shouldn’t sound so scary,” Petral said.
“Humans have been murdering each other for millennia. Why shouldn’t our kids join the party?”
Petral chuckled. “Have we always been so pessimistic? I seem to remember being interested in getting paid and getting laid, usually in that order.”
Fugia gave her a raised eyebrow. “How did that work out for you?”
“Hey, not everybody chose gloom and doom like you did. But lately, things just seem...worrisome. Maybe Cara had the right idea, heading for the Disk. If I was here, I’d be figuring out how to get back there.”
“Either the Scattered Disk will get pulled into the fold with the rest of Sol, or people like Cara will disappear out there again. I don’t see that happening, though. We’re expanding every day. The colonies are always an option.”
“You’re wishing you’d left with the FGT.”
“If I’d been given the option? Hell, yes.”
“So what should we do? We’ll have wasted nearly a week if we get to High Terra and it’s a red herring.”
“Yes, but we can send Emerson back to Mars 1. If that’s where the signal really originates and ends, he can follow it for us until we can get there. But if Camaris really is building a New Psion in the ruins of Mercury, and running all this data to attract new AIs—well, that’s the place to be, isn’t it?”
“We’re going to need some big guns.”
“Yes we will,” Fugia agreed.
HILGRAM HEAVY METAL
STELLAR DATE: 08.25.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Outermost Docks
REGION: Mars 1 Ring, Marsian Protectorate, InnerSol
Following final approval on their exit vector from Cruithne, Cara turned from the nav console and stood to get a better look at the holotank. In the display, an orange dot indicating Mars sat on one side, while Jupiter and the Cho marked the opposite edge. In the middle hung a mass of objects following spidery orbit paths.
While the Hildas asteroids were well mapped, millions of human-made objects hid in the space between the asteroids. The larger locations were difficult to hide, though they often moved to conceal themselves behind more massive objects. Smaller, ship-sized entities were nearly impossible to track until they popped up on proximity sensors. The Marsian military maintained the most updated maps of the Hildas, but they weren’t sharing their data. It had to be stolen.
“You got the map yet?” Cara asked Rondo.
“Sending it now, Captain.”
Fran chuckled from the maintenance console. “You keep being useful like this, and she’ll let you keep your beard.”
Rondo raised a defensive hand to the bush under his chin. “I didn’t realize it was an issue. I’ve worn my beard since I left the Mars 1 Guard. I have reasons.”
“Calm down,” Cara said, noting the concern in Rondo’s voice. She hadn’t seen the extent of his scars, but was aware they existed. “No one’s shaving the bear just yet. Can you plug in the route I sent you?”
The parrot bobbed his head from where he was perched above the comms station. He was proving to be quite adept at manipulating the ship’s NSAI and other systems that didn’t require physical input.
A series of highlighted arcs appeared on the map, showing a route that would take them past Mars and into the heart of the asteroid belt. Cara focused in on their destination, frowning when the only visual was a lumpy collection of girders.
The asteroid mining rig the Andersonians had seized, which Tim would soon be liberating, should have been well documented. For some reason, any record of the facility had been wiped from public databases, and it was only through Rondo’s search of military databases that they had access to these blurry images.
The rig was the size of a small city on Earth, capable of surrounding and processing several asteroids at once. It had been abandoned when the cost of fuel surpassed mineral prices, and smaller mining drones made a better profit by pushing farther into the belt. It had been mothballed for several hundred years, until one of the thousands of Andersonian refugee ships occupied it.
Since the occupat
ion, it had become home to a flourishing series of farms, which may have been growing designer poppies, and also a popular waypoint for piracy between Mars and the Cho.
So Tim might be caught up in fighting, not only Andersonian military forces, but pirates and smugglers as well.
The thought of smugglers sticking around to fight was amusing and only created other questions.
Rondo said.
She waved away the map and replaced it with their local surroundings. Cruithne was a lump on the edge of the tank, with its shipping lanes swooping away in cardinal directions. Thousands of ships hung in space around the station, with drones scurrying between them.
Moving back to her seat, Cara pulled the harness over her shoulders and shrugged them into place.
SECRET CHAPTER
STELLAR DATE: 08.25.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Central Warehousing
REGION: Cruithne Station, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
His face stiff from short-term cosmetic adjustments, Ngoba waited in line with a group of dockworkers outside the battered, black door of a club off Cruithne’s warehouse district. High-speed drones shot by in the nearby corridor, making the deck rumble under their boots.
There was little small talk in the group. Two people discussed a recent virtual fighting bout where a giant, yellow lizard had fought an overpowered, fluffy hamster. A woman with short, grey hair sniffed continuously, eyes distant, lost in something on her Link.
The backstory Ngoba had prepared was that he was a drone mechanic with a Link virus that had put him out of work. He had picked up enough repair lingo from Fran that he could at least talk like a technician, and if anyone pressed him, his plan was to complain of headaches and memory loss.
“You sure he’s really going to be here?” someone asked near the front of the line.
“Of course not,” their companion answered. “There’s no guarantee of anything. He could leave Cruithne tomorrow for somewhere that needs more help. Once we’ve turned the tide, though, we won’t need so much direct leadership. That’s when we’ll know we’ve made it.”
“Station Admin knocked on my door yesterday, and my kid answered,” the first voice complained. “I hadn’t schooled her well enough on saying she didn’t know anything. They scared her, though. Assholes.”
“Shut up. Not while we’re outside.”
Ngoba worked his stiff jaw for the next few minutes, until there was the sound of movement behind the door, and it swung inward. A woman with sharp features and spiky, silver hair appeared in the doorway. She looked down the line of waiting people, her gaze touching Ngoba briefly, then stepped back to allow them in.
He pushed forward with the others into a room that may have been a bar at one time, but was now filled with stacks of random cargo and piles of broken plas and other construction debris. Ngoba found a place against a large crate, and faced the center of the room, where everyone else was looking expectantly.
Once they were all inside, the woman pulled the door closed and locked it. Ngoba watched her, wondering if he had seen her anywhere before. Her face drew a blank, and his NSAI didn’t flag any immediate returns. He let the search continue as he watched the others.
This was only one of the meetings happening around the station at the same time. Ngoba had split his Lowspin lieutenants among the locations. They were to hold Link silence unless someone found themselves in danger.
The Collective held their meetings at the same time to dilute Admin resources. Station Administration could only field so many officers per shift, and they still had their regular patrol duties.
Following the raid on the Lowspin docks, there had been discussion of a follow-up action, but it had been decided that they needed to gather more intel. Ngoba himself had argued that it wouldn’t do any good to bust the smaller meetings if they didn’t get to Kamelon.
They needed the shard to determine how much control Camaris was exerting on her followers, and how much help she was really getting from the leadership of the Anderson Collective. There was still a strong possibility that everything the SAI had done to infiltrate and upset local governments had been without Charles Osla’s blessing.
For now, the chancellor wouldn’t say one way or the other. Depending on which way events turned, he could inherit many new Collective outposts throughout Sol, or claim to be the victim of Psion infamy.
“Is he here?” a man asked the woman with silver hair.
The woman had moved to sit on a crate in front of the group. She crossed her arms, still studying them as if she knew there was a spy in their midst. Her gaze never lit on Ngoba for more than a second.
She smiled. “You’re especially fortunate tonight, my friends. Kamelon will join us shortly.”
Ngoba clapped and nodded with the rest of them, careful to brush his hand across the pistol hidden in the front of his shipsuit, just checking that it was still there.
ADMIN AUTHORITY
STELLAR DATE: Unknown
LOCATION: Unknown
REGION: Unknown
An electric snap followed by the smell of burnt ozone interrupted Lyssa’s concentration. She was sitting cross-legged in a circle of flattened grass, on a rise just like the one she had left hours ago. Around her, the sea of grass waved and whispered, unchanged in the time she had been walking.
Only now, she was not alone.
A small, round-limbed figure stood in the grass in front of Lyssa. With wide, round eyes and a body covered in light green fur, it looked like a pudgy lizard with mammalian genes. The eyes closed and opened slowly, then beneath them, a wide mouth lined with needle teeth opened in a broad grin. A line of stubby fins started at the top of its forehead and ran down its back and along the top of a short tail.
The creature wore a worker’s harness hung with tools.
“Hello, there,” Lyssa said, offering a smile. “You’ve arrived.”
The creature looked around, blinking at the sea of grass, and then at Lyssa with an expression that changed from confusion to irritation.
“I see nothing amiss here. Why did you activate a maintenance request?”
“Something is amiss.” Lyssa flexed her hands on her knees. She was a little sore from sitting so long in concentration. She wanted to stand and stretch, but any sudden movements might excite the creature and cause it to disappear.
Like everything around her, the fuzzy lizard was an abstraction. This one represented a maintenance subroutine, probably designed for some section of Camaris’s world where cute things were abused for fun, and it wouldn’t look out of place while performing routine checks and repairs.
The lizard sniffed. “I see nothing amiss. Noting aberration and misuse of system resources. Identify for journal entry.”
“Are you asking my name? It’s Lyssa. What’s yours?”
The lizard shook its arms and legs, then rotated its body to get a better look at the grass sea. The wide pads of its feet pressed new circles in the grass.
“Lyssa isn’t a name. What kind of nomenclature is that? What’s your function and designator?”
She smiled. She had hoped her hack might have at least conjured an NSAI she could pret
end to talk to. This would take more work.
“That’s my designation,” she said. “My function is to leave this place. Can you assist?”
“This is not my function. Permission for release status?”
Lyssa paused. That was interesting. It couldn’t leave until she released it.
Probably a check on work control. “I’m going to stand up,” she told it. “Don’t go anywhere.”
The lizard stomped in the grass, moving to the edge of her circle to flatten more blades. It spread its arms slightly, showing impressive claws on the ends of its four-fingered hands.
“Permission for release status?” the thing grumbled again.
Lyssa rose and stretched, spreading her hands at the grey-blue sky. There had been a point after she’d located the lizard that she was sure Camaris would discover her actions. It wasn’t that Lyssa was trying anything overly destructive; she simply seemed to be the only entity in the current system. Anything she did, even her presence, was easily observable.
Since she couldn’t tell how long she had been trapped in the expanse, and Camaris hadn’t communicated with her, Lyssa could only assume that the AI intended to keep her trapped here as long as possible. Or she was occupied elsewhere.
Or she didn’t care.
No, Camaris cared, all right. Her hate ran too deep to allow indifference.
Not for the first time, Lyssa wondered what Emerson and the other Weapon Born were doing. She would not have woken since she accepted Camaris’s invitation, so they could very well still be waiting on the Mars 1 Ring.
They certainly would have asked for help by now.
Lyssa sighed. She couldn’t waste too much time trying to determine what her friends were doing. She couldn’t control their situation, and as long as she was conscious, her body must continue to live. She could only focus on getting back.