by Gavin Smith
Miska found herself standing in the middle of a purple-coloured cartoon forest with a comfortable looking quilted floor. All the flora was made out of fabric. Frolicking, animated plush unicorns in all manner of colours gambolled by. Miska had some vague idea that this was from some children’s educational sense game that had been popular when she was a child.
‘Oh, this is a nightmare,’ Miska muttered. ‘Fine, I give up, you can have the codes.’ A friendly unicorn trotted over to sniff at her. Miska tried to summon her attack software, in the form of a club with which to beat the unicorn flat, but nothing. Even allowing for how long they’d had when she was unconscious it was impressive just how extensively they’d hacked her integral computer and neural interface.
‘Do you want to give us the codes?’ Gosia’s disembodied voice echoed through the soft fabric forest. Miska held up her middle finger. ‘Just let us know when you’ve had enough. The safe word is Star Kitten—’
‘Star Kitten?’ Miska didn’t bother trying to hide her disgust.
‘Only use it when you’re ready to talk. Abuse it and we’ll just check on you when we feel like it.’
The problem was Gosia was right. Everyone did break eventually. Miska knew she should probably just spare herself the pain. The other problem was that she wasn’t built that way. Her dad and her sister had always said that she was stubborn. She braced herself. Then it felt like every single one of her nerve endings had been dipped in acid and the screaming began.
It had felt like an eternity. They had disabled her internal clock, so she had no idea how long it had actually been. With pain as a new constant she had intended to come to terms with it. Make living with pain her new reality and thus deal. That hadn’t worked. It had just really hurt. The verisimilitude of the sense program, in terms of sensory input if not environment, was so good that she had screamed until her throat bled. She was left lying on the comfy fabric forest floor in a puddle of red drool being watched by fucking unicorns. She knew she should just give in. She would break. But that in turn meant she would become a broken person. A different person. A weaker person. That, she couldn’t allow. Just telling them as a matter of practicality she could rationalise. It was the only sensible thing to do in the situation. And then the pain disappeared.
‘Why’d you stop? I didn’t say Star Kitten, you fucking pussies!’ she managed, staining the forest floor with some more red drool. ‘What is this? Aversion therapy for fucking unicorns?’
‘Sorry about that. I had to sample and loop your pain to spoof the program.’
The voice came from nearby and sounded familiar. Miska had a sinking feeling but it was still better than the constant agony. She looked up. Che Guevara was sat nearby, stroking one of the unicorns. Miska returned to her face-down position. As horrifyingly twee as her surroundings were, they were at least comfortable.
‘I hate being rescued,’ she muttered, the quilt-like forest floor partially muffling her voice.
‘That’s good. You’re not being rescued, just being offered an opportunity,’ the sentient communist virus told her.
‘Wait, are you the same one I met on Faigroe Station?’ she asked. She knew the virus tended to go where it felt it was ‘needed’ to fight the forces of capitalist oppression.
‘The same one.’
‘Does that mean Joshua’s body is on board?’ she asked. The sentient virus had possessed Joshua, an undercover data warfare expert who had been in Triple S’s employ.
‘All of Joshua is on board, although he is still in here with me, just taking a backseat for the time being, but yes, I am currently the Sneaky Bitch’s data warfare officer. They’re very impressed with me. Particularly because of the ease with which I hacked your systems.’
‘I’ll bet,’ Miska said, though it certainly made sense now. ‘What an extraordinary coincidence.’
Che just smiled at her. Miska couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more going on here. Either that or she was being stalked by a sentient computer virus that thought it was a pre—FHC Communist folk hero.
‘How’re you finding being human?’ she asked, largely for something to say. She was still trying to pull herself together.
‘I started off human, a long time ago,’ he said almost wistfully. That got her attention. ‘I’d forgotten how much I appreciated a good shit.’
‘Lovely,’ Miska said. She was aware of someone moving behind her. She pushed herself up and looked. It was her, writhing on the forest floor, body painfully contorted, agony etched into her silently screaming face. It was the spoof program, what Gosia and her crew would be seeing in the real world. She knew it would be accompanied by some similarly spoofed biometrics. Che had rendered both her and himself invisible to them. For a moment she couldn’t look away.
‘I had no choice,’ he told her. He genuinely sounded sorry, even ashamed of himself.
‘How long?’ she asked.
‘Five minutes,’ he told her.
It had felt a lot longer. She turned away from the image of her immediate past.
‘You said you weren’t here to rescue me?’
‘I’m going to return use of your integral computer and your neural interface to you,’ he explained.
‘Good of you,’ Miska told him. Her initial thought was to open every door on the Sneaky Bitch, including the ones to the outside. Well maybe not the ones to the cargo hold I’m in, she decided, modifying her plan. Given time she could work herself free. Mind you, I probably shouldn’t kill Joshua/Che, either, she thought.
‘There are conditions,’ he told her. Miska sighed. ‘You can’t kill anyone on board.’
‘Not kill anyone …!’ Miska exploded. ‘I’m killing every last one of these fuckers. Horribly! I may get some of my people and come back here and kill them again just to be on the safe side!’
‘Then you can stay here and frolic with the unicorns,’ Che told her.
‘If I stab you in here with an actual unicorn?’ she enquired.
‘I’m serious, Miska.’
‘You think I’m not? Why can’t I kill them? I mean they’re fucking pirates!’
Che looked momentarily embarrassed.
‘What?’ Miska demanded.
‘They’re my friends,’ he admitted.
‘You can make new ones!’
‘Do you want out or not?’
‘Fine.’ Miska sighed. ‘I won’t kill any of them.’
Che studied her for a moment or two.
‘Yeah, you’re going to have to try a bit harder than that to convince me,’ he finally said.
Miska threw her hands up in the air.
‘Seriously, Che, they’re not going to stop. Sooner or later I’m going to have to kill them. I may as well get it over and done with now.’
‘Those are the rules, take it or leave it. And I’ll be watching.’
‘The gun tramps, they’re not crew. I can kill them, right?’
‘No.’
‘Fine! I’ll go back to the torture!’ she said and crossed her arms.
‘You can’t be serious!’ He was starting to sound more than a little peeved with her. She wasn’t serious but she felt like digging her heels in.
‘Anyway, what’s your interest?’ she asked. Che narrowed his eyes. He was probably suspicious of the change in subject.
‘I am aware of what’s going on in-system at the moment. I suspect that, despite yourself, you’re on the side of angels this time—’
‘You know me, Che, fighting the good fight. Keeping the colonies safe from megacorp abuses.’ She offered him a fist bump, which he ignored.
‘Except when you change sides and go to work for New Sun.’
‘Oh, you know about that.’ Miska withdrew the proffered fist. ‘Well, I am a mercenary. Highest bidder and all that.’
‘Yes, it’s why you’re not being fully rescued,’ he told her.
‘Anything you can tell me about what’s going on? I don’t suppose you know what New Sun is up to?’ she asked.
‘No,’ Che said. ‘But I suspect the situation is being manipulated by the Small Gods.’
That got her attention.
‘Really?’ she asked. ‘Mars?’ She was thinking about Deimos, the entity that had inhabited Teramoto’s corpse.
‘Mars is always involved in colonial conflicts to one degree or another. Triple S and New Sun are just fronts for Martian interests.’
‘You brought Hinton here? Cut a deal with New Sun?’ she asked.
‘We brought Hinton here but the captain knew that Triple S had been in contact with Maw City about you. She made a deal with them in the Sirius System. Hinton was part of the deal, as was the bounty hunters taking a crack at you,’ Che told her.
Miska knew that with her out of the picture they could totally trash her reputation.
At least it was confirmed. Miska was giving some thought to going to the nearest Martian Embassy and asking them to leave her alone. Well, stop picking fights with their proxies, she chided herself. Then something occurred to her.
‘I won’t kill anyone if you get my gun and my knife back,’ she told him.
Che stared at her for a moment, a unicorn nuzzling his face.
‘Let me see if I’ve got this straight, you promise not to kill anyone but you want me to give you weapons?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she told him, nodding enthusiastically. ‘My dad gave me that knife, I’m not leaving it here with these assholes.’
Now it was Che’s turn to sigh. He seemed to decide it was the best deal he was going to get.
‘Very well then.’ He faded away.
Miska found she had access to her integral computer. The first thing she did was change her icon from the realistic looking one to the spiky cartoon version of herself, complete with her steel helmet. The second thing she did was beat a unicorn to death with her club.
The torture program was in a wooden crate in the hold of the Sneaky Bitch’s net icon. Miska didn’t know anything about historical sailing ships but she was pretty sure that the corsair’s virtual representation was supposed to be a seventeenth or eighteenth century pirate vessel. They nearly always were. Miska recognised the common element. The virtual ship had sails, cannons and was made of wood.
She was using one of the stolen stealth programs that had come with U.S.S.S Jimmy Carter, the electronic warfare ship she had stolen from the NSA. So far it was proving a lot more sophisticated than the Sneaky Bitch’s intrusion countermeasures, the visual manifestations of which appeared to be some very unconvincing pirate mannequins. She crept out of the hold and up the wooden steps onto the deck and looked out over the smooth, black, glass-like ocean that represented space. In the distance she could make out another ship. Miska turned around and glanced up at the masts. There were no sails up. The ship was still on the ocean. The Sneaky Bitch was running cold and silent. They didn’t want to be seen by the other ship.
They’re a long way from home for piracy, she thought. She picked up a telescope from the rail and in doing so snuck into the corsair’s passive scanners. She looked at the other ship through the telescope. She recognised it, or at least the type. The net icon was of an ironclad from the First American Civil War. It was a US government ship. She was pretty sure she knew which one as well. She interrogated the ship’s systems and her hunch was confirmed. It was the U.S.S.S Teten, the FBI destroyer that was part of the multi-agency taskforce that had been assigned to capture her and recover the Hangman’s Daughter. They had no jurisdiction in the Epsilon Eridani system, and any aggressive move against the Legion could be seen as an act of war, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t take delivery of a bounty. It was a bold move for Gosia. The last time the Teten and the Sneaky Bitch had encountered each other they had been exchanging munitions. That said, Gosia and her crew weren’t wanted for piracy in the Epsilon Eridani system.
‘It never rains but it pours,’ Miska muttered to herself. She wondered if her sister was still on board the FBI ship.
A map and a pair of compasses represented the navigation system. Miska confirmed her suspicions. They were still in-system. Gosia wouldn’t want to be too far from her people on the Daughter if she thought she was going to get the information she wanted from Miska. Miska was still, however, several light minutes away from Waterloo Station. The icon for the comms system was a signalling mirror. Miska folded herself down and flung her consciousness out across space in an occulted black beam of light.
The lag was killing her, but slowly and surely she was getting the U.S.S.S Jimmy Carter – or the Little Jimmy, as she called the stealth ship – systems up and running. She was mostly programming it for autonomous flight. Finally she was as ready as she was going to be.
She received three-minutes-old footage of the hollowed-out raven skull, which was the Little Jimmy’s net representation, detaching from the Hangman’s Daughter, which looked like a cross between an old prison hulk and some mythological funeral barge. The Little Jimmy made its way as stealthily as possible out of Waterloo Station space. Again, the New Sun’s ban on space warfare made this easier than it otherwise would have been. When the Little Jimmy spread its sails and accelerated there was no way that Waterloo Station traffic control wouldn’t pick them up, but by that time the ship would be gone.
Miska hated math, even computer-assisted math. The trick was to decelerate far enough away to fold away the sails and bleed off heat as discreetly as possible, but still keep enough velocity to drift in on the Sneaky Bitch. All the while relying on the stolen ship’s top of the line stealth systems to keep her invisible to the pirate corsair’s passive scanners. They couldn’t risk lidar and radar if they wanted to remain invisible to the Teten. Trying to work out the math for this, even with the help of the Little Jimmy’s dumb AI navigation so-called expert system, had given Miska another headache.
There was a horrible, disorienting, wrenching sensation as she ceased to exist in the Little Jimmy’s systems as the ship accelerated. Minutes later she existed again and the lag was down to nearly negligible milliseconds. Miska folded the sails down and bled the heat off. Heat would be the biggest threat of discovery. Now she needed to let the Little Jimmy’s admittedly excellent autopilot handle the extremely difficult manoeuvres that would be required, using only its compressed gas manoeuvring systems. She would have to move quickly now. She dropped one of her fuzzy worms. This one was yellow in colour. It burrowed into the wood, merging with the Sneaky Bitch’s systems. It contained one of the most sophisticated NSA intrusion programs that Miska had found when she’d stolen the Little Jimmy. Then she spoofed the security lenses in the hold she was being held in, occulted an instruction to one of the maintenance systems and tranced out.
Miska half expected all sorts of alarms to go off when she tranced out but they didn’t. She was impressed with Che’s spoof program despite herself.
Her body was still a mass of aching muscles but the twelve hours or so she’d been away from Waterloo Station had at least given her hand, and some of her other bruises, contusions and burns, time to heal.
A wheeled maintenance droid was trundling towards her. She frowned. Someone had painted a disturbing clown face on the front of it. It extruded a small, spinning circular blade.
‘Now wait a minute, haven’t you got anything a little less spinny?’ she asked as the blade moved closer to her right wrist restraint. ‘No, I’ve changed my mind, I’m pretty sure I can free myself.’ She grimaced and closed her eyes. Something sprayed up into her face. She risked opening one of her eyes. The wrist restraint had been cut but the circular blade had gouged a chunk out of the medgel encasing her right hand. Miska very quickly undid the rest of the restraints as the maintenance droid trundled back from wherever it had come from and she was free.
Her gauss pistol and the knife her dad had given her were waiting just outside the door to the cargo bay. She strapped on the knife’s sheath and SIG’s smartgrip drop holster. She drew the pistol, holding it somewhat awkwardly in her left hand as she made he
r way as quickly and as quietly as she could towards the closest airlock. She heard voices, and boots on the metal deck coming towards her. She cursed mentally and moved into the first room she saw.
Miska found herself in a tiny cramped bunkroom filled with various spare parts and tools. She was face to face with a short, slight, frizzy-haired woman wearing grimy overalls and a peaked cap.
‘Sorry,’ Miska told her and hit her in the throat, not quite hard enough to kill her, but hard enough to leave her short of air and unable to speak for a little while. Miska listened as the footsteps passed the tiny berth. She hoped they weren’t going to check on her. When she was sure they were gone she left the room. The woman was writhing on her bunk clutching at her throat.
Pistol outstretched, Miska – very aware of the time – moved quickly through the Sneaky Bastard’s cramped corridors. She had just one more corridor to go. She was pleased that she hadn’t heard them sound battle stations, which meant they hadn’t detected the Little Jimmy.
She rounded the corner. She supposed it was inevitable that the big Native American gun tramp and the dwarf had chosen this particular corridor for a discreet rendezvous. Miska was only slightly amused to see that their rendezvous involved a stepladder. They both stared at her. She stared back.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she told them, ‘this is going to seem really harsh.’
They were going for their weapons. Miska already had hers ready. Even though it was her off-hand the smartlink superimposed crosshairs in her IVD, showing her where the bullets were going to hit. The first three-round burst tore into the side of the dwarf’s knee with sufficient force to take his legs out from underneath him. His head bounced off the top of the stepladder on the way down.
The big Native American had actually drawn a PDW that he seemed intent on using as an oversized pistol. Miska went down on one knee. Her first three-round burst disintegrated the gun tramp’s left kneecap, the second his right.
‘Toss the gun!’ Miska told him, ‘Or the next burst goes into your balls! And you might want to think about how pissed I am with you right now!’