“It is.”
“Pure control?”
“The results speak for themselves,” the female insisted. “We have peace.”
“Oh, I can’t argue with that,” Rick assured her. “When we landed, we saw their peaceful, glassy eyes. We saw their peacefully uniform, shitty clothing.”
He nodded at her. “You guys seem well dressed, though.”
“Someone has to lead,” she said, unruffled.
“And it’s easy to love a system,” Rick observed, “when you’re the one sitting at the top, isn’t it?”
Really, Tim sub-vocal-texted, My Lord?
Rick cast an amused glance at his smiling apprentice. Tim knew the situation on Midgaard worlds was very different from here. Leading such an adventurous people was a major ass-ache most of the time.
You want to get us killed, don’t you? Tim asked.
It will get us to the open deck above the bridge, Rick replied. They don’t call it ‘walking the plank’ but it’s close enough for our purposes.
I hope you know what you’re doing, Lord. I’d hate to spend the last twelve seconds of my life knowing exactly how my body’s going to deform on impact with the ground below.
“Are you hinting that you’d like to be a member of the ruling class?” the first male asked. “A little presumptuous, don’t you think?”
“A little?” the woman exclaimed. “They have nothing at all to add to our way of life, no compelling reason for us to consider them at all.”
“Don’t we?” Rick tilted his head a few degrees. “If we don’t like it here, we’d be inclined to contradict the official narrative.”
“To what effect?” She sounded as though she were talking to a foolish child. “You’d be one voice in a sea of voices. Claiming he’d been surgically altered to fit in. Sounds crazy to me.”
“What’s truly crazy,” Tim observed, “is that you haven’t even asked why we’re here.”
“Why do any of you ever come here?” she asked archly. “We hear of the chaos and anarchy you endure out there. It takes no leap of the imagination to understand.”
“How fortunate for you,” Rick observed.
She looked away for a moment, half raising a hand to her ear. She smiled in a way that made Rick shiver, even though he knew to expect it.
At least things were finally moving along in the direction he wanted.
“Containment team is ready on the ground,” she told the two males before looking back at the two prisoners. “Your reluctance to conform to the official narrative is far less concerning to us than your implants. You can filter media inputs in the same way that I can, but we can’t take the risk of your working mischief with them.”
“Aside from the few seconds you’re about to get,” the second male said cryptically.
She gestured and the guards began closing in on the two prisoners. They took the hint and made their way out and through a large bullpen of desks where occupants looked at them with the morbid curiosity common to those who were watching condemned men.
There was no need to guide them as they already knew about the ‘plank’ that waited for them topside and they could see whenever a guard was about to correct their course.
They entered a large elevator that took them to a depression in the upper surface of the frigate. A wide ramp led up to the surface followed by a raised walkway leading to the forward end of the ship.
A fog had rolled in while they were in the boardroom and a light patter of drizzle glazed their faces as they approached the end of the line, literally, as far as the locals thought. They came to a halt, looking down.
“I suppose you mean we’ll have access to your systems after we fall out of the jamming field of this frigate?” Rick asked the second male. “Not sure that’s enough to undo the damage we’ve already done.”
The three of them exchanged glances.
“You’re about to call bullshit,” Rick said, just before the female was about to do just that, “and now you’re about to sarcastically ask me what damage we’ve been able to do while stuck inside your jamming field.”
He grinned at her. “Annoying, isn’t it?”
She scowled then glanced at one of the guards.
“Well, that’s rude!” Rick exclaimed. “Having Cheol, here, shoot me in the leg just to show me who’s in control of the situation! Someone’s going to have to come up here and clean up all that blood.
“Ahh…” He edged a step closer. “Now you’re convinced I’m not just making lucky guesses based on the context of the situation!” He quirked his head to the side, raising an eyebrow.
“How…” she began.
“Do you know what I’m about to say?” he finished for her, not missing a beat because he could see the questions well before his captors could. “Do you know how life comes about…” He crammed a lot of precog questions into the next few seconds. “Leornii?”
Her eyebrows tried to leap off her forehead at this unexpected use of a name she hadn’t given him.
“Chaos,” he told her. “Whether you believe the gods use chaos or that it’s just a question of big numbers having their way, it still comes down to chaos. Chemicals collide, proteins form…
“The same phenomenon you say drove us here – chaos – is what lets me do what I do. You see,” he said, trying to cover his true advantage, “our implants… they’re much better than yours.”
“Enough!” she shouted. “Cheol, throw this one…,” she indicated Tim, “...to his death and we’ll conduct a live dissection on this one to see what sort of implant he has!”
“Ah, ah, ah!” Rick admonished, wagging a finger at them, but Cheol was too eager, now that he’d been let off the leash.
He reached for Tim, over whom he had at least a sixty-kilo advantage, but Tim was too fast for him. His hand darted up to snatch Cheol’s right hand and he rotated it toward the guard’s body, bending it over hard, palm inward.
The guard grunted in surprise at the pain and Tim easily drove him down to a kneeling position, only half a meter from the side of the walkway, close enough to the end to miss the ship… probably.
“Hey!” Rick caught the second guard’s attention and pointed a finger at him to stop him. He slid the finger over to Leornii. “Check your unrest indicators,” he told her.
The three VIP’s angled their gaze to the side, concentrating on something that only they could see. Their confident postures became more agitated.
“What did you do?” Leornii asked quietly.
“Levelled the playing field.” Tim looked up into the damp sky. “I took away the visibility controls, so the only thing driving search results is raw curiosity. Most sentient species have an abundance of curiosity. Looks like you’re no exception.”
“We can undo your damage,” Leornii said, fists clenching. “The sooner you’re dead, the sooner we can put our society back to rights.”
“You’d think it was that simple, right?” Tim said mildly, still looking up. “And it would be, if I hadn’t created an assistant to do the coding for me. It’s almost self-aware – even I’m not so cruel as to create a self-aware program and leave it in this dump.”
“Probably would have terminated itself,” Rick said, “taking the whole system down with it.”
Tim raised his eyebrows in a nod of agreement. “Remember that program I built on Jiyuan?”
“That place with all the brothels?”
Tim nodded, pushing the guard’s hand a little further over at the wrist, just to keep him honest. “They paid good money for it too. It was doing marketing for them but now it’s running its own business. Caters to other programs, lets them flash their raw code at each other through the net.”
“That’s just nasty…”
“I try not to judge,” Tim said grandly. “Besides, it sent me a greeting note for my last birthday.”
“So you’re pals now?”
“More or less, and you wouldn’t believe the kind of stuff it sends me from the new business.”
/> “If you two idiots can spare a minute…” the second male cut in.
Rick held up a finger to forestall him. “You mean you like that kind of stuff?”
“Of course.” Tim squinted at him but then his eyelids flew open. “Whoa! It’s not like I get flush off it or anything; it’s just that a randy program will reveal some startling security vulnerabilities on a site like that.”
“Do you need us here for this?” Leornii asked sarcastically.
“Like you would just ignore a comment like that,” Rick turned to her. He gestured at the two males. “You’d just let that slide if one of these guys said the same thing? You’d spend the next week wondering if the sight of code got a rise out of the old yogurt-cannon…”
“You’re disgusting.”
“I’m disgusting?” Rick pointed at the first male. “Melanic’s the one wanted for public lewdness! Check the system. A very confused arrest team’s being assembled a few decks below us right now.”
Her focus drifted slightly as she checked. She took a step backward, darting an alarmed look at Rick.
“Found your own arrest warrant?” He smiled placidly. “Massive corruption. The really sad thing is that we didn’t have to fabricate any evidence. Your entire ruling class have been above the law for so long you don’t even realize when you dip beneath it.”
“We’re not just picking on you,” Tim added. “The three of you, I mean. I’ve rescinded a guidance memo from thirty-two thousand years ago that prevented law enforcement from investigating the ‘administrative class’.”
“I say we kill them now and fix this mess before it gets any more out of hand,” Melanic growled.
“Do you really think you’ll get the charges – pardon me, it’s a conviction now – dropped before the kill team arrives?” Rick scrolled his HUD. “They’re already in the air. You, my new friend, have only seconds to live.”
“Then fix it, damn you!” Melanic shouted in a near panic.
“Drop the jamming field so we can call our ship,” Tim insisted.
“Fine! But you fix it all before you can go,” Melanic said. “Till then, your ship comes no closer than two hundred cubits.”
Rick had to highlight the word. It turned out to be an old imperial measure, roughly a meter and a half. “Agreed.”
“Kill team’s on a holding pattern,” Tim said. “I’m working to neutralize our incursion into the local systems.”
The scout-ship emerged from the fog, dropping level with the top of the frigate but half a kilometer forward, as agreed.
“Everything’s getting pulled back,” Tim announced. “I reversed the orders on the code I wrote, so now it’s putting it all back the way it was.”
Rick saw the open link to the planetary net go down again.
“And now,” Melanic said with an evil grin, “back to the business of your executions!”
“Oh no!” Tim waggled his left hand in mock terror. He looked at his hand and back at the aliens, shrugging apologetically. “One sec…”
He let go of the guard’s hand and shoved him over the edge.
He raised both hands this time and waggled them. “Meh,” he grunted, “not any more convincing, really. Where was I?”
Melanic and Leornii were no help. They stared fixedly at the edge of the platform where their guard had fallen to his death.
“We were locked out,” Rick prompted him.
“Oh, yeah!” He made a helpless gesture. “I mean, game over, right? They got us now, unless…”
The upper-class aliens recoiled.
“You like that?” Tim asked. “It’s a picture of my ass! I want you to have a reminder pinned to your HUD’s of how easy it is for us to crack your pre-quantum systems.”
“You have a picture of your ass stored in your implant?” Rick raised an eyebrow. “Not that it’s weird or anything…”
“Yeah, well…” Tim curled the fingers of his right hand as though trying to grasp the entire embarrassing situation. “There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation of how that came about and I’ll gladly explain it on a fleet-wide channel but can we just get off this shit-heap of a planet first?”
“Fine. Thor, you reading me?”
“Loud and clear, Lord,” Thorstein’s voice blared loudly from the retracted helmet on Rick’s suit, taking its volume cue from the volume of Rick’s voice. “You ready for pickup?”
“We’re pretty much done down here,” Rick confirmed. Screw these guys, Tim, he sub-vocal-texted. “Pull up and drop the deck.”
He winked at the surprised locals. “We weren’t terribly surprised when you double-crossed us.”
“We had no intention…” Leornii spluttered, despite Melanic’s undeniable attempt. Clearly, these guys were used to writing reality on the fly and having it believed.
“No,” Rick soothed. “It’s ok, really. We’re relieved, if anything, that you turned out to be such assholes. We only temporarily set that program to undo the damage. I mean, how bad would we have felt, selling your asses down the river if you’d held up your end of the bargain?”
He broke out laughing at the looks on their faces. “You get it, right? You tried to cross us but it’s ok ’cause you’re so monumentally screwed! Kind of stupid, really, for you to assume that your tech is superior…
“Huh!” He was surprised at how fast this planet’s enforcement units could move. He pointed at Melanic, who’d been made the subject of a kill team. “Especially that guy,” he said, just before a sniper’s bullet sketched a thin path through the fog to punch into the side of the alien’s head.
Melanic pitched to the side, a spray of blood painting a red fan around his falling body. Leornii backed away in fear.
Rick was pushed forward slightly as their scout-ship darted into a position just beyond the end of the walkway, the air hammered aside by its progress. The cargo deck descended, bearing a few pallets and the security officer Thorstein had restrained earlier.
“Well!” Rick said with an air of finality. “That’s us finished here!” He hopped across to the cargo deck. “You folks have your hands full here so we’ll get out of your hair.” He motioned to Tim to grab the officer’s feet.
Tim hopped across and they picked up the local officer. “Gods!” Tim grunted. “What do these guys eat, lead?”
“On three,” Rick said, swinging the guy’s shoulders back. “One…” A swing. “Two…” Another swing as the wind picked up. “Three!” They released just as the wind picked up, pushing the small ship away from the frigate.
The security officer didn’t clear the gap. He slammed into the end of the walkway and dropped like a stone.
“Shit!” Rick said regretfully. “I feel bad! That guy was just… No wait! He went straight through the bridge windows! He’s gonna be ok!” He leaned a little farther, as if that would improve his view at such a distance. “Actually, he’s cut up pretty badly…”
He shook his head. “You know what? I’m sure those guys know how to take care of this. He’ll be fine!” He looked back up at his bemused former captor. “Sorry about that! That’s on us but at least he’ll be ok, right?”
“You’ll never break atmo,” Leornii shouted angrily.
“You know,” Rick shouted, “you’re actually right about that… in a way…”
The deck started lifting. Thor, jump us into orbit around the sixth planet as soon as you close the hull, he messaged. “Don’t be strangers!” he yelled, waving like an idiot.
The deck was a half meter from closed when he jumped up into the ship. He ran to the cockpit and dropped next to Thorstein.
“Y’know, she might get dragged off their ship when the air tries to fill the hole I’m about to make,” the engineer warned.
“Yeah, well, she called in fast-movers to kill us,” Rick said.
“In that case,” Thorstien said, reaching up to a button in his helm-holo, “screw her.” He touched the button while it was still red. It changed to orange, warning him of a hull breach. If
he hit it a second time, it would have jumped them instantly.
By leaving it at orange, he was telling the ship to execute the jump as soon as the safety warnings were resolved. A heavy thump reverberated through the ship, accompanied by a slight change in pressure. The city in front of them disappeared and, after a few seconds, the curve of a dead planetary surface shimmered into view.
“So,” Thorstein said, turning his seat. “You boys had fun on your little field trip? Made lots of friends and all that?”
“We pretty much got all the info we came for,” Rick told him. “Or, at least, most of the information they had.”
“What?” Thorstein put his foot up on a center console. “I didn’t see you dragging any equipment with you down there, so…”
“Their systems are old, Thor,” Tim said. He came in from the cargo/crew area and dropped into the captain’s seat, set back and between the two piloting seats. “Really out of date. We just compressed the data as we stole it and it fit on our implants with room to spare. I’ve already copied my half over to the ship’s system.”
“Must be because they’re so isolated out here,” Thorstein said. “Hey, you dropped my pal off before we left, right?”
Rick glanced back at Tim. “Ye…esss…”
“He’ll be fine,” Tim said. “Meanwhile, I see they had navigational files. Let’s see if they have a safe exit point from this place. I’d rather not just count on flying straight at the ‘wall’ and hoping that it doesn’t get us killed.”
“He’s coming along just fine, don’t you think, Thor?” Rick nodded at his young protégé.
“He is indeed! Reminds me of a young man, fresh off of 3428, back when it was still a mutineer’s hideout – no offense.”
“None taken,” Tim was setting up a holo to represent the hidden solar system they were sitting in. “Just because I share some genetic code with the original mutineers and those who benefited from it, doesn’t make me complicit.”
He spared Thorstein a glance. “You never told me you knew the boss before he was the boss!”
“Knew him? I adopted him into my family so he could marry Freya.” The engineer jabbed his thumb over his shoulder at Rick. “I’m responsible for his education, you see.”
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