by M. D. Cooper
* * * * *
The AI running communications for the New Saint Louis had exchanged encrypted packets with El Dorado’s Customs department twice a day for fourteen days. She and her companions—all AIs—had gone through the information with mixed emotions.
Frida was happy that there were AIs at El Dorado, holding positions of importance. She saw that some were in government, while others held rank in the military. A few seemed to be successful in universities and businesses.
But she was disturbed to see that there were humans who still held strong prejudices against the AIs around them. A debate had raged within the ship: should they stay here or continue on to another star?
A consensus was reached, and the determination made that they would stop, observe, and interact with the colonists. Any who wished to could stay; others were free to take the New Saint Louis and leave.
They were close enough now that light-speed communication only had a twenty-second delay. So Frida had reached out to the Customs office for an approach vector through the local El Dorado traffic.
But what she had just been told had her staring incredulously at the image of the customs officer on the holo display.
Frida stewed as she waited the twenty seconds for the woman on the other end to respond.
“I’m sorry, miss…Frida, was it? It has come to our attention that your ship matches the description of a freighter owned by a company called…” The woman on the other end ran a finger down the holo sheet she held. “Yes, here it is: the company is HBC, Limited.”
On the screen, the Customs woman spoke again.
“Oh, my.” The customs officer tsked. “According to our records, the company claims you owe them two-point-seven million credits for equipment taken from their warehouses.” The human on the other end shrugged. “I’m terribly sorry, ma’am, but my hands are tied. They have filed an injunction with the El Dorado Commerce Authority.”
Frida suspected that the woman wasn’t sorry at all.
With a patience she didn’t feel, she tried again.
Frida queried Niki while she waited for her transmission to reach the woman on the other end.
The woman at the other end made a point of studying the list before her with great deliberation. “Two hundred seventy-seven, you say? Yes...that corresponds to this impound list.”
Frida was incensed.
“Mm-m-m.” The woman tsked again as she tapped her stylus against her lips. “That could explain it. It appears you were grandfathered in. Your cylinders and the tech inside them appear to be the property of HBC as well.”
A frisson of fear ran through Frida at the thought of the company that had treated AIs so brutally. HeartBridge had been the powder keg that set off the First Sentience War, back in Sol in the twenty-ninth century.
“Oh, look! Good news,” the woman on the other end smiled a little too cheerfully. “It says here they’re willing to sell you the equipment for a reasonable market price, and will waive all penalty fees.”
“Now don’t you worry,” the woman ended in a perky voice. “If you don’t have the credits, I’m sure you can work that debt off in no time at all. It looks like this company offers very reasonable terms for that kind of thing. Let me just send you the paperwork to review….”
If Frida had possessed a physical body, she would have gladly slapped the perk right out of that bitch.
* * * * *
Deep within the far side of El Dorado Ring, the connection to the New Saint Louis was severed. The woman posing as the customs officer deleted the hacks that had rerouted the signal from the Customs office. The Norden Cartel command center was once again a ghost in the system.
Across the room, a woman posing as the New Saint Louis’s XO wrapped up her report to the real Customs office.
“That’s right, ma’am,” she said. “As our shipping manifest states, we have no cargo to declare. Just an all-but-derelict ship from Sol. We’re headed over to the NorthStar Shipyards to be decommissioned.
“We plan to part her out and then send her to the boneyard out by Guatavita,” she added, naming an asteroid a quarter of an AU from El Dorado that sat slightly above the plane of the system’s dust belt.
The man standing in the shadows—Dwayne “the Mack” Mackie, the cartel’s chief of staff—nodded to himself in satisfaction as the woman gestured, and the signal from Customs winked out, its hack erased as well.
“Very good, ladies,” he murmured. “Sally, you’ve let the AI stew long enough. Ping them back and tell them you’ve found them a temporary berth, then direct them to NorthStar Slip 9. Tell them there’s nothing currently available, so they’re being shunted to the private sector until we can make room for them.
“Verda, keep monitoring Customs for any chatter that indicates they’re suspicious—and be ready to intercept any attempts to contact that ship. Let me know the moment it’s moored—but be sure to keep their connection to the Ring under our control.”
“You got it, Mack.”
Mack nodded in satisfaction as he turned to leave, then paused at the doorway, making brief eye contact with each person in the command and control center.
“Don’t fuck this up, people. We only have—” he glanced over at the chrono, projected prominently in big, red numbers on the back wall, “twenty-two minutes before we need to rig for silent again. I want that ship firmly in our space before we have to go dark for the seven o’clock scan. Got it?”
He left to a chorus of ‘yeses’.
The scan was a maintenance program run by several multinodal Non-Sentient Artificial Intelligences, or NSAIs. It was installed by the FGT when they first built the Ring more than a century ago. Overbuilt would be a more apt description.
With all those billions of square kilometers of livable space, and only six million in use, there was a lot of room where organizations like Norden could hide.
It was easy to spot structures built on the carefully groomed surface the FGT left behind, covered only in soil and erosion-resistant ground cover. But below the surface of the ring were eleven eighty-meter-high levels, each a warren of maintenance systems, stubbed-in maglev lines, and webs of conduit and catwalks.
So the cartel hacked into the NSAIs, identified scheduled maintenance checks, and set up shop.
Disabling the maintenance and status scans would have given them away, so the necessity for the entire base to go completely EM silent at specific times was drilled into every cartel member’s head. Forgetting meant risking their discovery by the NSAIs, and that was not acceptable.
All they needed to keep the NSAI nodes from discovering illicit activity was to shut down when the NSAI’s remote scan swept past. It was a bit annoying, but had long ago become routine. And no one ever forgot to shut down for a sweep.
Normally, Mack would not spare the time to micromanage two perfectly competent communications people the way he had just done, but this was a very lucrative score, and he wanted to ensure it came off without a hitch.
He did not want to be the one to tell the owner her latest acquisition had managed to slip away—even though she didn’t yet know it existed.
Victoria North, owner of NorthStar Industries, might fire him for that level of mismanagement, but Victoria North, leader of the Norden Cartel, would simply shoot him dead. He had no desire to place himself in the sights of that woman, no matter what mantle she wore.
Mack walked down the catwalk that ran along an unused spur housing several out-of-service maglev cars, the one he’d just left having been converted into the cartel’s command and control center.
As he sauntered toward the car he used as his office, he leaned over the railing of the catwalk and looked into the open bay below. There, he could see that a shipment of arms was almost fully loaded into the cargo shuttles, ready for transfer to the warehouse on El Dorado.
That warehouse was a new facility for Norden, having come online just one month ago. In addition to storage, it housed their new chop-shop, a department whose sole purpose was to digitally alter bills of lading, scrub idents from weaponry, and part out and repackage larger acquisitions into smaller, more salable sizes.
It was a hell of a lot more efficient than when they’d been doing the work up here on the ring, with all of the periodic interruptions to avoid detection.
Mack resumed walking, grinning as he entered the anteroom to his office and saw his assistant sitting at his desk, dutifully doing whatever it was assistants did.
Man, I freaking love having an assistant—and an anteroom, whatever the hell that is.
Made him feel all sorts of important. Stars, he’d started drinking coffee just so he could order the little shit to go get him some.
Mack knew he was the exception to the rule when it came to those who reported directly to Victoria North. The others were all a part of her executive leadership team on the company’s legitimate side. They had business degrees, pristine references, and years of experience in corporate management, which served NorthStar Industries’ purposes well.
Mack, on the other hand, was a street tough who had risen through the ranks with his fists. And the occasional chaingun.
He understood that the rest of them had their place, but the company’s main raison d’etre was to be a front for the side of things that he ran. The cartel.
He knew where he stood in the pecking order, but former street toughs whose edges had not yet been polished smooth still got the occasional thrill from some of the finer things. Like having an assistant.
Too bad half Mack’s time was spent in his office aboard NorthStar’s flagship yacht, the Sylvan, remaining on hand for whatever Victoria needed him for. Mack considered transferring the guy up to the ship.
Now, what was his name again…?
Mack rapped on the guy’s desk with his knuckles as he passed, then snapped his fingers as if he’d just recalled something. “Oh, hey, get Sally on Link for me, will ya? I forgot to tell her something….”
It would have taken less time for Mack to reach out to Sally himself, but where was the fun in that?
Once seated at his desk, Mack accepted the Link connection that his assistant forwarded, not bothering to check that the man had disconnected.
Sally’s avatar in Mack’s mind looked surprised.
Mack snorted in amusement at that.
In the front of the office, Mack’s assistant disconnected from the conversation. Quickly, he encrypted the recording into a holo sheet that contained an order for supplies—and no small amount of coffee—that he needed to deliver to the dock. Once it was transferred, he grabbed the stack of holo sheets off his desk, rose, and exited the office.
* * * * *
The AI had been part of an acquisition from the raid on a distant mining platform years ago. It had been a lucrative haul, though the AI was the only asset from the raid that Victoria had decided to keep.
It was quite the coup, really.
Unlike other, more legitimate corporations, Victoria’s didn’t employ AIs. Not that she wouldn’t have loved to have had them, but deep down, she didn’t trust them to have the same base motivations as their human counterparts.
Or perhaps it was more fair to say she didn’t trust her own ability to judge an AI’s character like she could that of a human. Victoria was adept at identifying those men and women who were ruled by their base natures. It was what had made the Norden Cartel such a successful venture.
She didn’t dare muck it up with an AI. Unless it was shackled.
She recalled how the thing had fascinated her when Mack had pointed it out. The cylinder had been resting in some sort of isolation container. Mack had informed her that one of the miners thought she was trading her life for the container—and for removing the AI from the platform without damaging it.
Mack had blown the miner’s head off the minute the woman had handed it over. But not before the woman had shared something very interesting with Victoria’s second in command: the existence of a shackling program that ensured an AI’s compliance.
He had transported both back to Victoria.
She’d had her people review the shackling program while the AI remained contained within the isolation tube. Once the squints had assured Victoria that they understood how the program functioned and could replicate it, she’d had the AI installed in the flagship.
There had been a brief spate of resistance from the creature, but with judicious use of the compliance settings within the shackling program, the AI had become docile quickly enough.
To further underscore its place in the Norden hierarchy, Victoria had stripped the AI of personhood, calling it by the ship’s name, Sylvan. Nothing to see here; just another piece of equipment.
Now, the AI obediently sent Victoria a visual of the activity occurring at Slip 9, just as she had ordered it to.
In the larger window, she watched as a ship, battered and holed in places, was slowly drawn into NorthStar’s drydock. One tap had the feed zooming in, and she noted with satisfaction that a boarding crew was on standby.
This lucrative little score was one they’d been hoping to run into ever since they’d acquired Sylvan. Victoria had told Mack to keep an eye out for other opportunities to acquire AIs. But like him, she had assumed they would be one-offs: individual AIs unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. To have more than two hundred of them together on a single ship, ready for the taking....
Victoria smiled to herself. Oh yes. These will command a hefty price on the black market.
An alert popped up with
Mack’s image, and, with a swipe, Victoria pinned Mack’s image to a lower quadrant of the holo tank’s display and activated the alert.
“Antonio has a team ready to board the New Saint Louis as soon as it docks,” Mack confirmed. “I’ve alerted the warehouse manager, down in Muzhavi Ridge. He’ll store the AIs for a few days until we can arrange to have them shipped to our buyers.”
“Good,” Victoria murmured. “Report in once our new cargo has been secured. I’ll be interested to know—”
She paused as Mack’s image wavered, and the signal cut out.
“Sylvan!” Victoria called out sharply. “Reconnect!”
There was a long pause, and then the shackled AI’s voice sounded dully in her ear. “Yes, ma’am.”
As Mack’s image reappeared, Victoria made a note to have her technicians rerun the compliance program on the AI to ensure that no degradation had occurred. Now was not the time to have an AI running amok on her ship.
Victoria returned her attention to Mack. “Let me know if they give you much resistance,” she instructed. “Antonio will need to be convincing enough that they allow him to board.”
Mack nodded. “He told them he’s a customs inspector and needs access to their ship. That should be enough to get him through their airlock. Once there, he’ll set off a directed EM pulse strong enough to knock their network access offline before they can ping anyone for help.”
Victoria nodded as Mack continued, “They’re annoyed at the delays—and at El Dorado for not welcoming them as refugees—but I can pretty much guarantee they aren’t expecting what’s about to hit them.
“Verda secured a batch of isolation tubes the minute our contact in Customs tipped us off about the ship,” Mack informed Victoria. “So after they set off the EM, all they need to do is load the cylinders into the tubes. Shouldn’t take more than half an hour. Easy pickings.”
“Very well. I’ll leave you to your acquisition, then,” Victoria said. “Well done, Mack. This should bring us a nice little profit.”