Renegade Patriot

by Oscar Andrews

  His time at the Academy had been some of the best years of his life. He didn’t see Trent very often except in passing, but Trent would occasionally knock on his door and invite him out for a long afternoon discussing science and philosophy in an off-site macca bar or cooking stir-fry with him in his own apartment. Trent was also his teacher for the single most important class he took: Protocols of Peace. In fact, Trent was something of a legend for designing these Protocols, the source of much of his power and prestige. These were the guidelines the Federation used for overseeing the colony worlds and maintaining peace between them, based on Trent’s synthesis of hundreds of years of research into behavioral economics, cognitive processing, developmental and environmental psychology, and other topics.

  Two years ago, Trent had moved from the Academy in Vienna to the Federation Headquarters to take on a bigger role, overseeing the Peace Task Force for the Federation galaxy-wide. After all, he had written the model on the theory.

  HQ, however, was also Neffy’s local base. It seemed natural that they would stay in touch, especially considering their long history. But one holocall a week turned into one a month, and before Neffy knew it they were no longer talking at all except for work.

  To Ally, something about it just didn’t seem right. Neffy’s childhood had been cut short – his father was gone and his mother had left him, so it was only natural that Neffy would have attached himself to Trent at a young age. Still, it was obvious to Ally that Trent was cold and narcissistic, and she could only hope that Neffy would someday see that and stop looking for warmth and acceptance where there was none.

  Flicking his notes closed, Neffy fidgeted in his seat, trying to get comfortable. Eight hours. He should at least try and get some rest before they got to the Cygnus system. He knew roughly what he’d be stepping into. He would need to focus – which meant being in the moment, not worrying how anyone else would view him and judge his actions. Closing his eyes, he settled back into the reclining pilot’s chair and tried to sleep.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The planet came into view in the distance, looming up over the front of the car as Neffy straightened up for the approach.

  “Okay, we need to recalibrate for Kepler-186. They’re in a relatively tight orbit here, by the looks of this data.”

  Neffy was busy flicking holo switches and controls as he lined the car up to come into orbit around New Atlantia. He had barely slept, but had been tracking their course for the last twenty minutes, and was watching the controls when they automatically dropped out of hyperdrive. He’d left the cockpit lights dimmed to give Ally some extra rest. And secretly he’d cherished his alone time with only his own thoughts churning through his mind.

  Recalibrating for the gravitational pull of the system’s star was essential if they were going to avoid overshooting the orbital trajectory. They didn’t have time to take another pass at it, and besides, Neffy reminded himself, it would look completely unprofessional if they couldn’t even get their car into orbit. That kind of miscalculation was something civilians did all the time. But not the pros. Additionally, there was little doubt in his mind that the New Atlantians were watching, willing them to arrive before the Drewdonians. He only hoped they had made it in time.

  Neffy glanced across at the sleeping Ally. She had started to reactivate moments after they dropped out of hyperdrive but then went straight into a reboot. It had happened a couple of times on their last mission, but never before that. Neffy had just assumed it was something to do with some kind of induction in the cybernetic brain when they decelerated at such a rate. But it was strange that it had started happening so suddenly. He made a mental note to suggest Ally get checked out when they got back to T3 - just in case it was a maintenance issue.

  Seeing the lights flashing just under the synthetic skin on the side of Ally’s temple, Neffy spoke up, “You okay?”

  Ally didn’t answer.

  She was online, at least, Neffy observed from the flashing pattern of lights. Assuming she could still hear, but that her language algorithms just weren’t online yet, Neffy kept talking anyway. Ally’s auditory buffers would probably pick up what he was saying and relay it to her to bring her up to speed in a few moments.

  “We need to be aware of the Aegelweard being in orbit. If they’re not here already, they probably will be any hour now. I had a transmission come through from Trent that downloaded as we came out of hyper. He’d had word from Captain Eryn O’Shea on Atlantia. The Aegelweard has shown up on their system. We’ll need to go carefully. No idea if they’re going to be hostile towards landing ships. They won’t know we’re in play yet…”

  Neffy guided the car into an acceptable trajectory and locked on. The Nav would take them down from here into orbit. Then they needed to get some coordinates for the Federation Command Center where they were expected.

  Ally blinked a few times, mechanically, betraying the reality of her otherwise convincing synth body.

  “Back with us?” Neffy asked.

  “Yeah. One sec.” Ally was reviewing the buffered information of the last few seconds. Her eyes traced back and forth, as if reading something in midair.

  A few moments later she nodded and straightened up in her chair. “Okay. Ready to go. Don’t know what happened there, though. I should probably get checked over when we get back to the Sol system. Unless we just make a habit of updating the backup of my consciousness on a regular basis, in case this bot body fails.”

  She made it sound like she was joking, but of course she was desperately hoping for a solution to her problem. She glanced at Neffy, who was scanning for other ships in the vicinity. He didn’t reply at first, and she was just beginning to get irritated when he jumped in.

  “Ha! Right!” Neffy flashed her a mocking smile. “How do you know we haven’t rebooted your backup before?”

  Ally’s face dropped, realizing that what Neffy had said in jest could easily be true. She would have no way of knowing unless she checked the logs on her firmware.

  Nothing in the logs. Quickly she scanned her cybernetic brain, looking for evidence of chunks of time that had been missing, mild panic rising within. Ally found herself stunned by something she’d never considered before. Neffy sometimes had no idea about the impact his throwaway comments could have on a person. Or at least a partial android person. In a breath he had brought her whole experience of the world, her whole existence into question. For someone with such extensive training in human interactions, he could really mess things up sometimes.

  Neffy glanced over at her, realizing now that he’d been inconsiderate. He smiled warmly. “You’d believe anything!” he teased, turning his attention back to his holo, shaking his head in mock disbelief, “Do you really think I wouldn’t have told you?”

  The Nav system beeped. Neffy flicked a holoswitch and changed windows, sliding one out of his eyeline with a swipe of his finger, and bringing another into view with his other hand.

  He frowned. “Uh oh. There they are. About 100 clicks out, a colonial ship, probably holding 500 crew. They’ll be in orbit about 50 minutes after we land at this rate. Must be the Aegelweard.”

  “And so begins another adventure in The Tales of Neffy and Ally. Or should that be Ally and Neffy?” she said playfully. The tension of the job at hand superseded any of the existential considerations that had been bothering her just moments before. Falling back on old in-jokes was a tried and proven coping mechanism.

  Neffy played along. “As I’ve told you many times, the story just has to be called A Man and His Synthbot.”

  She punched him lightly on the arm, and he said, “Hey, watch it!”

  The car bumped them into an orbit close enough for holo communications, and Neffy started hailing the Federation Command.

  Twenty seconds later, a technician came online.

  “Captain Klingerman?” the mechanical voice said over the comms system. There was some static, and the transmission continued, “We’ve been expecting you. Stand by for
landing coordinates.”

  “Standing by,” Neffy responded.

  He pulled up a separate screen to see what else he could glean from the Drewdonian ship approaching the planet from the other direction. It seemed to be in good repair, fully armed. It had its shields up, and it wasn’t broadcasting any signals. He thought about hailing it, then thought it better to get down to the surface as quickly as possible and follow the protocol Trent had given him.

  Protect Atlantia first. That’s what his brief had said.

  The Drewdonians were the aggressors, and Neffy lacked the necessary intel to open a dialogue with them at this stage.

  The holo console beeped as his car received the coordinates.

  “Coordinates received,” he confirmed to the landing tech.

  “Acknowledged,” the voice responded, “we’ll have a welcome party meet you at the carport. Welcome to New Atlantia, Sir.”

  “Thank you.” The holoscreen dematerialized, leaving a map of the car’s flight path in his eyeline.

  Within minutes they were descending through the atmosphere. There seemed to be little atmospheric differential between the calibrated data and the weather patterns, making for an easy, automated descent. Neffy and Ally gathered up their belongings as best they could against the turbulence and the g-force. Another few minutes and they would be docked in a port.

  Ally glanced across to Neffy who was preoccupied with trying to get a sweater back into his bag. “So, how should we play this one?” she asked.

  “Well, I’m guessing they’ll want to be saved from this unwelcome Drewdonian intruder, so there’s no reason to expect they’ll withhold information.” Neffy paused, assessing the obstacles they were likely to come up against. “On the other hand, these guys have never had to worry about attack from orbit before. They’ll be scared, chaotic, and probably overly sensitive about protocols. That will slow things up. I think the best play will be to assume authority, so they fall in and just trust us to steer these negotiations.”

  “Hard and fast it is, then,” agreed Ally, smiling mischievously at her choice of terminology.

  “And deep,” Neffy added, grinning along. Juvenile humor could do a lot to ease the tensions on a mission like this one.

  They leveled out a few kilometers away from the planet’s surface. The light was low and red. Neffy remembered that the planet was tidally locked, despite being a significant distance from the star it was orbiting. In fact, it was quite a surprise when it was first colonized. Most tidally locked planets were on tighter orbits than this one, so not many colony worlds had to deal with having one side facing the star all the time. By the time they realized there was no night and day on the rock though, vegetation strains had been developed elsewhere so that food sources could survive the low luminosity levels and continuous light. Being tidally locked made little difference in the end. However, Neffy had forgotten that they would be stepping into permanent twilight.

  Better get used to it, he thought, remembering everything he had read about brain chemistry and the need for blue light to stimulate waking hours and serotonin production.

  As they came in to land, their space-car swooped over the landscape on approach to the docks. Behind them there were plains of sand and stubbled grass. Ahead of them, land vegetation, more sand, and an expanse of gray buildings that made up the city. Red sunlight glimmered off shiny surfaces.

  The viewer flashed up with an overlay, marking the main buildings and highlighting in red cross-hairs the one they were heading for: Federation Central Command, the tallest block in the little concrete city.

  “There it is,” murmured Neffy.

  Within seconds they had crossed the city and were docking in the car port, located a few stories down from the top of the building. The heavy heap of a ship clicked into the dock, and then sighed as if with relief as the engines powered down. It had been a long trip in hyperspace, and though in theory the fusion source could keep it going indefinitely, these vehicles seemed to run better with breaks every six hours or so. Neffy glanced at his holo. They’d been going about eight and a half hours.

  The car doors automatically swung open upon docking, letting fresh air into the cockpit. Neffy and Ally clambered out and jumped down onto the sturdy reinforced concarbonate flooring. The carport took up about three floors’ worth of space vertically. It was probably used to receiving bigger ships than theirs.

  “Welcome to New Atlantia,” a woman called, approaching their port, followed by an entourage of half a dozen other people. She was tall, brunette, with an athletic build and wore an atmosphere resistance lifesuit, similar to the ones Neffy and Ally wore, except not as modern. Neffy guessed it could probably withstand a vacuum for thirty minutes, and judging by the dress code of the welcoming party, this was probably the standard attire here.

  “Captain Nefertiti Klingerman,” he introduced himself, “And this is my assistant, Sergeant Alice Montgomery.”

  The woman nodded to each of them in turn.

  “I’m Sergeant Rikke Kae. Thank you for coming. I’m here to help you with anything that you need.”

  “Excellent. Thank you, Sergeant,” Neffy’s tone was congenial but official, “Time is of the essence. Perhaps we can speak with Captain O’Shea straight away?”

  Rikke Kae turned, gesturing back towards the door that she and her team had emerged from. “Of course, Captain. Shall we?”

  She pointed toward the door, allowing Neffy and Ally to lead the way across the big, empty carport. Once inside the building, the party followed a sequence of corridors and turns. Some had doors leading off them, into what looked like laboratories. Others were clearly administration areas for officials on the planet. Finally, they came to a longer corridor, which seemed even more spartan than the others. It felt like they were entering a military zone. Just from the look of the walls and floors, Neffy could tell they were materials reinforced with nanocarbon composites. In the event of an attack, this place would probably be bomb-proof.

  Probably, he thought, not wanting to have that concept tested out.

  “Straight down to the door at the end,” Sergeant Kae instructed them.

  Neffy led the way, closely followed by Ally, who was quietly mapping the building schematics as they wended their way through the building.

  The doors at the end of the corridor automatically slid open. Neffy, and then Ally, stepped through into a command center almost the size of the Reykjavik carport back on T3. All around them were consoles, meeting areas, and data banks.

  Neffy assumed this must be the main operations for the Federation on this planet – at least in theory. In practice, Federation officials on the various colony worlds exercised a great deal of local autonomy – otherwise they wouldn’t be having this problem in the first place.

  Past the activities of the scores of officials and layers of consoles, there were floor-to-ceiling windows stretching the length of the side of the building. Beyond the windows the red glow from Kepler-186 bathed the cityscape. Neffy wondered how they managed to live like this, but then, if he had grown up knowing no different, he perhaps wouldn’t find it as depressing as he did at the moment.

  Neffy and Ally took a few paces inside and then Sergeant Kae finally took the lead.

  “Wait here, please,” she instructed, and bustled off into the hub of activity.

  Neffy exchanged a look with Ally, who had the same suspicions. Kae had probably been given instructions to take them to a waiting area, but Neffy’s act seemed to have altered her attitude, forcing her to improvise.

  Neffy allowed his gaze to follow the sergeant until she disappeared behind some kind of static holo of a map, which people seemed to have to walk around. The map was likely of the planet’s surface, Neffy thought, not quite sure why it would be taking up so much room and attention during a time when the threat was coming from space.

  Then there was something else that nagged at him. He couldn’t put his finger on it.

  He didn’t have much time to con
template that thought, though, as movement from behind the holo panel caught his eye. Sergeant Kae was returning, but this time she was scurrying behind what could only be their leader, and a small entourage of curious and focused-looking officials.

  A good foot taller than the rest of the female officials, this woman could only be described as a warrior. Neffy had seen images of women who were thought to roam the ancient Steppes of T3, many thousands of years ago. These had been nomadic women, carrying only what they needed, and living from day to day in the harshest of conditions. Neffy immediately saw the similarity between the harsh desert conditions beyond the city and the conditions the Steppe nomads must have endured. He smiled thinking of how human history seemed to repeat itself across time and space.

  Humans are so fascinating, he thought – and then stopped himself. He had to watch out for the tendency to always see himself as an outside observer.

  “Thank you for coming,” the tall woman said. She held up a hand, palm open and facing the visitors. Neffy realized this must be a greeting and returned the gesture. Ally, in her synth-body, assumed she wasn’t subject to the same social niceties and stood looking blankly, waiting for Neffy’s lead.

  The lead official, like the other women, was also dressed in a tight-fitting lifesuit, but it remained unfastened in places, as though she didn’t intend to wear it out in the atmosphere. Like the other women, it seemed to serve as some kind of uniform, with rank designated in shapes atop their shoulders. One zip to the front panel was undone to expose her neck and the top of her chest, and the arms had flaps that were open with electrostatics that folded them back out of the way. This exposed her forearms and perhaps gave her greater freedom of movement.

  “We hope we can be of assistance,” responded Neffy. “Captain Eryn O’Shea?”

  The woman nodded.