Unsanctioned Reprisal

by Eddie R. Hicks

  The activation of the MRF would give them the freedom they needed, the power to pull away from the fleet, swerve around them, and dive up or below them or nearby rolling asteroids. From there, they would further secure their safety by pushing into the more densely packed areas of the belt where normal ships would have to rely on thrusters to safely traverse through it. Not to mention losing weapons lock while the Rezeki’s Rage strategically placed itself behind asteroids, using them as cover.

  That new freedom, however, came at cost. The pirates would send every ship within their alliance to pursue them. At least they won’t destroy us; they’ll want the MRF intact.

  Peiun’s orders carried out exactly how he envisioned in his head. The MRF, Nadevina’s piloting, and Alesyna using telekinesis to give the Rezeki’s Rage an extra push, took them away from danger, and into the deep end of the sea of tumbling rocks and mountains of the belt. The rate of rail gun fire decreased steadily over the course of six minutes, and then eventually became nonexistent. His HNI projection showed the pirates were forced to move slower to avoid crashing into asteroids. Others completely vanished from the projection when they neared dangerously close to asteroids at high speeds. Salvagers would enjoy the remains they’d be able to scavenge by the end of the day.

  “Stand down from combat stations,” Peiun said.

  “Yes, Captain.”

  Peiun quickly drew a line through the three-dimensional hologram of the belt, one that started from the Rezeki’s Rage’s current location and ended at Morutrin Prime. It was their escape route, one that should help keep their distance from additional pirate ships for the time being while extending their stay in the belt. Once completed, he sent the projection to Nadevina via HNI.

  “Follow this course, let me know when we are clear,” he said to her.

  “Understood.”

  Their escape would take hours, maybe even a whole day, more than enough time to put the human to work. He approached Moe, whom still remained on the bridge, holding the QEC they recovered from the Fortune Runner, trembling as his human flesh rejected comfortable Hashmedai room temperatures.

  “I want you to install this QEC to this ship,” Peiun said to him. “And tell me exactly where its corresponding QEC is and its last messages, if possible.”

  21 Penelope

  Atrium Arm

  Amicitia Station 14, Arietis system

  October 15, 2118, 01:38 SST (Sol Standard Time)

  Penelope Diamondrose felt like a complete noob for not hacking the security camera to the elevator she summoned. Now, the armed gunman had Travis Pierce and had vanished back into the elevator as quickly as its doors swung open, seconds before she could react or yell for him to run.

  It’s not over yet.

  Superimposed labels appeared over her eyes, all pointing her to the location of hidden and nearby security cameras. With a simple thought, her illegally modified HNI did the rest and transferred security cameras footage into her head. After two minutes of searching, leaping from camera to camera, she located the one camera she should have kept her eyes on, the one in the elevator.

  The video feed from the elevator’s cameras appeared, nobody was in it. The elevator did, however, remain idle, meaning nobody else got on it after they left. Three camera jumps later, she saw what was in the halls leading to the now idle elevator. The train station wasn’t far away. The gunman had to have taken Pierce there, since none of the people walking around looked anything like the two.

  She was right.

  The gunman kept close to Pierce. The two moved slowly, forcing Pierce to walk with him, whispering sweet nothings into his ears, like the fact he had a gun and Pierce better do what he says. She saw the two enter a platform and stand in a small queue to board the next train. Her HNI hacked into another camera, forcing it to tilt to the right and zoom in on the train’s holographic directory map. The UNE arm of the station was the station terminus. It made sense, the UNE city on that arm was the closest, and therefore the quickest way for the gunman to vanish with Pierce.

  There were over six thousand cameras in the UNE arm of the station alone. It would take her days, at best, to track them if she lost sight of them. That could not happen.

  Penelope didn’t have time to wait for the elevator to return. Instead, she forced the doors open with a wave of her hand and looked down into the darkened elevator shaft and the idle lift still at the desired floor. She leaped in, using the maintenance ladders to carry her to the bottom. Her HNI told her when it was safe to straight-up free-fall without crashing to her death. It automatically calculated the distance between her and the top of the elevator and the estimated time it would take for her to fall. It was a wonderful app she created, one of many stored in the hidden data crystals in her jewelry that wirelessly synced with her HNI.

  She hacked the top emergency escape hatch to the elevator, leaped in then forced its doors to open, and watched while her HNI created waypoint lines to follow. She followed the lines, rapidly sprinting to the train station. Various proximity alert icons dotted her virtual vision, reminding her how close many of the pedestrians within the station’s halls she ran through came close to crashing into her.

  There were two escalators heading to and from the platform Pierce was forced to. Naturally, the one leaving the platform was empty, the one going to it, was full. She hacked the empty escalator, forcing it to move in the opposite direction, and bolted up. The whooshing sounds of a train entering the station arrived about two minutes too early, she hacked the escalator again, forcing it to move faster.

  It wasn’t fast enough. By time she made it to the platform, Pierce and the gunman were gone as was the train they boarded. Her eyesight reported no hackable nodes close by to stop the train. Not that it mattered, hacking a train required security codes, complex ones she couldn’t crack on the spot. A quick test on the next train moving in the opposite direction confirmed that with access denied messages beaming into her HNI. She boarded the opposite moving train anyways, what she needed to do next, had to be done quickly.

  All trains moving on the station were connected and operated by station ops. If she was going to find the passcode it was going to be there. At the front of the train, she found a locked door that led to the computers controlling the train’s automated processes. She could change the direction of the train, speed, or make it bypass all stations from there. She was missing that one critical thing, the passcode. A quick blink of her eyes linked her HNI with the network nodes within the computer. From those nodes she found a path that led her to a security camera overhanging in station ops.

  The camera moved, zoomed in and out by her thoughts. She accessed one of Maraschino’s most infamous apps, a piece of software that could scan and retrieve all personal information found within one’s HNI. All Penelope needed to do was look at the person, and superimposed details about them appeared over her virtual vision.

  She scanned the humans that made up the team in station ops, skimming through their personal profiles, learning where they lived, how many credits they have in their accounts, name and rank, names of family members. Privacy was a myth.

  Bloody hell, not one of these buggers has it? Come on!

  She continued to scan the profiles of all personnel, searching for that one HNI memory core that would have the passcodes saved. She exhaled in a miserable manner, time was running out, the two trains were moving further and further apart. She found a computer station within ops that contained a duty roster of all ops personnel. Perfect. The list appeared in her vision after she downloaded its contents. It gave her access to the current location of all station personnel, including the administrator in charge of the trains. He was clocked out for a break, figures.

  Her sights returned to the cameras in ops where she located a computer station with communication abilities. Using her voice-masking app she spoke, sending her fake voice into the computer to broadcast an HNI message to all station personnel.

  “Lieutenant Kessler, please repor
t to ops.”

  Two minutes later, a single uniformed man boarded an elevator, sending it to ops. She ran an HNI scan of his profile. It was him.

  She leaped into his HNI’s memory storage, browsing his files, locating the passcode. On her way out of his HNI she uncovered recorded memories, private memories of him shagging numbers of Aryile call girls. He was a frequent visitor to one of the brothels in the lower levels of the station, especially on payday. His wife would want to know this, unless of course he was willing to pay large sums of credits to Maraschino to keep silent about it. It was his call.

  That, however, was a job for another day.

  With the admin passcode now copied into her HNI, Penelope returned to the previous task at hand, redirecting the train. She forced it to stop, and then enter reverse, bypassing all stations at the same time. She became the sole person aboard the train that did not express deep concerns as to why it suddenly stopped and went in reverse. Panic-stricken faces were on those around her, while she maintained her calm, cold, and cautious gaze peering out the window, watching station after station zoom past in blur.

  Her HNI kept tabs on the train she was pursuing. It was making all station stops. The gap between the two closed rapidly. Proximity warnings flashed, her HNI detected another train about to collide with hers on the same track. They were, after all, going in the wrong direction. She shoved her way to the front of the train, putting her in the carriage expected to crash into the opposing train first. Various holo screens laced with computer code appeared, searching for the network nodes she needed to force the incoming train to move out the way. She found it.

  Chaos and panic most likely erupted on that train, as it now traveled in the same direction as the one she was on, bypassing all stops. Not her problem.

  The train Pierce and the gunman were on came to a stop at the second station within the UNE station arm. She forced her train to do the same and got the hell out, leaping across the tracks onto the platform they should have been on. They were nowhere to be found, just a lot of horrified humans whom never seen a Hashmedai girl like her leap over tracks to get to the platform.

  The station’s cameras became her loyal servants and were quick to find Pierce and the gunman forcing him to walk. They were exiting the station and were seconds away from vanishing into the busy city streets, full of pedestrians leaving or participating in the city’s late-night partying life, with air cars in the skies below the fake holographic moon and skies.

  Penelope exited the station in pursuit of them, sliding down the escalator’s handrails. She somersaulted off it when the ground floor neared, landing feet first. Now the two were in close proximity of her HNI, she placed floating navigational points over their heads. Should they push deeper into the sea of pedestrians or behind one of the many office towers, she’d still be able to track them.

  The crowded sidewalks forced Penelope to take to the rooftops. Fewer people to push out the way there, plus, it gave her an overhead view of where the two navigational points had scurried off to. Her wrist cleared her forehead of sweat, her eyes remained fixed on the numerous rooftops she had to leap to. Her HNI sent all the data she needed to know to make that happen with floating labels in her virtual vision.

  Like a parkour athlete running an obstacle course, she leaped off one building onto another, landing feet first, rolling once or twice, and springing back to her feet to run again. Holo images generated by her HNI showed the best places to jump, the speeds she needed to reach, the angles she needed to achieve, and probability of success. Many of the jumps she made had a 45 percent chance of failure.

  A nearby structure had a pool hall located on its sixth floor. She had her HNI calculate the estimated distance to it, and the estimated time she would lose by making that detour. It was an acceptable loss.

  There’s a method to my madness.

  She approached the building where the pool hall was as she neared the edge of the rooftop she was on. Her HNI once again told her when it was the best time to jump, and the speed she needed be moving at. It also displayed dotted lines that showed exactly where she needed to fall to crash through a window on the sixth floor.

  She met the speed requirements.

  She approached the blue holo circle at the edge.

  Then jumped the second she was within it.

  Penelope kept her eyes forward, ignoring the zooming noises the dozens of air cars below her were making, or the twelve-story fall that awaited her should she not make the jump correctly, bad enough she needed to fall six stories to arrive at the sixth floor of the adjacent building. The air that ripped across her body during the fall was comforting, cooling her body down in preparation for what came next.

  She braced herself, and collided with the window, just as planned.

  It shattered into thousands of sharp fragments, some of them slicing her flesh. It was a better outcome, than missing the window and plummeting twelve stories. She hit the floor, tumbling and rolling, then got back to her feet without losing any momentum. She stormed into the pool hall, pushing over hustlers and men twice her size with beer bottles in hand.

  A pool cue and eight ball were swiped from one pool table, her actions were met with cursing and yelling, but zero fucks were given. She crashed through another window, and parkour leaped her way back down to the streets, landing a few meters behind Pierce and the gunman. Her endless pursuit continued.

  With the eight ball in hand, she threw it, following the instructions her HNI gave her in regard to the angle strength she needed to use. She smirked as the ball accelerated away from her, following the dotted lines before her eyesight, the estimated trajectory it needed to follow to hit the gunman in the head.

  The eight ball hit its mark. The gunman staggered, just long enough for her to close the gap, and finish him off with a whack against his face with the pool cue. Teeth and blood flew through the air. A second hit ensured his pistol hit the ground, while her footwork ensured he never got hold of it again.

  Pierce had scampered off somewhere, she wasn’t quite sure where, as her focus was aimed at the man who got up with a mouth and face drenched with red. He was ready for a fight, or so he thought. Hashmedai were physically faster and or stronger than most humans, Penelope was quick to remind him of that. She twirled the pool cue about, whacking him rapidly, backflipping away from his fists and kicks, sweeping out his feet, and eventually breaking the stick over his body.

  He wasn’t done yet, and neither was she as she held both broken pieces of the pool cue, and entered round two, dual wielding them. Their dance repeated in a similar manner, minus the leg sweeping part, not that it was needed, the final crack against his skull sent him down for good.

  She found Pierce hiding next to a nearby vending machine and made eye contact with him. His mouth moved, but no words came out. “You okay?” she asked him.

  Pierced looked at the gunman, now beaten to a bloody pulp. “I’m doing a lot better than he is.”

  Police sirens wailed in the distance. She groaned, knowing her much-needed rest would have to wait. Her rapidly thumping heart would need to hold out for a little longer while her glazed face continued to drip with sweat. Luckily for her, she was born and raised on Earth, and had a higher tolerance for heat and light, more so than other Hashmedai.

  “So, Travis, be a gentleman will you, and invite me back to your place?”

  Pierce’s apartment, UNE Arm

  Amicitia Station 14, Arietis system

  October 12, 2118, 02:22 SST (Sol Standard Time)

  Penelope frowned after arriving with Pierce at his apartment. She was expecting a dwelling full of weird things like microscopes, pictures of family members, too many university degrees hanging off the walls. What she saw was unopened boxes, lots of them. Her HNI scans indicated they were mostly full of clothes and old data pads. Pierce was far from the interesting scientist that helped solve the mystery of the Sirius system.

  Her HNI sent her a confirmation message verifying the cameras o
utside the apartment were under her control and programmed to detect the presence of weapons. An early warning in case someone from the outside world made note of the two entering, having evaded the police.

  She remotely forced the front doors to shut and lock then reprogrammed the entry codes. A memo was filed in her HNI that she needed to remind Pierce of the changes she made to his door security.

  Pierce offered her a bottle of water from the fridge. He knew his stuff when it came to Hashmedai physiology. “Am I free to talk now?” he asked.

  “Shh . . .” Penelope’s eyes looked about. Her HNI highlighted and labeled all electronic devices around the two, none of them were recording bugs. “Okay, now you may speak.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I told you,” she said, after chugging her cold bottle of water. “Penelope Diamondrose.”

  “You’re not an assassin; I’d be dead if that were the case.”

  Penelope sat on the couch. She almost forgot what it felt like to sit down. She spread her arms across its soft arms and kept her red eyes focused on him. “Not necessarily, the Empire has been known to send assassins on missions that didn’t involve killing a specific target,” she said. “But you’re right about that, I’m not affiliated with the Empire.”

  As expected, Pierce failed to keep his eyes away from her top. She liked that. It meant he’d follow her around if she asked him to. Not to mention it was a welcome confidence boost, confirming she still held that tempting honeypot persona that always got her access to top secret data files.

  “You’re not EISS, or Whisper,” Pierce said.