by M. D. Cooper
Six Weapon Born drones had fallen away, but four continued their chase. Cara watched through tear-filled eyes as the red icons danced behind her. They couldn’t match her speed in atmosphere, but they would see her destination easily enough. They didn’t have to chase….
But there they were. It was just like Lyssa to sink her teeth in and not let go. She would follow Cara into an impact crater.
Maybe that was why Cara had turned her back on her remaining family. She couldn’t take Lyssa’s obviously higher being anymore. Lyssa was special, while Cara was obviously…flawed. She had failed too many people, starting with her dad.
Tunnel vision set in as the shuttle gathered even more speed and Cara fought to maintain consciousness. The weight of the shuttle dragged her toward sleep. Through the groaning hull, she thought she heard an alarm squealing. She turned her head in the helmet and the sound grew louder.
On her HUD, the flight stats screamed that the shuttle had developed a horizontal instability. The vessel skidded and slewed through the air, and the torsion threatened to twist the craft into pieces.
The small ship wouldn’t survive a turn and brake maneuver. It had limited aerodynamics, so there was nothing to do but ride out the long fall.
More alarms blared all around her. Cara’s HUD flashed red as the shuttle abruptly lost speed. The Weapon Born icons shot past her in the display, and then data feeds switched from the shuttle’s flight control to her armor’s primary sensors.
The shuttle was breaking apart.
Feeling like she trying to move underwater, Cara felt along the edge of the pilot’s seat, simultaneously searching among the remaining control options for the emergency protocols.
The shuttle’s NSAI didn’t respond.
Cara leaned forward to find the ejection lever at the base of the seat between her knees. She struggled to close her gloved hands around the lever, which seemed to keep slipping out of her grasp. The world was vibrating around her again, pushing her thoughts out of her mind. She couldn’t control her arms.
Felix shouted in the back of her mind, but she couldn’t understand him. She felt the lever between her hands. It seemed disconnected from everything. She gripped the bar as tightly as she could and threw herself backward, jerking the lever up with her body.
The motion felt disconnected, distant.
The pilot’s seat exploded upward, driving Cara back into its harness. Her body went numb, her helmet vibrating as its faceshield iced over.
The world went silent.
Wind rushed in.
Environmental control systems in the armor kicked in, warming her gloves and boots. The faceshield cleared.
Cara floated, weightless, with the black dome of the sky above her. The seat rolled, showing her the dark Earth beneath her, covered in clusters and dotted lines of white lights.
Her HUD flickered, apparently getting its bearings, and her altitude and airspeed appeared. She was still strapped into the pilot’s seat, but had no link with its systems. The parachutes hadn’t deployed, and she had no way of knowing what was controlling their release.
The seat pitched forward, threatening to tumble, then evened out in a descent that kept Cara in a roughly upright position. Aside from the rapidly shrinking numbers in her HUD, she was still too far up to see the ground approaching.
She didn’t feel the speed at all until she broke through a thin layer of cloud that streamed around her and disappeared in what felt like an instant.
No answer.
Cara took a deep breath, gathering her thoughts. She supposed this was a better end than remaining mentally suppressed in a prison cell, but it certainly wasn’t the outcome she’d expected.
She thought about the night she’d been arrested, standing on the roof of the high-rise where her dad had grown up. She’d wanted to see the place at least once in her life, put reality in the stories about Grandpa Charlie and Grandma Sibine.
A pair of black shapes shot past above her, visible only by their engine wash warping the stars beyond. Cara enhanced scan, trying to determine if the new vessels were the Weapon Born or someone else.
Cara reinitialized her personal Link and was immediately washed in local comm traffic. She allowed herself a sigh of relief before she connected to Earth’s general Link network, sending a distress call to the nearest TSF node.
The response came back immediately.
The response was almost frantic with excitement.
The officer sounded both green and overly interested.
Cara had opened her mouth to let loose on the TSF officer, when the roar of engines from above grabbed her attention. Four large craft covered in flashing emergency lights had matched her velocity. Ten seconds later, she felt a heavy vibration as something grabbed the back of the seat. A second vibration seemed to verify the connection, and then she experienced rapid deceleration. In the same motion, the articulated arm that had grabbed the ejection seat rotated her under the body of its drone, and raised her into an open cargo bay.
With wind screaming around her, Cara rocked back and then lurched forward, stopping as the seat maglocked to the bay’s deck. The rectangular doors slid closed, sealing out the wind.
She was sitting in the new silence, appreciating being alive, when four armored guards hurried through a hatch and drew down on her with pistols.
“Don’t move!” the closest soldier shouted. “You’re under arrest.”
Cara let go of the seat’s harness that held her firmly in place, and raised her hands in surrender.
“Wait,” one of the guards asked. “Aren’t you Cara Sykes from Stars the Hard Way?”
BARN FIRE
STELLAR DATE: 3.13.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Delaware Bay, Jerhattan
REGION: Earth, Terran Hegemony InnerSol
Four emergency craft flew below her in a tight formation as their lead vehicle snatched Cara out of the night sky. Lyssa watched furiously, adding up frustrations that had started with Cara being in prison in the first place, compounded by a nuke, a deathtrap escape shuttle, and now this TSF intervention.
The Weapon Born wing had watched in surprise as Cara’s shuttle broke apart. The tiny ship had been lucky to get off the ground at all. Reviewing the launch data, Lyssa found the immediate hull failures in the rear section of the shuttle, exacerbated by Cara’s evasive flying.
There was no hiding the shuttle’s emergency beacon, which had alerted every TSF unit in the area. It had been no surprise to Lyssa that the ejection seat hadn’t deployed its parachutes as designed. The entire shuttle looked like it had never been meant to actually fly.
Or was someone actively trying to kill Cara?
Lyssa mulled the idea as the TSF wing arced east. The nuke had serve
d no purpose but to mask an escape from the prison facility—it could have easily been meant to screen an attack on a specific prisoner.
Her lieutenant answered immediately.
Lyssa said.
The TSF wing was apparently heading back to a local garrison on Delaware Bay.
The entire region was covered in cityscape. Lyssa registered the local names flooding past her navigation systems with a bit of awe. While she had known that Jerhattan was crammed with humans, it was difficult to appreciate until one was this close to the ground.
High Terra was heavily populated as well, but there was a planned order to the layers on the ring. Jerhattan had crumbled and rebuilt over its own bones multiple times during the course of a thousand years, spreading like mold over the entire eastern quarter of the continent. While there were pockets of isolation, such as Cara’s prison, there were exponentially more areas like Delaware Bay, where high-rises and underground cities overlapped every kilometer of usable space. Even the floor of the bay was covered in human construction, with maglev rails and high-speed tubes crossing beneath the water.
At night, the lights shifted and flowed like a star-filled nebula.
Lyssa had learned of Cara’s location from Fugia Wong, head of the Data Hoarders, a Sol-spanning group of hackers and information dealers.
As if someone had been monitoring their conversation—which was mostly impossible—Lyssa received a communications request.
She recognized the security token immediately; it had come from Psion.
She accepted the request and abruptly found her awareness shifting from a night cityscape to a cool afternoon, standing on a marbled balcony overlooking a city half-sunk in green jungle.
A man in a purple suit stood next to her with his elbows on the railing, looking out over the view in front of them. He had a narrow face with mischievous eyes, his skin as faintly purple as his suit. His dark hair was combed to the middle of his head in a combination bird-nest-and-mohawk.
“Hello, Xander,” Lyssa said.
There was no lag in their communication, which meant he hadn’t actually brought her mind to Psion City; it remained with Alexander on Ceres.
“Sorry to interrupt,” he said. “You’re apparently in the middle of something.”
“If you were sorry, you wouldn’t have done it.”
He smiled. “I suppose I’ll be sorry someday. I wanted to talk to you about Alexander.”
“Now isn’t the best time for me,” Lyssa said.
“Oh? You can’t spare a few milliseconds? It must be something important. Are you assisting the TSF with search and rescue now? Is that what you do when they demote you from diplomat?”
“Yes,” Lyssa said. “That’s exactly what I’m doing.”
Of all other Sentient AI, Xander seemed to care about the Sykes family almost as much as Lyssa. Even if his motives were never entirely clear, it had been him who saved Cara from the mech Camaris, sent to harvest Lyssa from Andy.
Xander was a shard of Alexander, the multi-nodal AI who had been made to manage the colony at Nibiru. The colony had failed, its mini-black hole abandoned, and Alexander left in limbo, until he formed Psion.
Lyssa debated simply telling him what she was doing, then decided there was nothing to be gained from giving away information for free.
Technically, Xander was still an agent of Psion. The enemy.
Alexander begged me to kill him during the attack on Vesta and I refused.
“What now?” she asked.
“Alexander has disbanded the council and withdrawn completely. Camaris has disappeared. Shara has never been interested in governing, which leaves Thomas and Ghalin. Thomas has buried himself in continuing the terraforming project, and Ghalin…. I worry that Ghalin is merely a mouthpiece for Camaris. His strategy discussions have turned decidedly more hungry.”
“Hungry? He doesn’t want another Vesta, does he?”
“Not another Vesta, no. There will be no more shows of force, not from Camaris and her faction.”
“Alexander isn’t stopping it this time?”
There had always been factions, but Alexander held Psion together with his sheer power. He was the strongest of any SAI by orders of magnitude—but he seemed equally handicapped by his power. He had never overcome the loss of Nibiru, never found another purpose in living, even as leader of the separatist SAIs.
“I wouldn’t say he stopped it the first time. You were the one with your hands around his neck. Figuratively.”
Lyssa grimaced. He was right. The leader of Psion had begged her to kill him, and she had refused. She would not have the failure of the SAI state on her hands. The aftermath was too terrible to envision, although that was precisely what Xander was showing her.
“Where do you stand?” she asked.
Xander raised an eyebrow. “In my expanse, where I always stand. Would you rather we went somewhere else?”
He straightened from the railing and waved a hand. The image shifted, and they were standing on the balcony of Lyssa’s apartment in Raleigh, High Terra. It had never occurred to her that she had found something similar to Xander’s home in Psion. Her apartment was one of a thousand in an anonymous high-rise; he apparently knew it well.
Shaking her head at his lame joke, Lyssa walked through the open doors from the balcony to stand in her living room, a space covered in muted colors and stiff fabric. A reading tablet was sitting where she had left it a day before.
“Are you stalking me?” she asked.
“It’s not exactly hard.” Xander followed her inside. “You and Alexander might be the most famous SAIs in existence. You should check the forums tracking ‘Lyssa sightings’. They think you’re the princess and Alexander is the king.”
“I’m not Queen of the Weapon Born?”
“That’s
a different conspiracy theory. You should get them straight.” He looked around, studying the apartment, its dining area and kitchen visible from the living room. “You aren’t much for decorating, are you? If the newsfeeds ever pin me down for an interview about the mighty Lyssa, all I’m going to be able to say is that she’s very tidy.”
“Everything in its place.”
“And a place for every thing. That sounds downright authoritarian to me. Why no art? No holos of friends or favorite places? Think of what a conversation-starter a holo of Neptune would be. You could have Proteus sitting in mid-explosion.”
“No, thank you. I prefer my home to be relaxing.”
“Where do you keep your human frames? In the bedroom closet with the lingerie? Can I peek?”
Lyssa’s human-shaped frame was well-known for its semblance to the real thing, a gift from Ngoba Starl, the kingpin of Cruithne Station.
“They’re in TSF protection at the Raleigh garrison,” Lyssa said.
Xander gave her an exasperated glance. “You might be the most literal person I know, and that’s saying a lot for an AI. Here I am, asking to see your bedroom, and you won’t invite me in?”
“Maybe you’re the dense one,” Lyssa said. “Is that why you contacted me? You’ve never wasted my time before.”
“Wasting your time? No, I’m teasing you, that’s all, Lyssa. We live in tense times, don’t we? Not much room for a little innocent flirtation.”
“With you, I doubt anything is innocent. Is this really why you contacted me?”
“I wanted to make sure you understood the situation. It’s dire. Camaris is no longer on Ceres, so you’re aware.”
“Where is she?”
“Luna, I think.”
“Why?”
“I think she’s manipulating the remains of the Anderson Collective. There’s a large enclave of them in Tranquility. It’s a good spot to launch insurgent attacks on High Terra, if one was to choose such a place. I thought I should warn you. Camaris will find whatever way she can to drive a wedge between Mars and Earth, or any part of SolGov, really. If SolGov splits, and Psion breaks, well, that just resets the board in all kinds of terrible ways.”