Eve of Destruction

by M. D. Cooper

  Was it an attempt? It seems pretty successful. How long has he been out there?

  Cara cursed.

  I’m really going to do this again. She shook her head. “These three are yours,” she told the sergeant, then sprinted down the corridor toward the opposite airlock.

  Using the command codes Jack had shared, Cara navigated her way to the Amplified Solution’s maintenance systems, including the battery of external drones designed to maintain the outer hull. It took twenty seconds for the passive scan to locate Osla spinning away from the ship—active scan would have cooked him—and send drones to his location.

  Cara reached the opposite airlock where the shuttle waited. Three dead Andersonians lay in the hallway, scorch marks covering the plas walls. She shook her head at the sight of them, hating the meaninglessness of their deaths, then ran through the airlock.

  Throwing herself into the shuttle’s pilot’s seat, Cara strapped in as she activated the NSAI.

  “Authenticate user,” came the reply.

  “What?” Cara demanded. “You’re kidding me. I need to use this shuttle. We’re having an emergency. I have one minute to save your chancellor.”

  “Authenticate user,” the AI repeated.

  Cara slammed her fists on the console, breathing hard. Then she pulled up the system’s maintenance console and activated the dirtiest hack she knew.

  “Sorry about this,” she said.

  Exploiting a vulnerability in the engine adjustment protocols, Cara burned the NSAI’s active memory. Without its security systems, the AI released control of the shuttle. The hack passed command to Cara, but it also meant she would need to actively pilot everything.

  She put the local scan in the holodisplay, which showed the curve of the Amplified Solution’s habitat ring with Luna in the far distance, and then cycled the airlock and popped free of the larger ship.

  “How do you owe me, Osla?” Cara asked the NSAI, which couldn’t answer. “Let me count the ways.”

  Following an uneven flight path, she maintained her connection to the Amplified Solution’s drones, passing the location data to the shuttle.

  The good news was that a drone had grabbed Osla. It wasn’t designed for handling delicate things like human limbs, so it may have broken his legs, but at least she had a good location on the chancellor and would be able to meet the drone in less than a minute.

  The bad news was that the shuttle had no dual-access airlock. She would need to dump atmosphere and open the external bay door to get Osla inside.

  “EV suit,” Cara chided herself. “It’s all good until you need an EV suit.”

  The shuttle was a luxury transport. The interior seats were plush, with barely functional harnesses, and the cabinet with the emergency suits was behind the wet bar.

  Cara set the limited astrogation at her command on a path for Osla’s location and pulled herself back to the emergency equipment locker. She tossed liquor bottles aside, aware they might become missiles inside the cabin if she had to make any sudden maneuvers later, but she didn’t have time to be nice about things. Wrenching the locker open, Cara pulled out a bulky suit and started the unwieldy process of donning it in zero-g.

  She had just gotten the legs on when the console pinged that she was a minute away from Osla’s location. The drone would do its best to match Cara’s speed, but she was going to need do the major adjustments with the shuttle.

  Sealing the suit, Cara kicked back up to the pilot’s seat with her helmet in her hands. She strapped in and pulled the bulky helmet down over her head, feeling behind her neck for the clasps.

  The shuttle was thirty seconds from Osla’s location when Cara dumped atmosphere and opened the shuttle’s side door. Her suit was slow to equalize pressure, and slower to find its temperature controls. She found herself shivering uncontrollably as the legs and arms of her suit swelled like balloons, trapping her in the seat.

  However, she didn’t need to move her legs to pilot the shuttle.

  Cara locked onto Osla’s location, the drone’s beacon flashing in her holodisplay. She was within visual recognition distance of the chancellor when something hit the drone, sending it and Osla spinning away at a new vector.

  “What the hell?” she asked the mute NSAI. “Did you do that?”

  She didn’t have the scan to tell what had struck her drone, but it was easy enough to guess that it had come from the Amplified Solution. Or the spies’ transport.

  Cara brought up what limited scan the shuttle had available, and the transport appeared in the holodisplay, still carrying the Amplified Solution’s exterior airlock door like a tumor on its side.

  “Do you have guns, that’s the question.” For once, she wished the NSAI could respond, though she knew the answer was no.

  Osla was going to be medically irrecoverable in seconds. If she didn’t do something quickly, nothing she did would matter. It was a waste of time to worry about the transport.

  Cara throttled the shuttle’s engine up, jerking forward, then cut it entirely. The burst of thrust pushed her after the drone, and in seconds, her superior mass had matched velocity with the smaller craft. Cara applied some braking thrust as her sensors complained about a nearing ship.

  “I’m going to have to just scoop you up,” Cara said. “I’m saving your ass a second time, Osla.”

  Or was it the third? She’d lost track.

  Tracking the drone’s vector, Cara brought her craft in an intersecting arc that would place it just in front of the drone. Without the NSAI, she would have to calculate the intersection herself, and try to match the drone’s velocity sufficiently so that the impact wouldn’t turn Osla into mush.

  Cara toggled the attitude thrusters, ignoring the closing transport. In the holodisplay, the drone continued to spin, and then abruptly, the shuttle’s icon met the drone, and Osla and a disc-shaped object with mechanical arms slammed into the wet bar inside the shuttle.

  Her brain didn’t connect the two incidents for a second, and then Cara realized she had caught the chancellor.

  She slammed the door control and set the interior environmental levels, then fed her astrogation system a new vector and lit the torch. The shuttle vibrated under the thrust, driving Cara back into her seat.

  Behind her, the drone slid along the floor, dragging Osla’s swollen and stiff body.

  After a minute of thrust, Cara brought the shuttle back around toward Luna, parallel with a shipping lane. She didn’t have clearance for the inbound traffic area, but if the transport tried to chase her, she could jump into the lane and draw Port Authority’s attention. They wouldn’t appreciate one ship attacking another on their roads.

  The Amplified Solution appeared in the holodisplay, a magnificent beast against the rest of Luna’s mediocre freight traffic. Cara watched the ship recede with longing in her heart as the realization set in that she definitely couldn’t go back to Luna, and due to Jentry’s betrayal, she couldn’t return to New Austin. It was very likely the TSF would be waiting to arrest her for real this time.

  Glancing back in the cabin, she found Osla slumped against the seat of a chair, head on his chest. She couldn’t tell if he was breathing. His skin was blue.

  She needed a hospital.

  The drone lay in the middle of the crew cabin, powered down.

  Still talking to the mute NSAI, Cara chided, “Why aren’t you giving first aid?”

  Of course there was no response.

  “Fine then, I’ll do it.” Cara programmed the shuttle to continue following the shipping lane, then unstrapped from her seat to find the first aid kit.

  She would need to get Osla into a warming bag, hook him up to the portable autodoc—if there was one—and at least make an effort to save his life.

  These steps were all necessary if she was going to kill him later.

  Struggling in the bulky suit, Cara got to work.

  NOBODY WINS

  STELLAR DATE: 3.23.3011 (Adjusted Years)

  LOCATION: Near
-Luna Orbit, MSS Amplified Solution

  REGION: Luna, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol

  Ten minutes after she had Osla stabilized, Cara decided the Amplified Solution was hers. After weighing her diminishing options, Cara set the shuttle on a course that would take it back to the Amplified Solution.

  The Andersonian chancellor was still unconscious, strapped into a medical bag that was oxygenating his blood after the trauma his lungs and capillaries had suffered. According to the autodoc, he had gone into shock, but there didn’t appear to be any lasting brain damage.

  They’ll just put him in a robot body, Cara thought. Wouldn’t that be ironic for an Andersonian?

  She hadn’t noticed any newsfeed drones around the Amplified Solution, another reason it was a good option. And she wanted the ship. Every option the ended with her in the captain’s seat of that courser was a better plan, as far as she was concerned.

  The lack of newsfeed drones meant the TSF attack hadn’t leaked anywhere… yet. Any minute now, the drones might swoop in and millions would be watching from Luna and High Terra. There might have been a new episode of Stars the Hard Way being written that moment.

  Felix hadn’t responded to her calls, and she wasn’t going to call Lyssa. Despite Fugia’s promises, she hadn’t responded either, so Cara was alone again. The other benefit to returning to the Amplified Solution was that Jentry was still there, and he needed an ass-kicking.

  The plan was all upsides.

  Cara brought the shuttle away from the shipping lane, ignoring hails from Port Authority, and found the Amplified Solution where she had left it.

  There was no sign of Jentry’s transport, which made sense, since, with a blown airlock attached to its side, it wouldn’t be able to dock to get them off the ship. They would need to call for another shuttle, or EVA.

  The trip back to the courser would take about twenty minutes. Abruptly, Cara started receiving Link requests from newsfeeds, asking what had happened on the ship and whether or not Chancellor Osla was alive. She ignored them.

  Cara focused her thoughts on Jentry. Did she actually know that he was TSF? She thought back to the meeting with Colonel Ferrell, who had never confirmed that she and Jentry were on the same team. In fact, the woman had decidedly not liked the spy.

  Why would she have played along, then?

  Thinking back to the first assassination attempt on Osla, Cara did her best to study the battle objectively. Every one of the attackers had been wearing a faceshield that made identification impossible. She had assumed they were mercenaries, since Osla had any number of enemies throughout Sol. But what if Jentry had led that group, and merely left the Andersonian headquarters to meet Cara at the hospital? Would Ferrel had even known Jentry was playing all of them?

  If Jentry was finishing the work he had started back when Cara first arrived on Luna, using her as a convenient way to distract Osla, who was he actually working for?

  Too many people, corporations, and governments would benefit from the Anderson Collective disappearing for good. Ever since the government in exile had spawned the Humanity First movement, more and more groups were falling on the opposite side of the AI debate.

  While Cara knew the moral stance was to protect sentient AIs, despite her complicated feelings toward Lyssa, there was no denying that the money lay with AI. Dividing organic and non-organic life was just another way to stifle the future, something that Cara figured was inevitable.

  Besides Osla, the next player was Harrin. A member of the SolGov Assembly would have the power to task the TSF, which could result in a situation where a tactical commander like Colonel Ferrell might find herself working with an operative like Jentry, even if she didn’t care for the situation.

  What if Harrin is behind the assassination attempts? What would he gain from removing Osla as leader of the Anderson Collective?

  Osla was a strong man, a dictator with plans of his own. From what Cara had observed, he intimidated Harrin, who liked to consider himself the tough-guy type. Osla was smarter than Harrin; his plans ran deeper. But Osla didn’t have the resources of SolGov at his command. He was the leader of a displaced people, squatting on Luna and scattered throughout Sol, trying to build influence.

  As the shuttle neared the Amplified Solution, Cara tucked her theory away in the back of her mind. She doubted Harrin would have had had a way off the Amplified Solution, so she would have ample opportunity to probe the truth. And punishing Jentry might add some more information on the problem.

  Approaching the rear of the courser, Cara matched velocity and set the shuttle on an automatic course for the engineering hab ring. She would need to traverse the core of the ship to get back to the command section, a trip that would give her time to gather some tools.

  The second command hab airlock was still available, but she didn’t see how the potential of surprise would really work out if Jentry had taken control of the ship. By docking on the opposite side, she could check the status of the remaining Andersonians, and, if they were dead or incapacitated, find some other help.

  With the command authority Jack had given her, she could pilot the Amplified Solution from engineering if she wanted.

  Cara considered that option as the shuttle docked. In another minute, the shuttle door opened on the airlock.

  Climbing out of the pilot’s seat, Cara reached Osla and checked the straps holding him against three seats. With the docking angle, he now hung above the airlock, which was awkward but secure.

  Before leaving the shuttle, Cara logged into the Amplified Solution’s maintenance net and checked the environmental control systems. The logs looked unchanged, showing the fluctuations in internal temperature and atmosphere control from when her group first entered the ship.

  Everything had been normal until the transport docked and the combat started. From there, Cara tracked the battle through the habitat ring from the sensor alarms and overloaded scrubbers trying to absorb all the particulate the grenades had added to the air.

  Moving from the logs to the active sensors, Cara counted five humans on the Amplified Solution. If the Andersonians had been defeated, she supposed the bio-signs would belong to Jentry, Amanda, Pedro, Harrin, and Jack the Salesman, who was probably wishing he’d stayed in bed today.

  The other interesting note was that the ship had logged her shuttle docking in its standby systems—without alerting the command deck. While that behavior was strange under normal circumstances, the Amplified Solution was orbiting Luna in a mode it called ‘display status’, which she assumed meant that all systems were operational as a demonstration. The NSAI wasn’t passing alerts to the command deck so prospective buyers couldn’t get spooked, the digital equivalent of sawdust in a transmission to hide rattling gears.

  Cara pulled herself into the airlock, closed the shuttle’s door, and set the security system. The airlock cycled, and then the interior door responded to her admin authority and let her inside.

  The Amplified Solution was hers.

  Cara stood in the corridor off the airlock for a few minutes, listening to the ship. The Amplified Solution was a lot quieter than her ship, the Forward Momentum, had been. A low hum vibrated in the walls from the main engine, while the atmosphere control systems sighed through nearby vents. Otherwise, she heard none of the usual complaints of strained metal or failing systems.

  The silence was creepy.

  The first thing Cara did was find the secondary astrogation console in the main maintenance bay. She stood in the doorway to the engine control room for a second, simply admiring how clean and organized everything was, then verified that she could bypass the command deck. She updated the administrative control to her own security token, and then took stock of the interior drone fleet.

  As Cara studied the mix of repair, transport, and utility drones, she debated simply dumping the atmosphere in the command ring and taking the Amplified Solution away from Luna. But the problem was Jack. As far as she knew, he was innocent.

  Also
, there was no satisfaction in spacing them all—no answers, either.

  Finding a weapons cabinet, she selected another rifle, a grenade launcher, and a scatter gun that would apparently apply a nerve-crashing electric shock to an entire corridor. Cara draped an extra bandolier of grenades over her neck for good measure..

  Cara left the maintenance hab and followed a ladder down an interior airlock into the central axle of the ship

  As she passed through the airlock to the center section, gravity dissipated into zero-g, her stomach did the familiar flip, and then she was free-floating in the long gantry structure lined with support systems for the habs.

  A utility drone separated from the wall near the entrance and floated toward her on steam jets. With her grenade launcher in one hand, Cara grabbed the drone’s safety handle and let it pull her down the corridor.

  All right, Jentry. Here I come.

  When Cara reached the airlock to the command hab, she paused to check the environmental control systems again. The sensors still indicated five human bio-signatures. They were concentrated in the command deck, which would make things easy.

  She patted the utility drone on the top of its body. “Thanks, buddy.” Then she pulled herself into the airlock.

  The lock cycled, lifting her into the hab ring, and Cara waited as the interior door completed its unlock protocol. She would enter the hab ring about fifty meters from the entrance to the command deck, not far from the exterior airlock where the shuttle had originally been docked.

  As the interior door opened, Cara waited, listening. When no sounds reached her, she stepped into the corridor. She kept the scatter gun at the ready on its most powerful setting, and slid along the interior wall.

  She passed the fallen Andersonian soldiers by the airlock, nothing looking changed from when she had been there before. As she approached the entrance to the command deck, she caught the sound of voices, and paused, listening.

  Harrin was complaining loudly. Jentry answered, followed by Amanda and Pedro. Jack the Salesman mumbled something, and then a fifth voice rode over the rest, unexpected, and forcing them all into silence.