Asterion Noir: The Complete Collection (Amaranthe Collections Book 4)

by G. S. Jennsen

  Dashiel was happy to provide these, and for thoroughly reasonable compensation. It was a rare win amid too many losses.

  He increased capital investment funds designated for the data suspension module product, then diverted an additional four percent of refined kyoseil to their manufacture…then decreased the increase to three percent.

  There was never, would and could never be enough kyoseil. It formed the underpinnings of all data storage and transmission technology. More vitally, it formed the underpinnings of their own data storage and transmission, and thus of their existence. It wound in fibrous tendrils through his nerve centers and saturated his neuromorphic brain, as it did for every Asterion.

  They’d been damn lucky to find a planet, Chosek, run through with kyoseil, and upon finding it they had done whatever it took to develop and maintain amicable relations with the native Chizeru. But no matter how many Chizeru they hired to mine the precious mineral from the interior of their homeworld, demand outstripped supply. The exploration wing of the Administration Division constantly searched the stars for additional sources, but in centuries none but a few scattered asteroids had been located and swiftly drained dry.

  Between twelve and fifteen percent of mined kyoseil was earmarked for Ridani Enterprises production lines. If allowed a greater portion, he could envision uses for forty or fifty percent of the aggregate supply. Until such a windfall occurred, however, he engaged in a constant balancing act of allocating, shifting and stretching his supply across his factories to optimize and prioritize its use at any given time—

  A line of data flared red in his peripheral vision, and he instantly focused in on it.

  Simul/Interact Boost Limb Augment Model Vk 3.2

  • Contractual Delivery Obligations: 22,000/quarter

  • Units Produced, Current Quarter: 16,800

  • Units Delivered, Current Quarter: 3,400

  • Units in Pipeline: 5,200

  • Delivery Deficit: (13,400)

  • Projected Quarterly Deficit: (8,200)

  Shit! Where in Hades’ five rivers had 13,400 brand new limb augments gone? Had he somehow made a mistake in the calculations? Accidentally sold them to some hocker while in a drunken stupor?

  An automated dampener routine kicked in to dial down the rising panic. He breathed in, then out, and checked the data again. No, he hadn’t done either of those things.

  He hurriedly made some adjustments to increase production of the new augment model in order to meet at least a portion of the shortfall in the near term. Then he silenced the focus sphere and pinged his Manufacturing Director.

  Vance, come by as soon as you get a minute. We have a…glitch.

  Vance Greshe was built like a quarry laborer, with thick muscles stretched taut over a sturdy frame. Hands large enough to encase the average Asterion’s head could, however, just as easily entwine a photal fiber weave with delicate finesse.

  Dashiel had known Vance for five generations, but he’d only known the man for two hours when he’d hired him away from colonial development on Adjunct Ni to run his production lines. He’d never regretted the decision.

  “I saw that the contract renewal with Dominion Transit came out unusually favorably. How did you swing it?”

  Dashiel motioned the man over to the conference table on one side of his office. “Exceptional timing. NOIR blew up their data vault and remote conduits last night, so now they need to build new ones. But that’s not why I asked you to come by. We’ve lost 13,400 Model Vk 3.2 limb augments somewhere between the factory and the distributors.”

  “Lost?”

  He pulled up the flagged data at the table. “They did not make it to their destinations. That’s all I know right now, which needs to change.”

  Vance quickly scanned the data points. “Let’s see what we’ve got.” He nudged the information to the side, and the supply chain flow for the augments in question replaced it. “We manufacture this model here on Mirai, at the factory outside Mirai Two. The augment shipments departed the fabrication warehouse at the factory in four separate transports yesterday evening local. We can follow the transports’ signals from our logistics network.”

  Four panes instantiated, each with a red blip moving against the overlay of a regional map. “Everything looks normal so far—” one of the blips blinked out. “That’s odd. It simply vanished. No malfunction alerts preceded it. No disruptions were reported in the area at the time that might have interrupted the transport.” In the second pane another blip vanished, followed by a third. Only a single transport continued on to reach its destination.

  “Time frame?”

  Vance enhanced the data points running along the bottom of the panes. “Less than half an hour from the first drop out to the last, but by the time they occurred, the transports were hundreds of kilometers apart, which suggests discrete causes.”

  “Yet discrete causes for three nearly instantaneous dropouts is extremely unlikely. Where are the transports now?”

  “Late reporting in, and they don’t return as anywhere on the grid. Like the augments they carried, they seem to be…lost.” Vance’s frowned. “I can’t explain their disappearance.”

  Dashiel rubbed at his jaw. “I can. They were stolen.”

  “Three separate transports at widely disparate locations deliberately knocked off the grid without any warning, all in a half-hour’s time? It would require tremendous resources and skill to execute. Who could do that?”

  Rather than answer the question, Dashiel accessed the government nex web. “Justice Division, Security Department, Public Monitoring. This is Advisor Ridani, Industry Division, requesting surveillance footage from—” he checked with Vance, who sent over the location and time of the first disappearance “—Mirai Two, Sector Three, beginning at 1422 APT last night.”

  “Surveillance footage access granted. Transmitting records.”

  A few seconds later the footage arrived, and he displayed it at the table. The birds-eye vantage showed several square blocks in the northeast corner of Sector Three. The tracker from his logistics network appeared on the visual to identify one of his transports as it cruised along the commercial vehicle lane. Abruptly the tracker dot vanished as before…and the transport continued on. At the next intersection, several vehicles obscured their view for a few seconds, and when the scene cleared, the transport was gone.

  “Dammit. We can check the other two recordings, but I suspect they’ll show similar events. I’ll request adjacent sector footage…or I suppose Justice should do it.”

  Dashiel initiated a theft claim, then let the system populate it with the details while he moved to one of the windows in his office. He hardly saw the cityscape it revealed, however. Instead, his mind replayed the surveillance footage in a loop.

  “The only entities with the resources to execute such a theft wouldn’t bother with it. Every augment is imprinted with our signature, making it impossible for anyone to pass them off to a reputable retailer. This suggests black market as the endpoint, but the Guides ensure no off-grid group gains the kind of power required to pull off such a heist.”

  Except NOIR, perhaps. They’d shown themselves clever enough to execute some impressive stunts, though never at multiple separate locations at once. But what would they need over 13,000 single-purpose augments for? To sell them for credits? He didn’t doubt the group had contacts on the black market, but did it have the kind of reach needed to move such a high volume of product? He’d ask Adlai later.

  “Have trackers placed inside every crate of end-product shipments across all production lines starting today. Apparently, tracking the transports is no longer sufficient.”

  Vance nodded in understanding. “I’ll also have the augment prototype line converted over to release-grade production until we make up the loss.”

  “Thank you. Whatever else you think of to bridge the gap, do it. I’ll tell Larahle to adjust the budget and free up the funds you need. Now, unfortunately, it’s time for the Quart
erly Report, so I’ll be unavailable for a few hours.”

  Vance looked perplexed. “It’s unfortunate that you have an audience with the Guides?”

  Dashiel adopted a chagrined expression. It had been a minor slip, but a slip nonetheless. “Certainly not. I merely meant it’s unfortunate that I need to depart at this moment and leave you to do all of the work.”

  4

  * * *

  Mirai Tower dwarfed every other building to the horizon. Perched at the center of the city, its tapered apex stretched into the clouds as if reaching up for the orbiting station to which its penthouse was inexorably linked.

  Dashiel rode the lift to the top floor alone, then stepped out of the lift alcove and directly into a series of extensive security screening procedures.

  He’d cleared the checkpoint hundreds of times, but the security dynes and the churning servers behind them performed their duties with full earnestness and precision every single time. It made sense, objectively. Impersonating him would be a difficult task but not an impossible one, if only because few things were truly impossible with the proper application of skill and resources. And the potential consequences of an imposter making it onto the Platform were unacceptable.

  But since he was in actuality himself and not an imposter, he cleared the checkpoint a minute later, at which point he strode through the d-gate beyond it and emerged inside the Platform.

  The meeting place of the Guides orbited Mirai for the current decade, which meant the distance he’d just traveled wasn’t so far at all—a short thirty-five megameters to high Mirai orbit. It didn’t matter in practice, as the d-gates bridged kiloparsecs as swiftly as they did kilometers. The Platform nevertheless moved every ten years, cycling through the five Axis Worlds so as to not display favoritism among them.

  He wasn’t late, but he was cutting it close, and many of the other Advisors were already in attendance. They milled about the arcing anteroom making small talk with one another, as if this were a cocktail party instead of the highest level of government meetings.

  The thirty Advisors, five for each Division, were the most powerful individuals in the Asterion Dominion save the Guides themselves. As the title suggested, they advised the Guides on a multitude of matters related to their respective areas of expertise. They held decision-making authority over an even greater multitude of matters overseen by their respective Divisions.

  They controlled businesses, property and obscene riches; in several cases they controlled entire exploratory worlds. And what they didn’t explicitly control, they influenced. Their whispers in the right ears shifted economies and fortunes.

  Dashiel had known the majority of his fellow Advisors for many generations…and he did not trust a single, solitary one of them. A few, like Adlai or Maris, he felt comfortable enough with in all but the most treacherous situations, so the amount of trust withheld was hardly worth measuring.

  Others, like…his gaze fell on Gemina Kail. He made it a point to always know where she was in a room so she could never take him by surprise. Today, a white one-piece pantsuit made her easy to find. Scarlet hair swept up into a tight bun atop her head did nothing to complement severe features and eyes so darkly green they appeared black from afar.

  Well, others like Gemina, he tried never to turn his back on.

  It hadn’t always been this way. His temperament hadn’t always bent so strongly toward distrust and circumspection with respect to his colleagues. Of course, he also hadn’t always been a high-functioning drunk. The alterations shared a common lineage.

  “Dashiel, I feel obligated to inform you that you have a hair out of place above your left temple.”

  If that was the only part of him out of place, he was doing far better than he felt. He pivoted toward Maris Debray wearing a smile—a genuine one—and brought a hand to his brow. “We cannot have such a faux pas, can we? Better?”

  “And the worlds have returned to their proper alignment among the stars.” Her orchid eyes—violet fading to a white ring at the pupil—narrowed at him. “Actually, you do seem a bit off. Trouble?”

  “Quite. I had three transports of brand new augments stolen on their way to the distributors. Snatched right off their routes and vanished into the ether.”

  Her dignified nose scrunched up. “Bizarre. Crime is so…distasteful. And messy.”

  “It’s definitely going to be messy for my credit account.”

  “I suspect you will find a way to persevere.” Her voice trailed off. “I don’t know, so little ruffles you that on finding you ruffled, I thought maybe you had heard something.”

  She clearly preferred to remember an earlier, better version of him. Any other conversation with any other individual, and the inevitable next step would be to ask ‘something about what?’ But where he and Maris were concerned, there was only ever one ‘something.’

  He forced an air of lightness into his tone. “No, and I stopped expecting to hear something years ago—not long after I stopped looking for her.” It was true, but solely because the places to look and methods to do so had long since dried up. “There’s nothing to hear and nothing to find, Maris. She’s gone—gone to us, anyway.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. It has never made any sense.”

  “And yet.” He held her stare, keeping his expression kind while masking anything which might reflect his genuine emotions on the topic. Those were for himself alone. In the dark, in his weakest moments.

  The interior wall dissolved, signaling the commencement of the meeting and a merciful end to their coded conversation. The questions with no answers that would have followed had been voiced countless times, and he wasn’t in the mood to hear or speak them again.

  Thirty chairs lined one-half of the circular central chamber. A single pedestal stood at the center point of the room, and beyond it a high dais curved in a sixty-degree arc. Behind the dais, five d-gates shimmered. One by one they brought the Guides in from…no one could reliably say. Perhaps from elsewhere on the Platform, or from secret locations on the Axis Worlds they represented. Perhaps from the stars themselves.

  Dashiel had always thought the Guides wore their skin rather awkwardly. The formality of their every movement betrayed a lack of familiarity and inherent discomfort with the natural flow of a body in motion. It was possible they only wore skin in the presence of others, spending the rest of their time as pure information. He hoped not, for it was not the Asterion way.

  His people inhabited physical bodies for many reasons. To enjoy the pleasures of the flesh, for certain—not only sex but food and drink and tactile interaction, wind rushing through one’s hair and the bracing immersion of an ocean of icy water. To stay grounded, in touch with and connected to the physical world and the creatures, sentient and otherwise, inhabiting it. To use tools and build with them real, lasting monuments that left their mark on the cosmos, that said ‘we exist.’ ‘We are here and we are real.’

  He did not believe the Guides should exempt themselves from these principles, but they had not asked his permission.

  At Quarterly Report sessions, each Advisor ascended the pedestal one at a time and presented their report on the status of their responsibilities, then dutifully responded to probing questions and accepted the dispensed guidance. With thirty Advisors, they were going to be here for a while.

  The tension in the room ratcheted up several levels when Adlai stepped forward, spurring the air particles in the chamber to heightened agitation. Everyone present knew about the latest NOIR strike, thus everyone present had an opinion and two rumors to spread regarding it.

  Dashiel maintained his casually aloof posture, but he too sharpened his attention on the proceedings, curious as to whether the investigation had progressed since this morning.

  “Guides, thank you for the honor of your time. Updates on a variety of ongoing matters have been filed—”

  “Tell us about NOIR.” Guide Anavosa of Mirai canted her head in a stilted expression of interest. Her alaba
ster skin resembled glazed porcelain, and her pale, cornflower blue eyes and hair looked so delicate they risked fading to ashenness at any moment. But her fragile appearance hid the most shrewd and calculating of intellects.

  “Ah, yes, Guide Anavosa. Last night, one or more criminals infiltrated the Dominion Transit Headquarters building in Mirai One, where they accessed the company’s primary data vault and corrupted its contents, particularly transit passenger records. They also destroyed the conduit lines to Dominion Transit’s remote backup servers, burned out the security cams and erased the security system’s historical data covering the two hours prior to and including the infiltration.”

  Guide Luciene of Synra directed a piercing, icy stare at Adlai. His skin radiated even less color than Anavosa’s, but it contrasted starkly with inky black hair and bottomless onyx eyes. “From this information, may we surmise that you cannot tell us how many individuals were involved, what data they accessed or the nature of the malfeasance they committed upon it?”

  Adlai didn’t wilt under the scrutiny. “As we often say at Justice, Guide Luciene, data is agnostic. It has no masters, yet it is subservient to anyone wielding the skill to shape it. Data deleted no longer exists. Data corrupted cannot be trusted to return to an uncorrupted state—”

  “There are backups.” Luciene’s voice grated over each syllable like a taut string threatening to snap. Dashiel found him deeply unpleasant.

  “The timing of the destruction of the conduits means the integrity of the backups is in question. My analysts are working with Dominion Transit techs to resolve the question of whether corrupted data was copied to the backup servers before the conduits were destroyed.”

  “This group of terrorists threatens the safety and sanctity of every Asterion. Find them and end them.” Luciene’s gaze traveled left, then right. “This is the will of your Guides.”