Singularity's Children Box Set
Page 28
Not bothering with their dead, the pirates started off without hesitation towards the blinding light. When the boat was about ten metres from the Farm, a figure came running from the huts. He levelled a gun at the boat, and there was a crack. Stella caught a glint from the spear as it left the gun and heard the splash as it bit into the waves, not far away. The pirates found this hilarious. One stood, pulling his trousers down and presenting his bare arse as a target. With another rush of dread, Stella recognised the shape as Marcel and watched, with horror, as he fitted another spear into his gun. The boat was even further away now, so he aimed high, going for range, tipping the gun at nearly forty-five degrees and shot another spear. This time, there was no glint; however, a second later, accompanied by a small grunt, a pencil-thin metal rod materialised, sticking out of the thigh of the already injured pirate.
His friends found this impossibly funny, and even the wounded man laughed hysterically at his plight. Stella suspected they might have helped themselves to the contents of the Madam’s medicine cabinet.
They laughed as they drew their guns and then laughed as they shot bullets into Marcel’s body. They continued to laugh as he collapsed. They laughed and shot until either Stella passed out or the bundle of his body became too small a target for the joke to continue.
Stella would remember blinding light, then only darkness. Even during the rare times she was allowed above decks, blinking painfully into daylight, there was only darkness.
***
Kids are tough. That might be enough, Chris allowed himself to hope. If he could get to her in time, she might be okay. He had arrived by chopper into the middle of a media circus. He had cadged a lift out from Naha, with a news crew come to feast on the tasty morsels of teenage whores, kidnapped girls, wounded heroes, pirates, and exotic locations. Even now, the world’s media would be spinning their plight into dramas and Telenovelas for the catnip they needed to titillate the billions of restless, thrill-seeking voyeurs under their charge.
Chris loathed it. As Stella’s boss, and the closest thing she had to a legal guardian, he had already been approached by two separate studios about the film rights. He had wanted to punch the smarmy, grinning cunts in the face, but he knew Stella and Marcel might, one day, need the money to put their lives back together. Assuming either of them survived.
Chris sat by Marcel’s bed and watched the boy’s chest rising and falling in time with the respirator’s concertina. He had once lain in the same bed himself, with Stella and Marcel sitting by him, chattering away.
A Nipponese frigate had been the first to arrive and had rushed the unconscious boy to their sick bay. They had plugged his leaks and poured blood into him until he was fit enough to operate on. Seven stressful hours of delicate surgery were needed to remove the bullets from his torso. The last was lodged in his sternum, having travelled through a lung to get there. The doctors and their Sages didn’t know if he had suffered brain damage; his heart had stopped at least once before they could get him stabilised and onto a respirator. After three days, he was moved to the sick bay of the Farm, one of the few buildings that had survived the pirates’ raid intact.
The world was divided into three groups: those glued to the real-time feeds and touching back story segments, those who had never heard of Sagong Marine, and a far smaller group of people actively working to find the girls and bring the pirates to various interpretations of justice.
Chris was firmly in the latter group, pulling in old favours and indebting himself to anybody who would accept his promises in return for information on the pirates.
Unfortunately, his quarry were no amateurs, nor were they rum-drinking parrot fanciers. They were twenty-first century criminals, connected to an underworld at least as sprawling and complex as the legitimate world it lurked below.
Satellite archive showed a large, decrepit junk, making its way towards the Farm. It had left the Yellow Sea and headed out towards the Farm at a slow cruise, in full accordance with its dilapidated demeanour. From the intercept course, it was clear that it knew exactly where it was going. With the arrival of cloud cover, the images had become vague and noisy. It had not been possible to track the boat’s progress further, but its arrival could be inferred from the timing of the RF jamming and electronic warfare attack on the Farm’s systems. Video from the Farm was also useless; any systems that hadn’t been hacked before the ship had even crossed the horizon were scrambled by EMP and dazzled by lamps. During the four-hour blackout, the pirates had stolen a fortune of tuna, which they had piled on the junk’s deck under a mound of ice using the Farm’s equipment and their own crane.
They had also added eight, high-value whores to their catch—and Stella. Once the cloud cleared, more blurry images showed the boat powering away, all pretence at decrepitude dropped.
The satellites had lost sight of the junk again under another thick blanket of cloud. Switching to infrared video recordings hadn’t helped; somehow, it could mask its heat signature. Seven hours later, the drifting, unregistered junk had been picked up by the Nipponese coastguard.
Chris had later received an update: the hull had been a disguise. A conning tower had poked up into the wheelhouse, and the pirate submersible had worn the junk like a mask. The best guess was that the vessel was trickled-down military surplus. It explained how such a knackered old wreck had made such good progress, while emitting so little infrared radiation. They were lucky to have captured the shabby craft; minutes later, it would have sunk, taking precious information with it.
The DNA the Nipponese had swept from its decks gave them a start, but apart from that, the news was grim. The hostages had probably already been transferred to another vessel. Similar crimes, although none so audacious, had been popping up over the past months and had a connection to the Cartel—the massive, shadowy, tentacled monster and bastard child of every pre-Mesh mafia-style group. The Kinfolk might label themselves White Hats, but the Cartel would not choose Black. In all likelihood, given a choice of headwear, they would probably select surgical caps and dental face shields.
Chris felt a terrible weight on his shoulders. An ex-military Cartel stealth sub would be virtually impossible to detect from orbit or from the air. There were so many small vessels swarming the islands and straights that a pirate crew wouldn’t have a problem slinking off to some quiet port to offload their booty.
[Offline Message] @2@k1 has sent a message.
“Mr. Tucker, I am a friend of Stella [Friendship Certificate:
Chris let the message scroll across his Spex and then glanced at Marcel to make sure there was no change in the rhythm of the boy’s breathing. He pulled out his Companion to answer and tapped away on the tiny keyboard. Imagining how Stella would have made fun of him for that old-fashioned habit, he forced a cough from what would otherwise have been a sob. Almost as soon as he had sent his response, a second message appeared requesting a live session, and a window popped up on his Spex.
The boy looked to be about seventeen or eighteen, long dark hair tied back in a ponytail, with a hooked nose and olive skin. He wore a brown leather jacket over a red lumberjack shirt.
Chris wouldn’t usually accept unsolicited comms, but he had set his spam filter to its most tolerant level, so as not to block any potential leads.
“Thanks for taking this call,” said the boy. “Stella has talked a lot about you. I’m not sure if she ever mentioned me or my brother, but we want to help in any way we can.”
“Hi Zaki. Yes, Stella talks about you sometimes. It’s going to be all right. Don’t worry, we’re doing everything we can to find her.”
“Yeah, sure. Me and my Kin are busy, too, so I won’t talk for long. Stella obviously trusted you, and you seem to be legit, so I thought I would pass on what we know. Hopefully, you will get back to us if you get any leads from your end?”
“Sure, that sounds fair.
Go on.”
“We managed to get some information on the sub. It looks like it might be heading to San Herando in the Philippines. There is a big Russ factory ship moored up there. It’s possible they are planning to transfer the tuna into the ship’s freezers.”
The boy looked off camera, giving Chris the impression he was assimilating new data as he spoke. “As I said, Stella talked a lot about you, Mr Tucker. She mentioned you used to be in the navy. Maybe you can pull some strings to get some boots on the ground there, in case they offload Stella?”
“Can you back any of this up? I don’t want to waste time on a wild-goose chase.”
“I’m sending over a TarBall with all the source data. Take a look.”
Chris okayed the incoming bulk data transfer request. He was stunned. When he saw the kid, he had silently cursed himself for letting the call through. He had expected to play the role of stoic older father-figure, offering platitudes to a heart-broken teenage crush. Instead, in a few concise statements, the boy confirmed the theories of half a dozen experts and provided the closest thing to hope Chris had dared experience since the first call.
“The data is coming in now. I’ll take a look and get back to you.”
“Thanks, Mr Tucker.”
“Thank you! How did you get all that stuff?”
“I’ve got some good friends and so does Stella. They want to help. They found the boat, right? Did you manage to get the DNA they pulled off it?”
“Yeah, four sets.”
“Finally, some good news. Can you send it over?”
Chris nodded.
***
They exchanged weary smiles, and Zaki cut the connection. He kept a frozen frame of Chris from the video link and added metadata before filing it away with the rest of the research.
He stared towards infinity, looking through the bloody dent in the plaster by the door, flexing the fingers of his right hand, while massaging his knuckles. He had been furious with his mother for not letting him take their Land Voyager and set off immediately to Stella’s rescue. She was right, of course. As a family, they had once travelled thousands of kilometres across Anatolia and the Balkans, but he would need to cover twelve times that; and, even if he survived a journey across a dozen countries—several knee-deep in anarchy of their own—it would take him months to get to the Philippines. Stella would be long gone by then; the trail would be cold. It had been a stupid idea.
Zaki knew that wanting to dash halfway across the world had been a childish physical reaction. He missed his dad. Anosh would have taken charge. He would have come up with a plan. They would probably have found Stella by now.
Staring at the bloody hole he had punched in the wall, he almost lost it again, furious at the universe for taking first his father and now his friend.
He managed to bite it down. He knew the universe was empty of meaning. Huge, fascinating, and pointless. He might as well get angry at a brick. Anyway, he was a cripple. What good would he do hobbling around, dragging his foot, pointing a gun with his cramped, twisted hand? The best place for him was online. Like his Silicium Kin, he was a digital ninja, perfectly adapted to his environment. Last-generation satellites and networked security cameras were theirs to own. He could pull live feed from across the globe and listen into everything but the most encrypted military traffic. He would find the pirates, and when he did they wouldn’t know what had hit them.
Code had become a commodity. None of the established players really wrote software anymore. The Mesh’s seething ecosystem of FAC produced code a hundred times faster and a thousand times cheaper than the cubicle farms of the crumbling corporate remnants. It was usually easier just to ‘borrow’ or steal. Even ostensibly professional engineers took shortcuts. Systems ended up as composite monsters, full of spliced-together snippets and modules miscellaneously sourced from projects found floating innocently through the aether.
Plasmids; Trojan modules worming their way into purportedly secure systems, creating chimeras riddled with compromised code. Backdoors patiently waiting for the return of their masters.
Zaki snapped out of his musings and went to find his brother, who was ensconced in the big shed, putting the finishing touches to their latest weaponised mini drone: a tiny stealthed disk a little larger than a frisbee, fitted with solid state, multi-barrel, micro guns. The drone was as far removed from their first cute little quad-copter, with its stink bombs and laser pointers, as the Kitty Hawk was from a sixth-generation fighter.
The combat drone was small and light, loaded out with both explosive rounds and flechettes tipped with ampoules of box jellyfish venom that the boys had brewed up in one of the smaller bioreactors. They would need feet on the ground at some point and, although Zaki was hoping Chris could help, they were also putting together a Plan B and a care package to increase their options once the shooting started—because there would be shooting. People were going to die. The boys had pledged this to each other and the universe.
Zaki waited impatiently, watching the hover test. When he could wait no longer, he started badgering Siegfried to come and pester their mother with him.
“Come on, bro. Mum’s still pissed off with me about last night. You ask.”
“You really think we need three?”
“Yes. I have put together a rough plan. You can take a look later and see if you can strip anything out, but we need one to carry all this.” Zaki waved his hand at the assortment of vicious-looking kit lying around on the wooden benches. “And we need at least two others for penetrators.”
“If we can find her!”
“Don’t worry about that, Segs,” Zaki said with an edge to his voice that made Segi shiver.
“Okay, I’ll ask Mum.”
Siegfried landed the drone and plugged it in to charge. Once he was finished, he shoved Zaki in the back to knock him out of his trance. Zaki’s mind had drifted out to sea again. Siegfried saw his brother’s Spex flickering as he watched feeds from satellites and reviewed messages from the thousands of people now connected to the search.
“Thanks,” said Zaki. “The DNA sequences have arrived. I’ll plug them into the BugNet.”
Segi left the cool shade of the barn and crossed the dusty yard to where their mother was changing the water of some olives she was preserving. Siegfried slipped into the kitchen and watched for a few seconds until she noticed him.
“What?” she asked, feigning irritation to hide any sympathy. She could imagine only too well how she would feel if one of them had been abducted; but, equally, she was terrified they would somehow get sucked in and she would lose another of her men.
“Zaki is sorry about last night, Mum,” Segi said.
She turned to look at him, tears in her eyes again. “Oh, tell him it’s okay. I know you just want to help your friend. I feel terrible, too.”
“Mum, can we use some of the time from the delivery kites, maybe a few weeks?” he asked, taking the opportunity. “We need to get some reconnaissance equipment down there to look for Stella.”
“I’m sure the police are doing everything they can, darling.”
Since Anosh had died, Ayşe had been forced to learn a lot—everything from how to maintain a wind-turbine to how to birth a baby goat. She lived in a strange mental space between two worlds: she might live on a rural farm, but her children genetically engineered animals and built robots in her barn. It had become commonplace for GliderKites to be delivering eggs or lamb chops one day, and shipping exotic chemicals fabbed in the boys’ bioreactors to somewhere as far afield as Cairo and Athens the next.
“Mum!” Segi breathed, exasperated.
Consciously, she accepted these new realities. However, in her heart, she lived back in the twentieth century, a world in which the old rules applied and the police would find a missing girl.
“Oh, I really don’t know. We need them for our deliveries…”
“We could upgrade our subscription for this month,” he suggested. From the softening of her tone,
Siegfried knew it was only a matter of time until his mother conceded.
***
“Bastards!” Chris swore, hurling his tablet across the room, where it bounced off the door and rattled down onto the floor. As a further provocation, the face on its screen continued speaking, and he could still hear the earnest words coming out of its little speakers. He had sent the DNA to the boy Zaki, and had felt some trace of optimism. Finally, they might be making progress. Then he had joined a meeting with the Nipponese-holding company that ran the Farm—
The VP had patiently explained they were not employees, or even the dependents of employees. They were illegal squatters and, in one sense, they had been lucky that they had been allowed to live rent-free for so long…
—that is when Chris had lost it and flung his tablet at the wall.