Horseplay

by Cam Daly

  There was another point on the map which was closer to Sol than any other system, but from where she stood she couldn’t reconcile its positioning with any explored world she knew. There was no sign of the Admiralty’s presence, so she moved to get a closer look.

  There was a tiny icon of a ship next to the mystery world, and when she stared at it more data appeared. It was a cranial pod transport, little more than a gradient-drive missile designed to move an Active’s brain from one system to another. Mezerello had used one to get to Earth years ago, with the orbital Factory above Earth responsible for building her Intruder body.

  This transport was just beginning its antimatter-powered acceleration towards Earth, with an estimated arrival time just about two human weeks away. She switched her focus from the course projection to the passenger manifest, then froze.

  “Yes, it is.”

  The Admiralty’s placeholder stepped into view from her side, forgoing the entrance portal and answering Shadow’s unspoken question.

  “She was the closest asset available. Obviously, we realize that your pairing as Active and Shadow will violate some standards. That can’t be helped.”

  Shadow turned to regard the figure, an anachronistic suit of vacuum combat armor from the earliest days of Fleet Four. Its featureless visor reflected her own face back at her in hues of blue and gold.

  “But - it’s been ten years since she left. She isn’t…”

  The Admiralty waited a moment for Shadow to finish, but she didn’t.

  “An Active? That is our decision. She is needed, so her time in self-imposed exile is over.”

  It reached forward and poked an armored finger into the transport ship’s manifest. A title appeared in front of the single listed name.

  Active Keryapt Zess.

  Shadow was still in a daze and only paid partial attention to the Admiralty’s next words.

  “The two of you are tasked to figure out who killed Mezerello Aarstop and why. You have two real weeks to prepare your Active and assemble her next body. She is awaiting contact from you now.”

  With that, the armored form faded from view.

  Shadow continued to stare at the name long enough for the Stage control system to decide she wanted more information about the passenger. Mission histories, personal details, contact request controls. She numbly reached for the latter and waited for the connection.

  Ten years since they had last spoken. Shadow tried to remember what she had said.

  It hadn’t been nice.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Connor - where the hell are you? I just got a call from ESWAT that you missed your scheduled ferry.” Even on the noisy street, his shift supervisor’s concerned tone was easily heard over the phone. It wasn’t just her bureaucratic you-aren’t-making-things-smooth-for-me voice. Something had rattled her.

  “Someone stole my damn car last night. I’m surprised you didn’t get the call to rush out and document the scene.”

  It was Saturday, but he knew that she was on duty this weekend too and would be at San Francisco Police Department headquarters by this hour of the morning. There was no chance they would dispatch a Forensics unit to investigate a car taken from a public street.

  “Sucks to be you. But it makes me glad you’re just a contractor and don’t rate an official vehicle. Do you know how much paperwork that would’ve meant for me?”

  “I’ll make the next ferry. The schedule they sent me says it leaves in twenty minutes so I should still be able to be on time for the meeting.”

  He jogged across the street to the secure ESWAT ferry facility. Tourists milled about, here on holiday from all over the world to see the famous waterfront. Connor grew up in New York and didn’t see what the big deal was.

  “You better. You have the spectral data, but deleted all the other backups you had?” ESWAT’s instructions had been very clear. “I know Todd Maxwell from back in the day. He’s a serious guy. Just agree to do whatever he asks and get back here.”

  “Yes, I have the last copy with me.” He approached the entry area to the secure ESWAT ferry terminal. “Is he extremely serious?” The new unit was officially “Enhanced” SWAT but the officers of SFPD and the news teams that covered them seemed to like to mistakenly use “Extreme” instead.

  “If you screw up, and I have to fire you, then I will be extremely sad.” She hung up on him.

  Connor put his phone away as he walked up to the armored pillbox of a guard shack. The whole area was set slightly apart from the tourist area of the waterfront and conspicuous signs made it clear that this wasn’t a place to come ask for directions or complain about parking tickets.

  Connor slid his police ID to the security guard behind the glass and waited while he scanned it.

  “Connor James? You were due here thirty minutes ago. You missed your ferry.”

  “I had…car trouble. Can I get on the next ferry? I’m supposed to meet Director Maxwell at 10.” He hoped the guard wouldn’t want to upset the man who was responsible for running all of ESWAT.

  The guard looked at the ID again. “This doesn’t really look like you. It says here that you’re a photographer.” Again, not an actual question, but it begged an answer.

  Connor bit back his response about how someone else took the picture and that was why the police department needed contract photographers. “You know how at the DMV they always manage to take your photo at exactly the wrong moment?”

  The guard didn’t smile. “My sister-in-law works at the DMV.”

  Connor was starting to think the universe was conspiring against him this morning.

  “She makes me nuts.” He pressed a button and the entry door buzzed. Connor grabbed for it before the guard could change his mind. “Don’t forget your ID.”

  #

  “So you really never watched any of the vids about me? Nearly a hundred years of service as an Active, 23 successful deployments recreated for posterity, and you’ve never seen a single episode?” Keryapt sat on the upper level of the civilian ferry to Alcatraz, apparently peering off into the distance.

  In actuality her sensorium was entirely shifted to the virtual environment of their shared Planning Stage. Every sensation being delivered to her brain was a computer simulation of being inside a giant cube. One entire wall showed the view from her Interloper body, and audio from the real world was filtered in, but from her current perspective it was like having a movie on in the background.

  Shadow was busy at her own terminal on the Stage and replied without looking over. “Not even one. I’ve seen some of your antics since you left the Fleet, but never felt like watching the ones about you as an Active. I think everyone else in Fleet Four has, though.”

  “Speaking of watching things, want to get some time in with Hawk before I reach the island?” Kery was watching a set of screens which showed Alcatraz from very different viewpoints.

  Shadow looked up. One of Kery’s screens was the view from the Observatory, parked a tenth of a light second above the equator. It showed a group of whitish birds chasing each other around the rocky edges of Alcatraz. The other was from the perspective of one of them, riling the others up. “No, thanks. I had simulation time with both remotes while you were en route to Earth.”

  “No simulation is ever as good as reality.” Kery expertly manipulated the glowing set of virtual controls in front of her, steering the seagull-shaped remote through the air. “Especially when it comes to feel. With tactile feedback from Hawk at 25% I can feel the thermals.”

  Shadow punched a few buttons and flicked a data overlay onto Kery’s screen. Colored bands appeared, showing wind patterns and air temperatures. “That seems like an easier way to do it.”

  Kery waved off the overlay and set Hawk back to automatic control. She turned to look at Shadow. “You rely too much on data and protocol. You have to feel the moment. Trust your experience.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. Maybe I should watch some of those vids after all. Figure out who y
ou are.”

  “It might not hurt.”

  “You have no idea what might…never mind. Have you watched them all?”

  “Have I watched them all?” Every single one. More than once. “Probably not. I’m not sure.”

  “So where should I start? The beginning, when you were just Activated, or the end when you disappeared for ten years?”

  Key hesitated for a moment. “There isn’t a vid for the final assignment.”

  “So how am I supposed to figure out who you are now?”

  Automatic translation systems informed the Active that her Shadow was making a human facial expression as she spoke. Resentment.

  Here on the Planning Stage, both of them appeared as they did in reality but nothing they said or did was recreated by their physical bodies. Keryapt had spent months of subjective time preparing for the mission while her cranial pod was being carried the ten light years to Earth, but she still had a lot to learn about human interaction.

  “The gesture translator says you are resentful. I can’t do anything about the past, Shadow. This is the moment we’re living in.”

  “Maybe your job is to be in ‘the moment’ but mine is to keep you safe while accomplishing the mission. Did your feelings tell you that the elderly male near the rear of the ferry has been staring at you for two minutes?”

  The view from her Interloper body changed slightly as Kery refocused her camera eyes. The man was indeed staring at her. The combat control system added a faint red threat tracking glow around his body. “I’m attractive. He’s just a bored old man.”

  She had directed the Earth-orbiting Factory to make the physical features of the Interloper universally appealing, but not striking, so her body was a generic light brown which could pass for almost any nationality. Her face was designed to be pretty enough to get a positive response but not be too memorable.

  Shadow seemed increasingly bitter. “So you don’t think he could be a threat? An enemy agent? You’re willing to bet your life, and the mission, on it?”

  “If he were, he wouldn’t be staring directly at me. I’ll have Dove keep an eye on him.”

  “That’s another thing that’s bugging me. Why do you have designations for the pair of close-in remotes that are different than their actual species?”

  “‘Hawk’ and ‘Dove’ sounded like more culturally-appropriate names for offensive unit and recon unit than ‘Seagull’ and ‘Pigeon’. I thought that you and Mezerello preferred to use clever human-style names?”

  Shadow held up a hand in objection. “That was Mez and I. She’s dead, and you aren’t her. You’re the great Keryapt Zess, dragged out of retirement to come make up for my bad decisions with your flawless record.”

  Kery had expected some friction in her interaction with Shadow, but surprised at this level of ire. She tried to stay level headed. “I was the closest asset that the Admiralty had. Believe me, I know that this pairing is…unusual. But we have to make do and find a way to work together. I’ll change the names.”

  She brought up the asset control display and scrolled through the entries in order of age. Asteroid Belt Factory, Observatory (repurposed), Earth orbit Factory, Observatory, Overwatch remote constellation, Interloper (occupied), Strikers (ready for assembly), Hawk and Dove. She stopped there and began editing the name field for the two remotes.

  Shadow took a deep breath, obviously unneeded in the virtual environment but an indicator that was trying to regain control over her emotions. “Never mind. Leave them as they are, you’re used to them.”

  Kery undid the change and looked at Shadow. “You sure?”

  “Yes. I need to follow your lead, learn from your experience.”

  “Okay then. Back on task. How long till Mr. Connor James gets on the ESWAT ferry?”

  “Bag check, millimeter wave body scanner, normal human bureaucratic delays…probably ten minutes if he doesn’t annoy them. He should make it.” Shadow switched the Observatory’s focus from the seagulls around Alcatraz to the sleek vessel which the human forensic photographer should be soon boarding. “Now that both you and Connor are on your desired schedule, can you explain to me why you had me hire someone to steal his car?”

  “I don’t want him to have time to question my cover story once we meet. You can have him win a new car next week or something.” She felt a little bit bad for the innocent human. He was hopefully about to provide them with more insight into the attack on Mezerello.

  “We’ll see. But I still don’t like having you go in like this. I would have preferred to just hire someone to steal the incident data directly from him.”

  “We don’t know how he’s transporting it - data card, hard drive, optical disk. It could be anywhere on him. If I could have arrived a few hours earlier then I would have done it myself, but we don’t have any other non-weapon assets here. This way, though, we get to figure out who cares about the incident data. That could be more important than the data itself.”

  #

  Connor stared at Alcatraz out the forward windows as the ESWAT ferry pulled away from the dock, glad to have a few minutes of relative calm before he had to interact with anyone again. There were only a handful of people in the surprisingly comfortable passenger area, wearing decidedly unfashionable office wear or midnight blue ESWAT uniforms. He hadn’t thought to put on his one suit, but thanks to his backpack, visitor ID tag and the fact that he was ten years younger than anyone else he would have stood out anyway. Watching his destination was the easiest way to ignore the curious glances cast in his direction.

  Alcatraz was barely 500 meters long and less than 200 wide, but had an outsized role in history due to its location in the middle of San Francisco Bay. The famous prison on its south end looked like a crumbling ruin compared to the gleaming ESWAT facilities on the north side as they came into view. The entire island was owned by the US government, which made it a perfect candidate when Homeland Security went looking for a pilot site for its new drone police initiative. Located just over two kilometers from San Francisco, ESWAT drone delivery vehicles could get to any point in the city within minutes.

  Connor idly pulled a data card from its padded receptacle in his pack, and twirled it between his fingers. This was the reason he had been summoned here. The night that the Dogpatch waterfront was destroyed, he had been sent to the scene wearing his full spectrum data rig. The incident had turned into a gigantic rescue and recovery mission with dozens dead and several blocks destroyed, not a normal crime scene, but the rig had been running the entire time. It gathered several terabytes of data from its infrared cameras, chemical sniffers and automated DNA analyzers. The results would normally have been stored indefinitely in SFPD cloud archives.

  In this case, however, the data had been declared classified and Homeland Security had forbidden SFPD from processing it. Copies of it had been delivered to the appropriate federal agencies a week earlier, but now the orders had come down for all the data to be erased from SFPD servers and for him to personally bring the original copy to Alcatraz.

  Connor looked at the ESWAT buildings as the ferry approached the island, then back down at the data card. At first no one knew what had caused the explosion and terrorism was feared, but there was no radiation or chemical traces to explain it. Days later it was announced that it was a freak meteor strike.

  Which made it even more strange that the data had to be kept away from the public. That felt wrong to him. He had studied journalism in college but never had a chance to practice the craft before the newspapers all went out of business.

  Only a minute left until the ferry arrived at Alcatraz.

  He checked once again that his seat in the nearly empty ferry wasn’t positioned to give the ubiquitous security cameras a view of what he was doing, then pulled his computer out and inserted the card. It only took a few quick clicks and its contents were backed up again.

  The slight bump as the ferry docked startled him, and he realized he could feel beads of sweat drip down from his a
rmpits. He shoved the notebook back down into his pack, banging in into the fantastically expensive camera in its padded slot. His now ex-fiancée had given it to him a year ago, only a few days before he had called off their wedding, and she never replied to his email about giving it back. He couldn’t let it go to waste or just sell it, so now whenever he used it he let himself feel a little bit bad about the pain he had inflicted on her.

  He emerged from the ferry and immediately shivered in the chill wind. The pair of gleaming ESWAT edifices loomed above him where the prison’s two “Industries” buildings used to be. The four or five story ESWAT building located just at the northwestern tip of the island was clearly where the drone delivery vehicles were launched. Stubby runways pointing off towards the northeast and southwest at the base of the building gave the island the semblance of being an aircraft carrier cruising across the bay. The long windowless building next to the ferry dock was the headquarters for ESWAT. Somewhere in there, Director Maxwell was waiting for him to turn over the Dogpatch incident data.

  He followed the rest of the ferry passengers down the gangway and on to the dock, surprised at first that there was no checkpoint for arriving passengers. Connor quickly realized the ESWAT section of the island was separated from the rest of the retired prison by an aesthetically painted but quite dangerous looking fence topped with razor wire. No tourist would accidentally wander over to the ESWAT side of the island.

  #

  Keryapt barely paid attention to the audio beacon tour as her body walked briskly through the former prison. “Alcatraz was known as ‘Evil Island’ by Native Americans who occupied this region. They used it as a place of banishment for law breakers. The Spanish explorers who came to the San Francisco Bay area called it ‘The Island of the Pelicans’ after the birds they found there, and the old Spanish word for ‘Pelicans’ was ‘Alcatraces.’ “

  Her attention was focused on something else entirely. The Planning Stage was filled with video screens, each showing a different scene from a different world. There were cities, swamps, caves, palaces, deserts, space stations and more, all with one thing in common. In all of them, Keryapt Zess was the star. She fought, negotiated, ran, seduced, escaped, bargained, deduced and destroyed. Without any mistakes of consequence.