Masada's Gate: A Space Opera Noir Technothriller (The SynCorp Saga: Empire Earth Book 2)

by Bruns, David

  The hangar itself was the polar opposite of the busy craziness of Pallas from my dream. There was only one shuttle parked, lonely, in a slip meant for a larger vessel. It looked ready to launch. Two men waited on the deck as the Hearse settled onto her struts. Gregor Erkennen rocked on his heels, like I was a waiter who’d forgotten his table. The other man seemed familiar, but I couldn’t put a name to him.

  “Took you long enough,” Erkennen said, doing his crossed-arms, heel-rocking thing. His almost-Russian accent always sounded put-on to me, but I knew he came by it honestly. His pop had been Mother Country, born and bred.

  “Invent a better drive,” I shot back. Realizing I’d just barked at a regent of SynCorp, I took off my hat—a sign of respect to take the edge off my cheekiness. Being Tony’s chief enforcer, sometimes I forget my place in the Company pecking order.

  “Working on it,” Erkennen said.

  “Figured.”

  “I assume you know my man, Bruno Richter?”

  Erkennen jerked his head to the left. The man next to him was thin and weedy. If a ferret could walk upright, it’d be named Bruno Richter. Mid-thirties: old enough to be confident, young enough to think he could still do what he’d been able to in his twenties. Richter was known for assassination by poison. Unlike me, he was an indirect sort of fellow.

  “Never heard of him,” I lied, careful to look Bruno in the eye when I said it. “How’s it hangin’, Bruno?”

  Richter ignored my outstretched hand, which was really only offered as part of my penance to Erkennen for being a smartass when I’d landed. Bruno hid his hands under his armpits, where most assassins store at least one weapon of choice. That stance is universal enforcer code for don’t fuck with me .

  “Glad to see we’re getting off on the right foot,” I said, smiling at him—my go-to expression for putting my professional colleagues off their feed. Let’s establish who’s who here.

  Erkennen seemed annoyed by the dick measuring.

  “Come to my office, Mr. Fischer. Time’s short, and there’s a lot to discuss.”

  “Lead the way,” I said. Erkennen turned to oblige, and Richter and I hesitated to move a moment longer. “Oh, after you,” I said, motioning forward and widening my smile.

  He didn’t move.

  “Bruno!” Erkennen called over his shoulder. With a lingering stare of warning, Bruno came when called. Like a good rat terrier should.

  I decided, whatever this was, it was gonna be fun.

  • • •

  “So, let me get this straight,” I said. Erkennen was being patient. I was a blue-collar type. I couldn’t be expected to grasp the strategic intricacies of the Company’s technology faction all at once, now could I? “You’ve got a decoy database on Titan chocked full of fake inventions, flashing ‘open for business’ like a Darkside hooker behind in her rent. You’re hoping … hoping , mind you … that your little charade pulls all Cassandra’s attention away from the real treasures here on Masada Station.”

  Richter cleared his throat, a warning to watch my tone. I pretended it was just phlegm and ignored him.

  “The deception will buy us time,” Erkennen said. “Time to find a cure for Cassandra.”

  “A … cure?”

  The Regent of Titan nodded. “She’s an AI. True—a unique form of life, to be sure. But at the end of the day, half of her is still just synthetic code married to nature’s original code—the human genome. And all code, whatever its origin, can be compromised.”

  “I thought you were spending all your resources on defense,” I said.

  “That would only ensure defeat, Mr. Fischer, as you yourself have suggested. What we’re really doing is delaying Cassandra until we develop a way to defeat her.” Gregor Erkennen looked at me straight on. “Your mission is simple, Mr. Fischer. Help Bruno protect Rebekah Franklin and her team, so they can protect Masada Station. Fail in that effort, and the Company will be lost.”

  I let that sink in a minute. Sometimes I have to boil down the cryptic into something actionable.

  The huge decoy mission happening on Titan: Erkennen and his people jumping up and down on a hill, waving their arms, daring Cassandra and the SSR to charge. She—it, I had to keep reminding myself—would hopefully take the bait. Meanwhile, Erkennen was looking for a tech miracle to undo her. But if Cassandra got wise and managed to steal the data from Masada Station, that effort wouldn’t matter a bit.

  “If I’m going to protect your supercomputer, I need a tour of the station,” I said. “And I need to meet your prodigy programmer.”

  “She’s indisposed at the moment,” Erkennen said.

  “Unacceptable,” I replied before he’d finished. “You want me to protect your geek crew here or not?”

  Erkennen sighed. “Rebekah Franklin’s grandfather passed away two days ago. He was a dear friend of the faction—of mine—and she is grieving.”

  I gave that news the couple of breaths of respect it deserved. Diplomacy isn’t my strong suit, but sometimes I surprise myself.

  “I understand,” I said, not really caring. Then Daisy’s face popped into my mind’s eye, and I felt like a heel big enough to fit on a clown’s floppy shoe. I adjusted my attitude. “Regent, here’s the thing—”

  “Gregor,” he said. “Call me Gregor.”

  I paused. Invitation to intimacy was not something easily offered by a regent of the Syndicate Corporation. Especially to a competing faction’s chief fix-it man.

  “As I was about to say, Gregor, I work alone.”

  “Not dis time,” Richter said, reminding me he existed. His German accent was thick. His smile was skinny, amused. Well, Daisy Brace had worked out, hadn’t she? Maybe Ferret Face would surprise me too.

  “The old lines,” Erkennen said, “they’re meaningless now. We have a common enemy.”

  I nodded, understanding for the first time, I think, the real stakes. This was for all the marbles. And, especially, one Big Blue Marble.

  If Cassandra stole SynCorp’s tech secrets, the Company would end. Understanding that is why I’d set my personal loyalty to Tony aside and traveled in the exact wrong direction to reach Titan. But here’s what I hadn’t realized, not till now—not till Gregor said what he said the way he’d said it.

  Life under SynCorp had provided purpose for billions after near extinction at Mother Nature’s hands. Was it a life of value? You’d have to ask them. Each and every one. But it was life.

  Cassandra promised freedom. But what did that mean, really? To lift the booted heel of the Company off the neck of humanity and restore its free-willed destiny to do whatever the hell it wanted to itself? Seemed to me we’d tried that already, and it wasn’t all that and a box of chocolates. The she-bot’s promise sounded like a line to me.

  Was Cassandra offering a better life than Joe and Jane Average already had under SynCorp? Maybe. For me, it all boiled down to this, though: what would a half machine know about what’s best for mankind? Maybe a lot. Maybe nothing. Maybe, like all of us, it was driven by pure self-interest. Maybe it didn’t give a hoot in hell for mankind at all. Thirty years before, the New Earthers and the original Cassandra—a true, pure artificial intelligence housed in a mainframe, I reminded myself, tasting the irony—had murdered tens of millions.

  There’s the devil … and there’s the devil you know.

  “You two are Rebekah Franklin’s guardian angels,” Erkennen said to fill the silence. I’m sure it had sounded inspirational in his head. But what he’d said almost made me laugh out loud.

  Richter’s grin became a smirk. He looked my way, and we shared the joke. For my part, it went something like…

  Stacks Fischer, an angel?

  What in God’s fiery hell had the universe come to?

  Chapter 13

  Rebekah Franklin • Masada Station, Orbiting Titan

  Bekah drew the sponge across her grandfather’s forehead. She had the pleasant thought that it was soothing him, cooling a life’s worth of cares from
his time-worn brow.

  In death, the worry lines seemed less. Opa Simon had seemed ready to go. Or, at least, contented to meet God on God’s own terms.

  Like I have a choice , she heard his rueful voice say in her mind.

  The peaceful expression on his face belied the cancer that had so virulently, so quickly riddled his body. Faster than his medical implant had been able to catch up and viciously outwitting the experimental therapies the Erkennen Faction’s best medical minds had applied. Sometimes—more often than not—nature bested technology, reminded you that creation’s original architecture, for all its apparent frailties and imperfections, was better than anything mankind’s mind could create from any combination of fire and thought and the empirical method.

  Though expected for weeks, Simon’s death had come abruptly. A few days earlier he’d been joking with Gregor Erkennen, praising Bekah as he always did when he was within earshot of Titan’s regent, strategic and obvious in his adulation. Then, less than twelve hours ago, the automated alert tied to his vital signs had called her away from the adaptive nested-loop functions she’d been working on. Not recognizing—or, perhaps, not wanting to acknowledge—what the alert meant, Bekah had been angered at first by the interruption. But her frustration had melted away when the truth hit home.

  Bekah’s loss had consumed her then, a strange combination of physical numbness and acute emotional pain. Her grief had ripped open a hot, yawning emptiness inside her.

  It was like someone had doubled the station’s gravity. Simply dipping the sponge in the water of the medical tub, then drawing it over Simon’s skin, was difficult. Downward, along each limb, as prescribed by Jewish law. The forced intimacy of washing her grandfather’s body as she performed the taharah , the tradition of ritual washing, was uncomfortable. Seeing him naked made her self-conscious, but she knew that was merely society’s conscience in her head, judgment not based in Jewish norms. The ablution was meant to cleanse the body, to return it to the pure state in which it entered God’s physical universe. It wasn’t something needful that Bekah had believed herself. But she respected her opa’s final wishes, and so she ignored the disapproving societal finger wagging in her head.

  Bekah dipped the sponge in the water and drew it along her opa’s skin. She thought he’d appreciate the irony of the medical tub—science providing a clean, germ-free environment for the mikveh preparing his body for burial. And the water, as pure as any in the solar system, scooped up for study from Saturn’s rings. She could hear Simon’s chuckle, see him nod his appreciation for the absolute appropriateness of this contemporary expression of an ancient ritual adapted to life in modern times. A common-sense commandment obeyed in the only way she knew how to obey it.

  She drew the sponge along Simon’s skin. Old, yes. Withered and rung out by life and disease. But also peaceful. What was left of God’s loan of life, Opa Simon would say, the final note now called in to balance the books. A gift once wrapped in pretty paper and now removed from the box, but leaving the box and weathered paper behind, a reminder of the transient nature of the soul-gift itself.

  When she’d finished washing her opa’s body, Bekah lowered the relative gravity in the infirmary and lifted him from the medical tub. As she laid him on the white sheet covering the mortician’s gurney, she had the odd thought that he must be cold. And while she knew intellectually that such a concern was silly, she pulled each side of the sheet over his body anyway because it made her feel better to do so. Bekah left his head and neck open so he could hear—another silly assignment of human need to a corpse that didn’t have needs. She read El Malei Rachamim , the prayer for the dead, taking her time to get the Hebrew pronunciation right for him. Then Bekah picked up Opa Simon’s Torah and read Psalm 16, his favorite: “Keep me safe, my God, for in you I take refuge…”

  Then she read Psalm 90. And two more psalms after that. She wasn’t even sure if he’d liked the ones she was reading now. But that wasn’t important, not really. What was important was that she was reading them in his name and remembering him to their ancestors—that she, the next generation, was performing this ritual as a continuation of thousands of years of Jewish tradition.

  Bekah could hear Opa Simon’s warm laughter at that.

  It’s a good start .

  She was entirely alone now, Bekah realized, without family. She didn’t want the ritual to end because when it did, that fact would be true. Set in reality’s concrete forever.

  Her sceye pinged with an incoming message from Daniel Tripp. She was supposed to meet him ten minutes ago. More algorithms. More debates over how robust they should be.

  She muted her sceye and set the Torah aside. Carefully, she wrapped the sheet more tightly around her opa. When he was completely covered from head to toe, Bekah opened the door to Masada Station’s medical storage unit and slipped Simon Franklin’s earthly remains inside. The temperature made her shiver. Or was it the feeling that this was inadequate to the demands of Jewish death rituals?

  God, I really am putting him in the freezer .

  Her sceye pinged again. She flicked an eye to open the connection.

  “I’ll be there in ten, Daniel, okay?”

  There was a delay. “Okay,” Daniel said. “I’m sorry to interrupt. It’s just that—”

  “I know, I know,” she said, aware she was taking her anger at herself out on him. “I’ll be there in ten.”

  She closed the connection. The white, enshrouded feet of her Opa Simon stuck out from the storage drawer. Cold seeped out around them in whispered clouds. Bekah pushed the tray the rest of the way into the unit and closed the thick door. Its rubber seals shunked .

  Airtight.

  “Goodbye, Opa,” she said. Then, almost like an amen : “Gravity: normal.”

  Her limbs adjusted, but her heart felt no lighter.

  Bekah left the infirmary.

  • • •

  “But that’s the whole point!” Daniel was saying. He took a breath. He was trying to control himself, though to Bekah, he didn’t seem to be trying very hard. Maybe she was being unfair. Maybe he felt sorry for her grief. “If we don’t give the algorithm the ability to screw up and self-correct, all it will ever be is programming.”

  They’d been arguing for at least fifteen minutes. The old argument. Daniel had circled back to his obsession over creating computer code that was a damned-near conscious thing.

  “And that’s a good thing?” Bekah asked, calculating her words, trying to keep her mind on the technical point she was making. Her thoughts wandered back to the infirmary and the foolish concern that her grandfather must be freezing. “Look, Daniel, we need predictability here. We need reliability. Today isn’t the day to strive for the next generation of machine learning. We need to use what we know and find a hack for Cassandra, not take a chance on giving her a back door into Masada’s mainframe.”

  His shoulders sagging, Daniel sat down on the smartdesk. The 3D biomechanical diagram hovering over it shook, then steadied again.

  “You’re missing the point,” he said.

  Something tickled the back of Bekah’s brain. Daniel could have been her Opa Simon, lamenting her lack of interest in the Old Ways. Making that connection led to another about how Daniel’s devotion to adaptive heuristics was so like her grandfather’s faith. Daniel seemed unable or unwilling to see the flaws in his own concept of what perfect programming could accomplish, or could be perverted into accomplishing against the interests of the greater good. He failed to see the dangers. Daniel Tripp was a zealot, and self-aware code was his god.

  “How can we fight an AI without weaponizing the way she thinks for our own purposes?” he insisted. “We can turn the tables on her, Bekah, fight fire with fire!”

  She was nearing the end of her patience. They’d wasted too much time debating this. The door to the lab swished open, saving her the need for yet another rebuttal. Her mind relaxed when she saw it was Gregor Erkennen. Maybe she’d make a personnel exchange request
after all, despite Gregor’s desire that Daniel stay on Masada Station and support their defense of the mainframe, should that become necessary. Maybe she could convince him that Daniel would better serve the cause as part of the team on Prometheus Colony. She could get Mrissa Seldan or Kim Dillon back up here in his place. They were both talented. They were both capable. And neither were self-important, closed-minded pr—

  “Ms. Franklin,” Gregor said, formal as usual when they weren’t alone. “I’d like to introduce you to someone.”

  Bekah noticed then the two men filing in behind Gregor, and she shelved the reassignment request for later. The first man she knew: Bruno Richter, Gregor’s bodyguard. A quiet, frightening man. His angular face always held a perennial, flat expression approximating smugness. But it had something else in it too, a kind of willful detachment. In all her time on Masada Station, she’d never actually heard him speak.

  The other man was older, nearing sixty she guessed. He wore old-fashioned clothing, a fedora hat and longcoat. He looked out of place among the Erkennen Faction’s blue uniforms and the sterile white, traditional lab coats she and Daniel wore. The salt-and-pepper scruff of his days-old beard growth fit the clothes.

  “This is Eugene Fischer,” Gregor said.

  “My friends call me Stacks,” the man said, offering his hand first to Daniel, then to Bekah. His palm was rough. Old and full of history. “Bruno here calls me Mr. Fischer.”

  Gregor smiled politely.

  Bekah wasn’t sure how to read Bruno’s expression at the obvious snub. Indulgent, maybe. Patient, within limits.

  “I thought you were leaving this morning,” Daniel said.

  “I was,” Gregor replied. “I am, soon. Stacks here and Bruno—I’m leaving them on the station. To protect you.”