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

by Bruns, David

“Protect us?” Daniel said.

  Gregor shared a look with Bekah. His eyes were hard, and a little bit sad. The mission he’d given to her and her alone was in them. She touched a fingertip to the Hammer around her neck.

  “To protect your work,” Gregor said, shifting his gaze to Daniel. “To make sure you accomplish what needs to be done.”

  “Of course.” Daniel’s eyes lingered on Richter.

  “What do you do in here anyway?” Fischer asked. “Make robots?”

  Gregor’s breath came out in a bah sound. “Bekah is my most insightful programmer,” he said. “She sees code in her head like Mozart saw music. Now, Daniel here is a visionary. I’m convinced he’ll produce the next-generation AI that will make us all obsolete!”

  Bekah blushed, while Daniel beamed.

  Fischer raised an eyebrow. “Really,” he said. “Robots, then.”

  “Oh, nothing so crude,” Daniel began. “Bodies are so unnecessary to the experience of—”

  “Cassandra would disagree, I think,” Fischer said.

  Mouth open to continue proselytizing, Daniel seemed to have forgotten his next word. Bekah noticed Fischer watching him closely.

  “Let’s leave that there, then,” Gregor said, turning to Bekah. “How’s Carrin doing on her special project?”

  “Still working out the kinks,” Bekah said. “But she’s close.”

  “Special project?” Fischer said.

  “She’s beta-testing a way to block the Dreamscape algorithm,” the regent explained. “We’re now almost certain it was an early infiltration strategy by Cassandra. A way to render personnel inert, as it were.”

  “Huh,” Fischer said. “Why bother fighting when you can make the enemy lie down?”

  “Something like that,” Gregor said. “Bekah, can I talk to you a moment? Alone?”

  She nodded. Gregor walked them both a short distance away from the others before speaking.

  “Remember what I told you,” he whispered. “Fischer and Richter are here to protect you. They’re the best at what they do. If they tell you to do something, you do it.”

  Bekah looked him in the eye. “Why do I—we —why do we need protecting?”

  Gregor’s smile was more hopeful than reassuring. “Cassandra will come here. Maybe not herself, but she will send agents. They’re probably already on their way. If we’re lucky, they’ll fall for our ruse and attack Prometheus Colony, and we’ll be ready for them. But if our deception fails, you have what used to be called a long time ago the nuclear option . And you have Fischer and Richter to make sure you can use it, should circumstances warrant doing so.”

  Bekah swallowed the fear rising inside her. It had never occurred to her that Masada Station might be physically attacked. If that happened, a few programmers and two men, no matter how skilled, wouldn’t be enough to keep them safe.

  “How was the taharah ?” Gregor asked.

  Bekah stumbled over the sudden change in topic. “Difficult,” she said. “I hope I did it right.”

  Her Opa Simon’s former student took her by the shoulders. “Your grandfather was very proud of you,” he said. “You are exacting. Attentive to the tiniest detail. I’d put my last SynCorp dollar on it—you did fine.”

  She smiled her gratitude at him. The Regent of Titan leaned down and engulfed her in a Russian bear hug. His warmth felt like family.

  “All right, everyone,” Gregor said, “it’s time for me to head down the well. I wish you all the very best of luck up here. Keep it quiet, eh? No one will even know you’re here.” He spoke briefly and quietly to Fischer, handed the enforcer something, then walked from the lab without looking back.

  “I’m going to my quarters,” Richter announced.

  “I need a break, too,” Daniel asked, standing and stretching. “I’ll be back for the next shift.”

  Both men exited together. When they were gone, Fischer turned to Bekah.

  “What did Gregor give you?” Bekah asked, curious.

  “He called it a skeleton coder,” Fischer said, holding up a small device. “Gets me in anywhere on the station I want to go.”

  “Oh. Okay.” That knowledge made her nervous, and a shade self-conscious.

  “Now that it’s just you and me,” Fischer said, “show me this dead man’s switch the regent told me about.”

  Bekah hesitated. She didn’t know Fischer. He looked like a human from another Earth, maybe a parallel planet or pulled from a different time. Everything about him seemed foreign. A man of her grandfather’s generation, true, but nothing at all like him. As earthy as her opa had been elegant.

  The difference made her uneasy, like his unlimited access to the station made her uneasy. But Gregor Erkennen trusted him. And his judgment would have to be enough.

  “Okay.” She walked to a computer console and pulled the Hammer out from beneath her shirt. Fischer eyed the oversized key hanging from the gold chain. “This is how it works…”

  Chapter 14

  Milani Stuart • Aboard the Freedom’s Herald

  Her sleep had been restless. Disturbed and random. The sweat from her body slicked the sheets.

  Milani turned over again, her hair worrying the back of her neck. Her joints ached. There seemed to be no such thing as comfortable anymore. No such thing as relaxing. She did her best to embrace the merciful darkness of her cabin, to wrap herself up in it while it lasted. Milani had prayed for the dark almost as often as she’d prayed for freedom. Along with silence and the sterile, recycled air of the starship and a comfortable temperature—welcome islands of relief among the constant illumination, the thrash music, the stink of rotting meat, the extreme heat.

  She’d almost come to believe her liberation was true, not merely her mind’s strategy to help her survive. Any second, she expected the lights to flare and Helena Telemachus to barge into her cabin and begin the whole process over again.

  “You thought you were free?” she’d say. “You’ll never be free.”

  The door chime rang.

  Milani’s eyes snapped open.

  Telemachus had never bothered with the courtesy of requesting entry.

  She sat up in her bed. “Lights.” The room brightened, Milani shying away instinctively. This cabin wasn’t the adapted quarters-cum-prison cell they’d caged her in before. Her eyes began to adjust, finding the 3D motion portrait of her parents. They smiled and waved from the small table at the foot of her bed. Milani released a breath she didn’t known she was holding and found herself grounded again.

  “Come,” she said.

  The door slid aside.

  “Mind if I come in?” Kwazi asked.

  Milani’s feet touched the floor. Something inside her heart ached, though it wasn’t a physical sensation. Odd, that. “Thanks for asking.”

  He stood in the doorway with a questioning look, framed by light from the corridor.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Come in.”

  The door slid shut behind him.

  “They sent me to fetch you,” Kwazi said. “For the announcement.”

  “Announcement?”

  Milani made room for him on the bunk, and he sat down next to her.

  “The ship. Telemachus’s trial. You know … you. Your deliverance from SynCorp custody.”

  Milani stared at her parents, smiling and waving in the moving portrait. They stood in one of the carved channels of the Antoniadi Crater on Mars, where she’d spent most of her childhood being bored to death while they studied the mineral formations in ancient riverbeds. Touching on the memory accented the ache behind her breastbone. It made her miss them.

  “I appreciate all you and … your friends … have done for me,” she said. “I really do. But, Kwazi, I don’t want to be a part of this. I never wanted to be a part of it. I just want my life back. I want to go back to helping people at Wallace Med.”

  He put his arm around her. Not so long ago it would have made her heart flutter. Now all she felt was a slow, burning tension forming be
tween her shoulder blades.

  “I know,” he said. It sounded compulsory, not understanding. “But things are different now. This is something greater than ourselves, Milani. This is our chance to kill the Company.” He gestured around them at the walls, the deck. “This is how we win.”

  She looked at him and saw a bright blindness in his eyes. A willful devotion to a version of reality she still couldn’t understand and wasn’t sure she wanted to. The look reminded her of how she’d found Kwazi in the engine room when this ship had been called the Pax Corporatum , almost lifeless and nested in his own filth—divorced from the real world, lost in a deadly dream.

  “How is the…” She was afraid to finish it. Afraid of him getting angry with her for asking, maybe? Or afraid of the answer. Maybe both.

  “What?” he prompted.

  “Dreamscape.” Milani held her breath.

  Kwazi released his own. “It’s fine,” he said tightly. “I realize—I mean, I have Amy there, and we talk and we … I have Amy there. But there’s something else I can do to honor her, and that’s what I’m doing now, Milani. That’s what we’re doing.”

  The way he emphasized we’re gave her pause. Did he mean the two of them, or did he mean him and Amy?

  “We’re changing things,” he continued. “For the better.”

  “Rebranding Tony Taulke’s starship something hopeful doesn’t change things,” she said. “Not really.”

  Kwazi squeezed her shoulder. He was trying hard. Trying hard for her, she realized.

  “But it’s a start,” he said. “The ship’s a symbol of freedom now, literally. Of liberation.”

  She nodded, accepting his acceptance of that belief. Kwazi smiled. Was he assuming she agreed with him?

  “Rabh’s regency is on its last legs now,” he said, encouraged. “Valhalla Station is boiling, ready to blow the lid off.”

  “What do you mean?” Milani asked. “What’s happening?”

  “You don’t know?”

  She shook her head. The first thing Helena had done was to disconnect her sceye to make sure the only reality Milani knew was the world Helena created for her. A world of isolation and pain and persuasion.

  “Earth is in turmoil. Mars is a Company fortress, but it’ll be broken soon. The outer colonies like Valhalla Station—their lifeline to food has been cut off.” He raised his hands. “The hydroponics and grain stores here will sustain the station for a while, but they’re not enough. You should see the vid protests on The Real Story . There aren’t enough SynCorp soldiers or marshals to contain it. This is what happens when the people rise up, Milani. This is how tyranny dies.”

  The stars were in Kwazi’s eyes again. The fervent fire of a believer who’s absolutely sure he knows what heaven looks like.

  “Here,” he said, excited, “let me show you.”

  Kwazi pulled up CorpNet. The Real Story presented, in rapid succession, short videos from around the system. Five- and ten-second snapcasts showed the faces of men and women who mined Jupiter’s atmosphere despite the dangers. The miners on Callisto fancied themselves the modern descendants of Vikings, rugged and fearless, but the people in the snapcasts seemed anything but. Men, women, the occasional child—they looked frightened. Headlines praising the SSR scrolled across the bottom of the screen. A breaking news banner claimed the hydroponics dome on Callisto had been seized, followed by Cassandra’s promises that food distribution would begin soon. Was that doubt she saw in the eyes of the Callistans who’d heard?

  “See? This is happening all over the system,” Kwazi said.

  “They look scared, Kwazi. The people in the vids.”

  “Well,” he said, gesturing at the screen, “they probably are. I mean, I don’t blame them. A lot has happened in a short time.”

  A mother’s face, dirty and stretched by fear, flashed on the screen. A little girl, her daughter maybe, had her arms around the woman’s waist. There was no audio, but a spokesman interpreted the woman’s moving mouth as thanking Cassandra and the SSR for her deliverance. The woman was so happy she was crying, he noted.

  “People are scared,” Milani said again. “Afraid their children won’t eat tomorrow.”

  Kwazi sighed beside her. “Why do you only see the negative?”

  The negative? Kwazi, for God’s sake—

  “Change is hard,” he said, his tone that of a placating parent. “There’s always turmoil. There’s always strife. But tomorrow will be better.” It sounded like a prepared speech.

  The woman’s face had vanished, replaced by a man in a white tunic. Milani recognized him, one of the doctors in the station’s infirmary. He looked exhausted. The clinic behind him was jammed with patients. A headline ran at the bottom, praising the professionals of Valhalla Station for their dedication to duty.

  “Okay,” Milani said, accepting for now at least that Kwazi would see what he wanted to see. “Okay.”

  “Come on, we have to go.” Kwazi stood up and held out a hand. The smile on his face seemed forced. “We have our own vid to make.”

  Feeling she had little choice, Milani followed him out of her quarters. A last glance at the image of her parents standing in the ancient Martian riverbed felt like saying goodbye to a previous life.

  • • •

  When the doors opened onto the bridge of the Freedom’s Herald , the busy noise of people talking over one another spilled out. SSR-uniformed personnel stood over the starship’s corporate crew, drawn weapons enforcing orders. The white-hot light of spot welders flashed near the forward viewscreen. A large man, his face cast in a perpetual scowl, turned in the captain’s chair to look her over critically. Then he glanced to Kwazi.

  “Well, she’s in better shape than the last time I saw her,” he said.

  “Yes,” Kwazi said, urging Milani forward to the center of the bridge. She could smell the sweat on the man in the captain’s chair. “Dr. Stuart’s much better today. I think she’s ready.”

  “She better be.”

  On the forward screen, Callisto’s orbital ring stretched over the corona of the pockmarked moon. There was no activity, no docking shuttles full of tired miners coming off shift or gashaulers full of hypercompressed helium-3 or deuterium departing for the inner system. All commercial activity from Callisto had ceased.

  No wonder those people are so frightened , Milani thought. It’s not just the food. It’s the not having something to do. It’s the idle minds turning to fear to keep themselves occupied .

  Milani understood that need for diversion. She felt that absence in herself even now, that hole where purpose had been before. She was a doctor. She should be helping people. Not watching them descend into … whatever this was.

  The doors behind her opened again. Soldiers dragged Helena Telemachus onto the bridge, her arms secured at her sides. Her hair was tangled, her eyelids heavy. Helena had been having a hard time of it.

  Payback’s a bitch, bitch .

  “And now, our guest of honor,” the man in the captain’s chair said. He stood formally. “Helena Telemachus, welcome to the bridge of the Freedom’s Herald . I’m Captain Braxton.”

  Telemachus jerked her arms, trying to free them. At a nod from Braxton, the guards on either side released her. Helena drew herself up, and her green eyes blazed. Her elfin ears, an affectation of body morphing from her youth, recalled a sad memory of the pride of self-worth they’d once represented.

  “On behalf of the Syndicate Corporation, I’m willing to offer you clemency,” Helena said. “But only if you release me and surrender to Company authorities. Immediately .”

  Milani could hear the SynCorp spokesperson behind the words, a ghost of the irrefutable power her pronouncements had once carried. Now the sound was hollow, a flaccid echo of its past authority.

  “I’ll have to decline,” Braxton said, nodding at the comms station. The image of Callisto’s docking ring disappeared, replaced by the rigid expression of Adriana Rabh. “Regent. So glad you could make the time.”


  “Go fuck yourself,” Rabh said. The background behind her was plain and unadorned. “Surrender that starship and yourself to corporate authorities. I give you my word—your summary execution will only hurt for a second or two.”

  The personnel on the bridge, whether they be Company prisoner or SSR trooper, stopped what they were doing. Rabh’s reaction, the steel in it, had surprised everyone. Its solid, palpable strength was a stark contrast to Helena’s earlier, empty threat.

  Braxton laughed and turned to Telemachus.

  “It’s like you have a script, you two,” he said. Then, to the screen, “Adriana Rabh, you are judged an enemy of the people. For too long, you and your fellow faction leaders have built your empire of riches on the backs of the citizen-workers of Sol. Retribution is at hand. Deliverance of justice is at hand. The end of the Syndicate Corporation is at hand.”

  “Pretty speech,” Rabh said without hesitation. “Type it up, print it out, roll it tight, and shove it up your rebel ass.”

  Braxton opened his hands, as if he’d done all he could do. “We’ll begin with Ms. Telemachus’s trial. Very public. Very lethal. It won’t take long. Then we’re coming for you, you old bitch. Victory is assured.”

  Adriana Rabh lifted a carefully sculpted eyebrow. “Assured? Is that why you’re hiding in orbit on the far side of Callisto in Tony Taulke’s silver space yacht? If your victory is so assured, why are Callistans rising up against you?”

  Braxton effected a look of confusion. “Perhaps you didn’t notice the object of their anger—they’re rising up against you , Regent.”

  “Keep telling yourself that,” Rabh said. Her eyes tracked beyond Braxton. “Helena, this is an unfortunate situation. And that’s a goddamned understatement.”

  Helena swallowed. “We swear our loyalty,” Telemachus said. Her throat had sounded wounded and raw. Milani noticed Helena’s hands trembling at her sides. Was it possible she was starting to feel sympathy for the woman who’d tortured her without mercy? Who’d murdered Kwazi’s loved ones for the sake of a lie? “We do our duty.”

  Braxton’s gaze swung between the two women. “Corporate catchphrases at the hour of your death? Now that’s true dedication.”