by M. D. Cooper
Ignoring the pain, she drew to a stop in front of the boulders. “Think I’ll stop here for a rest,” she told Tigan. “Don’t stay on my account, if my friend makes you uncomfortable.” She couldn’t keep the thread of humor from her voice; knowing he couldn’t possibly know the truth of her statement, she didn’t even try.
Lowering herself carefully to the ground, she sat cross-legged facing the big cat.
Tigan hesitated, then with a sound of frustration, joined her. “You’re as bad as the premier,” he grumbled, and her eyebrow shot up, above her eyepatch.
“Feretti, isn’t it? Sounds like you’re speaking from personal experience,” she observed, then saw him flinch and look furtively around before shrugging noncommittally.
She didn’t pursue the subject, although she wanted to. Something was nagging her about this man. Something about his actions wasn’t adding up, but she couldn’t quite put a finger on why just yet.
Dammit. My thoughts—it’s like straining to see through clouded plas! she raged helplessly. No mental clarity at all, with my augments fried like this.
Resting her cast on one knee, she reached for a few loose pebbles on the ground before her. Tossing them one by one at the ES field, she watched as it sparked blue at each tiny impact.
She sent a meaningful look Tobi’s way and saw the cat nod.
Message received.
Calista then turned to the only source of information she had—one she suspected knew more than he intimated.
“Know anything about these suppressors they implanted in us? They’re equipped with trackers, I suppose,” she said, her one eye intent upon his face.
“What?” Tigan jerked his gaze from the unblinking stare of the big cat to regard Calista with surprise. “Of course they are. Passive, though. They’re only programmed to respond if pinged.”
Calista nodded slowly, holding his gaze. “What if we try to use our Links to contact someone on the outside?”
“Link? You mean your implant?” Tigan asked, startled at the unfamiliar term. “Well, for one, you’re blocked from the world net. Second, any comm signal strong enough to reach you across that wasteland,” he gestured out toward the savannah, “would be picked up by the guard monitoring comms inside the bunker.”
“But if you and I wanted to communicate privately, across the prison yard?”
He laughed, a short, bitter thing. “Give you a hell of a headache, but no, they wouldn’t trace it. Wouldn’t do you any good, either, and they know it.” He eyed her with suspicion. “Unless you’re thinking about trading in contraband. And then the guards would expect a cut of it.”
It was all she needed to hear.
Faintly, she heard the cat’s response.
Tigan backpedaled quickly at the Proxima cat’s movement, but Calista hardly noticed. The pain triggered by Tobi’s response was blinding, and she gasped, gripping her head with her good hand.
* * * * *
Tobias handed Jason the kit that would replenish Calista’s mednano and crack the suppressor embedded in her skull. Jason stashed it in the small pack, along with the chameleon cloak that would hide her from scan, and a pulse pistol keyed to her bio signature.
Slinging the pack over his shoulder, Jason refreshed the nano inside the fabric Elastene bands encasing each wrist, then reached for an E-SCAR rifle and a bandolier of spare power packs.
“Sun sets at oh-seven-twenty,” the Weapon Born reminded him. “The disturbance our friendly agent has arranged is going to begin at oh-seven-forty. The glitch will occur thirty seconds after.”
Jason nodded as Tobias continued. “You’ll have fifteen seconds to get her through the field, no more. Got it?”
“Won’t be a problem, Tobe,” he assured the AI, slapping his old friend on the shoulder and giving Tobi a scratch behind the ears. “I can carry her if I need to, no sweat.”
the big cat suggested.
“No need, Tobi, I’ll be fine.” He stepped toward the hatch of the shuttle, then paused. “If they don’t come through for us with that airfoil….”
“No worries, boyo. Tobi and I will be aloft by then. If need be, I can fly Eidolon all the way in.” The battleframe shifted as Tobias approximated a shrug. “We run a much higher risk of detection, so it’s not ideal, but we’ll have her back, and that’s all that matters.”
Jason crooked the AI a half grin, sending him a sloppy salute before triggering the hatch open and fading into the rainforest.
TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE
STELLAR DATE: 03.14.3272 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Key warehouses and farms
REGION: Godel, Little River
Shannon had been the first to raise a concern about timing, during their briefing back on the Vale.
“If the DBC units are connected to each other, as well as to the master control on Barat,” she’d warned the rest, “then the first unit to be decommissioned could trigger a warning to the rest.”
“So the question isn’t just when the instructions for a biological agent will be sent to each converter to print,” Jonesy had mused, following her train of thought, “it’s whether or not tampering with one will trigger an automatic execution order in the rest.”
“And, no offense to you humans,” the silver-eyed AI said, slanting a pointed look toward Khela’s Marines, “but even your augmented reaction times are too slow to prevent it from happening.”
It had been Charley who came up with the solution. It was the same one he was poised to implement as he clung to the rafters inside Target Four.
His brain processed the skirling of seagulls, calling to one another as they wheeled above the cliffs ringing either side of the warehouse. His optics captured the motes of dust that danced through the lone sunbeam slanting down from the single transom window to the left of his frame.
But most of his attention was focused on the small, disc-shaped object affixed to the beam, twenty centimeters from his torso.
After a beat, Charley heard Terrance’s voice prodding her.
Inserting himself into the connection, he shunted its auto-response to always return positive. Satisfied he’d successfully neutralized the danger, he sent the ‘go’ signal for each team member to begin the DBCs’ shut-down sequence.
Charley neutralized the unit before him and began the long climb back down to the warehouse floor when Khela broke in again.
Charley began racing for the exit, spurred by the urgency he heard in her voice.
Charley increased his speed. He burst from the warehouse out into the warm coastal sunlight, angling for the nearest aircar in employee parking. He slapped breaching nano onto its frame, hacking its controls. Seconds later, he was airborne, banking over sparkling blue seas to head inland at the craft’s best speed.
Khela’s voice came back over the net.
The sound of an explosion abruptly cut her transmission.
Charley sent the ship’s doctor a swift response as he reached mentally for the controls of the shuttle cradled in the Avon Vale’s amidships hold. He knew that the vessel, like its sister ship, now had a portable autodoc and a stasis pod for triage. Bypassing the lockdown code and startling the bridge crew, he shut down the starboard dock’s ES field and opened its bay doors. Releasing the clamps, he dumped the fighter out into nearspace and activated the vessel’s thrusters.
A stunned silence carried across the combat net, broken briefly by Terrance’s anguished cry.
* * * * *
Khela was just reaching for the DBC unit, when she caught sight of the unmistakable shape of explosives, tucked high in an adjacent rafter. She pulled a small aerosol canister of colloidene nano from her kit and sprayed a stream of light-as-air particles at the package just beyond her reach. The nano clung to the surface of the explosives, its analysis causing her lips to tighten.
She instructed the nano to trace the line that led up to the bomb, and sucked in a sharp breath as she realized the extent to which this silo had been rigged. Telemetry from the nano suggested that the entire complex, stretching kilometers in length, was wired to blow.
She suspected she had mere seconds to act. Snapping a line to the rafter above her head, she fast-roped to the silo’s floor seventy meters below and hit the ground running.
She had no idea how quickly the substance would spread, nor did she have any way of knowing how much of a concentration would be required before there was enough to spark a conflagration.
One thing she was sure of: the little unit that was printing its biological material would most certainly have the ability to generate a spark, once that threshold had been met.
Khela’s top speed was twenty-four meters per second, thanks to the augmentation she’d received when joining Phantom Blade. Her Marine training had taught her that the rapidly expanding gases in a primary blast could reach an excess of eight thousand meters per second, depending on its yield. She was no physicist, but even she could do the math for that calculation.
She was the daughter of a physicist, though, and had been around him enough to absorb certain concepts, like the inverse square law. Which meant the farther away she was, the better her chances were of survival—although any Marine with a shred of self-preservation could also have told her that.
She activated her flow armor as she went, racing away at her top augmented speed.
The explosion followed fast on her heels, the leading shockwave lifting her and sending her body cartwheeling through the air. Shrapnel from the shredded silo overtook her, debris that would surely have impaled her but for the hardening of her armor. The rarefaction wave that followed sent her tumbling back, along with the wreckage that had flown out to meet her.
The world around her was one great conflagration; superheated air searing her lungs, despite the armor’s heat sink features. She barely registered the broken tree trunk that abruptly stopped her as her body slammed into it. She lost consciousness before her body hit the ground.
She came to with an agonized groan as something heavy was lifted off her. She ordered her mednano to perform a diagnostic assessment of her injuries as her armor unlocked. She instantly regretted it as she realized it had been holding her injured body immobile.
Definitely a few cracked ribs, she thought, and then, Terrance is going to kill me….
A mechanical frame came into focus, peering down at her as Charley asked, voice tinged with concern, “Captain, can you hear me?”
She nodded weakly. “Thank stars for armor,” she gasped, mentally adding ‘punctured lung’ to her tabulation of her wounds. “Muted the sound of the explosion.”
He nodded, then bent lower. “Can you reengage your flow armor so that I can lift you without harm?”
She laid her head back down and, a moment later, felt herself being lifted by the powerful AI and carried over to where Sable Wind sat amid a field of debris.
She sent the essence of a weary query his way.
* * * * *
The ride back to State House in the city of New Kells was somber, with the Sable Wind given clearance to land on the lawn outside the east entrance—although tensions were clearly elevated, and security on high alert.
Marta had assured Terrance that Khela would be fine with a brief stint in one of Avon Vale’s autodocs, so he had reluctantly disembarked with Logan, who had exchanged his maintenance bot frame for a humanoid one while en route.
After dropping them off, Charley quietly lifted off to round up the rest of the team and deliver them back to the ship.
Terrance and Logan were met at the entrance by a subdued Simone, who ushered them through security and into the president’s main briefing room. The security detail at the entrance had been doubled—and it didn’t consist of the same guards who had been present during their lunch, he noted.
Edouard Zola turned as they entered, and Terrance could see the strain bracketing his mouth as he nodded quietly before returning to the holo and the reports of devastation filtering in from across Godel.
“Your wife?” Edouard asked quietly, his eyes still trained on the holo.
“Marta says she’ll be fine,” Terrance assured him. “What’s the damage?”
“Extensive,” Celia admitted, stepping forward to greet the two. “Evidently, the DBCs were merely part of their plan. Either that, or they were a distraction, deliberately leaked to pull our attention away from the true threat.”
Edouard shook his head, glancing wearily over at Celia. “No, there’s no doubt that the spread of the spores would have dealt a heavier blow. They would have killed off all currently growing crops, possibly contaminating the soil and requiring remediation before we could begin to grow again.”
“So Barat’s goal was to inflict maximum damage,” Terrance murmured thoughtfully as he approached the seating area Edouard indicated and lowered himself into a chair. “Take out existing food stores with the explosions. Inhibit future food growth through the spread of the spores.”
Logan nodded as he joined them. “The spores were a precision-engineered form of an old nemesis to a farmer’s crops, teliomycetes caries,” he informed the humans. “Our doctor found traces of it within Captain Sakai’s lungs.”
Terrance experienced a shaft of alarm; it must have showed on his face, because the profiler sent him an inscrutable look.
“The spores have been removed,” the AI informed him. “She was not harmed.”
At that moment, Terrance didn’t know whether to thank Logan or to punch him. He settled for shooting him a dirty look before turning back to Zola and Mastai.
“I assume by now that Barat has to know that at least part of their plan was foiled,” he commented, one brow raised.
Edouard nodded, settling into an upholstered chair across from him. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter. The destruction of our current food supply accomplished what they set out to do all too well, I’m afraid. We have a major crisis at home to deal with right now. No one cares about Verdant mining anymore.”
“The vein of pure crystal silica you mentioned, in the asteroid at your inner belt.” Logan’s words were met with nods of confirmation.
“It’s not just the silica we’re concerned about,” Celia told them, crossing one leg over the other, hands automatically reaching out to smooth the hem of her dress. She plucked at it, toying at it with nervous fingers; her only sign of agitation in an otherwise placid face. “We have a few thousand Godel citizens on that mining platform. The WaNei asteroid is a Godel-held territory in the inner belt—its people expect protection from us. As well they should.”
Terrance looked from one to the other, then leant forward in his chair. “Why do I hear a ‘but’ coming?”
“Because there is,” the president admitted. “We received news a few hours ago that Barat has renewed their harassment of the shipping lanes. They also began to adjust the trajectories of several of their military ships. Their new headings have them pointed directly at several of our other mining interests.”
