Rogue Stars

by C Gockel et al.

  She smiled weakly. “I won’t deny it was a bit jarring for a second or two, seeing you like that. But….”

  Her hand drew down along his jaw to his chin, and she urged it up so he was unable to turn aside. “I knew what I was getting into. And I am not afraid of you.” At least, not in that way. “Now if this routine is something you concocted as cover for you wanting to leave—”

  “No.” He fell to his knees before her; his hands grasped her shoulders and his forehead dropped to rest against hers. “I don’t want to go.”

  Her breath lodged in her throat. The emotion bleeding out of his words crashed through her with more intensity than she could possibly absorb. Her chest burned hot as it nonetheless insisted on trying.

  Her throat eked out a trembling whisper. “Then stay.”

  He nodded silently against her. They didn’t move for untold seconds, struggling to pick up the pieces and put themselves back together, to regain some control over the inner tumult.

  Finally he pulled away a sliver. His eyes rose to meet hers as a hand rose to cup her cheek.

  “You are a most remarkable woman, Alex Solovy.”

  74 Romane

  Independent Colony

  “Are you ready to get to work, Meno?”

  I am looking forward to this endeavor, Mia. I expect to learn new things.

  “I’m not sure we’ll learn anything more worthwhile than the name of Miss Solovy’s first pet or her favorite author.”

  Yet that will nevertheless be something new.

  “Ha. Fair enough.”

  Mia stood at the top of the ramp in the hangar bay, the fingertips of her right hand pressed to the embedded panel of the Siyane’s external hatch. The contact pad of the remote interface rested snugly against the base of her neck. Her eyes were closed—but she was not blind.

  Instead she saw what Meno ‘saw’: a seemingly infinite three-dimensional grid of pulsing, spinning translucent orbs. The orbs grouped together in formations ranging from tiny to massive and complex. Threadlike filaments connected the groupings, and always there existed structure and order, sharp lines and hard right angles.

  The grid overflowed with color. The entire spectrum was represented in the spinning orbs, every and each color all at once. When viewed in the corner of her eye, an orb appeared a prismatic swirl. If she turned her focus to one, however, it transformed to pure white light.

  The orbs, of course, signified the qubits composing the Siyane’s security control system. Much as Schrödinger’s cat, until observed a qubit held all possible quantum superpositions of 0 and 1. When she observed one, the prism resolved to white; when Meno ‘observed’ one, he measured its true state.

  As such, her presence here was largely superfluous other than to guide Meno to the appropriate access points—and to make certain it didn’t rewrite the Siyane’s weapons, propulsion and life support systems to be more efficient while he was in there.

  Besides, she liked the view.

  “Begin recording.” She needed to image the security controls because when she finished it had to be put back as she found it, leaving no trace she had been there. She didn’t want to cause trouble for Caleb, even if she was a little worried about him. The odds of this new relationship of his working out well in the end were only slightly north of nil…but he never had been the cautious sort.

  Recording initiated.

  “Excellent. Overlay Alexis Solovy’s fingerprints.”

  Overlay successful. Security is requesting secondary encryption key. Analyzing.

  Meno had named ‘himself’ at her suggestion. At the time it was devouring ancient philosophical texts and had taken the name from the Plato Socratic dialogue on virtue, knowledge and belief. It continued to burn spare cycles contemplating the notion of inborn knowledge and whether, lacking a soul, it nonetheless possessed such knowledge.

  Secondary encryption key: Д085401Н129914С. Would you like to know my hypothesis on the meaning of this key?

  She smiled to herself. Artificials were tightly regulated, monitored, circumscribed, feared and often reviled, and with good reason. Perhaps excepting the last one, anyway. They possessed incredible processing ability—but computers ran many facets of society. Those CUs were also powerful, capable of zettaFLOP calculations and zeptosecond accuracy. Yet no one feared them, because they were dumb. They did not think; they simply calculated. Oh, a well-designed VI could create a convincing impression of thought and even personality, but it was still executing defined programming.

  Synthetic neural nets, on the other hand, were designed for that exact purpose: to think. To learn. To adapt. To improve.

  Their greatest feature was also their most dangerous one: curiosity. Mia delighted in Meno’s childlike inquisitiveness and thirst for knowledge. But though it wasn’t registered, she otherwise obeyed all the prescribed safety precautions. Because it was like a child—a hyper-savant child wielding unfathomable power and no perspective, no wisdom born of hard lessons and experience and no sense of boundaries which might keep it in check.

  So while she supplied Meno with endless zettabytes of information—history, art, literature, science, data on the very universe itself—she provided it no connections to the exanet or the local Romane infrastructure network. In fact, its hardware did not include any external networking capability, save for the single point-to-point node which allowed her to remotely interface with it. While interfacing, the only outside information it received came through her personal cybernetics. Hence the fingertips on the panel.

  “Maybe later. Are there any other authorized entrants?”

  Kennedy Rossi and Charles Blalock.

  “Is the secondary encryption key the same for them as well?”

  It is.

  “Terrific. Register Caleb Marano as an authorized entrant and input his fingerprints. I’ll let him know the key when he returns. Then mask the authorization.”

  Caleb hadn’t specified precisely why he needed access to Alex’s ship. Most likely there wasn’t any precise reason at all; he would merely be preparing for multiple possibilities. She did have a good idea why he didn’t simply ask for access. The possessiveness—and protectiveness—Alex exhibited regarding her ship had been blindingly obvious within thirty seconds of meeting her.

  Mr. Marano now enjoys authorized access, should he provide the ship his fingerprints and the key.

  “Thank you, Meno. Open the hatch, would you? We’re going to need to get him usage of the flight systems, too.”

  75 Pandora

  Independent Colony

  “What? Dude, I can’t hear you.”

  Noah leaned in closer to Dylan, to no avail. Between the strobing prism beams dancing across the sky and the synchronous musical and visual performance, he could hardly hear himself think, much less hear anyone else speak. Then again, the point of the circus wasn’t to think, but rather to experience. To feel. To get wasted.

  I said do you want another drink? I’m heading to the bar.

  A beer, man—but a good one.

  He leaned against the railing and drew in a deep breath, enjoying the warm night air and the smoothness of the sensory deluge.

  Yet his thoughts inevitably drifted. He had caught the news of the destruction of the Surno facility on Aquila. His father must be so pissed. It wasn’t his sole interest by far; Surno accounted for maybe ten percent of his holdings at most. But it would definitely sting.

  When he realized what he was doing he groaned and dropped his head back to stare at the art painting the night sky. Don’t even think about getting involved, Noah. Not your problem—not the business, not the war. Just keep the party going.

  He accepted the beer from Dylan with a wry smile and greedily turned it up.

  At that moment Ella lurched out of the crowd and fell into him. He held the bottle out to the side with one hand to avoid sloshing it all over him and grasped onto her with the other. “Hey baby, careful there.”

  She gazed up at him, eyes unfocused an
d blurry. “Noah, hi…. Whatcha doin?”

  He chuckled. “Not what you are, apparently.” He steadied her and tried to position her on the railing next to him, but she draped her arms clumsily around his shoulders. “You’re hot, you know that righ…?”

  Ella was pretty enough. But she was unstable when sober, which was an increasingly rare occurrence, and nuts when she was high. And if there was one rule he lived by on this mad planet, it was never stick your dick in crazy.

  He eased her off him. “Yeah, baby, I know that.”

  “You wanna—” She reached for him again, missed and tumbled to the floor.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, muttered a curse under his breath and crouched to pick her up. Sometimes having a conscience goddamn sucked. “Come on, Ella, I’m taking you home.”

  “Don’t wanna—”

  “Yes, you do.” He rolled his eyes at Dylan and began guiding her through the reveling crowd to the lift. It wasn’t terribly late; if he got her tucked into bed reasonably quickly, perhaps he’d return.

  The lift circled the building as it descended, and she swayed unsteadily against him. He willed patience. She didn’t…‘live’ was a strong word. She wasn’t staying far from the club.

  The lift settled to the street level and he maneuvered her in the proper direction. They walked slowly down the street, then veered onto a narrower thruway. The entrance to the residences where she stayed was located about a hundred meters farther on the left.

  “Oops!” Ella tripped and stumbled forward.

  Noah leaned over to try to save her from sprawling upon the ground—

  —the brilliant white stream of a laser pulse sliced centimeters above his head.

  “Ella, get down!”

  “Wha—?”

  He grabbed her arm and dragged her along the thruway, trying to stay low and near the wall. They came to a door, and he shoved her into the alcove. He slammed on the door but it appeared hard-locked. “Dammit! Okay, I need you to stay here, stay hidden. I’m going to—”

  “But I wan—” She pulled away from him and staggered into the thruway.

  “Ella, get back here!” He reached for her at the same instant the laser sliced through her neck and she crumbled lifelessly to the ground.

  “Motherfu—” The shot had come from close range. He yanked the small kinetic blade he carried from the narrow pocket in his pants and lunged toward the shadow he saw moving against darker shadows.

  He plowed into a body and they both crashed to the ground, each grappling for an advantage. He swung blindly in the dark and connected with bone, at least if the loud crack was any indication. Before he could do further damage a knee came up and rammed him in the nuts, sending a wave of nausea up his chest into his throat. He fought it back and stabbed wildly while struggling to hold the flailing gun away from his body.

  Abruptly his knife met pliant, sluggish resistance. When the man’s grip on him fell away, he decided the knife had found the man’s gut. He wrenched the gun out of the attacker’s hand, climbed to his feet and pointed it at the attacker’s head.

  “Who do you work for?”

  The man writhed on the ground, clutching at his stomach in the darkness. “Fuck you. They’ll send more. You won’t last the day.”

  “I’ll take that bet.” He pulled the trigger.

  It took twenty seconds of banging on the door for Brian to open it. Music wafted from the living room, punctuated by high-pitched laughter.

  “You need somethi—?”

  Noah grabbed his shirt by the collar. “Why is somebody trying to kill me?”

  “What? Hey, let go! I don’t know!”

  “Is it because of the explosives job? They were for the Vancouver bombing that just happened, weren’t they?”

  “I told you, I don’t know! Give me a break, man….”

  He tightened his grip instead. “Why did you offer the job to me? Did Nguyen tell you to?”

  “No, man. Calm down, okay?”

  “I am not going to calm down. I got shot at and an innocent girl is dead!”

  Brian’s eyes widened into saucers. “Shit. Look, the request came from higher. They didn’t tell me how much higher.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  His grip clenched to the point it began choking off Brian’s air.

  “Okay, okay….” Noah loosened his hold a miniscule amount, and Brian gasped in a breath. “I did overhear one thing—I got no idea what it means though.”

  “What.”

  “Something about you needing to do the job cause you’d worked with some guy named Marano.”

  “Caleb? What the hell does Caleb have to do with this?”

  “I got no idea! That’s all I heard, I swear. I didn’t know they would try to take you out, man, I swear.”

  “Fuck.” He let go of the shirt and shoved Brian into the apartment. “Don’t come looking for me, you understand?”

  He spun and stormed down the hallway, pausing once to punch the wall in frustration. He had no choice. He was going to have to bail, and bail now.

  Noah scanned the travel schedule from the relative safety of a group of tourists. It was the middle of the night, but there were always tourists at the spaceport. He wore a cap he’d bought on the way pulled low over his face.

  He’d sent Caleb a brief message a few minutes earlier. Watch your back. Something screwy is up. He’d expand on it later, if he was still alive.

  He couldn’t go where they would expect him to. Aquila was out, as was New Babel and Atlantis. Hell, if it was Zelones after him all the independent worlds were out. Even Romane, tempting though it was.

  No, he needed to go somewhere random. Somewhere which also offered him some cover and the opportunity to make a few credits until things settled down.

  He scanned the list again.

  Messium. Boring as shit and home to more military than he’d like, but it boasted a healthy population to hide in and a robust tech industry to service. And he was technically an Alliance citizen.

  With a sigh he slid away from the crowd and headed for the boarding platform. So much for the party….

  76 Space, North-Central Quadrant

  Senecan Federation Space

  Alex watched him sleep.

  She lay against him, her injured side facing up and unhindered. His arms were wrapped gently around her in slumber. Despite his best efforts otherwise he had dozed off, albeit only after going to prodigious lengths to ensure she was comfortable in the bed and not in pain and had everything she needed. It had been overprotective and unnecessary and rather adorable.

  She had insisted on getting downstairs under her own power, much to his frustration. ‘Bullheaded stubborn,’ he had called her; she hadn’t disputed the point. Her wounds still ached, but she felt as if she had her bearings again. By morning she should be functional. Not one hundred percent by a long shot…but functional.

  He must be beyond exhausted. She knew enough about military-grade cybernetics enhancements to recognize both what they empowered the body to do and the toll they inflicted in the aftermath. Human physiology was being pushed to its very limits. Thus far it was keeping up, but barely.

  She probably should be asleep as well…even if three hours of unconsciousness really should count.

  Instead she watched him sleep. She allowed her gaze to trace the line of his jaw, the curves of his exquisite and talented lips and the angular path of his nose.

  Her brow furrowed up a little. Something about the set of his mouth, the relaxed muscles in his cheeks and neck, the way…

  …then she realized. This was how he looked when it was the two of them—when they were talking or working or not doing much of anything and the mood was easy and comfortable. He appeared more serene and peaceful in slumber of course, but it was unquestionably the same aspect.

  He truly wasn’t manipulating her.

  Endorphins flooded through her body; it was all she could do not to laugh out loud.
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br />   Though she had allowed him into her bed, had shared secrets with him, risked arrest and even her ship for him…a part of her had still assumed he was deceiving her. Whether for some purpose or because it was his nature and he didn’t know any other way to be, when he had no further need of her a switch would flip in his eyes and he would be gone.

  His words and especially his actions told her over and over again he was genuine, yet she couldn’t bring herself to foreclose the possibility the persona he showed to her only represented another face of the chameleon—a chameleon he readily admitted existed.

  A mere hour ago she had thought her fears confirmed, thought the day a part of her had assumed would come had done so earlier than expected. Then, when he had fallen to his knees before her, raw and exposed, every sense she possessed had screamed at her to give in and believe the truth of him.

  But now…why now? Was it simply that now she was ready to trust and searching for a reason to do so?

  In the end it didn’t matter, for it was already done.

  She leaned in and kissed him lightly then settled on the pillow to watch him wake. She shouldn’t have done it; he needed the rest…but she needed him.

  He stirred and shifted. After a few seconds he blinked a couple of times to reveal blurry, unfocused irises; warmth flooded them even before they grew clearer. “Hi….”

  Her perception hadn’t deceived her: the set of his mouth, the line of his jaw, the impression his visage conveyed remained unaltered, enhanced solely by the addition of dazzling irises. She matched his smile. “Hi.”

  “I fell asleep?”

  “Just for a little while.”

  He reached up to stroke her cheek. “You should sleep.”

  “I did, remember? Most of the evening I believe.”

  “I’m not certain that counts.”

  “Well….” Her smile broadened. “I’ll sleep in a bit.”