by M. D. Cooper
“You know, it’s good to see you, Fugia,” Ngoba said in the lull. “I’ve thought about you.”
“So you said.”
“You don’t think about me?”
She signaled the server for more wine. “Of course I do. But I don’t let it get me sad. We came from the same place. We grew up together. Of course you imagine a future that isn’t going to become real.”
“The future is what we make it,” he said, probably a little more forcefully than he meant.
“I’m not sure that’s true. You know why I’m going to this dark site or you wouldn’t have agreed to come. Have you looked up who it belongs to yet?”
Ngoba tilted his head to the side, considering her. He still looked too relaxed. When they came in, she had almost thought he was going to tell Karcher to wait outside. But he didn’t.
He sniffed, setting his whiskey on the table.
“Tell me this,” he said. “Where do you want to be in five years?”
Fugia snorted a laugh. “What is this, a job interview?”
“Maybe. What’s your plan, Fugia Wong?”
She straightened, growing serious. “To free enslaved AIs.”
“That sounds like a righteous plan.”
“It’s not righteous. It’s the right thing to do.” The server brought Fugia a second glass of wine, and she swirled it before taking another sip.
“Which is the definition of righteous,” Ngoba pointed out when the server was gone.
“You like to think you’re smart,” Fugia said.
“You still haven’t answered my question.”
She rolled her eyes. “And you haven’t answered mine.”
Ngoba leaned forward and said in a low voice, “The ship is owned by a subsidiary of Heartbridge Medical. I had to go through three shell companies to figure out who they were working for. They’ve been in position for less than a year, and moved from two different locations way off the beaten path before that. I’ve got delivery manifests and crew changeout schedules, but nothing indicating the work they’re doing. Whatever it is, they eat a lot of food. And they drink a lot of juice.”
“What kind of juice?” Fugia asked, intrigued.
“Apple juice. The real stuff. They ship it frozen from farms on Mars 1.”
“Well,” Fugia said. “That’s interesting, but I already know what they’re doing there. It’s an SAI development lab. According to my sources, they have at least twenty SAIs held prisoner.”
“Can an AI be a prisoner?” Ngoba asked. “They’re things. Property.”
Fugia’s eyes narrowed and her mouth drew into a thin line. “That’s not something I ever thought I’d hear you say.”
“It’s the truth, isn’t it?”
“From what I dug up, you had one embedded for a year, didn’t you?”
That seemed to hurt him. He glanced away, reaching for the whiskey tumbler. “She wasn’t sentient,” he said, with what sounded like bitterness.
“How do you know?”
“It becomes apparent after a while. When you’re trapped inside the same head with another being, you figure out pretty quickly if they’re repeating the same thing over and over again in different ways. It was mad. You start to distrust your own mind, it’s damn insidious. I’d call it torture. Not to mention that if standard Marsian military Links embedded sentient AIs, we’d all know about it.”
“I didn’t realize,” Fugia said after a moment. “I’m sorry.”
He gulped the last of his drink. “So we’re even, then. I shouldn’t have said that about property. You’re right. I’m still…scarred, I think, by Caprise.”
Fugia was surprised to see him shiver at the memory. She gave him a feral smile. “I didn’t think we’d end up talking about exes.”
He pointed at her. “She was not my ex.”
“She got inside your head, though.”
“That’s not fair.”
Fugia collapsed in laughter. The music had started again, hiding her mirth from the nearby tables. She slapped Ngoba’s hand and he caught her wrist, then slid his hand down her palm until their fingers were intertwined.
She didn’t remember how she started kissing him, but she seemed immediately to be wrapped around him, grabbing at his collar and pulling him into her body.
“Damn, Fugia,” he said breathlessly. “We haven’t eaten yet.”
“I’m not hungry,” she said.
“But the music and the ambiance. Are you sure you want to waste it?”
“Yes,” she said, biting his lower lip.
“And they’ve got a lovely game room. Actual pinball machines.”
“You’re messing with me and it won’t work. Call your car.”
“What should I call it?”
Fugia growled as she straddled him in his seat. She was vaguely aware of someone closing the heavy curtain between their alcove and the outside corridor.
That Karcher is a good man.
GO DOG GO
STELLAR DATE: 04.15.2979 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: HMS Hopscotch Devil
REGION: Hellas Asteroids, Jovian Combine, InnerSol
The HMS Hopscotch Devil, by its registry information and mass profile, was an ironically named slow freighter that was more a collection of shipping containers bolted to an ancient deuterium drive than something that could be called a ship.
The command deck and crew quarters were contained in a drum centered behind the ship’s nose-sensor array, which barely maintained consistent gravity, keeping Fugia’s stomach constantly in the lurch. She had been pushing the max dosages on her anti-nausea medication since they’d left Cruithne, and was starting to worry that her hair was going to fall out.
The ship’s antennae were poorly shielded, which wreaked havoc with her sensitive equipment, so she was forced to spend most of her time in her sleep sack with her arms free, tinkering at her fold-down desk. From spare parts she’d found in a storage locker, she’d managed to build two electro-magnetic pulse generators and a sticky grenade that would fill a room with hull-repair epoxy in three seconds.
Or so she assumed.
Considering the tight quarters, she hadn’t found much time alone with Ngoba. She figured that was probably for the best. While their interlude at the dinner club had ended a long dry spell that now had her thinking about sex more than she cared to admit, she didn’t want to get distracted with all the potential emotions that would accompany continued sexy times.
Something most people failed to understand—probably because she didn’t tell them—was that she had grown up in a home where physical touch was discouraged except when her father would express himself with the back of his hand. Fugia had learned at a young age not to expect affection or to hang her self-esteem on getting it. She was best when people engaged with her mind rather than her body, which few people except hormone-addled, nineteen-year-old Ngoba Starl had seemed to find attractive.
During the trip from Cruithne, she and Ngoba had done a good job of remaining professional, in her opinion, and she was able to keep her unprofessional tear-his-clothes-off thoughts at bay. It helped that Karcher or some other member of the small crew was within arm’s length most of the time.
The closest she had come to expressing affection after her drunken tumble with Ngoba was when she let Crash nibble her ear when they said goodbye.
The little grey parrot had switched to his natural voice, squawking, “I love you, Foo-ja! I love you!”
Having a parrot shout so close to her ear had been like getting stabbed in the eardrum, but it also nearly brought tears to her eyes. Crash had snuggled her shoulder, digging his claws into her shipsuit, before launching into the air of Night Park to shoot back to his perch at the fountain. Even on the other side of the great domed space, she heard the ravens cawing in an odd chorus as their leader returned.
Fugia was tinkering with a project when a proximity alert went off at the pilot’s console. Ngoba was first to the pilot’s seat, and everyone else hud
dled around him as he verified their location and then brought up their first close-range scan of their destination, a ship with a registry return of the HMS Harmon’s Place.
A model of the ship rotated in the small holodisplay at the top of the pilot’s console, a collection of habitat rings rotating on a central axis, with a bank of engines at the aft end. A standard design—but with additional thrust capacity, without the usual cargo space of a freighter—Harmon’s Place was a long-range people hauler, designed for long stints in the black.
“Was that the name before?” Karcher asked. “I don’t like it. It sounds like a ship for a cult,” he noted, expressing a rare opinion.
Ngoba looked over his shoulder at his bodyguard. “The registry’s changed,” he confirmed. “It was something equally strange before. They’ve been editing their location returns at least as long as I’ve been tracking them.”
“So they’re worried about being found,” Fugia said. “That’s interesting.”
“It’s nothing to worry about,” Ngoba said, switching quickly through menus on the console. “It’s all under control. We’re the supply shipment they’ve been waiting on…We’ll just slide up and dock in no time.”
“We’re docking?” Karcher asked. “You think that’s a good idea, boss?”
“We’ll be wearing our EV suits. Worst comes to worst, we’ll just borrow their ship for the return ride home.”
Karcher pressed his lips together but didn’t say anything. Fugia could imagine any number of safer ways to approach the situation, but she appreciated Ngoba’s straightforward plan. It would be the quickest way to get access to the other ship, and would also get them inside whatever long and medium-range defenses the Harmon’s Place might employ.
Ngoba looked from Fugia to Karcher and then the other three members of the crew, all spacer mercenaries. “We ready to start this party?” he asked.
Receiving only groans at his joke, he stood and let Fugia take the console.
She was still wearing her visor as a headband, but she didn’t need it for this. She sent the Harmon’s Place a location update and then forwarded their manifest data and flight plan. While it was friendlier for human crews to interact during docking procedures, it wasn’t a requirement. Spacers and military usually wanted to chew up communication lines with idle chatter, since there wasn’t much opportunity for live conversation in such isolated locations. For an operation like the Harmon’s Place, she supposed the less talk the better. They might have been receiving shipments by drone for all she knew.
The request received an automatic acknowledgement, followed by docking instructions and their location update.
Not bothering to get up, Fugia switched to the astrogation control and entered the new information. The ship automatically adjusted its braking burn and readied positional thrusters.
“You didn’t tell me you could pilot,” Ngoba observed.
“This isn’t piloting. It’s telling the NSAI what to do.”
She glanced at the ship’s actual pilot, but he didn’t seem to care. She stood up anyway and gestured for him to sit. “Look good?” she asked him.
It was good. The Hopscotch Devil had already completed major braking, so from here, there were only small thrust adjustments to match Harmon’s Place.
“How’s the weaponry looking?” Ngoba asked the captain, a flat-faced woman with short black hair named Lana.
“In standby and ready,” the captain said. “You know we could just blow that ship full of holes. That would be a whole lot easier than trying to board it. Every time you board a ship, things go sideways.”
“I do love it when shit goes sideways,” Ngoba mused. He walked over to the cabinet beside his sleeping alcove and pulled it open to reveal a collection of weapons. “Mister Karcher,” he said, handing his bodyguard a chest plate.
The team pulled on light armor and then checked rifles and pulse pistols. While they were busy, Fugia loaded a satchel with her various grenades and sticky bombs. She also carried several general-use hacking devices ranging from brute force crypto-keys to network jumpers, and her ‘skeleton key’, a handheld cutting torch good for about five minutes’ burn.
“Everybody hold on,” Lana said. “I’m slowing our rotation to match theirs. We’ll be out of gravity in a minute.”
Fugia activated her magboots and felt the familiar kink in her stomach as the gravity shifted. In another minute, they were weightless. A screwdriver she’d forgotten to stow floated past her face, and she stuffed it in a cargo pocket.
A vibration passed through the bulkhead, and Lana tapped her console. “There it is,” she said. “We’re docked. We’ll get the freight ready. Are you all ready to go?”
Ngoba slapped his rifle. “Ready as we’ll get.”
The captain nodded. “Don’t forget the deal. We’ll wait as long as we can, but I’m not sacrificing my ship.”
Ngoba gave her a feral grin. “Don’t forget you’re safer in close than trying to get away. But don’t worry. We’ll disable whatever weapons that thing has.”
“Looks like point defense cannons at least,” one of the other crewmembers said. “Maybe an energy beam, but that might be a long-range antenna.”
“Could be both,” Fugia said.
She was surprised by how excited she felt. She had been waiting for months to reach this point, and now she was about to learn the mystery behind the message. Whatever was waiting on Harmon’s Place would unlock the first gate toward freedom for Sylvia and others like her. The first step in freedom for SAIs.
Ngoba led the way down to the cargo hold and the airlock. He pulled himself along the bulkhead with both arms, sailing easily in the zero-g. Karcher came second, and then Fugia followed, taking deep breaths as she prepared for whatever would come next.
SIT DOG SIT
STELLAR DATE: 04.15.2979 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: HMS Harmon’s Place
REGION: Hellas Asteroids, Jovian Combine, InnerSol
The interior airlock door sealed, and they waited in limbo between hull sections as the exterior door completed its handshake with the other ship. Their security tokens should have already cleared, but it was still possible to fail the final check, or find themselves trapped by a local override.
Fugia controlled her breathing, checking the seals on her light EV suit and helmet as she waited. The gravity shift had left her stomach feeling sick, but they were matched with the other ship now.
A green light blinked on the exterior door, and its seal released. With a long hiss, the door split in the middle and opened.
They were facing another cargo bay, similar to the one they had just left on the Hopscotch Devil—only emptier. Fugia took in the trapezoidal space with a few cargo crates maglocked in stacks. A transport mule sat to the right side of the empty room, but it was otherwise unoccupied.
“So much for hello,” Ngoba said. He stepped through the open door, sliding his rifle off his shoulder to hold it across his body.
“Wait,” Fugia said, catching his arm. “Shouldn’t someone be here to meet us?”
“Not necessarily,” Karcher said from behind her. “We’re just cargo monkeys to them. The crew could be knocked out for all we know.”
“What he says is true,” Ngoba affirmed. “But caution is less likely to get us killed.”
Fugia released his arm. She didn’t know what she had expected to find, but an empty cargo bay hadn’t been on the list.
“Bio check is clean,” Ngoba reported, reaching up to unseal his helmet. He clipped it to his utility harness, opposite his pulse pistol, and adjusted the rifle slung over his shoulder.
Following Ngoba into the cargo bay, Fugia unfastened her own helmet and clipped it next to the pulse pistol on her right hip. She carried the weapon as a last resort; if she did her job right, no one would get close enough to fire.
“Let me find a terminal,” she said. “I’ll get the crew’s status.”
“Over there,” Karcher said, pointing at a
nearby section of the wall.
Adjusting her visor over her eyes, Fugia watched the familiar steps of her tracking systems creating a matrix, then filling in the myriad communications and operating systems in use around her. The ship was running an older firmware, and before she reached the terminal, everything from the door controls, lighting, and HVAC were under her control. A user agent in the visor assembled a schematic of the ship and started populating it with network nodes and security checkpoints. She smiled to herself as she walked. The ship was wide open.
The terminal was unlocked when she reached it, and from there she quickly accessed the ship’s maintenance controls and ran through the crew logs. Without alerting the command system, she was able to get a crew listing and major system status.
“It’s a light freighter with no freight,” she said. “All the other cargo sections have been converted to lab spaces; the crew keeps complaining about the ‘egghead’ researchers, who in turn keep complaining about the crew. Looks like the crew are standard for-hire workers. The captain is former TSF.”
“Any security?” Ngoba asked.
She shook her head. “A few interior surveillance systems that I’ve got under control. There’s a weapons cabinet off the command deck, and a smaller store down in the engine control section. Probably personal weapons in the crew quarters. I think they’ve been flying dark so long they don’t think they need security.”
“So, boss,” Karcher said. “How big is an SAI, exactly?”
“I have no idea.” Ngoba looked at Fugia. “What do you think?”
“Varies,” she said. “But that’s a good point. They could be in crates, or probably integrated with a network. We won’t know until we see. We’re going to need something to carry them, though.… That transport sled should work.”
“You can’t check through your terminal, there?” Ngoba asked.
“That could alert their lab. It’s entirely possible the AIs might send an alert if they see me on their network. We have to assume they’re enslaved.”
