Ships of Valor 1: Persona Non Grata

by Aaron Kennedy

  I was trying to work through what the missing data was, tracing Heart’s and my mission from its beginning when it finally clicked. She wasn’t pissed at us. Actually, she was, but she wasn’t only angry at us. Hayes was frustrated at herself because of her busted operation, and she didn’t know how to get it back on track. The fact we succeeded in ours added insult to injury. She needed help, but was either afraid to ask, didn’t want to, or had never learned how. Luckily, my partner is significantly smarter than I am and generally better with people.

  “We still need to test our theory, and fully assess the situation, Commander Hayes. If you are willing, we could assist you. You are significantly more versed in the current situation than we are, and we have slightly more resources than you do. Perhaps a mutually beneficial arrangement can be met?”

  I am so glad I wasn’t the one who made the suggestion. I was also glad she didn’t have anything in her hands at the time because I’m sure she would have thrown whatever it was at the view screen. It’s funny both Hayes and I treated that as Heart’s substitute body. Odd that it’s much easier to identify personal habits when seeing others doing the same thing.

  I thought she was irate before. Oh was I wrong. “Why do you think I need your bloody help? I had this under control until you and your meathead of a partner waltzed in, blew my cover, and damn near got me killed. Twice! In what universe do you think it would be a good idea for us to work together?” I mouthed the waltzed wondering if that was even possible with a ship, before taking slight offense to the other insult.

  “We do not think you need us. However, seeing as working separately has resulted in compromising both our missions, I thought you might want to take the lead on a joint venture. It would likely be safer working together than at cross purposes.” Heart had gone ultra-calm, bordering patronizing. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to give her a coronary or talk sense into her, but reason versus emotion is not a good mix.

  She needed to vent. She had gone through three years of undercover work, essentially hiding all aspects of her own personality to blend in with GSI. The façade had finally slipped and she was on a binge striking out emotionally at anyone close to her. All her rage wasn’t meant for us. It was meant for the situation she had been in until that point and had exploded on her. We had been one of many triggering issues and were an easy target to go after because of proximity.

  After a few minutes of back and forth, I finally stopped them. Probably more forceful than absolutely necessary, but my goal was to have her mad at me, not Heart. If she viewed him as the reasonable one, we could leverage that impression. When it boiled down to it, GSI was a mutual threat and we could pool our resources and hopefully accomplish both our missions or go our separate ways. Being resentful about botched missions that neither side had advance knowledge of wasn’t going to get us anywhere.

  Chapter 38

  Nothing builds a team like a little bit of breaking and entering. I was back in my element at least. I was very familiar with breaking things, entering not so much. Hayes seemed to have extensive training on that side, however. Where my pre-mission education had focused on surveillance, her actual specialty turned out to be intelligence. She was a spook and had a decade of hard-won skills under her belt. Unfortunately, Heart refused to give her the medical all clear to accompany me. She still had at least two weeks before she would be useful in the field despite her vitriolic arguments otherwise.

  Since leaving Luna, I had grown accustomed to having only Heart in my ear so listening to both him and Hayes there was a new experience. It took me back to my team leader days where there was always chatter on the lines. Sometimes business but most often people yakking. Not on the main lines, like company or battalion, but on the smaller ones, like team or squad where there were only a dozen participants, things were more intimate.

  The guys would talk about a recent vid, or a book, or how bad chow was. They’d gripe about higher headquarters, anything at all. There was a guy named Overton who used to complain about Legion issued socks incessantly. About how they didn’t fit right, or wick moisture, or were the wrong color. He could go on hour-long tirades about how he had to special order socks from his home world because Legion socks were so horrible. We were ready to start calling him Socks except there was actually a guy named Sox in the company.

  Complaining was a way to pass the time and to blow off steam. When the bitching stopped we had to worry. That was when things were at their worst. If folks were moaning, they had energy to spare. When the chatter stopped, the team was giving max effort and likely close to a breaking point. Chatter was one of the best ways to gauge the health of a team. Teams who yakked were close teams, whereas teammates that didn’t talk probably hated each other.

  The spat in the hotel room had released most of the pressure in our little group, leaving it at a dull rumble instead near explosion that had been building. “Is it even possible for you to move any slower?” Rather than being mean Hayes slipped into abrasive and condescending, strangely was an improvement. Although I had decent comp skills, I was an amateur compared to either of them. The task was something either of them could do without thinking about it but took me quite a bit of active thought, and having them watch through my dampers made me a bit self-conscious as well. Heart wasn’t too bad, but something about Hayes grated my nerves.

  I chalked it up to a personality conflict. I like to believe I’m fairly easy going and get along with most folks. Spent years learning how to talk to people because frankly the skill did not come naturally to me. More than likely, our personalities were too similar. We clashed, but there’s a huge difference between clashing and actually hating each other. I didn’t think she actually hated me, even after the shooting.

  “About damn time.” I let Hayes’ minor insult slide, keeping my mouth shut for the time being, and slid into the GSI warehouse. Unfortunately, the facility’s computer systems were outside the normal networks, so I had to work through everything manually. Skulking about near the docks in the evening wasn’t my idea of fun, but the choice was either that or try to sneak into the headquarters building. None of us thought was a good idea. Hayes had actually climbed the corporate ladder to local security chief so had a decent idea of where and what the vulnerabilities were. This site wasn’t the top but was close. Its advantage was the hardline trunk into the corporate database it possessed. Our theory was it would give us a chance to bypass some of the higher-level security if we were fast enough.

  Heart had preloaded some nasty ware onto a tablet for me and all I had to do was get to the right terminal. My problem was getting through the appropriate doors. That took my minimal skills as well as the peanut gallery on the other side of my dampers cheering and jeering me on.

  When Hayes had told me the place was a warehouse, I had envisioned the same style Heart and I had used back in Auckland. Large building with lots of space dedicated to storage and probably a small office off to the side. This was not that kind of warehouse. This was a fully automated monstrosity with four-fifths hidden below ground level. No wonder it didn’t have the same kind of security as the rest of GSI, there was no way to maneuver around the place.

  From my vantage above the main floor, I could see thousands of containers shifting. Industrial conveyors moving them at several meters per second to various sections of the wall where each would pause for a minute and the process would repeat. We had scouted the building from the outside so I knew the spots corresponded to delivery trucks coming and going on prearranged schedules. A massive clockwork enterprise and this was its distribution center. I only needed to get to the center.

  Chapter 39

  Living on ships, ladders became a normal part of life. Living in space, I tended to forget about normal gravity. Ladders and normal gravity combined are actually a tad scary. Kind of like playing with explosives. After dealing with them all the time, I developed a healthy respect for them. Demolitions are great fun, and could do some amazingly cool things with them. Howe
ver, every now and then, I would do something and they remind me that they are indeed dangerous as hell, and I am not actually invincible despite good luck so far.

  I’m not scared of heights but I do appreciate them. Comes from torquing my ankle one too many times between grav shifts. Climbing down the thirty-meter ladder in a GSI warehouse was a gentle reminder of my own mortality. Long ago, I heard one of the many the rule of threes. For a species hell-bent on metric, we loved making rules with threes in them. I think it had something to do with the way our brains are wired. This particular rule applied to heights. At three meters, spinal injuries are the major issue, at nine meters, death is a concern, at twenty-seven meters, stop worrying. In low-g, relativity kicks in and falls don’t happen as fast so the distances don’t come as quick. A thirty-meter fall on Luna is relatively only a five-meter drop, hurts but not necessarily lethal.

  When I finally got to floor level from the catwalk where I entered, I was able to see more of the operation. The place was even more impressive from below. Something about looking up versus down tripped both my animal brain and added a little perspective into how everything moved. I couldn’t see anywhere near as much, but what I could see was clearer. The containers, much like the one in Heart’s main hold, were positively flying along their tracks. There was some room to walk, but if I were to guess, the space was only safe while the conveyors and machinery were shut down. I did not want to try with everything up and running.

  Off to one side, there was indeed a small office, but lacking a lived-in look. The impression I got was more of an afterthought and excess storage than anything. There was a small terminal sitting at a workstation on one side, and a bank of computer servers on the opposite. I was scanning the room for an access port when Heart stopped me. “Ari, do not bother. We have what we need. Please make haste and exit the facility.” I hadn’t done anything yet.

  Before I had a chance to ask what in the hell was he talking about, Hayes was on the link with far more urgency in her voice. “Gadsden, you set off an alarm. Get out of there now! Doesn’t matter anyways. That microcomp Rustbucket gave you wouldn’t have done jack against those U93s.” The second Hayes said compromised my body was on its own program. A conditioned response from working with explosives triggered my flight reflex and I was bolting back out of the office straight to the ladder and up as fast as I could. Adrenaline is a hell of a drug, making people fast, strong, and feel damn near invulnerable. The benefits do not reduce the effects of gravity, unfortunately. I almost slipped about a third of the way up then slowed myself down before a stupid mistake like a broken neck became the worst of my issues. “You’re no good to me dead. Watch your step.” Ah, the joy of backseat drivers with full audio-visual capabilities.

  I had left the sloop parked up around the corner and outside the shipping lanes for the docks. Getting from the sloop to the warehouse had taken fifteen minutes. I sprinted back in a little under a third that. I could feel my chest pounding and my lungs burning by the time I reached her and managed to get the reactors running. I had her up and rotating when a new map appeared and Hayes directing me to a residential area. “Head south, I’ve got a place you can park at for the evening. Just try not to get stopped by HKPD driving that rocket-boat of yours.”

  Putting my anxiety in check, I kept the throttle choked to city speeds and ducked into the last of the evening traffic. We had timed our heist for right after dark when there were still lots of people active but while no one would be at the site. The idea was to give us great camera cover on the main roads making a single vehicle hard to spot. Unfortunately, that also meant I had to fight traffic on the way back. Our original plan had me traveling north against traffic giving me a clear shot back to the hotel. The new plan was going the opposite direction catching the tail end of evening congestion. It would either provide me safety or trap me like a rat.

  Driving in traffic is a hugely different experience than doing so in open space. The situation reminded me of Heart’s and my run through the Mars’ asteroid belt. People didn’t care. Or more specifically the commuters had set their vehicles AI to what I affectionately called don’t care mode. The sloop was old school and completely manual meaning I wasn’t tied into the transportation grid. That left me in the figurative company of cabbies and fleet drivers. As I hadn’t done a whole lot of driving since my arrival in Hong Kong I tried to watch and emulate them, and quickly realized they were insane, far more skilled than me, or both. I settled for dialing the sloop’s shields to full and praying as I followed the directions to Hayes’ safe house.

  I had come to rely on the deep-sleep ware and dealing with this new situation brought back an old phrase. Muscle memory will save your life; muscle memory will get you killed. After training to the point where physical actions become second nature, and not having to think about them, when they become seamless and it saves minutes when seconds count. Unfortunately, sometimes there is a need to think about those actions and reacting is a death sentence. I needed my mammalian brain keeping lizard brain in check. My reflexes have saved me on numerous occasions but they are a pale shadow compared to the number of times a half second of real thought has.

  The sloop wasn’t designed to go this slow. Much like backing it out of Heart’s fabrication bay, I gently feathered the engines to move her due to need. The lack of rear propulsors made maneuvering tricky, to say the least. I relied on her other directionals to compensate, but the rear engines were monsters in comparison making it feel like using brakes to steer. I kept the rear engines running constantly at the lowest thrust and adjusted everything else around them. Nowhere near optimal and probably wasn’t good for her but neither was driving screws into wood with a hammer. Sometimes it was about making do with the tools available.

  I was about a fifteen minutes into dealing with traffic when I started to get a telltale itch. Battle senses are a hell of a thing. I like to think of my brain as having two parts. The conscious half that doesn’t know jack and the unconscious half capable of processing stuff at light speed. Battle senses are a fancy way of talking about the unconscious half of the brain screaming bloody murder at the other half. Something was wrong in a big way. By learning to listen to those warnings, a person can backtrack and figure out what the indicators were causing all the fuss.

  I had been so distracted in the moment by driving I hadn’t realized there wasn’t any chatter on the line. Heart and Hayes weren’t talking. In itself that wasn’t odd except Heart would normally give me little updates. The second issue was traffic was starting to trim. I didn’t know Hong Kong well, but it should be a little while longer before that happened. It wasn’t all traffic, though. I was still seeing the commercial drivers zipping in and out of what remained of the ever-thinning residential drivers. They were taking advantage of the opening and buying themselves a few minutes of freedom. As soon as I realized there as a pattern, my ware kicked in and I knew someone was tweaking the grid.

  Chapter 40

  The beauty of steering with reverse thrusters is when I turned them off I accelerated like a bat out of hell. I was up and out of the main clog perhaps three seconds before I saw something approaching fast from behind. I’m sure I pissed off quite a few residents but better them pissed than me dead. I was orienting myself as I realized whatever was chasing me was definitely not cops.

  The first one exploded where I used to be. Bloody hell. Missiles. Where in the hell were all these missiles coming from? I reminded myself I was dealing with a homicidal AI with unlimited resources who apparently wanted to either rule the world or watch it burn. Missiles were not a far stretch. The major issue with missiles is they are designed to take out fast movers, like my little sloop. I was glad they were the antiaircraft flavor instead of the destroy city blocks flavor. That would have ended the chase much sooner, as my shields probably couldn’t handle anything more than a bird strike.

  Hell, GSI would have gotten us last time if not for Heart’s quick thinking. Being nowhere near as smart as he is
, I tend to rely on brute force where he leans towards cunning. The sloop fitted that mentality well. Out of the trap was my first goal with acceleration being my best tool. Although the sloop had good maneuverability, it relied on forward speed to make that work. The faster I was moving the better I could avoid.

  Instinct demanded I go higher and my reflexes almost got the better of me before I dived low letting my conscious brain take over. The higher I was; the more open space those things would have to catch up removing all my advantage. Missiles are built for speed, not tight quarters so the more urban the sprawl the safer I was. They would catch me given enough time, but it was harder for them to turn and they lacked shields. Not that mine would stand up to anything more than a light bounce anyways.

  Although considered stupid compared to most of the other stuff on the road, the sloop’s collision sensing software was top notch. Human reflexes are only so good, so the machine was doing the lion’s share of the work. Understanding how the sloop’s systems react is how a good portion of the driver’s skill comes. When I was a kid, I was huge gearhead when it came to the races. Enough of one I completely destroyed several go-karts trying to do what my favorite racers could. I learned early turns were where the money was. If I could master the turns I could win races.

  My goal was either to hug walls and force the prox sensors on the missiles to ignite early by catching reactor heat from where I had been moments before my turns, or by having them slam into walls immediately after turns because of the missiles longer radius.

  Designed for racing, the sloop had cameras on all sides, which Heart had linked into my dampers instead of having me rely on the normal heads up display. This cut down my reaction time significantly, as I was able to focus fully on the path ahead, giving only the barest flicks of my eyes. These edges paid off as I felt the concussion wave as one of the missiles slammed into the pavement several meters back.