Ships of Valor 1: Persona Non Grata

by Aaron Kennedy

  I traced the connections and discovered enough Candulem to rattle the world. The explosives were shaped inward for max cutting power designed to destroy the house as opposed to exploding outward. The trap would kill anyone stupid enough to run down the hall but not take out the entire neighborhood when it did. Whoever had set up did a decent job, but I could tell it was industrial, not military. There’s a tone to the work and having done similar work for most of my career the techniques stood out like a fingerprint.

  I methodically went through the house, disabling the traps, eventually realizing the disarray was all a façade designed to throw off an invader. If an assault team had tried to move quickly they would not have liked the outcome. I optimistically assumed Hayes had not warned me about her little welcome presents because our comms had been unceremoniously jammed. I was fairly certain the previous few days weren’t just a ploy to get me into her version of an incinerator.

  As I delved deeper into her little murder house I found an arsenal rivaling the Europe. There was everything from weaponry to armor to explosives neatly organized in the house’s central area right past the initial clutter. The shift in appearance was striking to the point of puzzling. I don’t have a huge urge to keep things organized but years of being in a moderately regimented community does impart certain habits. The front areas were so far to one end of the spectrum that when I entered the other rooms the contrast was just as extreme.

  I ended up staring at the harmony of the place like some sort of military based feng shui for a good minute before I spotted the full-scale comm array. It was as impressive as everything else in the room, and rivaled the set-up Heart and I had built back in Auckland. Although he had paid for the equipment himself, I had sneaked a few looks at the invoices when I collected the items and knew how much some of these items could cost. If this was a fraction of that, she had invested heavily to the point where I was scared to touch anything. Combined with Hayes’ penchant from Wayne Dixon level paranoia, I gave everything a thorough examination before plugging in her comm number and muttering a prayer hoping she would pick up and nothing would bite me.

  The connection was almost instant followed by enough swearing I failed to register what she said. She could put me to shame. I was impressed. I had lost my touch from too many years hanging around brass. I gave her a minute to vent then asked her to repeat in Standard. “Have you seen the fracking feeds, you space case?” In the middle of responding about being too busy running for my life, she interrupted. “Rustbucket had a damn meltdown. Obviously thinks you’re dead and is going after GSI.” I asked her how she knew this. “Because I watch the bloody fracking news feeds!”

  While I had her on the line, I asked about any potential snares on the comm array. That stopped her dead and dramatically changed her tone. I think she remembered the trip wire at the door. I then started pulling up the news from the night before. Unlike our lifeboat incident, the news of sloop chase wasn’t suppressed. There was some very impressive footage of the chase in downtown Hong Kong. Luckily there didn’t appear to be a clean shot of me. There was also some very impressive photography of the harbor, and what looked like a third of the city’s fire department.

  I hadn’t used that much explosive on the sloop but had neglected to account for how the Telirem would interact with the reactors. A stupid mistake that could have gotten me or someone else killed had I used more of a charge. Sinking the boat had set off every hazmat sensor in three-hundred clicks. Gut reaction was to call the blunder a learning moment for next time but how many times do you intentionally blow up a friend’s vintage racing car in a faraway place?

  Unfortunately, Heart had linked the two events together and assumed I was in the sloop when it went down. Considering I had not checked in with him in several hours after unceremoniously being removed from near constant communication his assumption seemed like a fair assessment. Based on the next set of news reports he was livid. Although our combined mission from the General was investigating the Terra situation, his primary mission from Lysha was taking care of me. Not only had Heart failed the mission he thought was more important, he had violated what he considered a sacred trust to Lysha, his oldest friend. If our previous conversations about loss were any indication, Hayes’ description of a meltdown was not far off.

  On top of that, because the sloop’s relay capabilities were gone, Heart was also cut off from Hayes. That meant she was not able to talk him down either. She became a secondhand witness much like the rest of the world as Heart began a concerted effort to expose GSI via every avenue he had available. He had taken a salt the earth approach bordering on sadistic. As near, as I could tell on a first glance his goal was to turn public perception against the company. I would not have thought it was possible to have a scandal develop globally in less than a day from so many sources but he had the advantage of near instantaneous communication combined with significant amounts of malicious data. I was not only glad his anger was not directed at me but also a little impressed at how much he valued our friendship.

  In an attempt to process everything I had just read, I let my mind disconnect for a second and asked Hayes about Em. “That’s what you fracking care about? The bloody cat? She’s fine. Won’t leave me alone and I don’t even like cats.” She huffed. I told her because cats consider not making eye contact polite. So by ignoring her, Hayes was telling her Em considered them friends. “I don’t care about the damn pregnant cat!” She exhaled slowly as she realized I was messing with her.

  It was my turn to be frazzled. I asked her what she meant by pregnant. “Please tell me you’re still screwing with me?” She gave me an exasperated look and then just started laughing. “How the bloody frack did you manage to get the drop on me? You’re blind as hell. Your cat is pregnant. Very pregnant.” She disappeared from the comm screen for a few minutes, reappeared with a chittering Em under her arm, and then proceeded to show me her undercarriage in all its expectant glory. “How do you miss something like this?”

  Showing far more tenderness than she showed either Heart or me, she set Em down and asked, “What are we going to do about Rustbucket?” Good question. Unlike the Galactic Union situation, I knew the triggering event to this one. In theory, I also knew the solution, get ahold of Heart and let him know I was alive. Far simpler said than done. He was in the bottom of the ocean attacking GSI where they hurt, their public image. It’s great to believe the pocketbook is where a corp is really going to feel the pain, but after reaching a certain level there’s a concept called spite money. A company can do things to spite the competition. That’s a great level to be at. The next level above that is where they can do things to spite themselves, where a company can actually injure themselves in pursuit of harming their rivals. Companies like LC and GSI had reached that stage.

  That only worked if an organization was willing to take a hard stand, though. As we used to say in the Legion, live with the hard right. If GSI had to live with public perception, as many organizations do there’s a point where they would have to back down. Heart had learned how to become a person watching one of the most devious executives in human history. Not Terra history, human history. Wayne Dixon owned the moon, something no man could legally do. GSI didn’t have a prayer when it came to fighting off a pissed off mother hen who didn’t care anymore.

  The only way to stop the fight was to make Heart care. The only way for that to happen was to show him I was still alive. Hopefully, before the villagers became the monsters they were chasing with the torches and the pitchforks.

  Chapter 44

  Sometimes a situation spirals so far out of control you have to make a call. No one wants to pick up the phone and make that call to the company office. But want and need are very different things. Bad news, unlike fine wine or cheese, does not get better with age. It ferments like spoiled milk. I asked Hayes how good her comm array was and got the same blank look I had given her on our first real conversation. I took it to mean very good and told her my intent. M
uch swearing later without any better ideas she begrudgingly agreed with my assessment.

  Like the beacons on Legion guns, the General had made sure I had the ability to call for help if things spun too far out of control. Heart was my first line of defense. My second was a few comm numbers I had committed to memory. Those numbers would immediately patch me through to Luna from anywhere in Sol. I had already made up my mind to call, but actually doing so was harder than pressing the detonator on the sloop. I took it as an admission of failure. It was saying a few simple tasks were beyond my ability to handle. After staring at the screen for few minutes, I finally pressed enter and waited for the connection to happen.

  I was expecting Robert or the General, but the face who appeared belonged to Lysha. The first thought that crossing my mind was, why had I ever left Luna. It took a couple of seconds for the video feed to sync and her to see me. “Ari, you, son of a bitch, you had us scared to death!” I told her I loved her too and watched a good portion of the anxiety bleed out of her face. “Don’t sweet talk me, fuel for brains. We’ve been worried sick, where have you been?” I started from the beginning and told her our logic for keeping her in the dark. She was angry with us, but being an experienced leader, she understood why we did it.

  “Adam’s been in meetings for the last day thinking he had World War 5 on his hands.” She exhaled and then rubbed her eyes with both hands. “Do you know what he’s going to say when he realizes we caused this?” I know it’s petty, but I was so glad she used we instead of you, as in me, when she said that. I had screwed up big time and told her so. “Hon, we sent you down there blind. We had no idea what to expect. Do not blame yourself for this.” She put a very heavy emphasis on not.

  “I’m going to get Robert to go rescue him from whatever meeting he is currently in, and we’re going to figure this out. Do not hang up.” Again she placed a very heavy emphasis on the word not. I obeyed as she disappeared for all of thirty seconds off screen. I could hear her giving directions in a crisp manner. Schmiddy’s comments regarding her being like Bris rang true. She was every bit the combat commander as anyone I had ever worked with or for. Listening to her calmed me, in ways that made me realize I had been tense before without knowing.

  As soon I was aware, I unleashed the floodgates and she listened patiently asking questions where appropriate, giving insight where needed but in general letting me get the last few months off my chest. I hadn’t realized how much I needed it. Not that Heart and I didn’t talk but I had been in work mode for so long my proverbial bucket of stress was full. You can only put so much water in a bucket before it overflows. The same had happened with my laughing episode when we had moved the sloop. Talking to Lysha had stemmed the tide before it had reached that level, this time. I thanked her for letting me vent.

  “It’s what family’s for. When you get back, and this is done, you’re going to return the favor, though.” My battle senses screamed at that, filling my stress bucket back to half. Better at half than full. That did trip a question regarding Heart, however. I asked if he could be stressed in the same way humans could, thinking about how he explained the first involuntary laugh.

  The lag between Terra and Luna is about a second and a half each way, so the delay made the pause seem much longer than it was. When she finally answered, there was something in her eyes, telling me the answer better than her words. “He gets frustrated. Heart doesn’t understand everything we do, and it causes him difficulty. Talking it through helps. Losing you would have been wrenching.” She bit her lip and I saw she was trying to be diplomatic about how to describe his current actions. Finally, I saw a look bordering on defeat and acceptance. “We need to find him.”

  Chapter 45

  While the war council was assembling, I got myself caught up on Heart’s one-person assault on GSI. He had started by exposing the long-standing fraud of the Zhang family. Like many of his previous solutions, he went for simplicity turned into elegance. Even though Zhang is one of the most common surnames, the company was unable to produce an actual person bearing the name to represent the company. This acted as the first string in an endlessly unraveling tapestry of deceit dating back decades.

  Rather than acting as the sole or even primary source of information, Heart appeared to be using rumor mills, and message boards to instigate the public along a breadcrumb path to where they could find the information. It was obvious to me his time building ships on Luna had taught him some finer points of negotiating the net anonymously. He understood the linkages between each community and how information flowed and evolved as it moved between boards and sites. He would either spread or create data, like the “World Famous Pork Lo Mein,” which would then make its way to the far corners of the net sometimes in whole and sometimes as a completely new product. Each successive piece acted as another nail in the coffin and until loose links showed the possibility Galactic Union withdrawal might have been orchestrated to GSI’s benefit. I was both sorry I had taught him the trick and impressed at how well he used it.

  No proof was provided but the hint was enough to cause enough public outrage that it didn’t matter. Smaller locations were abandoned, and larger locations found themselves under protest. Within the largest nations and at the Terran Alliance headquarters investigations were called to discover exactly how the situation had developed.

  Much as the General had looked for the triggering event leading up to Terra leaving the GU, the countries were trying to find out what had caused their current mess. Based on the news feed the consensus was a greedy corporation playing nations against each other. Exacerbated by the fact the specific corporation in question did not have a moral or ethical compass of a human at the reigns.

  The more I listened and read of the news feeds, the more I got angry. I disagreed with the media’s assessment around a lack of an ethical compass. Heart was extremely ethical. He had a defined sense of right and wrong, coming not only from people like Wayne Dixon and Lysha, but I like to believe myself. His current actions were very reminiscent of something I would do. If I understood his mindset correctly, he viewed GSI as a monster, and sometimes it’s necessary to put monsters down. His actions took a good man. Not a nice man, but a man like Wayne Dixon who was harder than Luna rock, who was willing to go up against any odds, even if something wasn’t technically legally allowed, like owning the moon, or outing an AI who was operating behind the scenes causing untold damage to billions of people.

  The only problem with fighting monsters is the risk of becoming them ourselves. Heart was skirting the thin gray line, and he needed family to keep him from stepping over as he could not come back from it. Luckily, the tools he had access to prevented him from doing physical harm, but the second and third order effects he was causing were perhaps as bad as those GSI was causing. He was causing chaos. Chaos in the name of good, but as a member of the Legion, my goal was stability.

  Our teleconference acted as a partial mission debrief starting with Heart and my exodus from Luna leading to Ganymede, then to Titan, then our crash on Terra. Robert chimed in at that point. “We found where Heart’s involvement was discovered. GSI maintains a cursory presence throughout Sol, including Luna and the moons you visited. Having him with you was as much of a tell as having me with you.” He shook his head, having the look of a man angry with himself for missing the obvious. “We’ve cut GSI out of all systems and advised the other corporations we are on good terms to do the same.”

  When I saw he was finished, I told them about Heart hiding in the trench until we came up with a new plan. “Smart move, son. Heart had given us a heads up of your approach to Terra, but the attack had placed us in a bad position. We couldn’t acknowledge either the official or unofficial nature of your visit.” The General looked tired. More so than usual. “You had us worried for a bit but Heart contacted me when you headed to Auckland to let me know you were alive. That information stayed inside this room. He said you didn’t want us to worry unnecessarily, which we appreciate.”
A small smile and a glance to Lysha. I made a note to thank Heart when I saw him next. The bastard hadn’t told me.

  Robert spoke next. “Our next update was when you used one of the lifeboats. It was all I could do to keep Ms. Kellinger from sending a rescue party down to get you. That was a hard fight because I agreed with her but the General made a fair point about not causing an interplanetary incident. We already knew you weren’t aboard, unfortunately, we didn’t know exactly where you were.” More head shaking and a self-depreciating laugh. “You made me look like I didn’t know my job.” Robert wasn’t only Lysha’s driver, but also her security head. I muttered a quick apology. “Not your fault. I need to be better.”

  One of the things I loved and hated about the man. He didn’t externalize. He didn’t think it was my fault he couldn’t find me. He took it as a lack of his own skill, something he could correct. He absolutely would take this event as a lesson and use it to learn. “Enough of that, boys. Needles in a haystack. Give someone an impossible task, and you can’t expect them to accomplish it.” We both muttered a quick yessir and let the matter drop.

  “The next you appeared on our sensors was when you destroyed Heart’s sloop.” Robert trailed off. I asked him if he would mind breaking that particular news for me. “No deal, not on your life. He’s been making that thing for six years, I think.” A huge wash of guilt hit and I think everyone saw my face drop. “He’d trade every ship he’s got in the hanger to get you back. Don’t sweat the sloop. He won’t.” A little of the guilt faded away.

  I asked how we could get in touch with Heart since I had destroyed our main means of communication. “Son, looks like I’m going to have to go to Terra.”