Space Rodeo

by Jenny Schwartz

  “I’ve changed the nature and distribution of touch sensors over my body.” There was a strange note in Reynard’s voice.

  The AI couldn’t be shy, could he?

  Thelma glanced at her comms unit. “Why?”

  “I thought…maybe. Humans hug.”

  Her heart squeezed. “You want a hug?”

  “Harry said you hug him. That organic sentients touch to cement social bonds.”

  “It’s not essential, but yes, we do. Reynard, I will hug you. Unless you tell me not to. That’s one of the important social rules. No touching without permission.”

  “Unless you’re saving someone from injury or death.”

  She accepted that Reynard became pedantic when nervous. “Yes.”

  There was a pause before he responded. “You can hug me.”

  “All right.” She smiled. “So the next time I see you—”

  “I’m in Harry’s quarters,” Reynard said in a rush. “He said it was permitted and that it would be more efficient and secure for me to access Lon’s database directly.”

  She quickly assessed the queue of messages. Whether or not she could afford a break given that she also intended to take time away from her deputy duties to consider Lon’s analysis of the Xlokk data, Thelma decided she owed Reynard twenty minutes. “Warn Harry that I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  The hatch to Harry’s quarters opened at her approach. Thelma stepped through. She grinned at Harry who was standing near the weaponized shell that was his personal shuttle. Judging by the open toolbox beside him, he’d been working on it, but wasn’t about to miss Reynard’s first hug.

  The other AI shifted anxiously, swapping which three metal tentacles he stood on.

  Thelma opened her arms. “Hug?” She walked toward Reynard.

  The AI lowered his tentacles, standing now on five, and extended two, flapping them rather aimlessly. He looked like a mech monster. “An embrace is acceptable, since you are—eek!”

  She hugged him, and kept her body relaxed and her breathing steady as he wrapped two cold tentacles around her. It was a very tentative return hug. For good measure, she kissed him.

  “Germs,” he said.

  Harry laughed. The only viruses AIs had to worry about were digital, and AI data hygiene practices were scrupulous.

  Reynard was endearingly embarrassed. He released her hurriedly; probably barely refraining from pushing her away.

  “Thank you for all your help,” Thelma said to him.

  “You’re welcome.”

  She crossed to Harry and gave him a one-armed hug.

  He slung a casual arm around her shoulders. “How you doing, honey?”

  “Worried about the mech-mods. Worried for Max. Glad to be home.”

  “Why worried for Max?”

  She patted his chest. “I like your priorities.” She wandered away, moving just to be in motion. “I think the mech-mods mean some sort of political plot. Max hates politics, but he’s going to end up in the middle of it.”

  “He already is,” Reynard contributed.

  Harry tcha’d an amused rebuke at the other AI.

  Reynard defended himself. “Accuracy is important. Thelma cannot make good decisions on faulty assumptions.”

  “This is going to change the options open to Max.” Thelma kicked the strut of a workbench. “Covert Ops already prioritized him. A cyborg agent is a big investment to send Max’s way.”

  “That could be preemptive,” Harry said.

  She tilted her head, expressing silent incomprehension.

  “His family,” Harry said. “They’d planned to meet you in the Reclamation Sector. The Space Rodeo scuttled those plans. It’s too dangerous to risk the President here with so many people straying around. But they will meet with you.”

  “And taking this approach, Carl will be able to give prior assessment that Max is no threat to his family,” Thelma guessed. “As well as being around to protect him. Them.”

  Reynard scratched two tentacles together. “Why do you insist on classifying the Covert Operations agent as a bodyguard?”

  For Thelma, the answer was obvious. “Because of who Max is. Not the outside stuff. In his soul. Max is a protector. Anything less than a cyborg, capable of exceeding Max’s own Star Marine honed abilities, and Max would try to protect his bodyguard.”

  “The boy tries to protect me.” Harry backed her up.

  “Irrational,” Reynard observed.

  Harry shook his head. The gesture wouldn’t mean much to the other AI, though, so he put it into words. “No, Max cares. Some people show their care by cooking or nagging or hugs.” Thelma smiled despite her worries. Reynard swayed on his tentacles, uncomforted by the gentle teasing. “Max protects those he loves and those weaker than himself. The pursuit of justice is how Max channels his protective nature. Even if he couldn’t be sheriff any more, the core of who he is wouldn’t change.” That reassurance was for Thelma.

  She gave a tight nod. “I’d best get back to work.”

  “You have squandered seventeen minutes.” Before she could reply to that statement as she wanted to, Reynard continued. “But I liked the hug.”

  In passing, she patted the nearest tentacle.

  A tentacle patted her back. “No more kisses.”

  “I’ll save them for Max.”

  Lon’s preliminary report, derived from the data Carl had stolen from the Xlokk base, was as cogent as a Galactic Justice team’s months-long endeavor. Max read it in his office. He’d meet Thelma and Carl in an hour to discuss the report with Lon over lunch. He trusted Lon’s analysis.

  The AI had confined himself to consideration of the data stolen from the trampship. The implications of what it revealed was something they’d consider as a team. They had to decide their next steps.

  Max scrubbed a hand over his face. What he wanted was a session in the training ring sparring with Harry. Anger at the power-hungry arrogance of the plot they’d snared the edge of made him short-tempered. He needed to be calm; to treat Carl as a test run for the string of naturally suspicious, antagonistic Galactic Justice agents that he’d have to convince, and then, hand off to.

  Or was this a rare set of circumstances in which he should go over their heads directly to his father, the President of the Federation?

  He actually needed Carl’s perspective—and Thelma’s commonsense.

  She’d spotted the anomaly in Lon’s data for his territory and correctly linked it to the Xlokk base. It was the perfect example of why Lon valued human intuition. She wouldn’t be able to explain why the bunyaphi had stood out to her, but they were in this up to their wingtips.

  Max entered the kitchen to find Thelma plating up a stir-fry crunchy with fresh vegetables and with a generous serving of spicy protein strips. Carl leaned against the counter, casually at home in the Lonesome’s kitchen. Max’s primitive instincts prickled under his skin. In fact, the nape of his neck literally prickled: hackles raised, like a dog. Instinct demanded he thump his chest and growl “mine” before kicking Carl out of the kitchen.

  A refrain of curses that he’d left behind in the Star Marines ran through his mind.

  This whole set up was messing with him. He wouldn’t put it beyond Covert Ops to have selected Carl for precisely this purpose—not to stand in the kitchen, but to be the sort of man Thelma would be attracted to: another Galactic Justice academy graduate; against privilege, not benefiting from it; able to smile easily, to fit in.

  It wasn’t that Max thought Thelma would cheat on him. He recognized the generalized anxiety floating around, trying to latch onto his secret fears—like Thelma finding someone better to love. The unavoidable implications of Lon’s analysis of the Xlokk data had unsettled Max. He would pay a price for doing the right thing.

  Shoving his emotions into a metaphorical box and slamming the lid, he accepted his lunch from Thelma.

  For her, cooking was part of how she showed she cared.


  They were both worried. With reason.

  “Smells great.”

  “Fresh vegetables. I’ve been stealing beansprouts,” Carl said.

  The forced illusion of an ordinary meal shattered when they sat down. Max broke it. Delaying the discussion would waste time and cause indigestion.

  “Keep your quibbles on details to yourself, but if you can challenge a fundamental assumption or conclusion, interrupt me.” He set himself to eat quickly between sentences. “Ordinary transit between the Boldire and Saloon Sectors is four months at best speed. However, in a spaceship capable of jumping through the perilous wormhole in Sheriff Cayor’s territory the transit time is two and a half weeks between recognized settlements. The bunyaphi have recently demonstrated their possession of such spaceships. The Ates and Toprak clans’ ships have both been recorded at the Deadstar Diner, but the Su clan’s ship, the Ripping Claw, hasn’t been recorded anywhere in Lon’s database for my territory. However, it is mentioned in the Xlokk data.”

  “Aubree Tennyson mentioned it was stalled for repairs,” Thelma interjected.

  “That woman,” Max growled. The Galactic Justice agent for Zephyr always knew more than she should.

  “I’ll look into it,” Lon said.

  Max chewed and swallowed a large piece of celery. “The Su clan are participants in the agreement recently negotiated and signed in the Boldire Sector under the mediation of the Senate Worlds Development Committee for the bunyaphi to work toward peace. No one expects it to be easy for them to relinquish their tradition of feuding. The clans monitor one another, and one result of that is that their technological achievements mirror one another. In effect, they steal each other’s secrets. Their notion of industrial espionage is as straightforward as break-and-enter and theft. This method of keeping up with each other would explain how they all came to build a clan ship capable of traversing the wormhole from their home sector to ours. When the Su started theirs, the other two copied them.”

  “A working assumption, currently without proof.” Lon was keeping them honest.

  Max finished his plate of stir-fry. The background to the set up in which the bunyaphi were to be the patsies for this conspiracy was the easy bit. Not that the Su clan were innocent in any of this. Just that their guilt was confined to the illegal mech-mods and not the broader Federation-level plot. “Elliot Keele lost two ships when he sent them to coordinate with the bandits to ambush the Lonesome. The assumption at the time was that he acted at Senator Gua’s request as revenge against Thelma. In fact, Keele wanted me out of the way to ensure the Su warship’s secret passage through my territory to Xlokk.

  “We didn’t see it,” Thelma said. “Because Keele didn’t act against you again. He must have assumed that the Space Rodeo would sufficiently distract you or that the bunyaphi’s presence in the Saloon Sector would be masked by the influx of Space Rodeo dudes. Then you and Lon proved too efficient for him, spotting and thwarting trouble. So Keele hired assassins to try and kill me, or Owen, to distract you.”

  “If he could have avoided your territory, he would have,” Carl said. “But by then he was committed to the Xlokk base. Which brings us to an assumption that hasn’t been tested, but logically has to be true.”

  He pushed aside his plate. “The monitoring system on the old frontier line from the Reclamation Sector to the Saloon Sector triggers an alert when vessels cross it, particularly those registered to flagged individuals and organizations such as Keele and his mercenary group, or if a vessel lacks registration. Keele has at least one of Pang’s deputies on his payroll and can slip vessels across the line by ordering Pang’s compromised deputy to delete the alert as a false report. The unproven assumption is that Keele couldn’t subvert Sheriff Cayor or either of his two deputies in the adjacent territory, and so, couldn’t risk sending his vessels by the most direct route to the perilous wormhole. Instead, they entered the Saloon Sector via Pang’s territory, then had to position themselves to take the long route to the Boldire-bound wormhole because the only two safe routes from Pang’s territory to Cayor’s are monitored.”

  “By Cayor, who can’t be bribed or threatened,” Thelma said.

  Max gathered up the plates, too angry at the thought of his fellow officers failing in their duty to sit still.

  Carl watched him. “The border between Max’s territory and Cayor’s is far more open. No hazan fields, for a start. Add in the quality of Xlokk’s atmosphere, suited to hiding spaceship activity, and the planet’s position on a likely route through to the wormhole, and we have Keele’s reason for locating his mech-mod base there.”

  “How did Keele know that the old frontier line is still monitored?” Thelma asked. “I had no idea.”

  Max returned to the table. “Keele is in the same position as the Su clan. He’s guilty as hell of trading in mech-mods, but he’s also being used. Whoever is pulling his strings warned him about the old frontier line.”

  It was the obvious explanation, and the others accepted it.

  “Which brings us to the mech-mod base on Xlokk,” Lon said. “The details, dates and names of the mercenaries involved, supply ships and schedules, are in the report. The overview is simple. The Ripping Claw dropped off eleven bunyaphi to be the test subjects for the mech-mods the Su clan contracted Keele to supply. Five of them have ‘successfully’,” disapproval sharpened his tone, “been fused with a mech-mod. The remaining six are at various stages of merging, from initial mutilation to neurolink implantation.”

  Carl sat unnaturally still. Mech-mods were an abandoned, now illegal, offshoot to the cyborg development program that had augmented him. Some would say “created” him. “The bunyaphi’s production of three spaceships capable of traversing a perilous wormhole suggests that they probably have the ability, or could develop it, to manufacture the hardware for the mech-mods. However, if the Su clan had attempted to do so in the Boldire Sector, the rival clans would have spied their illegal activity.”

  Lon had a point to add. “Given their history of feuding and war, the bunyaphi have an excellent industrial manufacturing base. However, they have underinvested in fields such as neuroscience, and lack the medical science to manage the neurolinking of their volunteers to the mech-mods.”

  Thelma shuddered. “It gives me the creeps to think that they are volunteers.”

  “They view themselves as martyrs for their clan’s victory,” Lon said sadly.

  Max couldn’t believe the idiocy. “How could they possibly believe they’d be victorious? At the first evidence of mech-mods being used, the Federation will crush them.”

  “But first, they’ll have defeated their rivals. I imagine two simultaneous strategic strikes is their plan,” Lon said. “But we’re getting distracted. The Su clan are looking for a win, as they define it, against their rivals in the Boldire Sector. However, whoever set this up, involving the bunyaphi and Keele, intends it to entangle and besmirch the Hwicce Corporation, and through it, via family connection, to damage President Smith and all that he stands for. The most cursory investigation will find the control plates on the mech-mods stamped with the Hwicce logo.”

  Max flattened his hands on the table. “I am emotionally involved in this case.”

  Carl interrupted. “We all are. You have your family connection. Thelma cares about you. Lon is loyal to the Hwicce Corporation and you. And I…the use of mech-mods is a cruelty and perversion of the cyborg program that I will not let stand.” He hesitated. “I’ve been undercover for years. Being undercover has known risks. At minimum, I may be less attached to official lines of authority than other agents. Whatever the reason, I am not prepared to blindly trust that in reporting our discovery of mech-mods to my handler on the Anubis I’d be acting appropriately. I want to know who is masterminding this conspiracy and who, if anyone, from Covert Ops is involved.”

  “If we’re talking of wishes,” Thelma said. “I’d like to know if Covert Ops has any suspicion as to the conspiracy. Remember, someone cut loose Senato
r Gua, but left Keele standing.”

  “We’re not talking wishes.” Max’s tone wasn’t as harsh as his words. “But if all of us are suffering from compromised objectivity in this case, we need to scrutinize our decisions and the assumptions we employ to reach them. Lon, wrap up your findings from the Xlokk base.”

  “The Ripping Claw is scheduled to return in three days for its officers, which include the Su secondary heir, to examine the eleven mech-mods and, once they’re approved, to leave a dozen more volunteer drivers. I would have thought the Ripping Claw would stay either on Xlokk, hidden in a gorge, or in its nearspace, but extrapolating from the data Thelma provided about the other clans visiting the Saloon Sector, the bunyaphi’s enthusiasm to explore non-Boldire space outweighs their prudence.

  “The deal with the Su clan is for Keele—and there is proof in the data from Xlokk that it is Keele—to provide two hundred functional mech-mods. The additional thirty two you counted in the chamber, plus the eleven aboard the trampship, are extras if the fusion goes wrong.”

  Carl swore, then apologized, mainly to Thelma.

  She waved aside the apology. “Someone was smart to target the bunyaphi. Their sense of honor is partly what keeps their feuds running so long. A true bunyaphi warrior is part of the attack he or she launches on an enemy. The bunyaphi would never bombard an enemy compound from space.”

  “Skin in the game,” Max muttered. “So the mech-mods appeal to their extremists. All right. Have we missed anything in summing up what’s happening at the Xlokk base? Anything that doesn’t make sense, can’t be explained?” He took a deep breath. “So, wider implications? Next steps?”

  “Where were the mech-mods manufactured? By whom?” Thelma offered.

  “Likely in the Reclamation Sector,” Carl stated the obvious. The Reclamation Sector was the recycling center of the Federation, but it was also where patents and copyright were derisory notions and people could manufacture anything. Still. Mech-mods were the sort of illegal product someone should have noticed. Secrets weren’t easy to keep in a sector where everything was for sale, at a price. “But is learning who made them a priority?”