Cassandra's War: A Sci-Fi Corporate Technothriller (The SynCorp Saga Book 2)

by Pourteau, Chris

  Alvin was already packing the tools into the scooter they used to transit the vast sublunar maintenance bays.

  “Mary,” he said, using Ming’s assumed name, “I just don’t know what I’d do without you. That section has been a pain in my ass for the last six months.” She braced herself for the inevitable next sentence. “Those damned topside engineers couldn’t design their way out of an airlock with the instructions written on the inside of the door. Well, I’m ready for a drink!”

  Ming nodded, glad Alvin’s thirst for vodka had cut his storytelling short for once. He’d come to the Moon in his sixties to make a second career, living and working in the so-called Underworld beneath LUNa City that no one but maintenance crews ever visited. A vast honeycomb of caves and bays carved out of raw rock kept the growing lunar colony supplied with the essentials of existence: waste reclamation, water, air, power, and data. Few people wanted to work in the Underworld. What the techs called the “back alleys” were rough-hewn, dirty, smelly, and isolated.

  And that suited “Mary Wu” just fine. The best place to hide out was the place where no one else wanted to go looking for you.

  Alvin engaged the scooter, which lifted off the rocky, uneven tunnel floor. As the vehicle picked up speed, Alvin began an anecdote that only required the occasional grunt of acknowledgment from Ming.

  Less than a year ago, Ming had been one of those “damned topside engineers” Alvin so enjoyed taking to task. She had roamed the topside halls proudly, unafraid of who she was. Every day after lunch, she would venture onto the lunar surface to inspect the LUNa City dome—the greatest architectural achievement in mankind’s history, in her opinion.

  Now, Ming Qinlao was Mary Wu, Underworld technician and woman on the run .

  The Moon had proven a good place to hide. LUNa City contained more than eight thousand souls and, between the mining camps and the contract workers, consisted of a heavily transient population. Work was plentiful, the pay was decent, and recruiters were skilled at sensing—and avoiding—questions their clients didn’t want to answer. A perfect place to hide.

  Ming’s rational side liked to believe she had taken all those benefits into consideration when she fled to the Moon with her fourteen-year-old half-brother Ruben—now Rodney Wu—but the truth was, if she had done those calculations at all, it was subconsciously.

  Lily was here, that was the real reason. Ming had come home, plain and simple. She’d needed refuge and Lily had provided it.

  Rational Ming knew she might be placing Lily in real danger. Her Auntie Xi wanted the reins of power for Qinlao Manufacturing, and she’d stop at nothing to take them from Ming. Ming had seen on the YourVoice network how Xi had taken over QM following the disappearance of Ming, its rightful CEO. But the old bat couldn’t make it permanent unless Ming could be either physically brought before the board and voted out or declared dead with an official death certificate. Yes, anyone who stood between Xi and power was definitely in danger.

  So Ming grew her hair long, wore baggy jumpsuits, and avoided any places where she might possibly run into someone she knew from her prior life as a damn topside engineer.

  “Mary? You listening to me?” Alvin’s bushy gray eyebrows jutted out above his frown. “Girl, you zoned out. You taking drugs or something? ”

  Ming rolled her eyes. “No, I’m not taking drugs, Alvin.” But it was an attractive idea—banishing her dark thoughts for even a little while. She’d probably even get away with it. Drugs, gambling, prostitution—all of it was legal so long as no one got hurt. Injury meant reduced construction efficiency, and the marshals, the local arm of UN enforcement, took a dim view of crimes against efficiency.

  “Do you want to pick up another shift?” The scooter jostled them both. “We can get a head start on that sorter at the recycling plant—”

  “Sorry, boss,” she replied, shifting in the seat. “Gotta pick up my brother from school.”

  Alvin was silent for a moment. She could tell he was disappointed. He seemed to enjoy her company—or maybe he just enjoyed talking. “Okay, well, I’ll drop you at the stairs then.”

  Ming watched the tunnels fly by. Occasionally, she saw the dim glow of another maintenance crew at work, but the vast network of the Underworld was mostly empty. In contrast to the living quarters above, with their well-mapped geometries, these tunnels were dug on an as-needed basis, resulting in a rabbit’s warren of alcoves and winding passages. The perfect hiding place, if she ever needed one. As long as she had food and water, she could live down here for weeks, months, maybe forever.

  The scooter rolled to a stop next to the main staircase leading up to the habitat levels. Ming swung lightly to the ground and looked up at the forty levels between the alleys and proper society.

  Alvin nodded at her, his good humor returned. “Just think, Mary. We get to do this all again tomorrow. ”

  “And they even pay us for it,” Ming said, finishing their common farewell. “Have a drink for me.”

  “I’ll have two!” The old man’s laugh echoed in his wake.

  • • •

  Ming took the stairs three at a time to the upper levels. She loved the freedom of low-gee, how strong it made her feel. The flip side of that sensation was her constant struggle to maintain muscle tone after months on the Moon. In her previous life as a LUNa City engineer, she’d been a regular at gravity rehab labs, but now the chance of meeting someone there who might recognize her was too great. Her daily work kept her arms and upper body in shape, but maintaining muscle tone in her legs required conscious effort.

  Lily had come up with the idea of teaching Ruben self-defense skills as a way for both him and Ming to work out. Four days a week, after she picked him up from school, they headed to one of the communal gyms for weight training and light sparring.

  Ming bounded up the steps, but her mind refused to let her body simply enjoy its exercise. Her revived relationship with Lily was severely strained, but—to her surprise—not broken. Lily had not taken another partner after Ming’s rejection. Whenever Lily probed about Ming’s romantic status, Ming stayed silent or changed the subject. She had no desire to hurt Lily and even less to sully the image of Sying in her own memories.

  A young couple, newly minted engineers by the sound of their banter, made way for Ming, who leaped past them on the stairs. Their easy familiarity tugged at her conscience, and she pumped her legs harder .

  She needed Lily. Pretending to be Mary Wu, a nobody technician, was hard, a prick at her family pride. Every time she assumed Mary’s persona, Ming felt like a little bit of her own personality was leaching away.

  Lily stopped that bleeding. When she was with Lily, Ming felt like she was back to a simpler time in her life, a place where she was not a CEO and had no desire to know her estranged father. In that existence, there had been only two people in her life: Lily and herself. A perfectly balanced dyad of love and trust.

  She and Lily were sleeping together again, but it was a move of convenience more than intimacy. There was one double bed and one sofa in the apartment, and Ruben had claimed the sofa so he could fall asleep playing vidgames on weekends.

  Sometimes, after he was sound asleep on school nights, Lily reached across the small chasm afforded by the double bed to touch her back. Sometimes, Ming responded to her touch.

  Was it wrong? Lily always seemed to want to go back to the way they were, and Ming needed to feel alive again, so they both got what they wanted—if only for a while. They gave to each other and they took, and that was how they existed. For now.

  The data glasses hummed in her pocket, indicating an incoming call. Ming topped the landing and stopped to catch her breath. She cast her eyes down at twenty-eight flights of metal stairs climbed. Her thighs throbbed, her calves burned.

  The glasses vibrated again. Ming put them on and saw Lily was calling. She had to eye-scan the toggle on the cheap device twice before Lily’s face appeared.

  “Hey, sweetie,” Ming said in her cheeri
est voice. “I’m on my way— ”

  But Lily’s eyes were wide with panic and tears streaked her cheeks. She fiddled with a lock of blonde hair behind her right ear, a clear sign of agitation for her.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Rodney—” Lily’s eyes cut to the right, letting Ming know there was someone else listening in on the call. “Rodney got picked up by security. He hurt another kid.” She lowered her voice. “They have him in lockup.”

  Ming cursed, a slew of fear rushing through her mind. If they scanned his biometrics into the legal system and uploaded them through an Earth-based connection … no doubt Auntie Xi had bots trolling every data stream in the known universe. …

  “You’re his legal guardian, Mi—Mary. They won’t release him to me.”

  Ignoring her aching legs, Ming began taking the stairs four, five steps at a time. “I’m on my way. Stay there.”

  When she reached the neighborhood levels, she had to muscle her way through the crowds coming off the freight elevators. Shift change.

  Ming reached the level 16 security station and took a moment to catch her breath. Sweaty, dirty, her hair a bird’s nest of tangles, she didn’t exactly present the picture of a responsible guardian, but she had to get her brother free before they scanned him into the system.

  This far down in the colony, the station was no more than a two-man outpost: one marshal on local patrol, another on desk duty. The station itself was one room with a desk and a single chair, the back half partitioned off by a transparent plastic wall. Lily occupied the chair, the officer the desk. Ruben slumped against the back wall of the cell. He avoided Ming’s piercing glare.

  Lily jumped up and seized Ming’s hand, dragging her forward until Ming’s thighs touched the front of the desk. “This is Marshal Timmer, Mary. He picked up Rodney for fighting.”

  Ming offered the marshal her hand and the exasperated expression of an adult long past the limit of her patience.

  Timmer’s gaze took in her dirty hand and dirtier jumpsuit before giving her a perfunctory shake using only the tips of his fingers. He was young, only a few years older than Ruben, and his eyes kept flitting to Lily.

  “You’re the boy’s guardian?” he asked, frowning.

  “I am,” Ming said, adding a touch of regret to her tone. “Can I see my brother?”

  “He put another boy in the infirmary with a broken nose, ma’am. That’s a serious offense. If the boy had been of working age—”

  “He was being bullied, Marshal,” Lily offered. Ming did her best to hide her surprise at Lily’s tone. That was her girlfriend’s—ex-girlfriend’s, she reminded herself—seduction voice. Lily leaned over the desk.

  The disgusted expression on Timmer’s face gave way to appreciation. He licked his lips.

  “That other boy has bullied my friend’s brother at school. Every day. Terrible things, racist stuff.” Lily settled one buttock on the desk. She glanced down at the 3-D nameplate. “I heard the other officer call you Nate. Can I call you Nate?”

  Timmer cleared his throat. “Um … sure.”

  Ming backed away from the desk, letting Lily take over .

  “Look, Nate, Rodney is a good kid. He won’t do this again. Do you think maybe you could talk to the boy’s mother about not being such a racist? This is a UN city, after all.” Lily flipped her blonde hair behind her ear.

  Ming tried not to gape. Lily was hair-flipping this guy?

  “Rodney’s had a tough time. Not a lot of good role models”—Lily slewed her eyes toward Ming’s dirty jumpsuit—“especially male role models. And it’s hard when people call you names like that. Mary and I will make sure he knows that violence is not a proper response to name-calling. I’ll keep you updated on his progress. Personally.”

  Nate busied his hands rearranging the items on his desk. “Well, it’s a first offense, and he is a minor, and no workers were taken offline as a result of the injury.” He squared his shoulders. “But he broke the other kid’s nose. His parents are—”

  Lily put her hand on Nate’s bicep. “I’ll talk to them. I’ll be honest—I plan to give them a piece of my mind about the name-calling. I’ll let you know how it goes, okay?”

  Ming watched the gears whirring in the marshal’s head, though his eyes were focused on Lily’s cleavage. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen this side of Lily.

  Marshal Timmer pressed a button on his desk, and the clear steel of the cell door slid aside. Ruben stepped out, head down. Ming seized his arm, pulling him toward the door. “You and I need to have a talk.” When she looked back, Lily was leaning across the narrow desk typing her net address into Timmer’s tablet, her head practically touching the marshal’s.

  Ming paused in the doorway, looking back into the security station. When she was that close, Lily smelled like jasmine and musk, a scent that still made Ming quiver. Lily’s low laugh, throaty and suggestive, wafted toward them. Ming tightened her grip on Ruben’s arm.

  “Hey! Ow! I’m sorry, okay?”

  Rational Ming knew Lily had just helped them out of a jam that could have been a whole lot worse. More to the point, the woman Ming had loved—then discarded, then come back to looking for safe harbor—had just pimped herself out to save Ming and her half-brother, whom Lily had known for all of a few months.

  An emotion Ming hadn’t felt in a long time rushed through her.

  “Stop!” Ruben was trying to pry his arm free. Ming released him.

  Lily extracted herself from Timmer’s attentions and turned toward the door. Her face was flushed as her eyes found Ming’s.

  Ming stepped into the crowded hallway outside the station, breathing deeply. She finally put a name to the feeling slithering around inside her.

  Jealousy.

  Chapter 3

  William Graves • Haven 6, Blue Earth, Minnesota

  As the aircar pulled through the ’lock on Haven 6, Colonel William Graves blinked at the bright sunlight flooding the windows. His vehicle rose swiftly into the cloudless sky above Blue Earth, Minnesota. Beyond the half-kilometer security perimeter circling the dome, people dotted the landscape as far as he could see. The full spectrum of humanity—from rich to poor, from young to old, from every culture and ethnicity—spread out across the expanse of the empty prairie. They’d arrived in everything from expensive aircars to ancient gasoline-powered automobiles. Some slept in campers, some in tents, and some on the frozen ground—wherever they could find a warm, dry place to lay their heads. Not easy to do in December in Minnesota.

  They all wanted one thing: to get inside the dome.

  Haven 6 receded until the massive structure was no more than a shiny blister on the prairie.

  “How many of those people you think will get in, sir?” Captain Jansen asked. She looked as tired as he felt, and her dark skin had an ashen undertone. They’d both barely averaged four hours of sleep a night for the last few months. Probably less for her, since whenever he woke up and entered the command center, she always seemed to be there already.

  “Not enough,” he replied. As commanding officer of the US Army Disaster Mitigation Corps, there was one part of the job he was never able to get away from. Whether it was drought in Phoenix, wildfires in California, a hurricane in Miami, or whatever the hell he was doing in Blue Earth, there was always one common denominator: he was never able to help enough people.

  “Not your call, sir,” Jansen said quietly.

  He knew she was right, but that didn’t help. He had control over the crew, not the civilians. There was an entirely separate admissions division, operating under their own set of rules that seemed focused on a person’s genetics. The mission of the Havens was to act as a vehicle for the preservation of humanity. Volunteers from all counties and ethnicities, known as Pioneers, needed to be willing to cut all ties with their past and live inside a self-sustaining silo for the next century. When the siloes opened again, there would be a new generation to pick up the pieces.

 
When he’d first heard of the idea, Graves had dismissed it as science fiction. Now, with Earth’s climate in full crisis, he wasn’t so sure.

  He slipped off his data glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. Unsolicited, Jansen handed him a stim tablet. He accepted it, too tired to even say thank you. She knew he had a briefing to read before they arrived in Washington, DC .

  “How’s your family, Jansen? They okay in all this?”

  All this that I’ve caused was what he wanted to say. The world-saving bio-seeding technology that he’d released across Mother Earth had backfired spectacularly. Graves had given the order to launch the missiles that deployed those billions of tiny nanites now manipulating the world’s atmosphere. The power of those man-made mites was still unfathomable to him: entire cities buried under sand, storms wiping out entire population centers with near-surgical precision, polar vortexes putting areas in deep freeze…

  “There’s only my brother left now, sir,” Jansen said, bringing him back to the moment. “Parents passed a few years ago. We don’t talk much. He lives in Georgia—inland, of course.”

  “Is he a candidate for a Haven? There’s one in Arkansas he could apply for. I could look into it.”

  Jansen shook her head. “Don’t think so, sir. He says he’s not going to hide in a dome. If the world ends, he says, so be it. He’s just going to meet it head on.”

  Graves turned back to the window. Not a bad headline philosophy, but shortsighted. When that time came, those thousands of people on the Minnesota prairie outside Haven 6 would become hordes. His job was logistics; he knew exactly how many people the Havens could hold.

  Not enough.

  The seven Havens located around the country were a marvel of engineering. To call them domes was a misnomer; they were actually silos. Like LUNa City on the Moon, the domed part of a Haven was only the top floor, the penthouse of a much taller, cylindrical society extending deep underground .