by Bruns, David
I started working my girl’s controls.
“What are you doing?”
“I don’t like being told what to do,” I said.
“You’re gonna run? Fischer, that’s nuts! Power down!”
“What’d I just say?”
I fired up the engines. Newton threw up his hands and said, Whatever, man.
“Weapons lock.”
I know it was just my ears assigning my own human fear to the warning, but the Hearse seemed to agree with Daisy. Running was a bad idea.
Daisy reached forward to the nav controls. She stopped. With my right hand, I was fast-plotting an evasive course. With my left, I held my stunner to her temple.
“Hands off,” I said.
She obeyed.
“You should’ve taken those relaxers,” I said. “This is gonna hurt.” To my reluctant ship, I said, “Engage engines at full— ”
Tracer fire arced over the canopy. The angry red slugs zipped past, several hundred suggestions that I really should learn to listen to the females in my life. Those were military-grade tracers shot from a respectable distance. Seriously, who were these so-called pirates?
“This is your last warning,” my comms said. “Heave to or be destroyed.”
The order echoed in the small cabin. I was ready to make a run for it anyway. My mouth hovered over the command to punch it. I had no weapons to fight back. The Hearse was made for quick-hauling and doing it quietly, not fighting. And even if I’d had weapons…
“Fischer, this is our chance,” Daisy said. “This is what we came here for, right?”
She had a point. We’d followed the Starwind to find the pirates. Looks like we’d found them.
I powered down the engines. The Hearse shuddered. They’d grabbed her in a sensitive spot.
“This isn’t how this was supposed to go,” Daisy said, relaxing. She sounded more annoyed than intimidated. I had to remind myself that, despite her small frame, she was a killer like me. And, like me, she was probably already cooking up a plan to get out of this.
“Look at it this way,” I said, sitting back while the vessel hauled us aboard. “We’ll get a chance to stretch our legs.”
I switched off the canopy’s shading as the underside of our captor appeared overhead. Two bay doors were opening. The lines of the ship were hard and angular, ugly. Like the Hearse, it was built for stealth, not military parades. It was somewhere between a corvette and a frigate, size-wise, though I’d never seen this particular ship’s profile before. That meant it was new, probably developed off-grid.
These “pirates” were looking more and more organized. New ship design. Top-of-the-line military weaponry and stealth. Tony had a bigger problem on his hands than he knew.
The Hearse settled on the hangar deck. The pull of generated gravity made my blood feel heavy. The older you get, the longer it takes to get used to that.
One at a time, Daisy and I exited the Hearse. We were both wobbly. I wondered if her leg cramps were better or worse under the burden of one-g.
Six armed soldiers approached. Their uniforms were Kelly green with black lines. I’d never seen their like before. Definitely military. Not an eyepatch or peg leg on the lot. They carried ranks on their shoulders like fleet guys. Over the right breast of the uniforms was a symbol: the letter S formed the right half, with its mirror image on the left. The S and its backward self were connected at the bottom like two serpents joined at the tail. SS?
Nazis?
Not Nazis. Couldn’t be Nazis. I have a standing rule never to be taken prisoner by a cliché.
The guy with the most stripes on his shoulder came forward. “You are now prisoners of the Soldiers of the Solar Revolution. Hand over any and all weapons.” His eyes hardened. “Now .”
Officer Friendly certainly had the manners of a Nazi.
Daisy stepped forward, handing over her stunner.
“I’m here as a formal representative of Adriana Rabh, head of the Rabh Faction and Regent of Jupiter,” she said to the officer. I thought that was nice of her to step up, let them think she was in charge. Good tactical thinking on her part. “Regent Rabh wishes to open formal negotiations with the Dutchman.”
Wait, what?
My smile evaporated as Daisy moved to the officer’s side and turned to look at me.
“He’s holding three weapons,” she said. “A stunner, a .38 revolver, and a spring blade under his right wrist. Be sure you get all three.”
I took half a heartbeat to catch up.
“You fucking…”
One of the grunts moved forward, hands out. The other grunts pointed their weapons at me. Daisy extended her hand to Officer Friendly, who shook it warily.
“This is how they knew how to track us,” I said, handing over my stunner. I knelt and pulled the .38 from my ankle holster. Last came the knife. “They waited till we were in the Belt and then—”
“You’re getting old, Fischer,” Daisy said. “You should have smelled this coming a solar system away.”
“Fuck you,” I said. I’d let my affection for Adriana Rabh dull my instincts. Or maybe Daisy was right, and my dullness came from age. Either way, she was free and I wasn’t. Well, I guess that answers the question of whose side Adriana Rabh is on. Not Tony Taulke’s.
Daisy smiled in victory. “Hate to break it to you, but I’m not the one bent over here.”
Yep, she was right about that too.
Fuck me.
Chapter 19
Ruben Qinlao • Lander’s Reach, Mars
“Our first order of business it to express condolences to Ruben Qinlao,” Tony Taulke stated formally. “Ruben, your sister Ming and I didn’t always agree. In fact, we often disagreed.”
Politic laughter passed around the virtual meeting table.
“But I respected her immensely.” Tony paused, then: “And I can say, honestly, there would have been no Syndicate Corporation without her leadership.”
“That’s stating it mildly,” Gregor Erkennen muttered.
Tony offered Erkennen’s holo-image a tight smile.
“Thank you, Tony,” Ruben said. He still felt a little outside himself. Ming’s passing, while expected, had nevertheless opened a hole inside him. “I know she held you in … similar regard.”
Elise Kisaan, the striking and deadly Regent of Earth, cleared her throat. She seemed bored, and the meeting had hardly begun.
“One of the few positive parts of this meeting,” Tony continued, “is to welcome you to the council as the Regent of Mars. When I spoke with Ming before her death, she was overjoyed that you would succeed her.”
“I’m humbled by her faith in me,” Ruben said. “And yours.”
“I don’t wish to minimize Ruben’s loss,” Elise Kisaan said, “but can we take up new business? Specifically, just what the hell is happening in the system?”
Ruben regarded her quietly. He’d decided before the meeting that he’d rather watch and listen than speak—follow the old wisdom of having two ears and two eyes, but only one mouth. Kisaan, he knew, was the canniest of all the faction leaders, next to Tony. She’d eliminated famine on Earth in the last quarter century, turning the planet into a massive agricultural supply center for the Company. She’d segmented its land masses into longitudinal belts of farming communities offering localized cultivation and intersystem distribution nodes not unlike the mining-refinery hybrid model the Qinlaos had implemented on Mars—refinement paired with resource gathering at the source, cutting costs and maximizing efficiency. After Kisaan had won Earth’s hearts and minds by ensuring its dominant species stayed atop the food chain in the wake of global climate catastrophe, she’d gone on to achieve the same kind of dependent respect from the rest of the system.
Controlling the food supply made her dangerous, the most powerful regent in the system. Add to that Kisaan’s history, and she seemed the most likely suspect behind the conspiracy Ming had warned Ruben about.
“Agreed,” Adriana Rabh chimed in
. Then, as an afterthought, “Welcome, Ruben.”
“All right, then,” Tony said. He seemed calmer than Ruben would have expected, given all that was happening. Tony wasn’t known for his even temper. “Let’s start with you, Adriana. Update us.”
“We’re still repairing the orbital ring,” Rabh said. “There was a report the shuttle pilot might have picked up some kind of alien virus that would threaten the colony. Medical screenings of everyone on or off Callisto in the last week revealed nothing, however. Between the incident and the rumor, the station nearly rioted with panic.”
“Sounds like textbook Resistance work,” Kisaan said. “Throwing shoes into the works, then spreading stories to destabilize us.”
“They’ll do anything to disrupt the Company,” Erkennen agreed.
“Maybe,” Tony said. Ruben heard something in his voice that wasn’t quite disbelief. Musing, maybe. “It’s been a long time since Graves’s Rebellion.”
“My father said that Graves died with his rebellion,” Erkennen said.
Kisaan presented a wicked smile. “Maybe Graves isn’t in his grave after all.”
“Maybe,” Tony said again.
“The C-4B.”
“Gregor?” Tony prompted.
“It’s the C-4B used to blow up the Martian refinery,” Gregor Erkennen said. “Old-fashioned, military-grade explosives not manufactured in a quarter century.” That, Gregor seemed to be saying in his typically obscure Russian fashion, should tell them everything they needed to know.
“And also the weapon of choice for the Resistance,” Adriana Rabh said. “In the old days. ”
Tony looked thoughtful. “Maybe. First, the refinery on Mars. Then, the ring over Callisto. From one end of the system—of the Company—to the other.”
“Not quite,” Erkennen said, finger raised.
“That’s true,” Tony allowed. “Titan has remained untouched. As has Earth.” When he said it, he turned his eyes on Kisaan.
“And let’s hope it stays that way,” she said, holding his gaze. She’d dropped the cleverness from her mood. “The Company can sustain a hit in manufacturing capacity. Even a short-term loss of Callisto’s raw gases for fusion reactors since we have reserves on the Moon. But a drop in the food supply? Want a panic systemwide? Cut a few grain and fresh vegetable shipments to the outlying colonies.”
“Mars has significant hydroponic capability,” Ruben said, feeling a strange need to defend his planet. When you defend Mars, you defend our faction , Ming had told him once. Even dead, she continued to advise him.
“Mars grows what amounts to the parsley for the plate,” Kisaan said. “Earth still supplies the meat and potatoes—and vegetables and fruits and spices and, beyond all that, luxuries—to the system.” Her eye roamed over the projections of Adriana Rabh and Gregor Erkennen. “That goes for Callisto and Titan, too.”
Kisaan had outlined just how dependent they were on her matter-of-factly, without malice, but with her familiar imperious self-importance. Always watch your back around Elise Kisaan , Ming said in his mind. If you’re not careful, you’re likely to feel a knife in it. Kisaan had risen to power on the blood of millions. In context, the Red Widow of Mars didn’t seem so bad.
“Ruben,” Tony said, waking him from his thoughts, “what’s the word from Mars? We’ve been playing the headline on CorpNet for weeks. We need evidence. We need those responsible for the refinery bombing in custody.”
“Before she … passed … Ming had our faction troops and the local marshals scouring Lander’s Reach and beyond—the outer colonies, the extraction facilities. They still are, of course. But short of our initial findings—the precise, measured nature of the bombing, the use of C-4B explosives—there’s nothing new to report.”
“Nothing new to report?” Kisaan said, incredulous. “You’ve had weeks to round up whatever rebels are still on Mars. All the resources of the Qinlao Faction, and you don’t have a single bomber in custody?”
“We don’t call them Ghosts for nothing,” Erkennen said.
“Regent Kisaan, as Chairman Taulke indicated, it has been a long time since Graves’s Rebellion.” Ruben presented his argument in a measured way, logically. He used formal titles to help him slow his speech, to give himself time to think before speaking. One mouth . “I fear we’ve all become complacent, assuming the Resistance was crushed once and for all. We have Qinlao operatives infiltrating the factories and refineries on Mars, insinuating themselves into work groups, getting to know workers personally. But trust takes time. If there are covert pockets of Resistance on Mars, we’ll find them. In time.”
“If? In time?” Elise Kisaan’s venom lost none of its potency over the hundreds of thousands of kilometers separating them. “These sound like the excuses of a weak regent to me. Ming would never have— ”
“Please don’t do that,” Ruben said before he could stop himself. One mouth . But now he was committed. “I bury my sister tomorrow. Please don’t wield her name like a political weapon.”
Kisaan’s eyes widened, but her mouth closed.
See? Even she gets it , Ruben admonished himself.
“It was not my intention to dishonor your sister’s memory,” Kisaan allowed. It was a gracious, even gushing statement—for her. Turning to a fresh target, she continued, “And what are you doing, Tony, to counter this threat? Sending public relations reps to the outer planets? What is that accomplishing?”
The virtual call became still, save for the flickering of the 3D images of the five principals. Of all of them, only Elise Kisaan—secure on Earth as keeper of the Company’s food supply—had ever dared challenge Tony Taulke, high in his aerie above the planet, in an open meeting. No, that wasn’t quite true, Ruben corrected. In years past, when she still had her strength, Ming hadn’t been shy either. But she was gone now. And Ruben … well, Ruben was determined to be a different kind of leader. A wiser one who picked his battles prudently.
“Having Jabari here has been reassuring to Callistans,” Adriana explained. “Their Viking ethos respects his sacrifice for the Company.”
“Glad to hear it,” Tony said. “And Fischer? I assume you know he’s on Callisto by now.”
Adriana raised her head. Ruben had the distinct impression she was looking down her nose at SynCorp’s CEO.
“He was here, yes,” she said. “Next time, I’d appreciate a heads-up when you send your personal enforcer to my regency. ”
“Now where would be the fun in that?” Tony shot back. “And what do you mean was ?”
“He and one of my operatives are investigating the intercepts of our tankers,” she said.
“You mean the pirates,” Erkennen said.
Adriana sighed. “I hesitate to call them that. We have enough frayed nerves here already.”
“But that’s what we’re talking about here,” Tony said. Then, “I haven’t heard from him in a while. Have you?”
“No,” Adriana answered, “but is that unusual?”
“Not really, I suppose,” he allowed. “Depends on the job.”
“Can we get back to the problems at hand?” Kisaan said. “Rebels, pirates, and bombings, oh my! And you send your Helena Telemachus and a glassy-eyed worker bee to the far reaches of the system.”
“Messaging is everything,” Tony answered. “Control the message, control the masses: Politics 101. Meanwhile, we root out the problem through back channels.”
“Which brings us back to the Resistance,” Kisaan said.
“Maybe,” Tony said again. “Maybe not.”
“You keep saying that—maybe, maybe,” Erkennen said. He was a scientist, an empirical thinker. Unknowns bothered him. They were variables that begged discovery. “What does that mean?”
“It means these attacks are not random,” Tony said calmly. “They might seem random, but they appear designed to stretch our resources thin.”
“What do you mean, Tony?” Ruben asked.
“An explosion on Mars,” Tony said. “A dam
aged ring over Callisto.” His voice was unusually patient. A lawyer’s voice, carefully laying out evidence. “The pirates operating out of the Belt, siphoning reactor fuel in such small quantities, we were lucky to even notice. And now I’m hearing of a black market that hacks directly into the SCIs.”
“The medical implants?” Ruben asked. “Hacks how?”
Gregor Erkennen shifted uncomfortably. “It is a sophisticated, self-replicating algorithm that adapts to patches as quickly as we distribute them.” It was clear the Company’s head of tech development didn’t like admitting a weakness in his faction’s latest miracle invention. “The worm emulates source code so closely, we’re having a hard time stopping it. It mutates once it realizes it’s been found. But once we crack its encryption—”
“That almost sounds like artificial-intelligence level sophistication,” Elise Kisaan said.
“Well, you would know, wouldn’t you?” Adriana Rabh had never liked Earth’s regent. And she’d never trusted Kisaan, either.
“That was a long time ago,” Kisaan said. “I’ve done nothing but support the Company since we established the Five Factions.”
“People get bored,” Adriana suggested.
The two women fenced over subspace with their eyes. Tony watched their exchange. Ruben watched Tony.
“How does it work?” Ruben asked finally.
“Users—hackheads—purchase the hack,” Rabh explained. “Once installed, it slaves the SCI to produce a timed release of endorphins, a euphoric state enticed from the user’s own pleasure centers in the brain. They’re calling it Dreamscape.”
“We could outlaw it,” Ruben said. “Make its use illegal, have the marshals enforce—”
Gregor Erkennen grunted. “I’d rather have it out in the open until we find a fix. As long as it’s legal, we can more readily study its effects.”
“Which are significant,” Tony said. “Under the influence of this Dreamscape, workers are useless. Productivity is zero. It’s why we banned recreational drugs years ago.”
