Velocity Weapon

by Megan E O'Keefe

  “Hell of a mixed metaphor.”

  “You want it straight? You fuck with the Keepers, and there won’t even be a body for us to identify.”

  “Jules,” Lolla said, her voice soft and scared. “If it’s dangerous—”

  “Everything we do is dangerous.” She slammed back the rest of her drink and dropped the glass, tottering on the bar top. “Everything we do out here—just existing—in the Grotta risks our lives. Could get robbed and rolled every second we walk down the street. Yeah, yeah, save me your ‘there are rules’ and the weird scumbag chivalry, but I’m sick of it, all right? I’m sick of having to puff up my shoulders and walk like the biggest bitch in the world every time I want to stroll down the street to have a smoke. I’m sick of watching my back at every corner, at every doorway. Of minding my clothing so I don’t draw too much attention, or signal the wrong attention. Prime’s so far above us they don’t see us anymore, so maybe we should stand the fuck up for once in our lives and make them see us, right? Maybe we should dust off the gutter grime just this once?

  “But you won’t. You won’t ever stick your neck out. Not because of any weird desire to keep us protected. You’re just a scared, proud old man who can’t admit when an op’s a little too dicey. You want to keep rolling over low-key dealers and pinching hardware to wipe and sell at cost? Fucking fine, you do that, starfucker, but some of us don’t want to hustle until we’re dead. Rope enough credit together, launder it out, and we could go legit. Did you ever think of that?

  “No—of course you fucking didn’t because you don’t think past anything your miserable life has already taught you. Could have clean apartments, Harlan. Could walk down the street in a neighborhood without fear. Could even start a business with the credit we could wring from this—a real one—and go straight. But you’re too scared of change. Or maybe you’re just too scared of being made obsolete. Want us to rely on you for the rest of your withered days? Well fuck you, Harlan, because once you’re in the dust—and that’s coming soon, I can see it on your dead little face—we’re going to have to figure out our own paths. And unlike you, maybe our paths lead up. And out.”

  His face sunk. Every fine line already mapping a geology of years through his leathery skin deepened with tension. Harlan’s mouth flapped open—his usually too-smooth, too-right mouth—and Jules found through the adrenaline clouding her mind (or maybe that was the wraith, yeah, probably the wraith) that while she once waited to hear his every word, now—now it just seemed sad and pathetic.

  She didn’t want his advice. His advice kept her in that rathole apartment cubby off the crew’s main quarters. That cubby had seemed luxurious to her once, when she’d been scared and still getting used to the feel of blood on her hands. It had been hers—probably the only thing in the universe that had been legitimately hers—and there’d been comfort in that. Now, the idea of going back to that slick little hole in the wall with its few personal items stifled her. Suffocated her very thoughts.

  Harlan said something. Jules didn’t hear it through the thunder in her mind. The storm of years of frustration coming to a head all at once, all over one old man’s lack of vision. Of ambition.

  “Save it,” she said. Harlan stopped.

  She pushed to her feet and swayed once. The weird disassociation that came with high doses of wraith crawled through her skin, forced her mind out of her body, and she saw herself, all of a sudden, through what felt like Lolla’s eyes but was, of course, her own deepest experience of herself. A hard-bitten woman who was loud to cover how scared she was—the kid at the core—the raw and unformed person she would be, could be, if only she stopped tumbling down the cliff she’d already thrown herself off of.

  Everything snapped back into place and there was Nox smirking at her, but in his eyes was something like admiration. An edge of hunger that had nothing to do with sex or food. What she’d said had shaken him, made him think. If she called on him, he’d follow. Comfortable as Lolla and Harlan had made themselves at the bottom, Nox didn’t like it any more than she did. He just lacked imagination on how to crawl out.

  “Where are you going?” Harlan called out, turning the heads of everyone in Universe. Jules had stomped her way to the door without thinking, riding high on the booze and the wraith and the anger, her hands shoved down into her pockets so that those near her wouldn’t see how tight her fists were.

  “Out,” she snapped, and stepped into the rot-slick streets of the Grotta. A fine mist had congealed the dirt on the roads. Cleaner bots didn’t make it out this far anymore; they kept getting stripped down for parts.

  She’d walked a half mile, stuck in the storm in her own head, before she remembered the third smartboard in her bag. Jules keyed up Arden’s number on her wristpad and hailed them for a call. Their tired face snapped into view quickly, hair mussed from lack of brushing, but they’d been awake. A little bit of grease smeared their chin.

  “What?” they asked. Then squinted. “Where the hell are you?”

  “The street. Doesn’t matter. I got something I need you to strip the data out of it, make it readable.”

  Arden rubbed the side of their face with one hand, making that grease smear wider. “I don’t hack diaries.”

  “Fuck you. This is sellable.”

  “If it’s any good, I get a cut. Eighty percent.”

  “Ten percent.”

  “Hah. Sixty percent.”

  “Thirty percent, Arden, and I won’t dent that pretty face of yours.”

  They rolled their eyes. “Fine. It’s probably garbage, anyway.”

  Arden’s apartment—if one were being generous with the word—was slotted in a dim hallway two stories above an udon noodle place. As long as Jules had lived in the Grotta, Udon-Voodun had been a staple of the local cuisine. A spice-fraught mix of retro-cool, old-world Jamaican seasoning and Japanese noodle making, the place was an immovable object in the great currents of the Grotta’s residents. She was pretty sure it had started out as little more than a metal-slab lean-to, and had grown over the years into a proper building, sprouting apartments like warts as the Grotta’s residences gravitated toward the warmth and the stability. No one had ever bothered to install air vents capable of removing the scents of the cooking below, so every resident carried the permanent aroma of jerk spice and bonito. Most of them wore it like a badge of pride. Arden was one of those.

  “You high?” They filled the doorway, squinting at her. She shoved them aside and let herself in, kicking off her boots in the small square entryway.

  “Don’t be stupid. I just got off an op.”

  “Pupils tell another story.”

  “Adrenaline.”

  “Whatever.”

  A mat covered in tangled sheets took up a third of Arden’s room, the bathroom and a sink with a hot plate and a carbon-matter extruder the second third, and their desk—riddled with the carcasses of technology mid-vivisection—the last third. Jules barely had room for her feet, so she crossed her arms and leaned against the desk, pretending not to notice when it creaked under her weight.

  “So what’s worth hauling your ass all the way over here in the middle of the night?”

  “I was just down the street.” She slung her bag off her shoulder, rummaging for the board she’d kept back from Harlan.

  “I need you to look at this, scrape any data on it you can, and stick it onto something I can read.”

  “Something you can sell.”

  “Same thing. Gotta be able to read it to know who to sell it to.”

  They took the board from her and skimmed the surface writings, forehead wrinkling. “This is Keeper tech.”

  “I don’t care what it is. Break it and filter it out for me.”

  “Shit, Jules. Where did you even get this? Rob a Keeper on the street or something?”

  “None of your business where I got it, but you can keep your undies on. No Keeper knows I have it, I doubt they even know it’s missing.”

  “I seriously don�
��t know how that’s possible.”

  “It is. This going to be a problem?”

  They pushed past her and sat down at the desk, running a hand through one half of their shaggy brown hair as they pored over the device, flicking their way in and out of the surface apps, fussing a bit when they hit auth screens.

  “I don’t know. I mean, I’ve messed with some tight systems, but Keeper encryption… I mean, I don’t think this is Keeper tech. Oh, it’s about Keepers, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not half as shut down as it should be. Yeah. I think I can break it.”

  “Sweet. How long?”

  “Hold on, we gotta talk my pay.”

  “Already negotiated that. Situation hasn’t changed.”

  “Like hell it hasn’t. The percent stays the same, fine, the amount of work for me isn’t much different, anyway, but where are you going to sell this? Do you even have a buyer lined up?”

  “I just got it, Arden. Give me a fucking chance to put some things in motion.”

  “Hell no.” They squinted at her again, sizing up her condition. She pushed her shoulders back and stared them down. “You sell this to the wrong person, and you’ll bring hell down on all of us. I’m good, Jules, but I’ll leave tracks that people with the resources of the Keepers can find. There’s no helping that. I don’t have the kind of tech they do. But I think… I think I might know someone.”

  “Someone who can break it?”

  “No, no. I’m still all you got there. But someone you could sell it to. It’s weird.” They frowned and kicked off the corner of the desk, spinning the chair as they thought. She scowled and put a hand on the arm of the chair to stop their spin.

  “Weird how?”

  “I’ve heard rumblings, recently. Some woman—calling herself Silverfang, like she’s some old-school-cool hacker or some shit, was poking around some net fringes I frequent last week. She was offering serious credit for anyone who had data on the Keepers. Good, authenticated shit. I thought she was just some weird conspiracy nut looking for followers, but I dunno. Maybe this is the kind of thing she wants. She was getting a lot of turbulence from the regulars, people who thought she was wasting time and fucking around, so she dropped off the channels. But I can find her again, I’m pretty sure of that.”

  “Put your little hacker feelers out then and find her.”

  Arden frowned. “Seriously, where’d you get this?”

  She sighed and let the arm of the chair go, holstering her bag back onto her shoulder. “Side benefit of another op.”

  “Pretty big Easter egg.”

  “Yeah. I’m thinking about that.”

  “Harlan can’t be on board with this.”

  “He’s not. You get an update about this, you call me directly, all right?”

  They held both of their hands up, palms out. “Whoa. I’m not sure what’s going on with you two, but I’m a neutral party here. You offered me a job and a cut. You’re my contact. Easy as that. But… uh… Maybe try to smooth things over with him? I know he’s a cranky fuck, but… Where are you going?”

  Jules tugged her boots on and had her hand on the door before she realized she’d even decided to leave. “Out. Got some steam to blow off. Get on this as soon as you can. Call me when you got something.”

  “Jules, wait—”

  She slammed the door and stomped out onto the street. The scents of Udon-Voodun called to her, pulled her back toward the warm embrace of hot noodles and hotter broth. But if she stuck around, Arden would insist on bending her ear, and she didn’t want their therapy.

  She should go back to the crew’s digs, crawl into her cubby bed and sleep off her anger, but wraith mother pumped through her veins and she’d never felt more alive, more human. She wanted to run, to sprint and fight and fuck. Couldn’t do that last one without complication—she didn’t have the credit to hire anyone discreet—but she could walk. And think. The streets, at least, were still free. Even in the Grotta.

  CHAPTER 19

  PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3771

  THREE DAYS LATER THE NEW GUY STILL WON’T TALK

  Tomas tacked a sheet over the smartscreen and refused to say another word. It ate at her. Every routine piece of maintenance she did, every check on their course or Bero’s diagnostics—hell, even showering—she was aware of another living, breathing human on board the ship. And he was giving her the silent treatment. So she retreated to the one place she was meant to be alone: the debris field.

  She fell into an easy harmony with Bero’s robotic arm, guiding it through the twisted wreckage on her hunt for life-sustaining morsels. Whether or not Tomas wanted to talk to her, he was in as much deep shit as she was. If they were going to survive this journey, they would need to repair and refit both evac pods. Three days trawling the field since Tomas’s arrival, and she had yet to find anything half so promising as Tomas’s used pod.

  “The window for proper acceleration around Kalcus is closing,” Bero chirruped into her helmet.

  “Thank you, oh big-brained AI, for performing the duties of my calendar alerts.”

  A sigh across the speakers. She wondered how he’d modulated those tones. “I understand you wish to preserve both lives, but you have combed this debris field on six occasions. While I admire how quickly you’ve adapted to using your prosthetic in zero-g, I must insist that further EVAs into this field are futile. A waste of both time and resources.”

  “I’d love to hear your plan B, oh wise one.”

  “I don’t think you would.”

  Silence stretched between them.

  “You’re not serious,” she said.

  “It is a possibility. If he cannot be trusted while you are in coldsleep during the journey, then it may be the only solution.”

  “Jettison? Dios, Bero. Would you have jettisoned me if I’d been hostile?”

  A pause. “I’m uncertain. I require a human crew if I am to make it to Atrux alive. Grippy is capable of a great many repairs, but he lacks the dexterity for many tasks.”

  She cut the airjets and drifted, imagining the cold of space seeping through her suit, no matter that it was impossible. Space surrounded her. It always had. Even on world she was, technically, just on a larger spaceship. But it felt different now. Pressing in on her in a way it never had before. She knew what it was to feel alone. Had known the truth of that from the moment she’d accepted what Bero told her was true—and confirmed it when she saw the smear of light that had once been Ada Prime.

  Bero’s voice had been some comfort. Had. Now she wondered, wondered deeply, just what she really knew about the spaceship she called home. Bero was her life raft, her last-ditch effort to survive the destruction her species had wrought. And he put her in the same category as Grippy, the robot. Not that she had anything against robots, but she’d at least expected the AI to acknowledge she was another sentient being. She counted Bero as a person in her own mind.

  This was why Ada Prime didn’t give their AI personalities when it came right down to it. You couldn’t trust the cold, metal bastards.

  “You really would. You would have jettisoned me.”

  “It’s different for me.” A harsh edge etched Bero’s voice. “You do not invite those you do not trust to enter your body, do you? You live in my veins. Can reach into my mind and rearrange things at will. There is… intimacy, in having your mind contained in a place of dwelling.”

  She recognized that tone—the same edge she’d heard when Bero had shouted at her not to attempt the repair on the gasket. It’s dangerous out there.

  It’s dangerous in there, too, she thought, but bit her tongue. Tomas’s arrival had pushed something in Bero, activated a paranoia she’d only caught glimpses of since that first day. But was that fair? What would it be like for her, if people could invade her body at will, rearrange her innards, tweak the systems of her nerves and heart without her permission? Bero was permanently in a state of surgery, conscious.

  Even before the Protocol, that would be enough to drive any
one mad.

  Sanda’s head ached as if she had a brain freeze. Damn coldsleep side effects.

  “He doesn’t mean you harm.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “No. I can’t. And I can only imagine what it’s been like for you, having strangers come and go without asking your permission. I’m sorry I didn’t ask first. I’m sorry I brought him in and woke him up against your judgment. But we’re alone out here, Bero. If we’re to make it, we need all the help we can get. If he proves dangerous, then I’ll leave his fate up to you. But right now, we’re the only two humans kicking around this star system, and I’ve got to protect that.”

  “Understood.”

  “That’s computer-talk. Stop it.”

  A pause. “I’m afraid, Sanda.”

  She breathed out, emptying her lungs down to the bottom of her belly. “Me too. But I’ve got your back, Bero, and I need to know you’ve got mine, too.”

  “I do not have a back.”

  She laughed. “Fine. I’m looking out for you. You look out for me, too. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  The edge was not gone, but it was softened. He could modulate his voice to play off her emotions, but if she followed her thoughts down that rabbit hole there’d be no coming back.

  “What is our sulky friend up to, anyway?” she asked to lighten the topic. She hit the airjets, angling back toward Bero’s ’lock.

  “He has spent the last three days querying information about my schematics, crew, and all stored news sources. I’m afraid he’s disappointed.”