Maelstrom of Treason

by Michael Anderle

  “I’ll spend some time up there too,” Jia suggested. “I can practice, and with Emma backing me up, there’s not much of a risk, even when you’re asleep.”

  Lanara ignored the conversation, her attention fixed on a complicated line diagram that was a mystery to Erik. She’d mentioned it had something to do with power allocation on the ship. Every once in a while, she muttered something under her breath, followed by a number and a percentage before stabbing a node with her finger and producing a new diagram.

  Cutter leaned toward Lanara. “Hey, we’re the only fleshbags not paired up on this ship.”

  She gave him a harsh glare. “Shouldn’t you be checking on something in the cockpit and not wasting time with your feeble efforts to seduce me?”

  “Yeah. Probably.” Cutter grimaced and stood up, stretching. “Am I being haunted by my ex-girlfriends?” He hurried toward the cockpit, slapping the access panel with force as if afraid Lanara would produce a hidden weapon any second. The door slid closed behind him as he disappeared into the front of the ship.

  Lanara returned to looking at her diagram and muttering.

  Erik chuckled and shook his head. “I wonder if he’s going to get himself shot again to impress you?”

  “It wouldn’t impress me,” Lanara mumbled. “It’s easy to get shot. All you have to do is stand there. Every losing side in a war has a lot of someones who got shot.”

  Erik took a sip of his coffee. “I can’t argue with that logic.”

  “We do have to get along,” Jia suggested. “It’s going to be a long trip otherwise. I understand you might find his personality grating, but he will get the message.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Lanara insisted. “He can just not talk to me about irrelevant things. It’s inefficient.”

  “Fair enough. I’ll pass that along to him.” Jia looked at Erik, who shrugged.

  Not everyone could get along, and Cutter needed to learn not to annoy the engineer. Of the two of them, he was less important.

  That didn’t mean they were ready to operate without him. Relying on Emma before Jia was fully trained was a flawed plan. It’d be annoying if they needed the ship but someone was jamming them.

  They also needed a human face for many piloting situations.

  “By the way, Jia, don’t spend too much time sitting around in the cockpit,” Erik commented with a smile. “It might not be as nice as where we’ve been training, but I want to run you through more exo training in the VR rig. You’ve picked up a lot. I swear every hour of training is like a week for most people.”

  Erik didn’t want to admit that he hadn’t picked up exo piloting as quickly as Jia. She was another example of someone who wasn’t in the right position to maximize her inborn talents. She would have been a better fit for the military than the young Erik with impulse control problems.

  “Between the VR and normal flight time, it’ll be a good few days for training for me,” Jia noted.

  “Always need to keep busy?” Erik asked.

  “It’s not like we’ve got a hidden dance club in this thing,” Jia replied. She craned her neck upward, locking her eyes on the low ceiling. “It’s a good thing nobody’s claustrophobic. It is messing with me more than it did on the way to the prison station.”

  “It took me a while to get used to transports when I joined the Army. Knowing you, it’ll happen soon enough.”

  Lanara snapped her head up. “Good!”

  “I would think so.” Jia tried to move her chair before remembering it was bolted to the floor.

  Lanara shook her head. “Do you even know what I’m talking about?”

  Jia went back through the conversation in a second. “Actually, no.”

  “The VR.” Lanara frowned at Jia.

  “What about it?” Erik raised an eyebrow. “Is there something wrong with it?”

  There was being quirky, and then there was forcing your fellow team members to sleep in shifts to ensure one wouldn’t murder them all in their sleep.

  He wasn’t sure how long it’d take him to get used to their new engineer.

  “I still need to calibrate the system, and I need testers,” Lanara spouted. “You two will do well. Your experience doing this kind of thing means I can get useful data that will result in a decent system. I’m curious how far I can push this thing in the limited space and conditions. Processing power isn’t as much of an issue between the ship’s system, Emma, and the MX 60.” She trailed off, muttering under her breath. “52.4…25…400.”

  Erik turned to Jia. “I knew Fleet guys who used to say the crazier the engineer, the better.”

  Jia eyed Lanara. “I’d settle for someone between extremes.”

  Erik believed in Alina’s judgment, but he didn’t know what to make of Lanara. A woman that obsessed with her job would either be the best engineer he’d ever worked with, or a crazed lunatic who would end up sacrificing the rest of the crew to improve reactor efficiency. Erik had met a lot of unusual people in the military, but the nature of military life and training hammered out the extremes or at least taught soldiers and sailors to hide it. He’d always thought the old Fleet saying was a joke.

  Now he wasn’t so sure.

  He’d been expecting Lanara to look up, scowl at him, and declare his conversation inefficient, but she continued with her quiet number-intensive self-dialog. If it ended in improvements to the VR or power systems, Erik wouldn’t complain.

  He cleared his throat. “The first part of this assignment is already going well.”

  Jia gave him a puzzled look. “It is? How do you figure? All we’ve done is leave Earth. I know it’s only the third time for me, but I don’t feel like that’s a huge achievement.”

  “You’re thinking about this the wrong way.”

  Her face wasn’t blank, but it wasn’t animated either as she said, “Then enlighten me.”

  Erik motioned to the cockpit. “We’re on our way. If this does involve Talos, then I’m that closer to finding the people behind Molino. We spent too many weeks sitting around doing reports and waiting for something to happen. Now something is happening.”

  “Sukorn might already be dead and vaporized,” Jia pointed out. “Or turned into a weird mutant or nanozombie or cyberdragon or whatever absurdity the conspiracy can churn out.”

  “Then we deliver justice and put him out of his misery.” Erik shrugged. “Simple as that.”

  “I just said he might have been turned into a cyberdragon, and your response is, ‘Simple as that?’” Jia opened her mouth, shut it, shook her head, and tried again. “It’d be like fighting a dinosaur.”

  “Dinosaurs were tough because they went up against other animals. If mammals had had laser rifles and missiles back then, they wouldn’t have had to wait for that meteor.” Erik mimed firing a rifle. “You fire something that penetrates inside the belly of the beast and wait a second. Instant hemorrhaging.”

  “I suppose.” Jia didn’t look convinced. “Let’s set that aside. What if it has nothing to do with Talos? What if it’s just local gangsters? I’m okay with cleaning house, but I want to make sure you’re okay. If tracking down the people behind Molino just meant heading to Mars, I’m sure the ID would have already done that.”

  “Every planet can use fewer gangsters. Exercise and warmup are good for the body and soul.” Erik frowned and looked toward the door leading to the cargo bay. “It would have been nice if Alina had delivered our exos, but I can count on one hand the times I’ve used one in the last year, so I can’t say it’s required. Anyway, just have to kill time for a few days, and then we’ll go find her missing ghost and bring him back from the dead. Maybe take down a few gangsters or terrorists along the way if we’re lucky.”

  “That’s our version of luck these days? Gangsters and terrorists appearing to kill us?”

  Erik reached up and scratched under his chin. “Yeah. Something like that.”

  “Well, now that you mention it…” Jia’s mouth twitched into a mischievous sm
ile. “We’re one for two on not getting hijacked on trips lately. That’s good odds.”

  “We’re going to get hijacked? By who? Lanara or Cutter?” Erik laughed.

  “What about pirates?” Jia suggested.

  “In the Solar System?” Erik laughed. “You don’t see pirates, even near a core system. That would be…odd.”

  Jia raised an eyebrow. “Weirder than nanozombies or a crazy scientist keeping yaoguai in her apartment?”

  “Yeah. There’s our luck again.” Erik drummed his hands on the table and stood. “Now you’ve got me all worked up thinking about it, we might as well test Lanara’s VR rig and a new scenario Emma and I came up with.”

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Jia whistled in appreciation.

  The harness and VR helmet didn’t trick her into thinking she was in a full exoskeleton, but the sense of movement, visuals, and directional sound were spot-on. The slight shake of impact with each fall of the exoskeleton’s foot also was off just enough to remind her she was in VR. She laughed after thinking about it.

  “What’s so funny?” Erik asked, his voice coming through her comm. “I didn’t put any bikini-wearing space raptors in this scenario.”

  “I keep thinking how this VR rig isn’t realistic,” Jia explained. “But I’m comparing it to the nano-augmented VR, which is still fake. I’ve never piloted a real exoskeleton, so why am I complaining?”

  “True, but I’ve tested our normal place,” Erik replied. “It’s pretty close. In the Army, they start you out in simulations before they let you pilot the real thing for anything more than post maintenance runs. If it weren’t for them wanting us to get up to speed on field repairs, they might not have let us touch exos for a long time.”

  Jia jogged through a narrow canyon, a mountain on one side, a mesa on the other. Four AI squadmates trailed behind her in a V formation. The big disadvantage of the main full-sensory VR setup was its one-person limit. The whole rig was crammed into a corner of the cargo bay, accessible through a narrow path between supply crates. Lanara had set up VR helmets people could interface from anywhere via their PNIUs, but other than mild haptic feedback and directional sound via the PNIUs, they couldn’t offer immersion. They were useful for entertainment, not training.

  “Something’s better than nothing,” Jia concluded. “And training’s how I spend most of my free time lately.”

  “That’s kind of sad,” Erik suggested.

  “We all can’t play with little trees,” Jia retorted.

  Erik grinned. “I should have brought mine.”

  “I’m impressed with what Lanara pulled off in such a short time,” Jia admitted, deciding she’d had enough discussion about penjing, despite being the one to bring it up. “But it’s kind of strange. The training we’ve done at the range in the Shadow Zone, not to mention all the fights I’ve been in, have convinced me there is something fundamentally different when you know it’s real, even if it is still training.”

  “The brain always knows,” Erik offered. “That’s why you can’t get away with only training in simulations. The military’s spent a long time trying to figure out how to do that and keep combat readiness, but it comes back to real hours in the real world.”

  “If the simulations get me halfway there, I’ll be satisfied.”

  Erik smiled, proud of how far she’d come in so many ways. “Okay, no jokes, no bikinis. You’ve already demoed thorough control over movement and weapons. I’m keeping the accuracy and number of enemies a little lower for a few more simulations since you’ll need to adjust to the rig feelings, but this isn’t recon, rendezvous, or a shooting gallery. Your briefing is as follows: this is search and destroy for the targets, aggressive insurrectionists heading toward a cluster of small loyalist settlements in an APC. The villages are being evacuated, but if you don’t take out the APC before they arrive, civilian casualties are guaranteed. Satellite imagery spotted the APC moving into these mountains but has lost contact since then. Civilian vehicles have been spotted in the area.”

  “Are the rebels using optical camouflage?” Jia asked.

  “Unknown, but unlikely given the enemy,” Erik replied. “But there are a lot of mountain overhangs. If they’re lucky or timing it right, they could escape the satellites. Presume that’s the case. Terrorists have been picking off recon drones and ambushing squads after triangulation. I’ll leave up to you to decide how you want to handle that.”

  “I think I’d find being a soldier very frustrating,” Jia admitted. “All those deadly enemies hiding. No one wants a straight-up fight.”

  “Yeah. It’s nice when you can just call in close air support to tear them a new asshole, but anyone who lasts more than a week in a war knows how to keep themselves hidden. Heck, it’d be easy if all we needed to do was call in the Fleet to blast them into dust from orbit.” Erik chuckled. “Unsurprisingly, people don’t line up for orbital strikes and fighter strafing runs. You should hear how much the guys in Fleet whine about it. You don’t win a war without boots on the ground, no matter how many fancy ships you have.”

  The squad cleared the canyon and approached a narrow path leading up the side of another mesa. It was just wide enough for a single-file line of exoskeletons. Jia headed toward the path. Her AI squadmates fell in behind. If she couldn’t use a recon drone, she’d gain elevation and rely on magnification.

  A quick climb brought them to the top of the mesa.

  The mountains and hills around them were packed tightly together, with enough crags and overhangs to confirm why the satellites couldn’t pick up the enemy. Light glinted off something approaching the mountains in the distance.

  Jia magnified the image. It was a caravan of open-bed hovertrucks. The bulky design and slow speed suggested farming models, common in many frontier colonies. Men, women, and children filled the backs. Nobody held weapons, but some held dogs.

  “Well, great, we’ve got evacuees in the area,” Jia grumbled. “Dozens of them.”

  “You could try to contact them,” Erik suggested.

  “If the rebels are monitoring things, we’d give away our position, and potentially theirs. I don’t get it. They should have cleared this area already,” Jia hissed. “Unless they’re waiting.”

  “Waiting? Why would they do that?”

  “To pick off the civilians,” Jia concluded. “Alpha Five, launch a recon drone. We don’t have time to play hide and seek. Those civilians won’t survive one minute under rebel fire.”

  She held her breath and added the drone feed as a translucent overlay on the side of her faceplate. The drone swept the area, highlighting the approaching civilian vehicles in red but not finding any enemies. Higher-altitude images made it clear there was only one major way to get through the area. The civilians were in hover vehicles, not flitters. That would keep them near the ground and funnel them through the single pass for the slaughter.

  “The rebels haven’t taken out our drone, but we haven’t spotted them.” Jia turned her exoskeleton back toward the path leading to the base of the mesa. Jump thrusters could help her pull tricks, but there was only so much they could slow her fall in a normal-G environment, and she didn’t trust her thrust control yet. Killing herself by falling would be a ridiculous way to fail a scenario.

  Led by Jia, the squad sprinted down the rocky path with resounding thumps. She jumped to the ground near the end, turning in the air and bursting into a sprint upon contact. The other exoskeletons didn’t complete the same maneuver, instead running all the way down before turning to follow her.

  “That’s bad AI,” Jia grumbled.

  “No, it’s not,” offered Emma with a huff. “Erik was very specific about what he wanted in terms of their capabilities.”

  “That’s right,” Erik interjected. “Some people are better than others. You shouldn’t assume everyone with an exo can pull off the same stunts. I’ve seen that backfire a lot of times in the field.”

  Jia snorted. “You could handle it. I’m g
oing to be working with you.”

  “Or local Militia, or even local cops, who might not be all that well-trained. Keep that in mind. Now that we’re freelance, we might end up with some idiot with an exo hidden in his basement as our only help while we’re getting overrun by crazed terrorists.”

  “That’s a charming image,” Jia suggested.

  “But not an impossible one,” Erik insisted.

  Jia moved forward, using the recon drone feed to guide her through the rough terrain. The enemy was there; it wasn’t instinct guiding her, it was deduction.

  Erik and Emma might be dynamically adjusting the simulation, but this wasn’t a fantasy Zitark scenario. There was no reason to suspect the enemy had optical camouflage, and they weren’t being spotted through normal means, which meant they were hiding somewhere.

  “Come on, come on,” Jia muttered. “Alpha Two, contact the civilian convoy. Warn them off until we’ve secured the area.”

  She’d made it several more minutes when her simulated squadmate replied, “They don’t believe us. They think it’s a rebel trick.”

  “More realism,” Jia grumbled. “I’m missing the bikini babes already.”

  Erik snickered. “I knew you would.”

  Jia and the squad closed into the narrow opening of the canyon. No rebels in sight, no ambush. No sign of an enemy.

  Her heart rate increased.

  “What’s going on?” Jia frowned. “I don’t get it.” She killed her outside view and focused on the drone, taking control from her squadmate and moving it lower until it was skimming the trucks. “If they’re not trying to take out the civilians, then what are they trying to do? I…wait a second.”

  Each truck contained the exact same people and dogs. Either this was a colony of clones, or the whole thing was a trick. Jia decided on the latter, but that didn’t explain why the rebels would send a bunch of trucks with holograms. The vehicles were moving, meaning they couldn’t be concealing troops without obvious distortions in the holograms. She lowered the drone and moved it alongside the front cabin of one vehicle before moving to another. The drivers were identical.