Transformation Protocol

by David M. Kelly

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  When the lights on the supply transfer showed green, I opened the docking controls and overrode the standard clearance protocols. At this point, all I needed to do was disconnect us from the High-Rig—I'd taken care of the Jump programming while we were waiting for the servicing to complete.

  "Sealing airlocks. Disconnecting umbilicals. Releasing docking clamps in ten. All systems switching to internal." I felt the slight pressure change inside my ears as the ship sealed. "Initializing main thrusters for immediate departure."

  "Wait a second, Joe. Aren't you—?"

  Logan was cut off by a shrill klaxon that filled the room and bounced around the off-white walls.

  "What's that?" Aurore had to shout over the noise before I disabled the alarm.

  "We don't have flight clearance." I saw her face twist with worry. "Didn't think they'd be happy if I put in a request."

  She didn't reply, and I turned to the controls. "Thrust in... Three. Two. One."

  The acceleration pushed me down in my seat. It wasn't much, a one-tenth gee boost to clear the High-Rig and move us into free space.

  "Can we move faster?" McDole bit her lip.

  "With the traffic around the High-Rig these days, we need to be careful. Make that double without clearance."

  We hadn't even passed the inner traffic perimeter before the comm system buzzed into life, and a bored voice came from the speakers.

  "Shokasta, what in the hell are you doing? You have no clearance and just lit up every warning on the boards. Looks like Christmas in a shitbake in here."

  "Is that you, Fats?" I had no idea who it was, but in my experience insulting someone always made for a good distraction. "I thought they weren't gonna let you back on flight control."

  "This is Senior Flight Control Officer Lazlo. I don't know who you are, but you better put that ship back on Docking Port 31W right away. You'll find some friendly SecOps people ready and waiting—to arrest you."

  I'd already accessed the Jump controls, and now I activated the build-up sequence as we picked up speed. The Casimir generators had the reserves brimming with available power. I triggered the comms again.

  "Did they finally manage to cure that rash, Fats? The docs ever figure out where you picked it up? And did your wife find out?"

  There was no immediate response, and I looked up. Aurore had a wide grin plastered over her face.

  "That's Francois Lazlo. I swear he hits on every woman assigned to control duty."

  I glanced at the Jump indicator. It was several minutes from zero. I looked back at Aurore. "Know any recent ones?"

  She thought for a minute. "Keshia Ford. He was slobbering all over her. She had better taste, though."

  I thumbed the transmit button again. "Hey, Fats. Heard you tried to nail that babe, Keshia, and she told you to shove it in a fusion coil, that true?"

  An alarm trilled. Maybe I'd pushed too hard. Several missiles had locked onto us.

  "Joe, this might not be a good idea" Logan gripped the arms of his seat.

  "Don't worry. They're posturing. There's no way they'd fire on us."

  Lazlo's voice came back on the comms. "USN Shokasta. You have no flight clearance and have committed an act of piracy. Power down your engines and await a MilSec boarding team. This will be your first and only warning."

  The Jump counter told me we were still a minute away. "Come on, Lazlo. Is that any way to treat an old beer buddy?"

  The Jump was locked in. I couldn't change it at that point, even if I wanted to. We were at full acceleration too, but that wasn't enough to outrun a missile.

  The alarm changed, becoming more urgent, and the threat warning system lit up, dominating the main screen as it tracked an approaching missile. I cursed. Sometimes my mouth definitely wasn't my best friend. The impact predictor was counting down almost in sync with the Jump counter. While technically the ship was armed and armored, a missile would take us out if it hit us. At this range, we couldn't outrun or outmaneuver it.

  The on-screen missile track intersected with the indicator in the screen center representing the ship. I brought up an external display. The missile streaked toward us then detonated, and the screen went white as the ship bucked.

  A second later we Jumped, even though we were far too close to Earth's mass. I felt an internal wrench as if my stomach had been grabbed by some invisible fist then twisted into a knot and ripped out through my navel. My vision collapsed inward, the visible area shrinking to a minuscule dot as if I were looking down a long telescope the wrong way. I groaned then lost consciousness.

  When I came around, I had to check the ship's clock to find out how much time had passed. It hadn't been long. Transparent worms seemed to be wriggling around inside my eyeballs, but they faded quickly.

  "I thought you were trying to get us killed," Logan said.

  "Sorry, I figured if I could get him angry, it would keep him off-balance."

  "Next time, let Logan do the talking." Aurore breathed heavily.

  "Where are we?" McDole was staring at the screen.

  "On the outskirts of Alpha Centauri B, near the Uhrmacher Belt."

  The belt was a vast debris field that floated between Alpha Centauri A and B with asteroids and icy planetoids swapping between the two gravitational systems frequently. It wasn't the safest place to be, but I'd Jumped high above the ecliptic plane to minimize the danger. I brought the ship up to cruising acceleration so we had gravity once more and checked the generators. The Jump had been short, leaving plenty in the power reserves.

  "We'll need four hours to recharge."

  "What then?" Logan said.

  "I'm heading straight in. As close as I can get."

  Marduk Atoll was around one-hundred and thirty A.U. away, deep into the star system and close to the Habitable Zone of the star. There was no planet in the HZ—the dynamics of the twin stars largely disrupted the planetary-forming process, resulting in three separate asteroid belts. It meant we were a long way from the station, but as it wasn't near a planet, I could risk taking a deep Jump to get closer. Marduk had been seeded there a few months after Jump drive technology became available to the Atolls and was the biggest of their exo-bases with a population already over seven thousand.

  "What the hell's going on? I almost broke my neck."

  Dan stood by the entrance, rubbing his bald head.

  I groaned. "Why didn't you get off at the High-Rig?"

  "Well..." He looked at the floor. "I didn't have nowhere to go. And no way of getting there either."

  After Charlie's death, his ranch had been sold off, and with Dan presumed dead in the attack on Deimos, the proceeds had passed to the state's social fund. Dan could undoubtedly claim the return, but with lawyers involved, it was bound to be a drawn-out process.

  "We're heading to Marduk Atoll around Alpha Centauri. I think my wife is there."

  "I thought you were divorced?" Dan stepped closer. "You're nuts."

  I ignored him and made sure there was nothing close enough to hurt us.

  "How close are you going to Jump?" McDole sounded nervous.

  "See the hairs on my head?" As usual, it was shaved clean. "That close."

  I programmed the Jump for when the ship reached full energy levels.

  "You might want to reset your ship's transponder," McDole said. "You're not going to get close to the Atoll if Paek sees you coming."

  "Any suggestions?"

  "I can set it up so we look like an Atoll vessel. At least that way we'll be able to dock with Marduk. Once we're onboard, though, you're on your own."

  "Sounds reasonable." I opened the controls. The Shokasta would have a different physical appearance to an Atoll ship, but in my experience everybody trusted the transponder signal, as it was available at ranges beyond visual identification.

  "I suggest we grab something to eat," Aurore said. "This might be our last chance."

  "A last supper?" Logan growled.

  Aurore and Lo
gan left, with Dan trailing behind them. I turned back to the console and made the changes, guided by McDole. Once we'd finished, we made our way to the wardroom. There wasn't much in the way of supplies, but there were a few of the more edible Atoll rations. We joined the others around a table, and for several minutes, the room was filled with the crackle of food wrappers being opened and munching sounds.

  "Are you going to stop Dollie?" Logan asked.

  As usual, he'd cut straight to the heart of the problem, but I didn't have a clear answer. "Paek deserves to die."

  "You sure, Joe?" Logan took a deep breath. "Everybody follows their own path through life. It often seems right to them, but sometimes that crosses someone else's. It's the nature of the universe."

  "You think he should live?"

  He shook his head. "That's not my call, but you have to choose what road you're on."

  "If it had happened to you and Aurore, what would you do?"

  Logan grimaced. "I'd kill him."

  McDole had been silent through this, and I said to her, "I imagine you see things differently."

  "Because you think I feel a kinship with him?"

  "He's an Atoller."

  "Was." She sighed. "I've said before, not everyone in the Atoll community feels the same—we're not clones. In my opinion, Paek was never a good member of our society."

  "So you won't cry over his corpse?"

  "Killing is always easy. Finding a way to live with someone you disagree with is much harder." She pushed the food around her plate with her fork. "Considering what he did, I wouldn't blame you or your wife if you killed him. But the death of a human being is never something to relish."

  Dan brushed his hands together in dismissal. "Let the 'Tollers sort out their own mess. He ain't a threat to me. So I say leave him alone. Then we can go home."

  I finished my sandwich in silence, doubt gnawing at my stomach like a rabid rat. I'd convinced myself Paek deserved to die and had been prepared to take him out, but the thought of Dollie doing that and how it would affect her afterward had me questioning myself. There was something about Dan that was nagging at me too. Why was he so charitable toward the Atollers after what they'd done to him? He should have been braying for blood as much as me, but all too often he was talking in a much more placatory fashion. Was he that much more forgiving than me?

  A thought grabbed me—what if part of his "treatment" was a form of brainwashing? Could he be a double-agent for the Atolls, where they pretended to hand him over only to milk whatever secrets he could get out of us? Could the apparent indifference between him and McDole be a pretense to throw us off?

  Or possibly the conspiracy rabbits inside my head were freaking out again.

  *

  All too soon, the time to make the next Jump arrived, and I was no nearer to a decision over what I should do. My head said one thing, and my gut said something else. Maybe if I was lucky, Dollie would take that decision away from me. It was cowardly, but in some ways, I hoped we'd get there too late.

  It was strange seeing two large stars on the display, and despite the fact that Alpha Centauri A and B were farther apart than the small red dwarf binaries we'd seen, their relative brightness made them seem more of a double star.

  I slid into the pilot's seat and glanced at the power levels. We were at full power, and I activated the Jump sequence. The countdown was short. Then my stomach twinged as the ship translated through the Jump, passing through the rent the field generators tore in normal space before squeezing us out like a bullet at the other end as the Bronikov fissure collapsed.

  I watched the readings as they came in on the sensors. "We're about four-hundred thousand kilometers from Marduk. We'll be there in about six hours. Communication lag a tad over a second."

  "That's pretty fine shooting, Joe." Logan grinned. "I hope you don't cut things too close one day, and we end up seeing the inside of infinity."

  I laughed. "Somebody has to research these things."

  Aurore shivered. "But it doesn't have to be us, does it?"

  "Most Atollers think Earthers take so many risks," McDole said, "because their lives are so limited and poor they have nothing to lose."

  "Research is the act of going up alleys to see if they're blind." I smiled at her frown. "Risk is part of life."

  The comms system beeped for attention, a routine message directing us to a docking bay on the central hub of the Atoll.

  "Our deception is working. The welcoming party will be carrying garlands instead of assault weapons." I nodded at McDole. "Say thank you to the nice lady, everyone."

  I brought the ship up to full acceleration again, and felt myself pushed more firmly into the seat. "Let's hope they don't have a fit when they see us."

  "With the ID I've given the ship, they shouldn't react adversely whatever our appearance," McDole said stiffly.

  Logan raised an eyebrow. I imagined McDole had tagged the Shokasta as a special ops ship, which was a little surprising. The Atolls had little use for such subterfuge until relatively recently after Earth had broken out from under their isolating policies. Mostly they'd relied on the domination of their position in space.

  As we approached Marduk, I brought up a magnified view on the screen. So far, the station only consisted of the initial hub that formed the central region on the more well-established Atolls. It was still a drum structure beneath the outer protective skin, but unlike the larger ones, there was only one section. Usually they were built in pairs that counter-rotated to offset the gyroscopic effects, but this one had the counter-balancing spoke system at the one end, with the center being a non-rotating area to permit easy ship docking.

  Even without any secondary arms, the scale was impressive. The sensors told me it was three kilometers across and almost as deep. I did some quick math based on what I knew of the internal deck arrangement of the typical Atoll and came up with an internal surface area of over two-thousand square kilometers—about ten times the size of Baltimore and more than enough room to get lost in.

  "That's a lot of ships."

  Logan was right. There were at least a dozen ships around the station, far more than the Atoll could berth internally. "Presumably the VIPs are unloaded then the ships moved out to holding positions."

  "That would be standard practice," McDole confirmed.

  "Every big leaguer going must be here," Dan whispered.

  "I'm scanning the transponders to see if I can pick up any sign of Dollie's ship." Aurore worked her controls.

  "You won't find it," Logan said, shaking his head. "Sigurd will make sure of that."

  "I could set up a visual search," I said. "Feed the imagery through a pattern matcher to see if anything is a mismatch with its transponder."

  "I wouldn't count on that working either. Sigurd was a deep cover specialist." He paused. "I wouldn't be confident you'd find that ship if you went around and inspected every single one personally."

  "You can't hide a spaceship," said McDole.

  I felt the same way. While we knew various tricks to mask a ship's physical signatures, nothing could hide them completely. Unless...

  "The ship might not even be here." I looked around. "They could have Jumped in, left the ship, and programmed it to Jump away again. There could be nothing to look for."

  "And lose their only way of escaping?" Aurore looked at me. "Could they set the ship to automatically return?"

  "Maybe." It seemed unlikely. The local space-time curvature played such a part in a Jump that I couldn't see any way of doing it accurately enough. One rogue gravitational anomaly, and your ship could end up several A.U.s away—not much of an escape route. But I had a hunch Dollie wouldn't care about that. She'd be focused on getting Paek. And ruthless. She'd have planned this down to the last detail.

  "Couldn't you hide a ship inside wherever the Jump goes?" Dan asked.

  "You'd need an infinite amount of energy to hold open the fissure," Aurore said. "That's what limits the length of the Jumps. We can only
generate and release so much energy in a short period."

  McDole pulled a set of station plans from Marduk's computer systems, complete with overlays detailing conference rooms, informal discussion areas, and even sleeping quarters for the guests on board. I was hoping we might anticipate where Dollie would target Paek. The information showed that he was already there, along with everyone else expected to attend. Paek had shown up in the latest Corporate ship design, the Defined Payback, another militarized development based around the Ananta architecture. Seckinger and General Mkandla had arrived the day before us in the Zenith, which I thought was a strange choice but undoubtedly increased the type of saber-rattling potential Mkandla would enjoy. The pissing contest was about to begin.

  I huddled around the screen, studying the plans with Logan and McDole. The rooms where the all-important discussions were scheduled looked impenetrable. The information said they'd be guarded by a combined force drawn from all the major players as well as BlackISE, the private security force favored by the Corporates. The conference organizers seemed to have thought of everything, or at least if there was a weakness, I couldn't see it.

  "That place looks like it's sewn up tighter than Krystal Bliss's pre-nup," I said.

  Aurore laughed. "Her marriage to Romney lasted less time than it took to negotiate."

  "Wow, look at that..." Dan fiddled with an old Scroll he'd been using to help him update his skills. "Who's the dame?"

  He held up the screen. It showed the opening ceremony meet and greet with the various attendees. I scanned it, but Dollie wasn't there. Then I realized what—or rather who—he was referring to. Paek's group had arrived and was hobnobbing with the other representatives. With him was a rather familiar psycho-in-residence.

  "I was trying to hack some of their systems. See if I could find anything useful," Dan said.

  "Gabriella..." I whispered.

  Logan snatched the Scroll from Dan's hand, the composite shell crunching as he gripped it tightly. "That's crazy. She's listed as Paek's companion."

  Gabriella used sex the same way some people used paper tissues, as something temporary and disposable. If she was with Paek, there was something behind it. "She's not there because she's fascinated with him. And I doubt she's decided to go into the prostitution business," I said.