Infinity's End

by Jonathan Strahan

  Those odds she could calculate.

  Because as of this moment, no one had noticed the manual distress signal.

  So it was still broadcasting.

  Which meant that help might actually be on the way.

  THE AUTOMATED DISTRESS signal, half-choked off, arrived at the 52nd Mars Relay Station. Two versions of the same automated distress signal, intact, arrived at the 13th Moon Relay Station. No versions of the automated distress signal made it to any of Earth’s Relay Stations, at least not in recognizable form.

  Within thirty seconds of the automated distress signal’s arrival, the 13th Moon Relay Station evaluated the signal, and determined that the distressed ship was located in the Asteroid Belt. The ship had an old registration, marking it as inconsequential, even though the ship was owned by Treacher, Incorporated, a large entity that had funded many Martian building projects. Treacher also had ties to three different Martian governments.

  But the ship had taken an unusual route, never traveled by ships with highly insured passengers or cargo. The route was by definition dangerous, and anyone on board would have signed a waiver agreeing to rescue only in financially advantageous circumstances.

  The age of the ship, the route, and the lack of insurance did not make this a financially advantageous circumstance.

  But Treacher’s ownership did flag the system, so the 13th Moon Relay Station followed protocol for difficult and iffy rescues in the Asteroid Belt. The 13th Moon Relay Station sent copies of the automated distress signal to its counterpart on Mars.

  Then the 13th Moon Relay Station sent the automated distress signals to its archives.

  No one on the Moon even knew that an automated distress signal had arrived, been examined, and passed back to Mars. And no one on the Moon would have cared.

  WHAT COLETTE HAD to do was buy time. If the bad guys were on the Blue Moon to take the Egg, then she had to hide the Egg from them.

  The problem was... what if she was wrong? What if they were here for something else?

  She didn’t have a lot of control with this particular tablet. She was working to get more access, but she needed to spoof her own position here in the suite, and that would take time.

  She tried to delete all of the cargo manifests, and couldn’t delete any of them. She didn’t have the clearance.

  She sat cross-legged on her bed for a good minute, trying to figure out how to stay one step ahead of these very bad people.

  She had to convince them that they were in trouble on this ship, and she had to keep the Egg from them.

  Those were two different tasks.

  She called up the passenger manifest to see if she could locate anyone else who might be able to help her. She flipped manifest to its location-based listings, and saw, without looking at names, that all of the passengers were in the large buffet, scattered around the room, as if they were sitting at tables.

  All of the passengers except her.

  Before she could stop herself, she flipped the data again, saw her parents’ names and personal shipboard identification numbers. Then she flipped back to location-based information. Two little green dots, with her parents’ shipboard identification numbers, blinked from the side of the buffet, near the kitchen. They weren’t moving, but then, neither were the other passengers.

  Colette didn’t want to even guess what that meant. She hoped they were all sitting quietly, depressed at the circumstances, rather than being unconscious or injured or dea—

  Focus, focus, focus.

  She opened the tablet to the cargo manifest. The correct one. She took the contents, copied it into another file, marking that new file Sanitation Refill Schedule. Then she opened one of the cargo manifests without the hazardous materials, and copied the data from that manifest, and pasted it over the original manifest.

  Then she simply saved it. When she opened it again, the information on the Egg had vanished.

  And that had been too easy. Someone should have realized just how simple it was to make mistakes in this system, not that it was her problem.

  But the bad guys might figure that out. So, she moved the cargo manifest out of its normal file and into the food service files. Some searches would bring up the cargo manifest, but someone would have to know what kind of search to conduct.

  She needed to figure out how to distract the bad guys until the rescue ship got here.

  And she needed to be able to do so from inside this suite.

  FOR A MOMENT, Napier had thought he found one of the cargo manifests, and then it had vanished on him. He had a device that easily broke the surface codes on the bridge’s systems, but the device didn’t give him what this system called the Captain’s Access Codes. For that, Napier needed five forms of physical ID, which he had planned for.

  He already had his men getting that for him.

  In the meantime, he searched. He felt a slight time pressure, but knew that because of the distances out here, he had more time on this job than he would have had he been closer to Mars or Earth’s Moon. He had an internal clock, and at the moment, it allowed him to feel some leeway.

  He paused his search for the cargo manifest to find a way to retract the captain’s chair. The damn thing rose in the middle of the narrow bridge like a throne, and he wanted it gone. It irritated him, particularly since it turned to offer him a seat every time he brushed against it (which was much too often for his tastes).

  He finally found the controls for the chair, but as he did, he also saw something else. A blinking emergency light, buried deep in the manual controls.

  He touched the light with a bit of hesitation, worried that he would activate the wrong system.

  Instead, he found that a second distress signal had been sending for more than an hour. Why a ship like this would have more than one distress signal, and why this one wasn’t attached to the beacon, he had no idea.

  Shutting it off was a simple matter. He toggled the controls to the off position. The system didn’t even argue.

  For a moment, he wondered about the secondary signal. Then he decided it was probably part of the automated distress signal’s system, not something he had to worry about.

  He needed to spend his time finding one tiny piece of cargo in six cargo bays stuffed with material ultimately bound for Earth.

  He had a dozen people on his team, but that wasn’t enough to search all of those cargo bays. And he was searching for the Glyster Egg, which was a delicate system in and of itself. He had no idea if his own equipment would accidentally activate it.

  He didn’t want to take that risk, not this far out. What if the Egg had a broadcast feature he didn’t know about? What if it not only disabled this starliner, but his ship as well?

  That was something he didn’t want to suffer through.

  So he needed to proceed with caution.

  And he needed to find the cargo manifest.

  SOMETHING IN THE automated distress signal that arrived at the 52nd Mars Relay Station activated the review process.

  The review system sent a notification to the starbase beyond Titan where the Blue Moon originated, asking for a passenger manifest. Calculations needed to be made. The system needed to do a proper cost-benefit analysis of the rescue. Could the rescue vehicle arrive on time? Could it save the ship/cargo/passengers? Were the lives/cargo/ship worth the cost of the rescue?

  Such an analysis could not be done without passenger names and histories.

  As the system waited, the message from the 13th Moon Relay Station arrived. Now, the Martian system noted that the Moon would not conduct a rescue or even contemplate one, should one be needed.

  Only the Martian system would take the risks involved, which changed the calculations yet again.

  The system was about to reject the rescue request, even without an answer from the starbase, when several manual distress signals arrived, evenly spaced from each other.

  But each manual distress signal contained a signature, proving that someone on board the B
lue Moon had crafted that distress signal by hand.

  That someone was named Colette Euphemia Josephine Treacher Singh Wilkinson Lopez.

  Treacher.

  A quick analysis showed that Colette Euphemia Josephine Treacher Singh Wilkinson Lopez was a distant Treacher relative, not involved in the corporation or in any local governments, but still on tap to receive a portion of the Treacher Trust when she came of age.

  A second Treacher was on board as well, another woman, also in line to receive an inheritance from the Treacher Trust.

  Treachers were protected throughout the solar system because of the family’s great involvement in many businesses and governments from Mars to Saturn and maybe beyond.

  The review’s purpose changed. The routine review no longer had relevance.

  Two Treachers on board a ship, any ship, anywhere within the reach of Mars Rescue Services, required an immediate and adequate rescue response.

  The information got forwarded to Mars Vehicle Rescue (Space Unit), along with all available information, including the amount of time lapsed.

  Given the hazards of travel through that part of the Asteroid Belt, and given the kinds of emergencies that happened there, the time lapsed changed the chances of success from more than 80% to less than 50%.

  Which meant, given the costs of rescues that far from Mars itself, all Mars Vehicle Rescue (Space Unit) could spare would be one large rescue vehicle, with a crew of twenty.

  The systems in Mars Vehicle Rescue (Space Unit) had determined likely outcomes, and decided that the most possible outcome was this: The rescue vehicle would arrive to find a destroyed ship, dead passengers, and no rescue needed.

  But the presence of Treachers meant the possibility of lawsuits. The possibility of lawsuits meant that it would be good to get the DNA of the dead Treachers, just to prove that their portion of the Treacher Trust was now available for some other distant relative.

  Mars Vehicle Rescue (Space Unit) did not want to be liable for anything to do with the Treacher Trust, so the rescue ship numbered MVR14501, but known to its crew as Sally, left its docking ring on the way to an out-of-the-way shipping route in the Asteroid Belt.

  Instead of a crew of twenty, the Sally had only ten crew members. If they had had to wait for the remaining ten crew members to arrive from their scheduled time off, departure would have been delayed another three hours, something the system calculated it did not have.

  It didn’t matter that the crew was small; the chances of success were small too.

  The crew of the Sally looked at the rescue attempt as a drill, not an actual job.

  And that was a mistake.

  THE STUPID PASSENGER identification system seemed hardwired to the life reading of that particular passenger. Colette didn’t remember signing up for that but she was a “minor” who “had no rights” without “suing for them” so she had no idea what her parents had done to guarantee her passage on this ship.

  Whatever it was, she couldn’t spoof the system and if she couldn’t spoof the system, she couldn’t get out of the suite.

  She stood because her butt was falling asleep on the bed’s hard surface. She moved the tablet onto a little holder built into the wall, and wished she could use a holoscreen instead.

  Something pinged in her brain about holoscreens, but she let that marinate. Because what she really wanted to do was get the tablet to tell her where the bad guys were, and so far, the tablet was refusing.

  Well, it wasn’t refusing, exactly, because that would have meant it had some kind of sentience, which it did not. What it was doing was refusing to acknowledge their life signs, since they were not paying passengers.

  Apparently, crew, staff, and service personnel at any kind of starbase stop were beneath the notice of the concierge level. She dug into the systems, and tried to see if she could get a reading on the non-paying passengers, even if they only appeared as some kind of shadowy coordinates on the ship’s map.

  She couldn’t, any more than she could detach her own heartbeat from the passenger manifest, but she could reset the holographic concierges on every single floor.

  That discovery made her heart race. She couldn’t reset the concierges to “forget” anyone, which was probably good from the ship’s point of view, but she could set up the concierges to interact with every human being they encountered.

  She dug deeper into the controls. She could actually set up the concierges to follow anyone unregistered with the ship. Some of the more sophisticated concierges could follow the unregistered person until someone in authority dealt with them, even if that meant following that person off the ship.

  Well, she couldn’t get out of here and harass the bad guys herself, not without getting caught, and she couldn’t get the Egg and figure it out without getting caught, but she could do this.

  She only hoped it would be enough.

  NAPIER WAS ABOUT to contact his second, Grizwald, when the man walked onto the bridge. He was larger than most of Napier’s crew, but size had its uses, especially when it came to intimidation.

  And intimidation wasn’t the only thing Griz was good at.

  Griz handed Napier a small box containing everything he needed to access the Captain’s Codes.

  “We got some problems,” Griz said.

  “No kidding,” Napier said and opened the box. It had the skin gloves, and some other bits and pieces of the captain himself, no longer bloody, but cleaned up so that Napier could use them.

  “I mean it.” Griz’s tone was harsh. “Look.”

  Napier frowned with annoyance, then looked in the direction that Griz was pointing. A head floated behind him.

  For a moment, Napier thought maybe Griz had brought him the captain’s actual head, but he hadn’t.

  “What the hell?” Napier asked.

  Griz slid his hand toward the head, and his hand went through it. The head vanished for a half a second, then returned.

  “You are unauthorized,” it said. “If you do not leave this area, you will be subject to discipline.”

  “Discipline?” Napier asked Griz. “From who?”

  Griz rolled his eyes. “The crew,” he said.

  Well, that wouldn’t happen. Part of the crew was trapped in the so-called brig (really, two emergency cells that would get troublemakers to the next base) guarded by three of his people, and the rest of the crew was piled in an airlock, awaiting Napier’s order to have the bodies join the rocks floating around this part of the Asteroid belt.

  “So what’s the problem?” Napier asked.

  “It’s following me,” Griz said. “And it won’t go away.”

  “That’s not a problem,” Napier said, by which he meant, That’s not a problem I need to deal with right now.

  “It’s blocking access to crew quarters and other parts of the ship,” Griz said. “Once it started following me, everything shut down when I got near it.”

  Napier felt a surge of anger rush through him. “So you came here?”

  He glanced at the bridge controls, and sure enough, they had all shut down. He would have to redo all of his work.

  “Get out,” he said to Griz. “Now.”

  “You both must leave,” the head said to Napier.

  “And take that thing with you,” Napier said to Griz.

  Griz shook his own head, then scooted around the holo-head, and went out the door. The head remained for some reason Napier did not understand.

  “You must leave,” the head said to him.

  “Not happening,” Napier said, and opened the box. The ship required a minimum of five forms of physical identification from an officer to access certain parts of the controls.

  The most basic was active fingertip control, which the ship would test to see if the finger was warm, attached, and belonging to a crew member.

  Napier had stolen a number of items over the years that made warm and attached and belonging into three different things. The ship would think that his hands were the Captain’s ha
nds.

  “You must leave,” the head said to Napier.

  “And you’re going to get shut down,” Napier said, as he placed his index finger on the bridge control board.

  “Not happening,” the head said, mirroring Napier’s earlier response, which worried him more than he wanted to think about.

  He decided not to look at the stupid head anymore.

  Instead, he went back to work.

  HALFWAY TO THE coordinates in the Asteroid Belt, Dayah Rodriguez, who was in charge of the Sally’srescue team, finally got a reading on the Blue Moon.

  The ship didn’t seem to be in physical trouble, although it hadn’t moved from the location cited in the distress signal. But one small ship floated around it, constantly bouncing and shivering the way that some of the illegal vessels did to avoid standard tracking units.

  Fortunately, Sally didn’t use standard tracking.

  A jolt of adrenaline shot through Rodriguez.

  She suddenly realized they were understaffed and perhaps lacking the proper amount of firepower.

  “Speed up,” she said to Hamish Sarkis, who was piloting the Sally. “And send a message back to headquarters. We have pirates. And if we want to catch them, we’re going to need some help.”

  They were going to need a lot more than help.

  They were going to need a lot of luck as well.

  NOW, COLETTE WAS obsessing about her parents. Because they still hadn’t moved. No one had. Why weren’t the passengers fighting back? What was going on?

  She was pacing around the bed, trying to figure out if breaking out of this stupid suite was worthwhile.

  And then her breath caught.

  She had set up the concierges to follow the bad guys.

  She just needed to locate the concierges. When she found them, she would know where the bad guys were.

  Which would help her escape, but then what?