by Kate Moretti
Katie rolled out the door, working her arms as hard as she could on the wheels of her chair, with Rachel walking quickly alongside her. It might not have made much difference if they did have the truck; Martian electric motors were notoriously pokey. The tractor ground along the road into the capital at its top speed: a steady twenty kilometers an hour. Katie gritted her teeth as she drove, trying to ignore the frustrating feeling that she could have outrun the damn thing in the old days. It was cramped in the cab, with Rachel sitting beside her and the folded-up wheelchair crammed in between them. Neither of the girls spoke until they hit the outskirts of town and a solid traffic jam, whereupon Katie let loose with a string of good old English profanity that would have done New York proud.
Rachel craned her neck out the window. When she pulled her head back in, her face had gone pale again. “There are tanks blocking Wanda the Great Boulevard,” she said.
“Run for it, Ray,” Katie said, her hands clenched on the steering wheel.
“What?! Don’t be ridic—”
“With your face and hair, you’re a dead girl walkin’ to whoever’s overthrown Anya. Your only chance is to run and hide.”
“You’re just as well-known as I am!”
“Yeah, but I can’t run. You got a chance. Go and take it, ya dumb Polack!”
Rachel grabbed Katie’s arm and turned her fierce green-eyed gaze on her. “I won’t leave you, and that’s that!”
And then it was too late. A whole flying squadron of uniformed soldiers on scooters, riding against the traffic, pulled up on both sides of the tractor. A towheaded guy who looked not much older than Katie and Rachel dismounted and knocked on the driver’s side door. “Lady Kaitlyn? Lady Rachel?”
“Maybe it’s all right, Katie,” Rachel whispered. “Coup plotters wouldn’t call us that, would they?”
“It must be a trap,” Katie whispered back. “I won’t let them take me without a fight!”
The soldier knocked again. “The Queen thought you might be worried, but everything is all right. She said to tell you she never properly thanked you for helping Zap-Gun Jack rescue her from the Greater Venusian Medusa.”
Katie looked at Rachel, who looked back at her. Nobody but the four of them and Jack’s Venusian friend, Karolla, knew about that little misadventure, the very subject of Rachel’s short story “Zap-Gun Jack Flash and the Dame-Eating Monster of Venus,” which had created this whole version of reality. The girls shrugged and opened the doors. Ten minutes later, they were sitting comfortably in a private room in the Roseate Palace, sipping Elysium Planitia tea and nibbling kruckle bean cookies.
“It was a close-run thing,” Anya was saying. She really did look just like Rachel, except for a mostly-healed scar running from her left temple to her ear, a souvenir of her struggle of wills with Johnny Marshall—alias King Ares III. “We never would have found out in time if you hadn’t made that call. And you say it’s because you finally managed to build that transistor thing you’ve been talking about?”
Katie nodded. “Yes, when I put it in our radio instead of one of the vacuum tubes, it seems to have made it just a bit more sensitive, enough to pick up the coup plotters’ transmissions.” She elbowed Rachel and grinned. “But it wouldn’t have worked if fumblefingers here hadn’t soaked the transistor and then half-broke it…”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Martin Berman-Gorvine is the author of six published science fiction/fantasy novels: the Sidewise Award-winning novel The Severed Wing (Livingston Press, 2002), 36 (Livingston Press, 2012), Seven Against Mars (Wildside Press, 2013), Save the Dragons! (Wildside Press, 2013), which was a finalist for the Prometheus Award, Ziona: A Novel of Alternate History (Amazon/CreateSpace, 2014), and Heroes of Earth (Wildside Press, 2015).
THOUGHTS ON BRAVE NEW GIRLS
“I have always been a proud feminist and cannot fathom why any society would insist on hobbling half of its people. I am also drawn to powerful, active female characters in my own writing, which certainly implies that they have high scientific and technical skills in the best traditions of speculative fiction.”
Illustration for “Of Cat’s Whiskers and Klutzes” by Evelinn Enoksen
ROBIN HACKER
by Ursula Osborne
CHAPTER ONE
“Oh, not again!”
My computers began to ping and beep, flashing lights in all colors of the rainbow. Warnings of all sorts flashed on my screens, but I dismissed them immediately. I knew the words by heart, and I didn’t need to read any of them to know I had been discovered yet again.
I hated being on the run; it was a real hassle. I didn’t mind the running so much, and I was never afraid. But moving, hiding, packing—that was the problem. I hated all of it. Not to mention I’d have to get new ID, new documents to travel around the city, and new equipment. That would cost me a lot of money I didn’t have.
I’d have to get a new spaceship, too, which was the biggest problem of all. I had no money, and ships were hard to come by. You needed papers, reasons, an ID, a pilot license and registration, and all kinds of things that would get me identified and recognized. That would cause the computers to flash, beep, and notify everybody that I was armed and dangerous—a fugitive and a traitor—and I didn’t care for that, if you can believe it.
I never had much problem with stealing, but I always made sure it went to a good cause. Now I’d have to waste some of the rebel money on my own relocation, all because I’d been so careless. It hurt my ego, and it might hurt the people who were being harmed by the stuff my friends and I had created. I rarely slipped like this—I made sure I was the best in the game. But even the best had bad days.
Slamming down on the buttons, pushing levers up and down, turning dials, and typing on my keyboard, I finally managed to quiet my ship down. The warnings ceased, the lights flickered out, and the silence enveloped me. It was so much easier to think in peace and quiet.
I just had to focus. First, I launched my signal jammers full force. I never powered all of them up if I could help it—it took too much energy from the ship. But at the moment, I needed every possible solution to stay hidden long enough to escape. The next step was to turn off all the processes I wouldn’t need. Online banking, hacking software, and company databases all went dark on my screens, all replaced by police surveillance streams and feeds. I shut down the lights both inside and out, little that it helped.
I didn’t know who had found me. It could’ve been my school or maybe the government. Either way, it was the same people. They’d probably teamed up to send their hounds after me. As I’d learned a year before, they were in this together, and finding me was at the top of their list.
Finally gaining some control over the ship and steering to the side of the flyway, I focused on the reports. On the official channels, I was barely mentioned. Nobody liked to admit a fourteen-(but fifteen in fifty seven days)-year-old girl was breaking down the best defenses the universe had to offer and cleaning out any company on her way through. I learned soon after they started chasing me for the first time that they had a code for me. I was usually a rogue soldier getting hold of an army ship. They warned the citizens of our and any neighboring cities to stay grounded, preferably inside their homes, and wait until I was caught.
The disguise was a clever one, because there were rogue soldiers roaming around Space quite often these days. The government tested a new drug on them to make them fight longer and without question, and it messed with their brains. That was why so many went cuckoo, busted out, stole a ship, caused some mayhem, then usually died in a lab under the scrutinizing doctors and scientists trying to fix the drug and its influences. The drug my school created. The drug my friend created.
Revisiting those memories made me shudder, but deep down, it made me warm, as well. I missed my friends from the all-girls school for gifted galactic, and more often than not, I forgot abou
t them. I should really make more effort to stay in touch. The silly things one thinks when under pressure…
The Vidya Intergalactic Science Institute for Girls I was visiting promised a bright future in making our societies even better, thriving in a post-apocalyptic world. Earth died a long time ago, ruined by humans who have since populated many similar planets.
Today, people needed smart leaders with skills that would make our living in Space better and easier with time. Or so they made us believe. When I was picked, it was the best day of my life. I was just twelve at the time, years ahead of my schoolmates, and they allowed me an early transition to my second-level schooling. My parents were so proud, they bought me piloting lessons with an instructor, and I aced the final exam a couple of weeks later.
I think they must regret it now when I zoom between the planets, mostly hiding in Space, stealing. I haven’t had any contact with them since I escaped. I caused a lot of trouble at school, and that’s what drove us apart. Mostly.
School was where I discovered the plans for our leaders to use our school projects in real life—to subdue people, stop rebels, and control the minds of soldiers. All kinds of terrible things they were exploiting their brightest and smartest for. Not supporting that vile idea, I rebelled and escaped. Now I spent my days hacking and harming their research databases, stealing money, and redirecting it all to rebels. They are constantly working on removing the harmful pills, weapons, software, and other things kids like me inadvertently made to control the people.
Nevertheless, I miss those days sometimes, and I always feel shame when those feelings arise. I miss my easy life when I would just sleep and eat and, at any other time, play with science, because it was all a game for me. I’d had friends for the first time in my life, and we were doing what we loved. We’d never imagined it would all go south and make me a famous fugitive. It’s not how we’d imagined becoming famous back at school.
Yeah, world is easy for the ignorant, they say. Where were we? Focusing back on the feeds, I caught a mention of a big corporation that had offices on multiple planets—something about lending the radars to the forces after me as a generous donation to assure safety of the citizens as soon as possible. Fantastic.
Despite Earth being ruined and left for dead, humanity had learned nothing from past mistakes. People with money still made sure they held all the power. They set food prices, privatized water, and drugged people to bend their wills and make them invincible so the losses in wars would be smaller. They paid soldiers to remove troublesome people and colonize anything that didn’t have a logo on it, making sure they held all the strings. So naturally, they were involved in the hunt for me, as well. I must have trodden heavily on certain feet there when I wired some funds from them. Okay, some is a bit of an understatement, but it’s not like you notice when one pea goes missing in your risotto. I guess they kept a close look at their peas after all.
Intergalactic mega-companies constantly fought among one another to get their hands on the smallest rocks floating in Space, and they used their armed personnel to do the dirty work for them on weekly basis. Wars in Space were common to a point where nobody even reacted to news of a new fighting front opening. As long as it was far away in space…
Kids—because soldiers were usually barely older than sixteen—were drugged to the point where they had no idea they were harming their own families to make their employers slightly richer. Some of the soldiers were under the influence of drugs my friend had created, using weapons from my school, and all because my school’s donors were corporations with selfish interests. My parents’ company was among them; they ordered the pills for mind control and increased performance. It was a day of celebration when Valencia created the pills and I, the daughter of mighty Victor Ngai, created the software to monitor the effects and performance for Ngai Corp. That earned my school another generous donation.
Hearing the news anchor warn of another rogue soldier on the loose, urging people to hide, made me laugh. I was short and skinny, definitely not a threat to anyone. I was a hacker, a hacktivist actually, and I didn’t know how to do any real damage outside the virtual world. They described me as “the rogue IT soldier.” IT soldiers almost never received our drugs because barely any of them fought in the field. Shut in big rooms, sitting behind computers and under constant surveillance, they also almost never escaped. But try explaining that to ordinary people. They just registered the words “danger” and “hide.” The rest was unimportant.
I turned my attention to the biggest screen before me. Switching to the secured lines of the military, I was greeted with the truth.
Name: N/A, Robin
Age: 5421.63298 days
Last seen: detected hovering above the ocean on star Avani.
My picture, about a year old, was displayed next to my information. The report also said I was driving a small merchant ship, blue and black on the outside, an old model of Carriex. It said nothing about a dented wing. Counting myself lucky nobody had spotted that distinctive detail, I set to hack the system and delete the files. The alarms that echoed around my ship completely surprised me. I was hidden; I’d made sure of that. My jammers were on full force because I know I turned them all on. Every single one. So what—
A tip to all future pilots: using all the equipment on just one task that’s not even supposed to be part of the vehicle can fry the system.
Next step: run like hell.
Deciding to make their intel outdated as fast as I could, I put my ship in gear and turned toward the nearest city. In the city, it would be even harder to get away from police or the army, and it would be far more dangerous to land and try escaping on foot, but I had little choice. I needed provisions, a new look, new papers, and a new ship. A shame, really. I loved the current one. It was a really common model, and nobody gave it a second glance most of the time.
Gunning toward dry land, I took a moment to note down all I needed to buy and all I had to save. Luckily, I hadn’t transferred all the money off my cards yet, so I would be able to buy my things quickly. If you knew where to get them, you could get set for the road—so to speak—in a matter of minutes. And I knew just the place.
As Midori, my go-to place, was under heavy surveillance, I decided to try my luck in Avani, Qart. A small city that was hardly able to sustain itself, they had begun to import metal and mining industries to make it more profitable. It was a dirty city that a lot of people preferred to ignore, which was fine by me. For the morally challenged—which I am not, by the way, but some people may say so, and they would all be wrong—it wasn’t as good as Midori for fake papers, but it would do.
After zooming over the skyline for another half hour, blending in with other merchants on their nightly business, I reached my destination. Landing on the outskirts of the city near the old market, I quickly assessed the status of my ship.
I disconnected all my personal computers and took out all the memory cards used for data and software. I deleted any user history on the ship’s computers and shut them all off. Next, I picked up a bag that held a couple of thermo shirts and put on my boots. I stuffed my hygiene pack, dry food packs, a bottle of water, and the cards I still held in my hand on top of the spare clothing. With one last sad look over the ship, I shouldered my bag, checked my headwrap, and left the ship abandoned and unlocked—some criminal would pick it up. When the authorities found the ship, they’d catch a real criminal. Something I was not. Really.
CHAPTER TWO
Winding my way around the city’s edge, I joined the people on their way to the market. It was early morning, and the stalls were just being opened. The people around me were mostly merchants, with some early shoppers who probably worked night shifts. Avoiding collision after collision on the big solar street, I made my way past food stalls and clothing stalls, deciding to try to get a ship before anything else. I knew a man who dealt in scrap jun
k, but if you asked the right questions, you could get yourself a discarded ship nobody would miss.
Locating his shop a few stalls ahead, I double-checked my wrap and then approached with confidence. He was displaying his recycled wares, from clocks to knives and anything else that could be used again. It all looked a little shabby, but it was cheap. Luckily for me, he was alone and so immersed in his work that he didn’t even see me at first. I tried to catch his eye over the awfully tall table holding his goods. I had to clear my throat about four times before he noticed me.
“Sorry,” he said, looking like he was genuinely sorry to have made me wait. You’d never guess this balding, graying man was dealing ships from the back of his shop, which probably worked well for him. “How can I help you… ma’am?” he asked.
I nodded. It was better if he thought I was older; my mother’s name was on the card I would pay with.
“I’m looking for a steed,” I said in the deepest voice I could muster, only then realizing I wasn’t supposed to sound like a man with a cold but rather like an older woman of high standing. My mother’s name would be immediately recognized, as we were natives of Avani, and famous ones at that. The man suddenly stood taller, eyes shining at the prospect of selling a vehicle that would probably pay more than a week’s work at the stall.
“We don’t sell those here, but I can show you the stall that does,” he said loudly, clearly for the benefit of the people walking by. You never knew when an unexpected raid would pop up in the form of cleverly disguised officer.
He took me through his stall’s storage, talking loudly and animatedly. “You can go through my shop because it’s a shortcut, see? I always tell them they need better signs. A lot of people stop by my humble scrap shop first,” he said as he closed the door behind us and motioned to his employee to man the stall.
