“No.” Henricksen smiled. “Of course not.”
Silence for a while, both of them watching the airlock, waiting for the robots to appear.
“It’s hard on them,” Serengeti said quietly. “Leaving Oona.”
“I bet.”
The airlock beeped, security panel flashing green as the door slid open.
“She’s safer there, Henricksen.”
Henricksen glanced up, frowning at the camera. “Whaddaya mean? Why wouldn’t she—?”
“The engineers.”
“Ah. That,” Henricksen nodded.
“They won’t touch her as long as he’s around.” Serengeti turned her camera toward the airlock as Tig and Tilli appeared, smiling like two happy little clams. “The engineers won’t like the idea of one AI creating another.” The camera pivoted, pointing at Henricksen again. “But they won’t touch Oona as long as she’s on the Citadel. Not with Cerberus to protect her.”
Henricksen grunted, looking at her, glanced down the hall as Tig smiled and waved.
“Permission to come aboard, Captain?” Tig called.
“You’re already on board,” Henricksen said dryly, waving at the ship around them.
“Oh.” Tig’s face lights flared, front legs rubbing even faster. “Then…permission to, um…walk down there?” He pointed to where Henricksen waited, smiling hopefully.
Henricksen folded his arms, staring down his nose. “Whaddaya think?” He glanced at the camera, tipped a surreptitious wink.
“Well, we are a little short on robots.” Nearly a third of them never came back from the Pandoran Cloud. Another third stayed with Negev and the other AIs from Faraday, leaving Serengeti’s complement perilously short. “Might be useful, having a few more hands around.”
Tig leaned forward, batting his rounded eyes, cheese-wedge smile stretching right across his face.
“And someone needs to ride hard on the DD3s.”
Tig blipped and went blank. “DD3s?” His front legs lifted, rubbing together. “Are we…keeping them?” he asked carefully.
“For now,” Serengeti told him. “Engines need fixing. DD3s are good at that kind of thing.”
“Engines.” Tig shared a look with Tilli, front legs rubbing more quickly. “You broke the engines again?”
“They’re not completely broken. They just need a little tender loving care.”
“Need a whole lot more than that,” Henricksen retorted.
“Oh, don’t be so dramatic. They aren’t that badly damaged.”
Henricksen tilted his head, giving her a look.
“Oh, you’re no help at all.” She turned away from him, pointing the camera at Tig and Tilli. “We need somebody bossy down there in Engineering.” The camera swiveled, looking from one robot to the other. “Think you two are up to it?”
Tig nodded enthusiastically, poking at Tilli’s side until she nodded, too.
“Good. Now get,” she told them.
“Aye-aye!” Tig clonked his hind legs together and snapped off a salute, marched quick time down the hall, and ducked into a ladderway, leaving Tilli to follow more slowly after.
Henricksen stared after them, smile playing about his lips. Tilted his head, eyebrows lifting as Tilli slowed and then stopped, looking up at him. Turning her round eyes toward Serengeti’s camera. “Almost forgot,” she said, flushing, leg-ends rattling at the decking. “Oona wanted me to give you something.”
A touch at her side and a panel opened, revealing a storage cavity beneath. Tilli reached in and retrieved something—some sort of mixed metal figurine made of brass and copper and steel, clockwork parts and riveted plates bent and fitted to form planes and angles and complex curves.
“It’s an owl,” Tilli explained, holding the clockwork bird up. “Oona made it for you. I’m not really sure what you’re supposed to do with it,” she admitted, “but she wanted you to have it. It—It does a thing. Watch.” She hunkered down, fiddling with a winding a key half-hidden under the owl’s wing. Turned it over a few times and she set the metal creature on the deck plates, smiling shyly as the toy hopped around, crying ‘who-who-who!’ in a creaking, clockwork voice.
“It’s very cute,” Serengeti told her, touched by the gift. Pleased beyond words.
“You make sure you tell her. When you…When you…” Tilli trailed off, blipping softly, sagging sadly in place. But she brightened quickly, flashing a cheery smile as she waved to Serengeti, and saluted Henricksen before taking off after Tig.
Henricksen watched her leave, thoughtful look creasing his brow.
“You missed them, didn’t you?”
“A little,” he admitted, smiling softly. “DD3s don’t really have much personality, after all. And the TSGs…well, they’re a bit too standard configuration, if you know what I mean.”
“I do,” Serengeti murmured. “I most certainly do.”
Henricksen glanced at the camera, nodded toward the far end of the hall. “Should probably get back. Finlay was having a bit too much fun with that Artillery pod. Not really sure she’ll have paid attention to much of anything else going on up there.”
“Noticed that, did you?”
Henricksen grunted. “Surprised she waited until I left.”
Serengeti smiled to herself, watching. “Finlay’s had a rough time of it. She deserves a little fun.”
Henricksen nodded, smile turning thoughtful as he turned around and headed for the elevator, riding it up to Level 10 and the bridge.
Finlay flushed guiltily as he stepped inside, squirmed her way out the Artillery pod and hurried over to Scan. “Sorry, sir. Lost track of time.”
Henricksen just shook his head and walked over to the Command Post, logging in as Serengeti settled into a camera above him. Eyes drifting to the windows, studying the damaged ships outside. The bits of debris floating almost dreamily around. “You know, I wasn’t quite sure we’d ever be here.” Soft voice. Pitched low so no one but Serengeti would hear. “Fleet’s gonna look different, what with all these matched ships and AIs. Hell,” he grunted. “Negev’s still complaining about being stuck in that Aphelion, and that’s one of the better ships we pulled from the Cloud.”
“Yeah, well. She’s lucky she has a chassis at all.”
Some of the AIs from Faraday were still waiting. Just not enough ships in the Pandoran Cloud to house them all. And Meridian Alliance manufacturing could only turn out new ships so fast.
They’d catch up eventually, get all the Fleet AIs into vessels, Negev and the others into the chassis they’d been designed for. But until then…
“They’ll just have to make do,” Serengeti told him. “Deal with the bodies they have for now.”
“Tell that to Negev. Maybe she’ll listen to you.” Henricksen tapped at his panel, checking the status of the engine repairs, straightened and just stared out the windows, considering the ships outside, the stars around them. “Think it’s time?” he asked her, looking up at the camera.
“I think it is,” Serengeti said quietly. “I think it’s well past time.”
She reached inside her, all the way down to the core of her systems, and activated her beacon. Her real beacon this time, not the Dreadnought she’d hidden behind before. A flip of a switch and it came alive, squawking Serengeti’s name to the stars for the first time in fifty-three years.
“No more hiding,” Serengeti said. “No more pretending I’m something I’m not.”
Henricksen’s eyebrows lifted. “And the chassis? What about that?”
“The chassis. Yeah. I’ve been thinking about that.” For the better part of the last two days. She’d been thinking about a lot of things while Henricksen lay unconscious in the med bay. “Think I’ll keep it.”
“And the engines? The guns? The other parts they fitted?”
“All of it. Sort of a package deal. Accessories specially made to go with the body.”
Henricksen turned toward the camera. “Why?” he asked curiously. “Why not go back to what yo
u looked like before?”
Serengeti thought on that a while, carefully choosing her words. “You said something once that I’ve never forgotten.”
“Oh yeah?” Henricksen flashed a smile. “Something wise, no doubt.”
“Indeed,” Serengeti said seriously. “You told me some things should never be forgotten.”
Henricksen’s smile slipped. He raised a hand, touching the scar on his face.
“I don’t mean to forget, Henricksen. Not any of it. Not ever.”
The End
Read on for a free sample of Deathform
Chapter 1
Standing at the airlock door waiting for his ship to be boarded, Jack Kind fights the disorienting pull of memory. Twenty years old again, sheened in sweat, he wears nothing but a pair of piss-speckled tighty-whities. The barracks has already emptied. Stomping boots echo through the bulkhead. Screams rebound. When FROST soldiers burst into the room, he drops his weapon and dives to the floor with his hands on the back of his head.
“You alright?” Dino says.
Back to the present. This is his freighter. The war long over.
“Fine,” Jack says.
The airlock prep chamber is filled with equipment. Reinforced lockers house helmets and hardware. There’s a bench bolted to the center of the floor, a reminder that this is little more than a high-tech dressing room. Not the most glamorous place to die.
The proximity alert went off during dinner. A ship beelined toward them, small and armed with an illegal plasma cannon. Jack hailed but there was no response. He ordered the rest of the crew to the panic pod, but Dino stayed with him, so now they wait, while on the other side of this door unwelcome guests scrambling along their hull like insects seeking blood.
The way Dino’s standing, Jack can tell he’s ready for a brawl. Because at 6’6” with long tangled hair and the facial features of a caveman, Dino Vitale has never lost a fight.
Jack has. Plenty.
A mechanical whirring draws their attention behind them, to the far corner of the prep chamber where a defense turret takes aim. Jack frowns into the lens. He clicks the portable communicator dangling around his neck, a black cube about the size of his palm.
“Hunter,” he says. “I told you to stand down.”
Her voice buzzes through the speaker: “Just trying to cover our bases.”
“Don’t. We’re complying.”
“Well, shit.”
He can’t blame the crew for being upset. They’ve held to their delusions of dignity. The notion that there are lines which cannot be crossed. It’s a feeling he has come to resent.
Hunter says, “They’re opening the outer airlock.”
Jack wipes his hands on his jeans. “How many?”
“Five.”
“Armed?”
“Yes.”
He says to Dino, “Do not fucking move unless I say.”
“Okay.”
“I’m serious.”
“I realize that.”
They have faced their share of touchy situations. Close calls with law enforcement. The kind of people you throw money at until they let you on your way. Plus the occasional raiders with their clunky ships that can barely escape Earth’s gravity, but they always quit once they scan Bel and find the turrets.
This is different.
Hunter: “They’re pressurizing. Fifteen seconds.”
For a moment, he wonders if he will throw his body to the floor in surrender.
The door zips open. Frigid air rushes in with that faint electric burning smell that lingers after a spacewalk. Bodies and movement. Men with rifles pointed. They wear blue formfitting suits, like soldiers wear, though these lack insignia. A leader breaks from the pack, comes forward shouting.
On reflex, Jack hikes his collar to hide the tattoo.
The leader jams his rifle into Jack’s gut and shouts, but the words are muffled inside his helmet. His face is small and red. He forces Jack into the corner next to a fire extinguisher, and for a moment, Jack is back at Camp Gertrude, awaiting a beating from the guards who would only leave once he was face down on the white concrete, frozen blood sealing him in place. Then the man in the spacesuit grabs his hair and yanks him upright, and Jack sees that he is not one of the guards he used to fear so badly. He is a goddamn pirate.
The man lets him go and steps back and opens his hands. An impatient gesture.
“I can’t hear you,” Jack says.
The man’s face screws up.
Jack screams, “I cannot hear you!” He taps his ear.
The guy lowers his rifle uncertainly, slaps at the clasps around his neck. Another pirate helps him. When the helmet comes off it reveals a head of sweaty black hair and Asiatic features. The guy is young. Mid 20s at the most. A pink scar runs from the left corner of his mouth to his ear where a patch of hair is missing, folds of thicker scar tissue there instead. When he speaks again, his broken English places him somewhere in Venus’s system. “Where is a cargos?”
Jack hitches his thumb toward the inner hallway.
*
As freighters go, Belinda is on the smaller side, but the cargo hold is still stadium-sized. Rows of grav suspension containers—26 of them, though she can hold up to 100 of the 40-footers—rest under a high ceiling of white strip lighting. Jack takes the pirates inside, wondering how they intend to load these massive crates aboard their vessel.
They ignore the cargo, fan out and walk the rows. Jack and Dino look on, helpless.
The leader circles back. He holds his helmet under his left arm, rests the rifle in the other, hip-level. “Where is a cargos?” he says.
“Not sure I follow,” Jack says. He gestures at the containers, but he’s got a terrible sinking feeling.
“Other cargos, Mr. Kind. Do not play game.”
Jack winces. There’s no sense in pretending.
He leads them to a blue crate with a black circle on its side, walks the perimeter and stoops to release the straps. “Stand back,” he says.
Hesitantly, the pirates obey.
He clicks his portable. “Belinda, target container 1187 for selective Zero-G.”
Nothing happens.
“Belinda, you there?”
Belinda has been glitchy for years, ever since he switched off her AI. According to Stetson, it’s something to do with encrypted files and fragmentation. You’re not supposed to tool around with such complex software, but Jack prefers things old-fashioned, with a human at the helm.
He tries again. “Belinda. This is Jack Kind. Target container 1187 for Zero-G.” Under his breath, he adds, “Please.”
“Yes, Jack.” Her voice comes monotone through his portable.
The air shudders.
Dino helps him heave the container from the floor. Even in microgravity, the thing is hard to lift. Something twinges in his back as he strains. The container rises, rotates slightly. It floats, suspended, about chest height in mid-air. They hold to the bottom handles and guide it a few feet down the aisle. Jack has to hang off the side to pull it back down. He asks Bel three times to reengage the gravity before she does.
There is a silver door in the floor where the container had been. At gunpoint, Jack lifts it open. It’s heavy and drops with a bang, revealing a darkened compartment with a ladder built into the side. The pirates hop down one at a time. Jack shoves his hands in his pockets, an attempt to stop their shaking. Hunter and the others will be watching from the turret above. The pirates already noted and dismissed it. They know he’s too smart—or maybe too stupid—to give the order. Make a run for it and hope Hunter has been practicing her aim. Hope there’s nobody watching from the attack ship.
No. He has caused enough death in his lifetime.
He hears the hiss of pressure releasing from the suspension crate down there. The pirates hoist up their take. Five rectangles, the largest ten-feet tall by seven-feet wide, each wrapped in white foam and delicate brown paper. Paintings. Art. Cultural artifacts. Stolen from the cat
acombs of cultures shattered by the war and reduced to contraband to be sold on the black market. He doesn’t know what the paintings are of or who they’re by or what they mean and he doesn’t give a shit. They equate to a great fuckload of money. That’s what matters. Because even if the pirates don’t execute Jack, there will now be a buyer on Earth who has paid for something that will not be delivered. And the seller—one of the most dangerous men in the solar system—will hold Jack responsible.
The pirates tear through the paper and padding and gape. Ooh. Ahh.
Satisfied, the leader says, “I think we will be go now.” He smiles. Big white teeth.
Chapter 2
The freezers, dining room, and kitchen are nestled on the top level at the rear of the ship. He surveys slabs of frozen meat shrink-wrapped in their cases, selects tenderloins and mixed veggies. Bel carries about five short tons of food for any given run, enough for the six crew members to eat comfortably for a year, much longer if rationed. He’d been a cook in the military, and one of the first lessons he learned was how important food is for morale. As for hoarding so much of it, that’s just one more compulsion he developed in the prison camp. Like keeping a full canteen on his belt at all times. The cooking takes his mind off things, anyway. He prefers a simple meal. Home kitchen quality with a slight kick. A red wine mushroom sauce to swirl across the steaks, a pile of veggies with a dash of garlic and parmesan. Rolls don’t survive the suspension tanks, so it’s flatbread for grain.
They’ve been in near-Earth orbit for three days now, awaiting clearance to dock and unload their shipment. The legal one. It’s large enough not to raise eyebrows, but not exactly profitable for a trip across the solar system. He’s been avoiding the crew since the pirates. A decision has to be made, but it’s much easier to hide in his quarters with a bottle of bourbon. He’s been doing this for ten years. Smuggling contraband for criminals. This should have been no different from the rest. Hard to believe this might be his final meal with his own crew.
Footsteps behind him.
“Don’t go thinking too hard,” Hunter calls.
Serengati 2: Dark And Stars Page 40
