by M. D. Cooper
Cara felt less willing to touch anything now. “Why aren’t you wearing gloves or something?”
“Oh, it can’t infect humans. We should be careful about that dog, though. I didn’t check the warranty information on that.”
Fugia pointed to a bit of the controller that she needed help holding in place. Cara adjusted the component and held bits together as Fugia touched them with a quick-joiner.
“Nice,” Fugia said. “Just one of these will eat through an airlock in about twenty seconds. The nice thing about it is that you don’t hurt the structural integrity with an explosion. It’s more of a specific melting.”
“That sounds kind of terrible.”
“If you’re the thing getting melted, I suppose it is.”
“Is this some kind of kit you bought?”
“I picked up some of the components in Springfield, the suburb next to the terminal where we landed. Most of this stuff is used for high pressure plumbing applications to clean mold out of the lines.” Fugia chuckled. “It just occurred to me how dumb it is to name a suburb in the Cho, Springfield. Maybe they envied an Earthbound city or something.”
Fugia made three more welds and set the joiner on the desk. She picked up the control board and turned it in her hands, checking different sections as she pointed out what it all did. It was a relatively simple device that made sense to Cara.
“That’s it,” Fugia said. “Thanks for your help. Unless you want to help me build three more of these.”
“Are you doing it right now?” Cara asked. “I’m going to check on Em.”
“I suppose the dog needs attention,” Fugia said, belying her obvious affection for the puppy. “I still want to build a booster for that lo-jack in his tail so we can see who might respond. Wouldn’t it be fun to fight some pirates?”
“I guess,” Cara said.
Fugia shrugged. “You’re probably right. Fighting pirates is fun until they start to win. Imagine the life you could have on a pirate rig, preying on freighters out in the deep flight lanes between the Cho and wherever else.”
“We’re a freighter,” Cara said.
“This is more of a freighter with teeth. Most freighters don’t have point defense cannons and their own mini fleet of attack drones.” Fugia let out an evil laugh. “I feel for the idiot pirates who attack this scow.”
“Sunny Skies isn’t a scow,” Cara said.
Fugia rolled her eyes. “It’s sweet of you to think that. If the ship had an AI, I’m sure it would fix the juice machine for you.”
“The AI would need hands.” Cara thought about that for a second. “That’s kind of why humans and AI are stuck together, isn’t it? Each can do things the other can’t.”
“It’s chicken and the egg, really,” Fugia said. “Sure, AI could build a drone or mech to do what they want, but there’s always going to be something they might need a human for. Maybe.” She pointed at the headset. “Were you just talking to Lyssa?”
“Yes. We’ve been playing a game. It’s a dating simulator with birds.”
“That sounds ridiculous.”
“Lyssa says she played with the AI that runs the Mars 1 Ring and thought it was fun. It’s kind of goofy but I like it.”
“So that’s what you were doing when I pulled you away to help me with my bombs?”
“I was going to play with Em, too.”
Fugia nodded. “Then you should scoot and do that. The dog needs love or it’s going to activate the lo-jack and bring the pirates.” She flashed an evil grin. “Then we can kill the pirates with our drones.”
“Pirates are humans, too,” Cara said, mimicking something Andy had said.
“Humans smell bad. Few deserve your sympathy, trust me.”
“Goodbye, Fugia,” Cara said, rolling her eyes now.
“Say hello to Lyssa for me.”
“Can’t you do that over your Link?”
“I’m busy,” the woman said, turning back to her work. “You be nice for me, how’s that?”
Cara went back into the corridor, headed for the hydroponic garden room that become Em’s play area. She fit the headset back over her ears.
“Fugia’s weird,” she told Lyssa.
“Yes,” the AI agreed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
STELLAR DATE: 10.02.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: HMS Mercy’s Intent
REGION: Europa, Jupiter, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
The alert that the Mercy’s Intent had arrived at Europa found Cal lying in bed in Captain Gala Fitzgerald’s quarters. She lay naked on her stomach next to him, turning a polished stone over in her hands. Her prosthetic arm brushed against his shoulder as she moved, warm and strange.
“Looks like we’ve arrived,” she said.
Cal sat up and pulled on his boxers. The captain of the Mercy’s Intent had a small holodisplay next to her desk, and he walked over to turn it on, stretching as he crossed the floor. When the display awakened, he glanced back to catch Gala watching him.
“You didn’t explain those burns on your side,” she said.
“These?” Cal asked, pointing at a swatch of mottled skin that ran from below his rib to the top of his leg. “Heat condenser in a transport shuttle blew up on me and a couple of the parts embedded themselves in my side before I got out of there. Didn’t move fast enough.”
“You don’t see people with scars much, it seems like,” she said. Gala set the polished stone on the nightstand next to her and rose to her knees on the bed, not bothering to cover herself. Her mech arm was thinner than her muscled left arm. Her abs stood out as she stretched as well, rotating her shoulders from side to side.
Cal watched her as the holodisplay loaded an image of local space.
“You’re going to get me excited again,” he said.
Gala chuckled. “I’m sleep deprived enough as it is. I have to work today.”
As the holo filled with the image of Europa, tinted blue by the software, other icons populated the display, showing private ships, a few Jovian patrol vessels, and then the green swarm of Heartbridge ships. A few that had been in storage at Clinic 46 had already arrived.
Shrugging into her uniform shirt as she walked up next to him, Gala studied the display as intently as Cal.
“When did Heartbridge amass so many ships?”
Cal didn’t answer. He pulled up another list of the Heartbridge registry returns and counted seventy-one ships.
“We should be getting a request to report any minute now,” Gala said. She stepped into her pants and buttoned them in place. “Where did you throw my shoes?” she asked.
Cal waved at the vicinity of the door. He wished he had time to send Jirl a request for information on the local commander. In his experience, the people Heartbridge put in charge of their heavy cruisers were better at politics than combat.
The presence of so many ships in the area could only mean that Heartbridge wanted a show of force, and was potentially moving their base of operations from High Terra to somewhere in the JC. He had long suspected the company was considering such a move. Its holdings had always seemed diversified in areas that favored weapons development over bio-research, which is what one would expect from a supposed healthcare conglomerate. Millions of clinics scattered throughout Sol meant that the average person felt favorably toward Heartbridge, even if those businesses were a tiny part of the company’s real business.
“There it is,” Gala said. “I’ve been commanded to report in to a ship called the Resolute Charity. They’re sending the location data now.”
“Do you know the captain?”
“Her name’s Vickers. I’ve never met her before. I think she came from the Mars 1 Guard.”
One of the interesting components of Heartbridge’s crews and leadership was that they were mostly Sol-agnostic, having come from everywhere. Few retained any nationalistic fervor. The Marsians might dig at the Terrans while the JCers called them all groundpounders, but they managed to get along on the
private ships. They were paid well, which didn’t leave much room for complaint.
Cal pulled up a current map of Europa, highlighting the major cities. Why hadn’t Heartbridge chosen Ganymede for a new base of operations? He supposed it didn’t matter. Europa probably had cheaper real estate and offered similar access to the rest of OuterSol. It also had relatively clear space compared to Ganymede and the Cho.
Through his Link, he accessed the public information on Caption Vickers of the Resolute Charity. An image of a gaunt woman with hazel eyes and bloodless lips appeared in his mind. First name Rachel. Cal flipped through her service history with the Mars 1 Guard. She had retired with a full pension but was obviously the kind of officer who couldn’t sit around doing nothing. She had been with Heartbridge for three years, mostly moving the Resolute Charity from one moon to another in OuterSol for social events on the ship.
The Resolute Charity put the Benevolent Hand to shame. The ship was thrice the size, with enough beds to service multiple cities or rings. Surgeries, genetic modeling centers, a full spectrum of treatment options for nearly any human physical or psychiatric ailment that science hadn’t managed to stamp out across the last thousand years. The ship also had a drone fleet of over a thousand, with long range missile batteries, rail guns and a point defense system. It was a shame to keep it in orbit most of the time. The Resolute Charity was the kind of ship that should have been long gone on a colonization trip.
“How soon do you need to report?” Cal asked.
“Not just me,” Gala said. “We. They asked for you specifically. As soon as we’ve got a parking orbit approved with the Europans we’ll head over in a shuttle. They didn’t specify an exact time. They did forward a social schedule, and there’s a dinner in six hours.” She smiled.
Cal had to acknowledge that Fitzgerald had a nice smile, even if it often devolved into a scowl.
“I guess I’ll need a suit,” he said.
She slapped his ass. “Your birthday suit is all right.”
Cal caught her arm when she tried a second time and pulled her against him. “Careful,” he said. “That’s going to cost you.”
“I’ll pay,” Gala growled.
Once the Mercy’s Intent passed Europa’s border control two hours later, Cal and Gala, along with two of her command team, left the ship in a shuttle operated by an AI that reminded him too much of Sandra back on Clinic 46. He supposed that AI was dead or drifting now, but during the thirty-minute trip to the Resolute Charity, Cal couldn’t stop thinking about Sandra’s strange responses to the verification questions several days prior.
While the other officers joked with each other, Cal replayed his last conversation with the AI. For some reason she kept asking if he allowed Tim on board.
“What do you mean, did I allow him on board?” he had asked. “The kid’s on board. We can put him out again. That’s the option right now.”
“Do you allow him on board?”
“Why are you asking me this?”
“Do you allow this?”
“Discontinue conversation,” Cal had ordered, sick of listening to the strange quaver in the AI’s voice. It didn’t make sense for the shuttle to express any kind of emotion over Tim Sykes having come on board. He had wanted to put a pulse burst through the thing’s logic center.
When they reached the Resolute Charity, Gala left with her officers to check in with flight command, while Cal went down to a local shopping center off the main inbound shuttle area to buy a suit.
The dinner had turned into a full-blown social event with government officials from several Europan cities and some other well-to-do privateers who happened to be in nearby space. Cal knew it was going to be a time to meet the influencers in the area for the next few months. He might as well put on a good face and get a sense of who was going to be in charge. Jirl might want a report on what he saw, so it wouldn’t do if he showed up in the same scorched shipsuit he had been wearing since the raid on the Worry’s End.
As he walked through the shopping district, Cal studied the mix of crew, family members and visitors milling through the area. Like most Heartbridge ships, the people here didn’t look like they expected anything serious to ever happen. Even if the ship served its purpose as a relief vessel, none of the slow-walking crew members appeared ready for a true disaster.
None of them looked as determined as Andy Sykes. None of them looked ready to shoot a man in the face as Brit Sykes had done.
Where were the Sykeses right now? He knew no one had tried to activate the Seed they’d taken from Clinic 46, which would automatically broadcast a carrier signal if loaded into one of the attack drones they’d stolen. That surprised him. It meant Tim may have survived the transfer process. If that was true, he was one of the first.
Cal smiled to himself as he thought of the bounty he might demand for handing Andy Sykes over to researchers, the first human-AI hybrid who hadn’t gone insane, along with Tim Sykes to sweeten the deal, the first child to survive a partial imaging. Something about that family must be made for abuse.
Brit Sykes he would just like to kill, or maybe implant her with another broken AI as he had done with Petral Dulan. That might be nearly as enjoyable.
Cal hadn’t cared specifically for Dr. Farrel but the man hadn’t deserved to take a shot in the face. The shoulder of Cal’s shipsuit was still stained from the researcher’s sprayed blood.
Across the next few hours, he chose a new suit and agreed when the tailor asked if wanted his shipsuit ‘disposed of, sir’? Then Cal walked down to a restaurant and had something that resembled steak with a bourbon aged in zero-g.
“Isn’t it all aged in zero-g?” Cal asked, giving the waiter a raised eyebrow.
The waiter shrugged. “Do you know anything about whiskey?”
“Don’t try to give me Scotch.”
The waiter smiled. “The marketing claims you get more wood exposure in the barrel in zero-g. In reality, they’re not paying to get it out of a gravity well. I don’t think there’s much difference.”
“I hadn’t planned on tasting it much anyway.”
Cal raised his tumbler and silently toasted Dr. Farrel before throwing back the shot. Sitting in the restaurant with a second shot of the zero-g bourbon, Cal composed an update for Jirl Gallagher, letting her know about the upcoming party and who was expected to attend. He supposed she probably had all the guest lists but was never quite certain what made it back to Jirl and what didn’t. He suspected each member of the Heartbridge board had their own Jirl Gallagher, carrying out various projects for their boardmember. Cal would never say that he worked for Jirl, but he had figured out that the research he supported fell under Arla Reed, and Arla Reed could be cut from the Heartbridge hierarchy if she fell out of favor. That was the magic of governing boards of private corporations. The offending party could be excised like a cancer and the organization lives on. Cal didn’t enjoy politics per se, but he was aware of the importance of not being too beholden to one leader. If things didn’t work out with Jirl and Arla, he could always ply his skills in another part of the organization.
As he gathered his thoughts for the report, Cal found himself thinking about the future again, remembering both his night with Gala, and Tim Sykes’ angry gaze, pushing back on him like a replica of Cal at that age.
Cal nearly spit his whiskey. Family? Kids?
He laughed, causing a nearby diner to give him an annoyed look.
There was a reason Andy Sykes looked like a half-stuffed scarecrow, and it was called family.
Cal finished the report, applied his encryption token and sent it out into the Link. He still had a few bites of steak remaining but he left them on the plate, choosing not to feel too full prior to the party. He did order another bourbon.
In the restroom, he checked his shoulder holster and made sure the pistol didn’t show against the line of his suit. He had two non-metallic blades in the small of his back as well, in case security applied the same checks to Heartbri
dge employees.
As he washed his hands, the sounds of someone vomiting in one of the stalls was impossible to ignore. Cal checked the mirror as a man in an ensign’s uniform shoved open the door and steadied himself, wiping his mouth.
“You look like a mech ran you over,” Cal said.
The young man walked unsteadily to the sinks and splashed water in his face. He nodded at Cal. “I just learned we’re shipping out tomorrow,” he said. “After the big shindig. That’s what they’re going to announce.”
“Shipping out, huh?” Cal said. “Where to?”
The ensign looked over his shoulder to see if they were alone. “I guess they just put it out to all the captains in the fleet. We’re headed for Titan. The middle of nowhere.” He gave the mirror a miserable grimace. “I just got engaged.”
Cal raised his eyebrows in the mirror and slapped the ensign on the shoulder. “Distance makes the heart grow fonder,” he said.
The young man wiped his face and continued staring in the mirror, looking like he was going to vomit again.
Cal walked back into the restaurant, still tasting the bourbon in his nose. The ensign’s dismay must have been based on the meeting Gala Fitzgerald had been called to. If every ship in orbit around Europa was headed for Titan, that meant a lot of refueling operations for the next few days, since many hadn’t even arrived from Clinic 46 yet.
Heading out to Titan meant Heartbridge was definitely making a move. The question was, did Cal want to move with them?
He buttoned his jacket and left the restaurant, ready for the upcoming party.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
STELLAR DATE: 10.02.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sunny Skies
REGION: Europa, Jupiter, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
The space around Europa showed a higher density of objects than Andy expected, hours before they came within range to start pulling registry pings. As the names and registration info came back, Andy had to call Fran over to read the list again. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
