by Ben Chaney
“Drummond. Sit rep, please.”
“I—uh…We—There’s been an incident in the Infirmary. Details are fuzzy, but a few—er—uh—a few assets have deviated from their programming. We are containing the disturbance now,” said Drummond. Andreas let out a chuckle. Swallowed it when Kabbard shot him a look.
“‘Assets’…‘Deviated from programming’…You’ve got T99s running amok in this corporate park you call a penal colony, and they’re waking up to the fact that they’ve been taken from their homes, shot into space, and turned into slaves. Call it what it is and deal with what it is. Now, I’m seeing movement in sectors Five, Six, and Seven. Are all those areas locked down?”
Drummond stiffened.
“Of—of course they are! Triggered by the Class Four as per standard operating procedu—”
“Sir,” a technician’s voice cracked as he interrupted, “I’ve been trying to tell you, sir, the doors in Sector Five weren’t triggered and won’t respond to direct commands!”
“Sector Five...” Drummond turned and looked at the big screen. Red dots spread into the corridors surrounding the sector. Kabbard bristled.
“There’s a direct path leading from Sector Five to this Control Room. Andreas! Nicks!” barked Kabbard. The two of them stepped forward in silence. They weren’t EXOs and they weren’t military, but scheming killers were more useful than stuffed shirts and new-hires.
“Move to intercept the inmates in the main corridor, and recruit any guard you find along the way, particularly those with stun batons or spurs. I’ll dispatch more to you over the Comms. Go.” The two of them hesitated. Looked at one another.
“I dunno, sir...going off mission?” asked Nicks.
“Yeah...Sato sent us here for the kid, not to go play hero. I’m not trying to get myself killed off the clock,” Andreas said. It took every ounce of Kabbard’s iron discipline to not knife-hand Andreas’ throat. A little extra when the bastard shrugged.
“Sato sent you here to follow my orders. You’ve heard them. Now go.”
They backed slowly toward the door. Technicians around the room nervously gestured to refresh their Neural keyboards. One of them shot up from his seat.
“Mr. Kabbard?! Mr. Drummond?!” the tech blurted, waiting to be called on like a school boy. Both men turned their version of a cold stare on the frail man too young to look this old. The words tumbled out of his trembling lips.
“P-perimeter breach...Main Hangar, Airlock Four,” said the tech.
“What?!” said Drummond. “That’s impossible. The disturbance is contain—”
“Full Screen, NOW!” shouted Kabbard. It seemed to blast the boy back down in his chair and flip him to face his station. A few keystrokes and the live feed appeared on the big screen. Kabbard squinted at it. Beyond the chaos of the scrambling workers, the Hangar looked fine. Except...Where’s the Zeus? The Furies sat parked where they’d left them. But Kabbard’s prize office perk and the cargo therein were missing. Andreas cocked his head.
“Where’s the—”
“Roll back the feed! Five minutes!” Kabbard commanded. The Tech scrubbed the feed backward. Eventually, Airlock Four opened and the Zeus emerged. It taxied in reverse to where Kabbard had left it. The canopy opened.
“No. Fucking. Shit,” said Andreas, almost laughing, as their prisoner crawled backward out of the cockpit and backtracked to the rear compartment.
“Freeze it there,” said Drummond. The low-res image of the Rasalla boy paused him mid-stride on his way around the rear of the craft. Kabbard gritted teeth behind tight lips.
“There is your culprit, Mr. Kabbard. Thank you for offering your services, but you have my leave to pursue your vessel,” a wry grin tugged at Drummond’s corpse-like face. “Rest assured, we have the situation well in hand,” he turned his back. Kabbard dug his fingernails into the meat of his palms.
“Let’s go, boss. His funeral,” said Nicks. Kabbard felt like he could breathe fire.
“It could be all of ours,” Kabbard said, taking one last glimpse of the panicked faces throughout the control room. He turned away. The three of them trotted off to the door as the buzz of activity resumed in the Control Room. Kabbard tried to ignore Drummond’s nauseating voice rising above the din.
“Organize what personnel we have to push the inmates back into Sector Five! Have some engineers accompany them to manually lock down the doors, then perform a gas purge on Five, Six, and Seven.”
“Vent the O2? Some of our own people are stuck in those sectors, we can’t—”
“Just long enough to stun, not enough to kill. Moron.” Hearing Drummond say that, Kabbard hesitated in the doorway. Kept walking.
“Sounds like they got a plan. What’s ours?” asked Andreas. Kabbard wanted to smash the man’s smug, mercenary teeth down his throat. Instead, he pointed the white hot rage at the end of the hall. Beyond.
“Get the Zeus, rip that little piece of Rasalla shit out of it, and burn him alive.”
24
Voice
JOGUN’S ENTIRE BODY shook with fatigue as he stared the captured Themis guard in the face, clutching Doc Yugi’s bloody scalpel. Two of the new inmates, Kolpa and Rusaam, held the man down with the toned, cable-fiber muscles of Pit-hardened Cutters. They were the first Jogun had released and “healed”. He had tried to explain it to them, but Kolpa...his mother was a Blue Lady back home. The hand of God was in everything. Even this? The wet blade flashed in the blinking red light of the alarm.
The guard was nothing special. Mid-forties, expanding gut, and a brand new uniform soiled at the crotch. He hadn’t stopped babbling about his ‘first week on the job’ the entire time. Between that and the blaring alarm, Jogun could barely get a word in.
“Where—. Whe—WHERE IS THE—Goddammit! Rusaam will you slap him, please?” Jogun said, face-in-palm. Rusaam punched the fat man across the jaw, knocking him out cold. Just a Pit worker. Jogun thought, seeing the pain flood Rusaam’s scarred, narrow face. A worker ripped away from his family. Rusaam cracked the knuckles on his calloused, trembling hands. Spat on the guard.
“Get another one,” said Jogun. He rubbed at the ice—pick pain in his temples. Somewhere beyond those doors Kabbard had his little brother. But...he’s not...not for real. Oh Christ, Matteo...All these years, Jogun had almost allowed himself to forget. He shook his head, frowning. The love is real. He’s family. I’ll find him.
Kolpa, solemn, stocky, and silent, brought the next guard. The gaunt man seemed half-dead already, staring through sunken eye sockets at no place in particular on the floor. In the blinking red light of the alarm, Jogun almost didn’t notice the dark stain soaking through the uniform. The smell of blood followed. Jogun winced as he got up, hobbled closer, then clutched the guard by his sallow cheeks.
“Hear me?” said Jogun. The guard’s glazed eyes rolled. Eventually settled on Jogun. He nodded slowly.
“Good! Now. How do we open these doors?! Is there any other way outta Sector Six?!” Jogun pointed to the massive plate steel doors that had cut his group off from those that ran ahead. Too weak to keep up, he had lagged behind with Kolpa and Rusaam helping him carefully along. Then everything slammed shut. As far as they could tell, there was no way out. Other inmates beat against the doors with anything they could find. Mostly their shoulders and fists.
“No...” said the wounded guard, “Can’t open...closed from the Con—Control Room.”
Rusaam balled up a fist and cocked it back. Jogun stopped him.
“Gotta pray,” said Kolpa, “Pray for the way to open!” Kolpa knelt on the ground and started muttering in the thickest Riverspeak Jogun had ever heard. Suddenly, it was drowned out by a new sound. It started low, then rose. Started over again. Again. BowwwWOOOOOP. BowwwWOOOOOP. BowwwWOOOOOP.
“Purge!” the wounded guard rasped, “Have to get out! Have to—” A sharp hissing sound followed. Within seconds, everyone in the room started gasping. Men broke their hands and arms pounding on the plated doors.
Collapsed. Kolpa’s wide-set eyes turned bloodshot as his prayers withered into ragged croaks.
The guard wrenched free from Rusaam and started crawling. Jogun crawled after him. After reaching a panel in the floor, the guard tore a lariat out of his uniform collar. A small silver key dangled at the end. Jogun watched as the guard took it in clumsy fingers and tried to insert it in a space on the floor panel. Failed. Passed out.
One last breath. Jogun took it in deep as he could, then pulled himself to the panel. He felt consciousness fade as he fumbled with the key. Calm. Focus. It slid into the hole. Clicked when he turned it. The panel popped open. He shot a hand inside and felt some kind of handle. Pull. Twist. Push.
A seam creased the floor and a blast of visible air sliced through it. The purge alarm stopped as the seam slid wide open, revealing stairs leading down.
“Sector 6 breached. Purge overridden. Sector 6 breached. Purge overridden,” the electronic voice repeated. Around the room, chests began rising and falling. Rusaam and Kolpa crawled to Jogun and looked down into the opening.
“Hidden service tunnel?” asked Rusaam.
“Our miracle...” said Kolpa, his voice choked and rasping.
“Somethin’ like that,” said Jogun. He turned his flicked eyes upward. Was that you? If it was, I could use some more. Give me the strength. “Hey y’all! Over here!”
They traveled through the tight passages for what seemed like hours. In the soft copper glow of the floor lights, they chose a left. Then a right. Another right. Jogun longed to find stairs leading up, but every turn led them further down. Away from the hope of finding Matteo. Where are you takin’ me?
It was a while before Jogun noticed the silence in the others. No one asked where they were going or what the plan was. It made him nervous, more so as he felt the eyes on his back. They were following him. He balled his hands into tight fists, clutching his faith as it tried to vanish. Years of unanswered prayers and desperate nights had worn it paper thin. As conditioned as the training from the Dose. God, if he was there, had been deaf, blind, and dumb since that day on the balcony. Why now? T-junction looming ahead, his last shred of faith tugged him left.
Dead end. It felt like the wind was knocked out of him. His knees buckled, collapsing him backward into the alert arms of Kolpa. I’m just a dumbass cripple gettin’ everybody lost in the dark.
“Need to get ‘im some water,” Kolpa said.
“Sure, hold up, lemme just turn on the faucet,” Rusaam said, “Where the hell we s’posed to find a drink in here?” Voices behind them were getting restless. Kolpa strained to look through the amber darkness.
“Maybe those pipes on the wall,” said Kolpa.
“Pipes?” Rusaam walked to the dead end wall and felt around, “Motherfucker, these ain’t no pipes! It’s hatch coaming! We got us a maintenance hatch right here!” Rusaam grunted as he pulled the handle. It wouldn’t budge.
“I’m fine,” Jogun said, “Help him.” Kolpa gently propped Jogun up on the railing, then trotted to Rusaam. They counted to three then put all their weight on the handle. It popped open. White light spilled into the narrow hall, striking Jogun in the face. He blinked at the shock of it. As his eyes adjusted, the light seemed to fill him. Things beyond took shape.
“Ground Level. The Motor Pool...” Jogun said. He crawled past Kolpa and Rusaam to the door, then peered through. Business as usual for the start of the day. The cells were emptied to take advantage of the low-daylight part of the month, putting all hands on deck. Only a week or two until Full-Day, cooking the surface up to two-hundred-sixty degrees Fahrenheit. Jogun climbed through the hatch and stood on a catwalk overlooking the facility. Kolpa and Rusaam joined him. Then the rest.
“Kolpa,” said Jogun in a voice that felt like someone else’s, “How much antidote we got left?”
“We’ll make it enough,” said Kolpa, nodding. One-by-one, every inmate they encountered across the motor pool was injected, then embraced by the Healed as muscles seized. In most, the antidote did its work. Life flickered back into their eyes. Souls to their faces. In others, the seizing stopped with dead silence and a trickle of blood from the nose. It ripped Jogun apart, watching the young, healthy brothers get carried off.
He felt strange. His heart searched every face for Matteo. A searing frustration that burned him from the inside-out. And yet an unshakable certainty that he was right where he should be. Right now. Brother by brother, he helped all he could. Escorting the Healed from their confusion and terror. Comforting the dying with whatever came to mind.
The last one they dosed, a Rasalla boy of fifteen with a fresh ‘T99’ on his shoulder, passed away slowly. Painfully. The convulsions wrenched tendons and dislocated joints. Blood poured from his flared nostrils.
“It’ll end soon. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid. We’re with you, brother. Your family’s got you. It’ll stop, your pain’ll be gone, and you’ll walk with God. Go on and sleep.” Jogun felt him seize in a final choking breath, then relax. Peace seemed to come over the boy’s tear and blood-streaked face. Jogun touched the eye-lids. Closed them gently.
He got up to find the next one. Found instead a crowd of silent onlookers. Hundreds of them. As he met their eyes, each of them touched their foreheads. Then their lips. Then their chests. The Mind to see the Righteous Path. The Voice to find the words. The Heart for the courage to walk the Path. A blessing every Rasalla boy learned on his first visit to the Stepstones. It had never made much sense to Jogun. Yet now his veined hands trembled as he returned the gesture.
“The Righteous Path,” he said to himself. Though hoarse and faint, his voice carried far in the Motor Pool. Like it or not, the Healed waited to hear him.
“I-I’m not. Ah shit, the ‘Voice to find the words’ would do me good right now,” he said smiling. A laugh rippled over the crowd. The long lost feeling almost brought him to tears. As the room settled, he found his Voice.
“But the Mind to see, the Heart to walk—that’s what we got, y’all! And it’s damn clear to me: our path leads home!” Jogun shouted as hard as his vocal chords would let him. The crowd roared. Rusaam pushed to Jogun’s side.
“Hot shit,” Rusaam said, “Where do we start?” Jogun looked around the Motor Pool. Scouts, Crawlers, Loaders, pressure suits, hydraulic tools, detonators, core charges, fuel cells. All the mining equipment he’d known for years is just that, mining equipment. Very different uses began popping up in his head.
“Here. We’ll start right here,” Jogun smiled.
25
Assets
“SIGNAL LOST–CHECK INPUT Device” had been blinking on every screen in the Control Room since the Purge. From his post, Kruger could only watch the chaos unfold. It was his first week on the job. One of the dozens of new hires, he was nowhere near qualified to debug, hack, or otherwise duct tape the servers into working again. That was left to his trainer, a fat, pale, red-bearded tech named Scotty. And Scotty looked like he was about to keel over. Sweat poured down his stretched gray jumpsuit. Each burst of his rapid staccato key-strokes ended with a critical error. Again. And again. And again.
Drummond dashed from console to console, yelling frantic nonsense at each tech. Though things looked pretty well screwed, Kruger couldn’t help but feel relieved that matters were out of his hands. He took advantage of his short stature and bean-pole frame, tucking himself behind Scotty’s seated bulk.
“Somebody give me a fucking visual!” Drummond shrieked, “Something! ANYTHING!” No one spoke up. Only the sounds of clicking, typing, and the buzz of error messages.
“It’s simple! THINK!” said Drummond, “What would cause the Purge to trigger a server crash? How are those systems connected? Didn’t I pay one of you useless slobs to write the system to begin with?!” Scotty stopped typing in his Neural. Froze. Kruger stared at the floor, waiting for the axe to drop.
“Scotty,” said Drummond through his teeth. The Warden’s attempt to look threatening as he stomped to the desk was m
ore of a preteen girl’s tantrum. Still, Kruger saw Scotty gulp behind the bearded neck-rolls.
“I-it’s some kind of weird edge-case,” Scotty blurted, “I’m doing all I can to track it down but the debugger——”
“But nothing! You’ll find it and you’ll fix it, or you’ll be looking for a new job with a big, fat, black mark on your RFID Profile! That’s if I don’t have you arrested, locked up, and driving a Crawler for the rest of your pathetic life. You—Do you hear me!?” Scotty lurched forward in his distressed office chair. It creaked and snapped as he winced, rubbed his chest, then fell out. The wet smack he made when his body hit the tile made Kruger cringe. Scotty’s shared Neural image above the desk disappeared. That’s...not a good sign.
“No no no no no, don’t do this to me you fat bastard!” Drummond crouched beside Scotty’s beached mass and tried to roll him over. Scotty wouldn’t budge.
“Get up and fix this!” Drummond gave one last feeble push, then plopped back on the floor. Grabbed the thick wrist and felt for a pulse. Dropped it. He lolled his head backward and stared at the ceiling. Kruger leaned out to steal a look at his late trainer. A mistake.
“You!” said Drummond, “Yes, you, come here!” Drummond circled around the desk and grabbed Hendrik by the arm. He dragged him to the terminal, righted the broken chair, and pushed him into it.
“Sit! Type! Do something!” Drummond said.
“Sir, I—I’m just a trainee,” Hendrik said, his own heart thumping in his chest.
“You didn’t lie on your resumé, did you? You can program, can you not?” said Drummond. Kruger, light-headed, sat at the desk. He pressed a finger to his temple to summon his own Neural, then searched his history. Found Scotty’s last shared data cache, then opened it. Miles upon miles of debug scripts materialized in front of him. The language looked familiar enough, but the system itself would be like reverse-engineering a fusion reactor with a screwdriver and a pair of pliers. How the hell do I even start?
