Cyborg (The Deep Wide Black Book 1)

by JCH Rigby

  Whatever it was, it shouldn’t have been happening in the cells. So, he shouted for his buddy as he ran down the cell block skidding to halt outside the appropriate door. Keying the entry code, he went inside. Seconds later he shouted again, a lot louder.

  Footsteps came running along the corridor, the cell filling with people, all looking at the body slumped across the table. The body with ruined eyes, and a trickle of blood coming from each ear.

  Friday, August 17th

  BOLITHO WATCHED WORDLESSLY AS the man who had offered no name, dropped the bloody chip onto the table. “Tell me you’ve got cell video. Tell me that much, at least.” The visitor’s voice was icy with rage.

  Captain Bolitho was more than uncomfortable. The town’s chief of police wasn’t used to defending his officers and jurisdiction from angry spooks, and that’s what this man had to be. Escorted in here by a colonel from police headquarters, who’d commandeered his office, called him in, thrown him in front of this stranger with little explanation or introductions, before simply walking out and leaving the agent to it.

  “We’ve got video. He’s been on camera from the moment we brought him in, of course, and we searched him, before you ask, three times.” Bolitho didn’t like spooks. Honest cops were accountable for their actions; these people didn’t seem to be and there seemed to be an awful lot more of them around in these uncertain times than before.

  “Thank providence for tiny kindnesses. No physical search would have shown you that chip. You would have needed an MRI of the skull.” If Bolitho thought the intelligence agent was letting him and his cops off the hook he was sadly mistaken. “Next, you’ll tell me you’ve lost the retinal scan you carried out, and you can’t put your hands on the swab results.”

  “As it happens, we haven’t lost any of those things. We’re not complete fools, you know. This man’s eyes say he’s Michael Yip, an ARTOK-sponsored engineering student at Tech, working on the Mass Driver. His DNA and fingerprints though say he’s someone else. It doesn’t matter he’s managed to blow his own fool head off. We’re backtracking that scan. I’ll ensure you receive an update.”

  The agent grunted in acknowledgment before continuing. “I’m sure you’ll track him. That’s what scares me. Tell me about this tapping.”

  The abrupt change of direction confused Bolitho. “What about it? He’d been in there for three days, and every day he’d keep on with the same story: ‘I’m just a student. You’ve got the wrong guy. What’ve I done?’ When we left him alone, he’d be up and around the cell, muttering. Sometimes banging on the wall or the door. Sometimes shouting at the camera. Sometimes sleeping. But whenever he was doing nothing else, he tapped his legs. Like a drummer, or something. That’s all.”

  “Show me.” Demanded the agent. They watched the screens in silence. The spook took the controls, played with the images, went forward and back. “Why did you bring him in?”

  “We received a tip from a snitch in a bar. He was seen with some faces we know, and our snitch didn’t know him. That’s all. We followed him for a while then just stopped him, on spec, to have a word. He got lively, tried to run. Too good to ignore, really.” Bolitho doubted the agent would see it; but any cop’s instincts would have been triggered.

  The agent grunted, then turned back to the screen where the late possibly-Yip tapped at his legs, looking distraught. Twenty slow minutes passed; Bolitho grew irritated and made to leave, only to be waved back to his seat. Then: “Do you see it?” Asked the agent.

  “See what?” Said Bolitho not having a clue what the spook meant.

  “The sequence. He’s tapping out numbers on his legs. Right hand for singles, both hands for tens. Nine sets of combinations, each with a pause before the next set, then repeat the whole lot. A total of twenty-five rhythms. He’s counting out the primes below 100.”

  “What?” Gasped the policeman bewildered. “Why would he do that?”

  “Look at this bit.” The agent manipulated the controls. The image blurred with speed, then the date-time stamp on the screen flickered and settled at an hour before Yip’s death. “Look. Look here. He does four taps, both hands together for forty; then seven taps with the right hand. Forty-seven.” The agent clapped his hands and took a step back from the monitor as if he had solved an ancient puzzle.

  Bolitho stared up and into space, then back at the spook. “A prime number, isn’t it?” The conversation was becoming unreal.

  “Exactly! Now, look at the next set.” The figure on screen tapped again—five together, then two with the right hand.

  “Fifty-two—what’s he up to?” Said Bolitho confusion apparent on his face.

  “He got it wrong. It should have been fifty-three. An hour later a microscopic charge took those interesting eyes clean out of the front of his skull.”

  Bolitho’s confusion deepened. The agent smiled at him like a teacher about to explain a simple math problem to a child. “It’s a Chinese covert reliability technique. Simple enough to remember, complicated enough to need concentration. If you are flustered, and make a mistake, the chip starts looking for physical symptoms of anxiety. If it doesn’t like what it finds it takes action. He probably wouldn’t have known what it could do, just that he needed to tap out the sequence. Now, if the eyes were Michael Yip’s, who the hell did those fingerprints belong to? Who was the rest of this guy?”

  Bolitho stared at the bloodstained flake on the table. “Well, we know his name, and we’re trying to find out a bit more—where he worked, who he associated with, that sort of thing.”

  The intelligence officer stared at him. “Did it not occur to you to mention that to me a little earlier? So, who the hell was he?”

  Bolitho stood up and leaned across his desk. “I did offer you an update, if you recall. You weren’t interested. The swab and the fingerprints belonged to someone called Rob Younus. I’ll see if we’ve gotten anywhere with the rest.” He sat down and began tapping at the screen, and read something. “Well, that’s, interesting.” He didn’t want to say it. “A report’s been filed while we’ve been in here talking. It seems we’ve got nothing.”

  “What do you mean, nothing?” Repeated the agent.

  “Just that. Rob Younus has left no trace on any system anywhere. He’s a ghost. The data points to the name, but we don’t know anything else. How old he is, where he comes from, where he works, anything. The address is a fake; there’s no such place. No birth or immigration records.”

  “What about Yip?”

  Bolitho studied the slate. “He seems genuine enough. Lodgings, work record, academic grades. He immigrated three years back. Parents stayed behind, somewhere in, China?”

  The intelligence officer stood up and began walking about the cramped little office. “Forget about China, we’ll worry about them. This has got Earth First written all over it. Younus sounds like a rush job, a blank. Just enough notice for a cover identity to be produced in a hurry. Someone knew about Yip, and something about him was valuable to them, so they sent some blank man here to try on his eyes. Someone’s doing specialized surgery. We may find them, but we’ll probably never know who the blank really was, and the rest of the real Yip will be long dead.”

  “But what was so useful about him?” Wondered Bolitho more to himself than the agent.

  “His ARTOK connections. His access to the Mass Driver, I’d bet.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Heavy Lifter Deck Cargo

  “The desideratum of all . . . is speed. Your fools don’t see it—they are always running about to see where they can put on a little more armor to make it safer. You don’t go into battle to be safe!” –Admiral Jackie Fisher, 1841-1920.

  Tuesday, August 21st

  "Lance Corporal Arden! You’re needed!” I loped into the Two Platoon junior NCOs’ office, right into the middle of a whirlpool of activity. Andy and the rest of the section commanders were pulling kit out of lockers, checking screens and radios and the rest of thei
r command gear. I shoved my way toward him.

  “Where the hell have you been, Steve? You can’t just disappear like that—we’re on standby. There’s an Op on, and half the guys aren’t where they should be. Get out on the hangar floor and sort the section out, while I prep for the boss’s orders.”

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  Andy continued readying his gear as he replied. “All I know is that the Company received a warning order about ten minutes ago, ordering the Company to prepare for an operation against paramilitaries in the Hevelius region of Mare Procellarum. “No Move Before” had been given as two hours, which is bloody short order and probably means big trouble. Now go round up the section while I find out what the hell is going on.” And with that he slammed his locker closed and ran out the door headed to the briefing room. I headed out to the hanger floor my mind racing as I tried to guess what the best load out for the section would be for an op we had no information on.

  FROM COPERNICUS GARRISON, IT's about 900 kilometers to Hevelius, a couple of hours’ lift by heavy transport, so we got our Quick Battle Orders from Andy while we were on the way. Sure enough, a sizable force of Earth First irregulars were attempting to take over the Mass Driver. The word we got was C Company guard platoon was holding them, but only just. It was going to be lively. Details were still sketchy, hence the QBO’s instead of a more thorough briefing but Andy kept listening in to his headset and passing on handy little nuggets of wisdom he gleaned from the command net.

  “There’s about 200 civvie workers in the area; most should be in the Operations Complex at the western end, but the rest could be anywhere, depending on what they were up to when the paramilitaries turned up so check your targets before you engage.”

  I looked around the passenger deck of the heavy lifter; a lot of the guys were staring straight ahead, eyes fixed on nothing. Andy caught my eye, giving me a reassuring grin like he could read my thoughts. They knew we were coming, and a hot landing under enemy fire was a real possibility.

  The really crap news was that if the enemy got deep enough into the Mass Driver they’d be impossible to weed out without trashing it. The ARTOK company would not be too thrilled if that happened.

  The Mass Driver covered a sizable area toward the western edge of Mare Procellarum, overlooked by the low walls of Hevelius crater but still well out into the plain. Sited there to take advantage of the flat ground for material to be launched into orbit from the linear accelerator’s coils. Now, though, that very flatness would work against us by robbing us of cover for our approach. Thanks a bunch, ARTOK.

  A lot depended on what the bad guys were after. If they wanted to destroy the Driver, they could. If they wanted hostages for some reason, they most likely had them by now. However, if they were after a spectacular of some sort—well, all bets were off.

  None of this was my problem, though. As second in command of the section, I was way too far down the food chain. I only needed to worry about taking our objectives and keeping the section alive through a company-level assault on a prepared and ready enemy. Piece of piss, really.

  “It’ll be Chinese kit, you watch.” Andy was doing his secret squirrel stuff again, being the first guy with the hot poop.

  I gave him a confident grin that only went as far as my lips for inside my stomach was doing flip flops.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Hevelius Mass Driver

  "One, the control software is unreliable as of now. Two, the Driver’s alignment must be suspect. Would you trust a billion rubles worth of load to something that either might do the job, or might spit your cargo all over the moon? Three, all the cooling systems will be out of whack, so if by some miracle it still works it won’t stay working for long. Four, even if everything works, which it won’t, and even if we could check it all in an hour, which we can’t, we’re losing thousands of rubles every second the Driver isn’t lifting cargoes for our customers.”

  Anna Chechyryova finished her brief and retook her seat around the small conference table which had somehow miraculously been located and squeezed into the room. She spared a moment to look around the table which held a mixed ensemble of military and government types all politely listening to what she, as the on-site ARTOK Operations Director had to say. Anna had been off-site, visiting a potential corporate client, when she got the call and hurried back to Hevelius. The conference was taking place in a commandeered office in an engineering unit about half an hour away from the Driver.

  The brief silence in the room was broken by a rather dapper dressed man sitting opposite Anna. “There’s an obvious political dimension, too, as well as the economic one, ladies and gentlemen.” Alphonse had been introduced as a “government adviser.” Anna didn’t like consultants, lobbyists, or spin doctors, and he smelt of that breed—great at stating the risks, lousy at scaling them for severity or probability. “If the Outward Party government could be blamed for letting terrorists destroy the Driver, and for the economic damage which would follow, then wavering voters might desert them.”

  Alphonse nodded toward her. “Respecting your presence Ms. Chechyryova, ARTOK money could vanish with them, and your relationship with your principal client is famously… tense? Shall we say? The government has no desire to offend its voters or the ARTOK company, or to tread on the toes of NipponDeutsch. Construction of their starship depends on the timely arrival of the scheduled loads. A show of force would be useful. A surgical strike.”

  Feeling a little side lined by the presence of a member of central government the politician at the table, the Mayor of Friendship City, took an opportunity to get his point across. “Look, we simply can’t afford this. Not forgetting the several hundred citizens are caught up in this. We have lives, families, and livelihoods to consider. Friendship is a marginal community without work, and Ms. Chechyryova is the principal employer in this region. If we lose the Driver, well—” He jabbed an accusing finger across the table at the regional police commander. “What are you going to do about it?”

  The chief constable visibly wilted under the Mayors stare, scrambling to make excuses as to his lack of response to the situation. “It’s Earth First, we know that much.” He stated simply. “I could put names to a few of them right now. They’ve been working themselves up to something like this for a while, so I doubt they’re going to fade away as soon as they see a cop. I won’t get them out of there in a hurry and I can’t guarantee what damage will be done if I try. What you’re telling me is you’d like these people dead rather than arrested, and quickly.” An embarrassed silence followed his words as no one hurried to disagree.

  Anna could see that this meeting was turning into one massive session of pass the buck with no one willing to make the hard decisions necessary to oust the Earth First terrorists. Well ARTOK had entrusted her with responsibility for the Driver so it looked like it was up to her. Steeling herself she addressed the one person who had remained conspicuously silent and aloof during the meeting. “Brigadier?”

  Heads turned and every eye in the room fixed on the soldier. Chechyryova thought he looked disgusted by the buck-passing. “It’s rather more straightforward than you may wish to think. We—that is, the commander of the unit I have tasked with this—we will do everything possible to ensure the facility is undamaged in our operation to dislodge these irregulars, but I can give you no guarantees whatsoever.

  “Madam, we will try to preserve your company’s assets, but it’s not looking good. Mr. Mayor, Chief Constable; we will try hard to preserve private property and even harder to preserve innocent lives, but again I can give you no guarantees. Sir—” this with a nod to Alphonse, “—we will also try not to embarrass the government, but there I can offer you even less hope.

  “If I was in government, I’d personally be deeply embarrassed if anyone found out I was only prepared to allow one platoon of light infantry to defend a critically-important facility as extensive as the Mass Driver site because I wanted the place to look
demilitarized and ‘nonthreatening.’ Frankly, it would have been a sight more secure if it had looked very bloody threatening indeed. I would have an armored battalion all over it, given the authority, and you wouldn’t have this mess.”

  Alphonse at least had the good graces to look suitably abashed by the Brigadiers disparaging comments. The Mayor and the Chief Constable huffed like children. The Brigadier ignored them continuing to speak to Anna directly.

  “‘Surgical strike’ is not a phrase I hear very often in military circles, it tends to be bandied about by politicians who no either nothing or worse, little about military operations but consider themselves armchair generals. We’ll do what we can, ladies and gentlemen, but it won’t be quick or cheap or tidy. If we’re lucky, you might achieve two of those. You won’t get all three, whatever happens.”

  HEVELIUS IS BIG. THE Mare Procellarum is big. The whole bloody place is as bare-assed as anything. When Earthie soldiers go on and on about needing cover, I’d like them to take a look at what we were seeing that day. In theory, there was plenty of cover: little folds in the regolith, ray systems, rilles, eroded crap, low-velocity impact melt, ejecta of various sorts. Some of them were ravines a few dozen meters deep, but most of it was so shallow the vehicles would be visible from the waist up. We learned about all this stuff in school, and I’d forgotten most of it until the start of this tour of duty. Now it all seemed a bit more important. Like I said: plenty of cover, but you needed to know where to look for it. Perfect country for missile artists, so Andy’s wisecracks about Chinese weapons had me worried.