by Eyal Kless
When he checked the internal clock again more than two hours had passed. Mannes wondered whether to take some time and organize his thoughts, perhaps enjoy some mindless entertainment, or simply get into the cryo bed and wake up an hour before arrival. There was merit in sleeping his worries away. He could arrive refreshed and focused, and no one would bother him unless it was an emergency. On the other hand, he would be unconscious, vulnerable. Well . . . at least he had plenty of cryo beds to choose from.
Mannes’s eyes wandered to the screen, which was showing the space he was leaving behind. Earth was just a large, blue-and-white ball in space, already too distant to show any visible features. He caught a glimpse of another shuttle in the side camera. It was far away, of course, but he focused on it for a brief second and the screen, sensing his retina, magnified the image. It was “his” shuttle, the slightly smaller model, carrying the family he’d changed places with. They’d probably already discovered they had only one or two cryo beds and three screaming kids in a small, weightless environment. Mannes shook his head and promised to find a way to make it up to them. Maybe he could pull some strings and get them to win another trip to the moon resort, or even a guided tour through the space hub, or upgrade their hotel room to a full suite—now that was a good idea.
He was still watching the shuttle when it exploded.
Chapter 21
Twinkle Eyes
I found Galinak sitting on LoreMaster Harim’s reclining chair. He didn’t even bother to open his eyes when he asked, “So, how was the rest of your conversation with those rust fuckers?”
There was nowhere to sit. I leaned on the desk, crossing my arms. “We need to grab Vincha’s daughter before a very capable operative does so, and stop a man called Mannes from using the girl, possibly by killing him.”
Galinak nodded. “And if we decide not to do it, we have three years to live.”
“Pretty much.”
“They screwed us again, Twinkle Eyes. I can see why the rest of the world hated those wire rippers.”
“We don’t have a choice,” I said, but Galinak shook his head slowly.
“There’s always a choice. We could send those Tarkanians to rust and live as freemen.”
“And die in agony in less than three years.”
Galinak turned his head and locked his gaze with mine. “Would you rather be a Tarakan slave for the rest of your life?”
I wanted my answer to be witty as well as persuasive, but I couldn’t find the words. Instead, I changed tactics and said, “Whatever our decision may be, we need to find Vincha first and tell her what’s going on.”
That got Galinak’s attention, and for the first time a smile appeared on his face. “It would be nice to meet the old gal.”
“I’m sure she’ll be delighted to see you, too.” I kept my face as neutral as possible.
“She’s gonna try to rip our balls off.”
“I trust you to stop her from accomplishing that.”
He shrugged theatrically. “Maybe . . . you think you can track her down??”
I liked the way Galinak asked me that. It meant he trusted my skills and found me useful, and since he was the one who could survive the wilderness, I desperately needed him at my side.
“I’ve done it before, and I have a few ideas and more than a few contacts in the City of Towers. We need to start from there.”
“Agreed, but first we need to get out of here. Any chance you can fly this metal bird? I mean, you seemed capable enough with the helmets and everything.”
I thought about it, but shook my head. Even if I somehow dreamt a way to manoeuvre the metal behemoth and take it to the skies, flying and landing it was beyond me. Besides, I considered the library LoreMaster Harim had gathered, his lifework, should be kept in a relatively safe area. “No, we need to leave all of this here.”
Galinak sighed as he got up, hefting the power machine gun in his arms. “We’re gonna have to fight past the Dwaines, you know.”
I checked the power clip of my peacemaker; it was full. “Maybe they’ll listen to reason.”
Galinak slid a second power tube into the weapon’s reserve chamber. “Sure, I’m certain they’ll listen to reason,” he said, “they sure look like listen-to-reason type of people.”
“It was an honest mistake,” I said, as we walked to the back door of the Leviathan.
“They’ll understand.” Galinak flicked out the enhanced aiming device.
“Let me do the talking,” I said, pulling the lever. The door began to open downwards.
“Sure. You’ll do all the talking and persuading, I’ll just be all quiet and respectful.” Galinak gave me the thumbs-up and kneeled down to a sniping position.
“And don’t do anything rash,” I said. “Let’s give diplomacy a chance, for a change.”
“Diplomacy is my second name.” Galinak hooked the weapon’s sight into his SmartGlass.
A bullet buzzed past my face just as he finished the sentence, causing me to throw myself to the side.
“So much for diplomacy.” Galinak half turned and let loose a burst of energy bolts. There was a distant cry to our left, followed by angry shouts from all directions.
“I think the welcoming committee awaits us,” Galinak said as he pulled the trigger again. “I hope you prepared a nice speech.”
“Rust.” With the peacemaker in my hand, I deepened my sight and surveyed the area. “We’re surrounded,” I informed Galinak as bullets began flying all around us.
Galinak let out another burst of deadly bolts. “Let’s go parley,” he said, then we lunged forward.
Chapter 22
Mannes
“Hello?” Mannes did not remember tapping his left temple, but he must have done so because it was Daichi’s voice speaking in his inner ear.
“Holtz, are you there? Are you receiving this? I know I’m getting through.”
Mannes’s eyes were still fixated on the screen, watching the debris from the exploded shuttle, his shuttle, spreading in a growing arc. The family was dead. Two parents, three kids—one was almost Deborah’s age.
“Mannes, answer me, it’s important.”
Coincidence? It couldn’t be.
He pressed his temple with his middle finger, keeping the conversation internal and hidden from the shuttle’s AI.
“Mannes here.” He heard his thought being voiced over the Comm.
“Christ, man. Why didn’t you answer?”
A whole family. Dead.
“What is it?” He steeled his internal voice.
Daichi was still breathing hard and speaking very fast, like he always did when he got overexcited. “They got to the others. Andriana was taken, I know that for a fact.”
They almost got me. They murdered a whole family instead.
“How?”
“I saw her, Holtz. Six Guardian Angels, six. Christ, she’s what, five feet tall? They took her family, too. I saw it with my own eyes.”
Deborah.
“And Jameson is dead.”
“Dead?” He must have sat down without realising it because when he moved abruptly, the restraints tensed lightly against his body.
“The newsline says he fell from a bridge, or jumped. I think he was running away from them—or was pushed.” Daichi’s voice broke. Jameson was the only one in the crew who could reach Daichi when he was at his worst.
Then it’s over.
Daichi must have read his thoughts. “It’s not over yet. I pieced together the code, we could still do this.”
“What? How?” They’d divided the code between themselves, thus ensuring the program would not be launched without a consensus. At the time, he’d thought it was a great idea, a responsible idea. Now he realised it only took the removal of one of their members to void the entire enterprise. A thought suddenly occurred to Mannes: Despite everything they’d done so far, he never actually believed they would eventually go through with it.
“Andriana gave me her code last
week, for safekeeping. She sensed she was being monitored. And Jameson . . .” Daichi laughed sadly. “He used to recite the code silently to himself. You know how he is about remembering things.”
Mannes nodded to himself while thinking: You meant to say “how he was.”
“I couldn’t overhear him, but I read his lips one day. It was easy.”
Yes. Jameson was the kind of guy who would recite the code to himself every morning with the discipline of a monk, and Daichi was the kind of man who could memorize a twenty-six-digit code by reading someone’s lips from the other side of the room.
Mannes held the last piece of the code.
“We have to do it now.” Daichi’s voice wavered again. “Andriana . . . she’ll crack . . . soon.”
She would, especially if—when—they used her family as leverage.
“Cain is not thoroughly tested,” Mannes said, as if Daichi did not know every line of code that fleshed out the entity they’d created. “We need another year. Who knows what could—”
“He’ll do fine, he’ll adapt. We made him that way, and the tunnel we dug in is ready. Frankly, Holtz, we have no choice.”
The shuttle’s voice filled the cabin.
“Doctor Holtz, this is Norma, your shuttle’s AI. You are being hailed at the Comm from the Tarakan space hub.”
Those kids were probably being annoying, and with the space that cramped, the parents were exasperated, right to the point when they were all blown to pieces.
“Holtz. Where are you?” Daichi would not let it go.
“Block the message from the hub.”
“This is against proto—”
“You know my rank—block it!” He was shouting now, at a low-level shuttle AI. He was losing it.
“Holtz . . . the code.”
Mannes looked at the screen but there was nothing there. The image of the debris was already gone and he suspected that soon it would be purged from the memory bank of his shuttle, too. He wondered briefly how they would cover up this mess but guessed it would be laughably easy. An accident, terrorism, whatever. People always believed what they were told to believe.
“This is our only chance to do this, Holtz. Don’t crack on me now.”
Deborah.
“Sir. We are being hailed again. It is the hub’s central command, priority one.”
“Block it.”
“This is—”
“Block it!” he roared.
“Holtz. The code . . .”
They murdered a whole family, and it was his fault. Adam’s fault. Professor Vitor was right. Adam has to be stopped.
His piece of the code was only fourteen digits long, the shortest of them all, easy to remember. A couple of birthdays strung together with name initials. He was just lazy about it, really. Mannes recited the code once into his internal receiver.
Daichi hung up without another word, or maybe he was cut off by Central Command because a second later Commander Ismark’s voice filled the cabin and his emergency inner channel.
“Doctor Holtz, this is Captain Ismark of the Tarakan space hub. What the fuck is going on?” The commander’s voice was always angry, even on the best of days, but this time it sounded steel-edged.
“Commander, I don’t know what you mean.”
“Do not play games with me, Holtz. You were supposed to be on Shuttle S2 carrier, which blew up suddenly and the next thing I know, I’m finding you on shuttle S2FX. The casualties from S2 are a family of five who should not have been on the S2 at all.”
“There must have been a mix-up—”
“Hold on.” Commander Ismark shut the Comm for a long moment, then she was back with: “Holtz.” Her voice, impossibly, hardened even further. “I am receiving info here that there was an external breach of the manifest of the shuttle plans. An engineer access code was used to change the shuttle plan.”
There was only a brief pause, during which Mannes could not find anything useful to say. Commander Ismark’s voice filled the cabin again. “Doctor Holtz, you are under arrest. Until further notice you are to do nothing whatsoever. Communicate with no one—this is a direct order, and I will be monitoring your access points and blocking all messages. The shuttle will turn around and head back to base, where you will be taken into custody until we get to the bottom of this.”
As she spoke the shuttle began changing its course.
Mannes finally found his voice. “Commander, changing course is going to take time, and I am needed on an emergency call on the moon base. Surely we could—”
“Your time of arrival will be eighteen hours and thirty-seven minutes. I suggest you get some cryo sleep, you’ll need it. Ismark out.” She cut communication off, and the shuttle’s AI informed Mannes almost immediately that his credentials were suspended and that all communication from the shuttle was blocked.
Mannes stood up again.
“Please sit down as we make a course-changing manoeuvre,” the AI pilot warned in a pleasant but firm voice.
He ignored it.
So the game was up. He was going to be interrogated. Kindly at first—after all, he was a high-ranking member of Tarakan civil service. Then the questions would begin to be more difficult. They’d find out about things. He’d make mistakes, let something slip. Even if he held it together for a while, they had leverage. Deborah.
Mannes looked around. The cryo beds were there, tempting him to enter the black void and forget his troubles for just a little longer. But instead of complete despair, he was suddenly filled with inexplicable rage.
Like hell was he just going to lie there like a mummy until they came to take him away. Screw that plan. He could still make a difference. He could try to reach the moon resort and call people. People of power, people who knew him personally and owed him a favour. He was the deputy head of the Computer and Science Engineering Department, for crying out loud. His security credentials were as high as a three-starred army general. Fuck Ismark and her orders. At the very least he would buy time for Daichi to clear out and for himself to think of a story that just might stick. Maybe he missed the S2FX for old time’s sake and, with the mischievousness of a civilian engineer, changed the roster. Maybe he was just an asshole who wanted a bigger shuttle.
Mannes didn’t know how, but the head gear of his space suit ended up in his hands. He fastened it on in three expert moves. He was not hooked to the oxygen attachment, of course, so immediately it became harder to breathe. He fought the rising panic and concentrated on what he had to do. Quickly, before I pass out.
“I am detecting that you are wearing the space suit’s helmet.” Norma’s voice was calm but stern. “May I remind you that you should only wear the helmet during detachment from the space hub or in case of emergencies, and that—”
Mannes went straight to the pilot’s hatch. Yes. It was closed, locked, but he’d spent three years in and out of the S2-type vessels, and one learns a trick or two in the process. There was a manual override for emergencies, a handle . . . there . . . and you had to stick the utility cable into the power core and . . .
“You are trying to breach a secure area. Please stop immediately or measures will be—”
Now he had to kneel and search for the other handle. That was going to hurt his back, and his gut was really in the way of things.
A short puff was the only warning that the knockout gas was being released into the cabin. He was clad in a full space suit, but that only gave him a minute or two before the nanoparticles would penetrate and find his skin. Mannes groaned and stretched as his breath marked the inside of the helmet. Found it. Pull.
The door slid open above him and he jumped up and sailed through it to the cramped space of the pilot cabin. When the door was sealed behind him and the measurements on the space suit arm display had shown that the gas had not sifted through to the cabin, he unsealed the helmet and took several deep breaths. He caught his reflection. Perspiration was running down his face and he grinned right through it. Yeah. Plan B it fucki
ng is. The AI kept warning him that his actions were a breach of several hundred rules. Mannes found the switch that controlled the program’s speech and turned it off with childish glee. The cabin went blissfully silent.
Now to take control of this baby.
It proved harder than he thought it would be, and he almost fried the entire pilot’s board twice, but luckily the S2FX was not military grade, so with a little ingenuity he brought the manual pilot online and suddenly he was flying the shuttle.
He actually whooped.
Now he just had to figure out where he was and where he should be heading. Assuming Commander Ismark wouldn’t blow him to little tiny pieces. Mannes looked at the flashing screens, then out to space and tried to ignore the sinking feeling in his stomach. He’d piloted more than a few personal engineering crafts in his life but always just around the space hub. For greater distances, they always used a trained pilot AI. Now he needed to plot a course to the moon base without slowing his speed, and do so manually.
As if on cue, Commander Ismark’s voice filled the cabin.
“Doctor Holtz.” Her voice was now forcedly calm. “I am not asking you what have you done, I can see it, and I am not asking you what you are going to do. I am telling you that you have made a grave mistake. Commandeering a space craft is a class A offence, so for your sake, I am telling you to—”
Suddenly there was the sound of an alarm. For several seconds Mannes thought it was coming from the shuttle, but then he realised that the Comm had remained open. He heard someone shout, “Commander, report of shots in B and C sections.”
To Commander Ismark’s credit, her response was not an incredulous “What?” or “Come again?” Instead, she calmly said, “Inform Earth command immediately that we are under attack. Unseal emergency pads, call Guardian Angels into—”
A man’s voice interrupted to report that shots had been fired in section E.
“Deploy the Guardian Angels in all sectors. Level code red 2. All civilians should head to the escape areas and wait for—”
