The Intruder Mandate: The Farthest Star from Home: a military sci-fi suspense novel

by William Cray

  The technicians at the plant were acutely aware of this. One day their status as lesser beings to machines would be revealed and they would be replaced by a series of arms, manipulators and sensors. When that day arrived they would be exiled from their duties and would suffer along with the rest of the unemployed wretches down in the trench scraping out a living by harvesting quee or inspecting ventilation shafts. As a result, they emulated the machines as much as possible, hiding human weakness or personality to prevent anyone taking notice of them in a light that was not computer like in efficiency.

  Reactor Six operated nominally at ninety three percent of rated power. She didn’t know where that power went or where it was routed to, but she had to make sure the output was consistent with what the Controller asked of it. Out of curiosity she committed a slight breach of protocol by asking the Controller, where the energy of her reactor was routed to and she was told politely, that it went to various places, all of which were important but not critical and she should go back to her station and check that everything in her reactor was well.

  Once again, everything was acceptable, but Bai allowed herself for a moment, to think maybe, the Controller was actually a condescending bitch guarding her job. After all, there was a rumor, heard once during a scandalous luncheon with a co-worker, that during the last cycle, the Controller had been rated as merely proficient. Shocking. Proficient didn’t cut it for a Controller.

  On occasion, the Controller would ask her to increase the output of her reactor. One time in particular a year back or so, she was asked to up the reactor to ninety eight percent rated power. She accented for the increase and watched with rapt attention as her dials and readouts pushed forward into areas she had never seen before as her reactor pumped out the additional gigawats of energy requested. Later that night she had discovered that there had been a test at the Stratospire by running up its Large Capacity Elevator all the way to Phobos. Subsequent tests of the Stratospire had coincided with additional power requests from her reactor, so from that, Bai knew, or at least suspected, that her reactor, Reactor Six, was somehow linked to the Stratospire and its operations. And that, Bai thought, was kind of exciting.

  Bai secretly liked excitement. She had attended the prestigious Karachi Institute on Earth, selecting fusion engineering as her course of pursuit in hopes of getting a job on one of the Emperors, or as a second choice, a local merchant ship running from Saturn to the Kuiper belt. But it was not to be. She had not scored so well on her final rating evaluation, the Reactor Safety Test. Her middling score had been devastating, and her hopes as a career ship reactor officer were gone in a flash. Instead she wound up getting the only open job she could find in Sol, as a junior reactor technician in New Meridian City. It was one of the worst assignments available for a graduate of the Karachi Institute Nuclear Engineering School.

  Yes, the New Meridian facilities were at the base of the awesome Stratospire, but it had been shutdown for three generations, and to enhance the miserable experience, all the fusion power domes making up the facility were smack in the middle of the worst ecological disaster in the solar system…The Zone.

  The biggest challenge for the eight workers in Dynamic Industries Fusion Electrical Generating Plant’s control room was determining where in the system Phelman's children were leaching power. They watched their monitors and traced invisible electro-relay pathways from transmitter to receiver, ignoring everything else going on around them. So intense was their concentration that the idle office chatter that filled the typical workplace was reduced to quick blurbs on a screen about a malfunctioning power coupling, or a rare verbal comment about a stray giga-watt of energy had been stolen away into the ether.

  Despite the hardships of working adjacent to Power Dome 3, Bai found she kind of liked working there. The work was not taxing in any manner, although once a year she had to re-qualify for the reactor service and she was fine with being…efficient. It was, after all, just a job, and somewhat surprisingly she had found something else in the city she liked to do. Something exciting. Something she could do when no one at work would see her.

  Despite the events taking place throughout the Zone, it was a regular day for Bai. She checked dials, fluid levels, and trend curves. Her coworkers were oblivious to the world outside of their own self-contained environment and efficiency model. It was a tremendous responsibility, even if it was sickening in its monotony. In reality, they were so engrossed in their tasks her co-workers knew little about her. And she knew little about them. They fraternized so little in that small circular control room, they never noticed that she used drugs regularly, or that she snuck a knife past security today.

  In fact, they had no inkling anything at all was wrong until she got up from her station before her designated break time … and killed them all.

  Bai Lee stepped over the dead terrorists and began switching over power from the first two reactors into the Stratospire's energy relay as she stood in a pool of blood. She worked as efficiently as she could, but it was a slow process to switch her reactor’s power output into the Stratospire. It was important she do so quickly. She watched the readouts from the Controller’s station as power was diverted from each reactor in turn. The power into the city would have to be diverted. It would leave vast swaths of the domes in the dark. But it had to be done.

  The monitor continued to blink administrative messages across its readout. A string of failure to ascent messages followed by computer safety overrides cascaded down the screen, each tick a warning that someone at their station had failed to act before the computer found it necessary to intervene.

  Station 4…Failure to accent…Automatic Safety Override initiated….

  Station 3…Failure to accent…Automatic Safety Override initiated….

  Station 1…Failure to accent…

  She looked over at the unmanned stations. The operators slumped at their positions with necks gashed wide and pools of blood at their feet. Her mind drifted as she looked down to her shoes standing in the black-red pool. The body of the proficient Controller looked back up at her with shocked eyes, appalled at the inefficiency of her death and the wasteful way in which her blood rushed out of the gash at her throat.

  Bai wavered, the horror of her act bleeding into the clarity of her new purpose as she routed all power to the Stratospire. She wavered, but did not break. Switching power to the Stratospire would allow everyone to escape. We can all get out through there and be safe far above the nightmare here.

  She stepped up into the copula platform, safely away from the blood flowing on the floor. She continued monitoring the countdown as the final reactors began their slow climb to power.

  She watched the gages carefully. A miscalculation at the wrong moment could overload one of the underground energy relays and cause a failsafe to trip and correction would take precious moments to restore. Bai used all of her knowledge and expertise so that everyone could escape. Flee this place. She was the only one that could do it. All the others were dead.

  She looked up from her task for just a moment as several armed men came into the room and began erecting defenses around her. She yelled at them that they should go. “Head to the Stratospire. You aren’t safe here.”

  They were completely ambivalent to her, or to the bodies of her co-workers strewn across the floor. They ignored her warnings as they mounted braces on the heavy doors and took up firing positions along the corners of the room. They were there to protect her. She was okay with that. She looked at their police uniforms. They were city police. She would be safe while she finished.

  “Thank you.” Bai said. “I will be done soon and we can escape.”

  Bai knew she could seal the dome and make it impregnable to all but a full military assault, but she didn’t know how. The knowledge to seal the facility against attack lay dead in a pool of blood at her feet. If she had been able to close the gates and seal the dome she could have accomplished her task in security, but instead she and her important wor
k would have to be defended. She knew if she didn’t finish soon, demons would come up from the trench and try to stop her. They would force the gates and try to shut down the reactors but she couldn’t allow that, not until she was done. Not until her task was finished and everyone could escape.

     

  The Stratospire

  Central Elevator

  Hummelt Wyk followed his supervisor into the elevator, finally concluding his shift and ready to return to the station. He had gathered his tools and made sure the robotic R-Tek assistants returned to their couplings to recharge, waiting for the next crew to come down the shaft and task them. It had been a regular shift doing a preventative maintenance inspection with nothing unexpected or out of the ordinary. Taking a seat on the bench style couch, he strapped himself in for the fast ride back up to Phobos. The maintenance shaft was the only elevator that ran routinely on the along the Stratospire these days, with the remaining passenger cars and the central Large Capacity Elevator mostly shut down now. It was a short trip up the Stratospire from the Zenith Coupling level, but he took the two-hour journey almost daily and today at least, it dragged on more than usual. Hummelt was glad to be leaving. There were strange things going on below them in the old city.

  Hummelt watched as his supervisor rubbed his eyes. “What’s wrong Meiki?”

  “Just glad to be headed back up. I need to call my wife.”

  “She down in the city?”

  His supervisor nodded, still with his hands on his face.

  “What do you think is going on down there?”

  “I have no idea, but I’m taking the next shuttle down. I don’t know why they just don’t unlock the elevator and let us head down.”

  “Yeah, that would make sense.” Hummult replied sympathetically. Inwardly he was glad the tower was locked out below them. What ever was going on down there, could just ride the tower up. Having lockout controls on both ends of the tower seemed like a good idea right now.

  “Hopefully it will be over soon.”

  “Ah…I’m sure everything is ok. When they clean out the domes, everything will be better. Less crime. Maybe we won’t have to pay so much in taxes,” Hummult laughed, trying to ease his supervisor’s obvious concern.

  Near the end of his shift Hummult began to get antsy. Something hadn’t seemed right. Even though his maintenance contract stopped at the Zenith Coupling, ten thousand kilometers above New Meridian, he didn’t like the idea of being at the end of the tether with terrorists setting off bombs and initiating chaos below him. Extremists had been threatening to bring down the tower for a century or more, but this time, it felt different. It had been a long time since something this big had happened on the surface, and all of it was occurring around the base of the long beanstalk he edged up now. His counterparts on the Martian side had some gravity, but they also had to deal with the radiation. He didn’t envy them. Hummelt was glad to be racing away from all of it.

  As the spherical axis car began to slow, the gravity eased. They would be weightless until they reached the stations spin chamber. He would be in his shift house shortly and could get some sleep. Then he might head over to the rings and get a few drinks with the rest of the stranded crews stuck on Phobos during the crisis. The maintenance shaft car slowed to a stop with the easy smoothness of perfect operation. Hummelt and his supervisor unbuckled from the couches and gathered up their gear, standing ready at the door for the ride back to their quarters. As the door cycled open, a silver hulk hovered at the entrance.

     

  The S.P.E.C.A.T.S. shimmered with an odd light, reflecting the patterns and colors around it, giving it the appearance of a ghostly apparition in the empty maintenance compartment car racing towards Mars. Anne Braiselle had taken two hours to prep the suit, loading it with variable mass, ammunition and charging batteries, but also cutting short the extensive pre-combat checklist that the suit required after deep storage. She downloaded her info-board data into the suits mission computer since there wasn’t time to generate a proper mission profile. Painstakingly slow, the beast came alive.

  Climbing into the suit and synching her cybernetic systems, she felt herself becoming one with the suit she had been designed to wear. Her first powerful steps, actuated by the impulses from her mind, brought the rush of invincibility. The S.P.E.C.A.T.S. combat suits were almost identical from a distance, but Axe once told her that he could tell she was behind the beast because it moved like her, alternating between the smooth grace of a big cat and the extended talons of a predator. This was her back-up suit from the Vendetta, but it fit like a second skin and executed her will instantaneously. She was immune to most small arms, and faster than anything heavier. Electronic countermeasures kept computer and radar directed systems from tracking her and the Tri-Lum plating made her a specter at range to the naked eye.

  Combined with the ruthless expert that resided inside, it was the perfect weapon of war. It’s only true limitation was duration. She needed every once of energy she could hoard, so her suit was optimized for speed rather than bulk. Variable mass plates converted to brace actuators, armoring only critical systems, making her lighter and more agile. She would be a rapier rather than a tank, and she much preferred the stiletto to the gun.

  The shock gel stores had all rotted out in storage, so she was going in raw. She would have to manage G-forces carefully, cutting into her speed and ability to absorb punishment. Cochrane had brought down what little live ammo and decoys he could scrounge up.

  They will have to do.

  She did the abbreviated start up sequence and loaded a limited mission profile from her infoboard. The last thing Cochrane gave her was a demolition kit.

  Swift fitted it to her suit and they headed to the elevator.

  The spherical car rolled over as the gravity of acceleration pushed away from Phobos, towards the surface and the Intruder. Anne Braiselle’s armored boots touched deck as acceleration neared one MSG inside the maintenance car. Saving precious power, she shut down all systems except for communications. She still had not heard from Major Duran. The suit had only a fraction of its mission power, relying on a twenty percent charge from ten-year-old batteries. She would need every ounce of energy for the suit once she reached the Mind Control Antenna, now in operation below her.

  After two hours the elevator slowed, rotating the car to maintain the consistent gravity inside as Anne began to re-power her systems. The elevator couldn’t take her further. The doors rotated open, revealing a dimly lit corridor running along the circumference of the carbon-nanotube structure, curving around the beam of the Stratospire.

  The corridor was lined with great open windows showing the breathtaking curvature of Mars. Distant Sol retreated fast below the horizon. She glided along the corridor, reaching the access doors described to her by Colonel Cochrane. Using her infiltration systems, she quickly overwhelmed the door locks. Alarms blared as the Zenith Couplings safeties were overridden. Lowering her visor and activating self-contained atmospheric systems, she pried the doors open and the remaining atmosphere in the chamber flushed out. Swift stood at the edge of the giant cavern. Like looking through a straw she could see the opening into Martian atmosphere as a tiny pinpoint of light in the distance. The Stratospire was constructed like two open bottom cups connected by six strings, with thousands of miles open between the two.

  Anne Braiselle stepped back away from the edge, pausing to activate the EM propulsion unit mounted onto the suit’s shoulders. The generator spun up to neutral power, humming quietly as she set up the suit for the long transit to the surface.

  With a graceful leap forward she plunged into the darkness, angling down along the center of the wide curving shaft, falling from thousands of kilometers up, through the center of the Stratospire, accelerating downward.

  It wasn’t long before she could sense the faint tingle of the Intruder array. Even this far up she felt like it was reaching towards her. They would soon know that she was coming
for them.

  Good, she thought.

  29

  Commonwealth Ministry of Interior Affairs

  San Juan, Puerto Rico

  Earth

  Regia Tonaska traversed the gardens in front of the Ministry building. It was an old Imperial building, taken over by the Commonwealth after abdication. Like all the old Imperial buildings, it possessed a great exterior garden, displaying the full range of ecodiversity of the Empire. It was Old Cannis’ trademark. All of the dynastic rulers after the flares were gifted scientists and researchers. By reputation, Old Cannis was a botanist of great renown. He loved his gardens and ensured that every important place that carried his seal had a magnificent arboretum in the persistent tribute to life that his reign was dedicated to. This garden, however, was sallow and fading, its leaves turned at the edges and its flowers becoming less brilliant every year.

  Regia felt the heat of the San Juan afternoon, creating a mild bead of sweat flushing her forehead as she traversed the garden to the main entrance. She wore her traditional Martian Redcoat, which was normally reserved for formal affairs. The Redcoat’s seals and heaters had been removed, but the coat was still made heavy enough to protect its wearer from the harsh cold of Mars. It was not made to walk around in the equatorial sun of San Juan.

  As a non-voting member of the Commonwealth she rarely had to bear the ornate formalities of state. Today was much different though. Her planet was in crisis and it was important today that Roberto Giaconna recognized that he was dealing with a great nation of people who were closer to them than they were to the very sun.

  Reaching the front of the Ministry, she was shown in with all the formal flourish of an arriving ambassador, escorted by a uniformed officer of the Commonwealth Commandos who stood in ceremonial guard of the building. Upon entry to the Deputy Ministers’ offices, she was taken to the foyer where she sat and cooled down for a moment. The escorting officer had probably noticed the slight discomfort of her formal attire and kindly sent ahead for the foyer tempurature to be lowered. It was a relief while she gathered her thoughts.