So many of them. The best divers Pan Korea had to offer. He could take any one of them head to head, except for maybe Rikksin. But this was hopeless. He’d sacrificed so much to get here. And it wasn’t just the money. His hopes were gone, his dreams. So many fantasies about the things he’d discover, the way the other divers would speak his name in hushed awe, the respect he’d finally get. It had all gone down the drain. If he couldn’t beat them, maybe he could join them. Get a few crumbs of glory. But he knew that was just as much a fantasy as all the rest. They’d never let him. He wasn’t Korean, he hadn’t been initiated, he didn’t have anything they wanted. He was a joke. A fool who’d gone on a fool’s errand—
“How’s the slop, fishy?”
Three trays slammed down around him. The gravver and his Slinky friends, come to tease him again. The Slinkies slid their trays onto the table and ate as best they could, leaning their faces down into the mush and slurping it up like pigs at a trough. Whatever tasks their arms were designed for, it didn’t involve using kitchen utensils. As for the gravver, he dined like a dainty princess, savoring the taste of every bite of slop. Gen-modified taste buds, Mordecai thought, and a smart move for anyone who planned to spend their life in the far reaches of space.
“Ya ain’t friends with yer friends, huh?” said the gravver. He nodded over at Rikksin’s clan. “Guys got here a week ago. Ya scavenging the same stuff? Can tell it from yer face. Ya get all squinchy when ya get jealous.”
Squinchy?
He must have squinched some more, because the three men burst out laughing at him, the Slinkies spraying bits of food all over themselves.
“That’s luck on the frontier, my friend,” said the gravver. “Ya get there first or ya might as well not get there at all. Well, mostly.”
“Mostly,” said one of the Slinkies.
“Unless you’re a little flexible,” said the other. “As far as ethics and such.”
The Slinkies slunk in unison, bobbing up and down in a demonstration of their own limber scruples.
“See, yer friends,” said the gravver. “They got here first. That’s good and that’s bad.”
“Bad ‘cause they got a head start,” said one of the Slinkies.
“Good ‘cause they did all the hard work for you,” said the other.
The gravver held out his hand. Empty. Until with a flick of his wrist, a quant chip rolled out of his sleeve and into his palm.
“That’s a public net they’re running their data through,” said the gravver.
“Public,” said one of the Slinkies in between gulps of slop. “And we installed it.”
“It’s all on the chip,” said the gravver. “Everything they sent back home. Every bit and byte or whatever.”
Mordecai physically salivated at the thought. But his mood jackknifed back down just as quickly as it had risen. “It’d be encrypted. It’s not any use to me. There’s no way to crack it, not out here, not with the computing resources I have—”
“Oh, we got the key,” said the gravver. “We stole a guy’s arm.”
“An arm?” said Mordecai, bewildered.
“You gotta be careful outside,” said one of the Slinkies.
“It’s a dangerous place,” said the other.
“Guy wanders off on a strange planet and goes missing, who you think has to go find him?” said the gravver. “The Koreans? Hell no. It’s guys like us. The search party. One of ‘em went sight-seeing his first day out. Took his last dive right off a cliff. He was long gone when we found him. But we got the arm.” He smiled, his teeth a little too big for his compressed skull. “All metal. No flesh. But that’s where you guys keep your data, right? In the arm?”
“How much?” said Mordecai. “Assuming I can extract the key.”
“That’s our boy,” said the gravver with a smile. “It’ll be a couple billion. And a couple billion more to take you out to the site.”
“The site?” said Mordecai.
“Where they’re working,” said the gravver. “The data, the arm, and a trip right out to the Koreans’ work site. Can’t beat that deal.”
Mordecai sat there in silence for a long, uncomfortable moment. If an ordinary conversation was frightening, this was a horror show. It was highly illegal, to say the least. And what would Rikksin do if he found out? What would he say? What if there wasn’t any key, what if it was all a waste, what if the data was unusable—
He took a breath. None of that mattered. Not really. He was thoroughly screwed already. It couldn’t get any worse. This was hope. This was a chance. A tiny chance. But it was something to cling to, a straw to grasp at. He didn’t have anything else. It was take what had fallen into his lap or crawl back home in disgrace.
For once in his life, Mordecai was going to put aside his worries and act.
“Deal,” said Mordecai. “Now show me the arm.”
They’d left it in the passenger seat of an automated rover parked about a mile away from Fort Twicken. It was wrapped inside an old blanket, a crimson stain spread across one end. Mordecai couldn’t bring himself to touch it. The gravver did the grisly work for him, unfurling the blanket and dropping the severed limb into the middle of the seat.
There it was, flesh and all. Most of the arm consisted of high-end cybernetics, but it ended in a bloody stump, wires fused to veins and tech melded to flesh. They’d severed it expertly, slicing through human flesh and leaving the robotics in pristine condition, other than a few scuffs from the fall.
“Try it out,” said the gravver.
Mordecai pulled a tablet from his duffel bag and jacked it into a port in the wrist. It took a few seconds to power up again. He jumped as the fingers suddenly clenched, an automatic response. The thing had reflexes just as much as any human did, and they’d outlived their owner. The hand was going wild, writhing back and forth on the seat. There was no data coming in from the man’s nervous system, so the arm had to act on its own.
But that was easily fixed. After about a minute of frantic coding Mordecai had spoofed up an emulated nervous system, convincing the arm that it was attached to its owner again. A few more minutes and he had access to the memory chip. And just as the gravver had promised, the key was there and ripe for the plucking.
“You like?” said the gravver.
“Here’s the payment,” said Mordecai, holding out his own arm. The gravver pressed his hand against it, wrist against wrist and chip against chip. Mordecai felt a light buzz as the cryptos transferred over. “Now the site.”
“Just get in,” said the gravver. “It’ll take ya right there.” He handed Mordecai the quant chip, then slapped him on the shoulder again. “A little light reading for the ride.”
“Better go,” said one of the Slinkies, bobbing at a convoy of rovers pulling out of the fort. “But don’t follow too close.” Rikksin’s clan. They were off, heading to whatever discovery they’d made. Mordecai ran around the other side of the rover and leapt into the other seat.
“Ya find somethin’ worth stealin’, ya keep us in mind!” shouted the gravver as the rover’s engine roared. Mordecai forced a smile and then he was gone, the rover driving for him and tailing the convoy at a comfortable distance, just over the horizon and just out of sight.
There was nothing to do other than scour the data. Reams full of it, and it’d take him days to review it all. He stared down at his tablet, flipping through the intercepted files. Comm messages. Schematics. White papers they’d already written up. It was all in Commercial Mandarin, but Mordecai was fluent. You had to be if you wanted to dive. And this stuff was truly out there.
Not a lot of details, but what there was didn’t make any sense. They wanted plants. Ferns, kudzu, moss, and even algae. And gene splicers. They’d ordered nearly a hundred different pieces of machinery, all of them biotech related. He’d have expected them to order more computers, or even heavy equipment. But this was a mess of nonsense. And the white papers were all about the biology of the Cousins. Their nervous system, their genes, the
ir brain structure. He tried to make sense of it all, tried to understand what Rikksin must be thinking—
He heard a loud thump.
He looked up from the tablet to see the rover veering away, heading up a rocky slope. He could see the caravan in the distance, and he could see where Rikksin was headed. A city. An actual alien city, built millions of years ago by a now-faded civilization. He’d expected ruins, but this looked brand new. It looked alive. Spires climbing towards the sky, giant beanstalk-like things dotted with bits of green. They were buildings of some kind. They had to be; they were too orderly to have sprung up on their own. A lush forest of plant life grew at the base of the structures, but he knew from the reports that the city was abandoned. The Cousins were there, sleeping, totally unaware that someone had finally crossed the stars to bang on their door and wake them up.
But his rover was heading in the opposite direction of the city. Up a cliff instead of towards the site. Over a bumpy trail and towards a dead end a few miles away, leading off the edge and into nothingness. The rover was speeding up, programmed not to follow the other divers but to take a dive of its own.
The gravver and those Slinkies had fucked him. And now he knew exactly how they’d gotten that arm.
He ripped his jack from the diver’s arm, searching for someplace on the dashboard to plug it in and take control.
Nothing. No steering wheel, no controls, no computer. Just a smooth, polished surface covering the mechanics within.
The rover accelerated. Maybe another mile and he’d be over the edge. Just another corpse for the gravver and his friends to scavenge like the vultures they were.
He slammed his fists against the dashboard. He was hyperventilating, and he was losing control. He couldn’t lose control. He couldn’t let the anxiety consume him, not like it always did. Not if he wanted to survive.
He bit his tongue, using the pain to center his mind at least a little bit, the salty taste of blood mixing with the planet’s smell. He flipped his cybernetic eye again and again until he came to X-ray vision. He could see right through the metal dashboard. The controls were in there. A bundle of chips and wires right in the middle, hidden behind a panel.
And a thin, almost imperceptible crack where the parts of the dashboard had been fastened together.
He grabbed the diver’s arm, slamming it against the crack, screaming at the top of his lungs. He didn’t know what he was shouting, and he barely even knew what he was doing. It was all endorphins and reflexes now, no time for conscious reflection or thought. But it worked. The panels on the dashboard separated with a loud thunk, the cybernetic arm bounced out of his grip, and the rover’s innards were exposed.
He shoved the jack into the rover’s control center. Data flashed across his tablet screen. This was the rover’s brain, and he had about thirty seconds to hack it before he went over the cliff. He couldn’t get control, not that quickly. He couldn’t do anything. He was fucked.
Or maybe he wasn’t. He’d spoofed the arm, and maybe he could spoof this. He went at it, working the code, coming up with what he could on the fly. The rover barreled forward. He could see the cliff’s edge, see the expanse of nothingness ahead of them, the empty sky and the jagged rocks littering the landscape below.
He threw up in his breathing mask. His fingers shook. He was screaming again, this time just a gutteral death-cry borne of pure fright. But he worked through it all. He kept coding, kept typing, kept what parts of his mind he could control focused on what he had to do—
The rover jerked into a U-turn. It was just feet from the cliff’s edge, sending a spray of pebbles over the side as its wheels curved ruts in the dirt. And then it was barreling just as headlong in the opposite direction.
He’d done it. He’d flipped the computer’s map, one-hundred and eighty degrees. The rover was still on auto-pilot, still trying to send them both to their doom at the bottom of that cliff. Only now it thought the cliff was in the opposite direction.
It gave him a few more minutes, and that was all the time he needed to dive into the rover’s brain and turn the thing off. Soon he was in the metaphorical driver’s seat, in total command of the rover with his tablet functioning as the steering wheel.
He was going to get that gravver, and get him good. It was very, very unwise to fuck with a diver of Mordecai’s talent. He’d hack the man’s Ident Records, fake up a little criminal history, mark him as a fugitive on the run. Molesting a sheep. A whole herd of them. They’d arrest him, lock him up, ship him off to some penal colony to break rocks in an asteroid mine somewhere out-system.
But that little bit of satisfaction would have to wait. Death trap aside, the data had been real. The city was real. Rikksin and his clan were there. And so were the Cousins.
He maneuvered down the cliff and to the outskirts of the city. The spires rose higher than he could see, and whatever they were made of must have been impossibly strong to hold them up so high in this gravity. They swayed in the wind, giant needles threading through the clouds as they passed.
He could see the Koreans’ convoy parked near one of the buildings. He couldn’t see any of them, not even with his cybernetic eye set as a telescope. But still, he didn’t dare approach. He had the element of surprise, and that was about all he had. He drove around the other side of the city instead, tucking the rover away behind a rocky outcropping. Then he grabbed his duffle bag, locked down the controls, and headed towards the city on foot.
The distant greenery became clearer as he approached. It wasn’t a forest, not really. There were things that looked like trees, miniature spires shaped just like the giant ones. Knotty holes dotted the twisted wood, a gooey yellow liquid dripping out of them. Some kind of sap, perhaps? The skin of the things must have been the equivalent of leaves, dark green strips of flesh that followed the spiral around the trunks and zig-zagged between the holes.
But the trees were at an almost perfectly equal distance from one another. This was no overgrown forest. They couldn’t have moved an inch from where they’d originally been planted. The place was part city, part forest, an oddity given what else he’d seen of the planet. There hadn’t been life anywhere else he’d been, just empty wasteland. But here it thrived, a city alive with everything but its citizens.
He passed through a row of trees and into the city proper. Small bunker-like buildings made of clay formed an outer border, blocky things with no art to their design. What looked like fluffy red fungus clung to the sides. He stepped closer, scraping a bit of it off and running it between his fingers. It was a colony of some kind of microorganism, he could tell that much. More data than that would require exactly the kind of biotech equipment the Koreans had been ordering from back on Earth.
Mordecai weaved between the buildings as he went further into the city, sticking close to the walls in case the Koreans were ambling about. But there wasn’t much space for them to wander, at least not on foot. Up ahead of him was a series of canals in lieu of streets, sloshing with a liquid that looked like pea soup. It reminded him of Venice, if the place had been infested with algae.
Giant leafy things floated by, and at regular intervals. Brown, and twisted up like half-open clam shells. They kept coming, over and over. Every thirty seconds another passed. He stepped closer, and one of them drifted towards the edge of the canal. As if it sensed him there. As if it knew. He tested it with his foot. Sturdy, but definitely alive. Some kind of transport? He didn’t want to risk it. There was just enough space at the edge of the canals to go on foot. It was a bit of a balancing act, a chore given his unfamiliarity with the planet’s gravity, but he trusted himself more than he trusted some organic transport system no one had been there to maintain for thousands upon thousands of years.
He kept moving closer to the center of the city. He wasn’t even sure where he was going. He jumped over canals like a little schoolboy, slipping between row after row of trees oozing that thick yellow sap.
And then he saw something moving.
It was just a flash, but it was definitely there. Up ahead of him, a few hundred yards. He ducked behind a tree, dropped his bag, and switched his eye to infrared.
It was humanoid, whatever it was. At first he thought it was one of the Cousins, roused at long last by his presence. The thought made him want to drop everything and run. The mood regulators had been doing double duty with everything he’d been through, and they were losing their potency. But he switched to telescopic vision and took a closer look.
It was a man. Another diver. One of the Koreans.
He saw another, and another. They were crawling in and out of one of the spires like little ants, taking in loads of equipment and bringing things out to analyze. Whatever they were trying to study, it was in there.
He spied on them for another half an hour. It would have been boring to anyone else, but to him it was ecstasy. He went into a trance, and everything else disappeared but the patterns. They were what made it so interesting. Patterns were data. And more importantly, they were a puzzle, and quite a complicated one. It absorbed him, watching what the Koreans did, timing their movements down to the second. Putting each of the pieces in its place in his head, pondering it all until he finally understood it.
That one was unloading equipment from a rover, and he’d be done in another ten minutes or so given Mordecai’s estimates of the volume of the rover’s storage bay. This one was installing what looked like a remote net terminal. Still another had to be a supervisor from the way he pointed and shouted without doing anything of substance. Each of them a jigsaw piece, following their own path without knowing how they fit with all the others, walking at their own peculiar speed according to their own peculiar habits. Mordecai watched, logging it all, thinking about it all.
And then he solved the puzzle.
There was a gap. A recurring four-minute gap when every single one of them was by the convoy of parked rovers, well away from the spire. It was more than enough time to make it inside. He was certain of that; he’d timed it all in his head down to the second. He’d have to run. What would happen once he got in there, he hadn’t a clue.
Restricted Fantasies Page 11
