The Deep Link (The Ascendancy Trilogy Book 1)

by Sicoe, Veronica

  I push the cutlery away from me. "You know what? Fine. I'll help you if you help me. Care to point me to someone who can re-implant me? Anybody? I thought not."

  He rolls his eyes. Then pauses. "Actually, Bray said he met a guy who's a hacker or something. Maybe he'd do something for you."

  "Oh really? I'm sure he would," I say cynically. "Who's this guy?"

  "Crispin... something-or-other. I have his address." He stares at something in his virtual vision, then narrows his eyes at me. "Calle Squero, twenty-seven. Other side of the river."

  "Thanks," I retort. But make a mental note to check that guy out anyway. No option, however unlikely, is worth ignoring.

  Jade stands up, and grabs his backpack. I stand too. "Hey, Jade? Why's the TMC after you?"

  "Does it matter?"

  "Doesn't it?"

  He grabs the door handle. "Tell you another time. Maybe. When you're actually interested in the story, and not just looking for a flaw in my motivation." He leaves the door open just a crack as he goes. I can see Vik wrap his arm around Jade's shoulder before he takes him out of my line of sight.

  I pushed him harder than I meant to. I hope he'll forgive me. He's the closest thing I've had to a friend in years. Ironic, since he's the one who made my childhood miserable. Seems I have a knack for sympathizing with my tormentors. I smirk, thoughts slipping to Amharr and his feverish touch once again. I shake the vision away.

  The new technician's overall I'm supposed to wear on the run with Denise is surprisingly comfortable. Bleached linen with brand new orange stripes on arms and legs, and a beautiful machine-stitched logo on the chest, that says 'Environmental Control Service, Unit 25'. Too bad my inactive nacom looks like a dead piece of plastic welded to my wrist. I'd make a very convincing technician otherwise.

  In the hallway I almost bump into Bray. His eyes fix on mine. My pulse quickens, my fingers itch, and a thousand things cross my mind, none of them wise.

  He steps closer until his face is inches away from mine. Something in his look has changed, but I'm not sure what. He almost seems...

  I open my mouth to say something, but close it again.

  He bites his lower lip, then slides past my shoulder and walks away.

  -

  Denise is patiently waiting for me out on the street. Her hair is cut at shoulder-length, bright orange with pink and crimson highlights. She greets me with a wide smile, thankfully refraining from hugging me.

  "Hey Taryn, so good to see you again. Hope you got a good rest?"

  "Yeah."

  Her almost fluorescent green contact lenses remind me of Gary, except they're star shaped and blatantly artificial. What's the deal with these enhancements? Amelia's even worse than her. From what I've seen, there's barely any piece of her that grew naturally.

  "So where do we start?" I ask. "How many surveillance towers do we have to check out?"

  "We'll do the nanotech lab sector today. Only twelve towers there."

  "Twelve? Shit."

  "Don't worry, we have plenty of time. Days are long here." She smiles again, and I notice a little gem embedded in her upper left incisor.

  "Alright, let's go." I head right down the sidewalk.

  "Taryn, it's that way." She points in the opposite direction. I turn around, sighing angrily.

  "Relax, I've got it all under control. Here." She holds out her wrist. "I can show you a map with all the towers on my nacom. It's not very detailed, the screen's too small. But I've got a lot of info stored up here." She taps her temple. "You don't have to worry about a thing. This is gonna be exciting."

  "Sure," I mumble.

  -

  Erano looks even more confusing from street level than from a Maglev highrail. The buildings are tall and densely packed, and the streets run full with vehicles and people. We stick to alleys and narrow passages between storage facilities and labs, cluttered with dumpsters and waste disposal tubes running down the walls.

  To make me feel better about not having a synet, Denise spends some credits to print out a basic map. I study it as she leads me deeper into the district, trying to memorize as much as possible. The good part of coming out here with her is that she's completely oblivious of my problems, and manages to distract me.

  As we walk East we leave the Spoke and the Rebreather behind us, spewing out moisture in cascading veils.

  "The first surveillance tower is right over there," Denise says. "One block behind the Torre di Ricerca."

  "The what?"

  "The Research Tower. It's where D2's datasphere nodes are; where all the com related tech is hosted and managed." I look up at the blade-shaped building. Enormous antennae sprout from its edges farther up, seemingly piercing the dome overhead. "Impressive, isn't it? One of the few things the Trust has done right." I glare at Denise. She just giggles. "If Preston would hear me now, he'd sure have a word or two about it. Truth is, colony life has its pros as well as its cons. It's not all bad." She gazes over the crowded sidewalk. "I'd like to live a normal life. Like them. Vik says that's what we're trying to accomplish. I doubt we'll live to see the results, though."

  "Not necessarily."

  She shrugs. "Soon as the fighting starts nothing's certain anymore, only death."

  I didn't expect this sort of outlook from a bubbly girl like Denise. "Why don't you leave?" I ask.

  She smiles as serenely as ever. "It's the best shot I'll ever have."

  "At what? Why'd you join Preston in the first place?"

  "He saved my life." She flashes her tooth-gem at me.

  I try to imagine what kind of life-threatening situation this girl could have gotten into to need rescuing by a hunted man. All I come up with are shuttle accidents or malfunctioning skinsuits. Stupid scenarios.

  "I have a genetic abnormality," Denise says. "I don't sleep."

  "What, like—never?"

  She giggles again. "Not quite. I average about four hours a week."

  "Wow."

  "The TMC picked me up from my foster parents back on Cannisa, Procyon system, when I was five. They kept me aboard an R&D vessel for investigation. Removed a whole portion of my brain—replaced it with nanotech to study my mutation. I went blind as a side effect and had difficulty speaking. But who needs to speak if there's no one to listen, right?" She smiles to herself. "Anyway. Twelve years later, Preston forged papers for a transfer to another research station and freed me."

  I swallow dryly. I can't even imagine what she's been through. The year I spent aboard the warship that took me from Maza after the Raids seems like nothing more than a bad vacation compared to Denise's ordeal.

  She notices my discomfort, and nudges my shoulder with hers. "Hey, I recovered. Took me a good three years to get used to these, though." She points at her brilliantly green, star-shaped irises.

  "Your contacts?"

  "No." She laughs. "They're not organic. Inserts routed directly to my parietal lobe. Most of my visual cortex is gone."

  "How— How do you see? I mean, what—"

  "I can hardly remember what it's like to see through normal eyes. I'm fine with how things are now. In fact I got an upgrade soon as we settled down here," she says, cheerful as always. "Preston contacted an underground technician and paid a shitload of credits for it. Now I can scan things in infra-red. Pretty cool, eh?"

  "Yeah, great," I reply hesitantly.

  "And I didn't joke when I said I've got it all in here." She taps her temple again. "Integrated memory upgrade. The hardware the TMC left in my brain is pretty useful, you know. I can run complex computations in half the speed of an average synet, and connect to two dataspheres in parallel."

  This time my mouth pops open.

  Denise laughs a bright, crystalline laugh. "Not all bad, see?"

  I nod at her, still shocked, watching my boots advance on the boulevard's pavement of their own accord.

  "So, to answer ‘why I'm not leaving,'" Denise says, "this is the closest we've ever come to landing a blow against the Ti
cks. I'm not gonna let the opportunity slip away. Besides, Vik needs me."

  "You're not worried it'll all end in bloodshed, and accomplish nothing?" She shakes her head decidedly, as if the thought never even crossed her mind. "But you're stirring up a hornet's nest down here. It's suicide."

  "You don't have enough faith, Taryn. Preston knows what he's doing."

  "Yeah... that's what scares me."

  We cross the boulevard and enter an alley somewhere behind the Research Tower. I can see the surveillance tower, perched up on a high, thick pillar, looking like a globe with unsightly protrusions all around it: its many surveillance bots, currently recharging, some antennas, and additional sensors toward the top. The tower must be active; I can see the LED band around the top of the pillar glow green, and all the bots blink orange lights.

  I look around to check if anyone's watching us, but we're alone in the alley.

  "I'll tap into their system and check their weapon status, staff shifts, and maintenance schedule," Denise says. She pulls out a small device from her pocket and carefully approaches the tower from the side, walking along the wall. "You count the bots. Check the nearby alleys too. Distract them if you have to, so I can do my part. Won't take long, I promise."

  I sigh, and stare up at the tower.

  Two, four, six...

  Preston's got a method to what he's doing. Everyone he's picked for his core team so far is a fugitive, with nowhere else to go and no other purpose in life than taking revenge on the TMC. He's got them doing his bidding and they're thankful for it. Calculating old bastard.

  Ten, twelve, fourteen...

  And what's the deal with Bray? Why is Bray so obedient even though he obviously hates Preston? I wonder what his story is.

  "Seventeen," I tell Denise.

  "Just a second."

  She's connected her nacom to the device and the device to a panel on the building next to the tower. Now she's tapping on the small screen with surprising proficiency, her eyes unfocused as she stares at her implants' virtual display, computing god-knows-what.

  "Done," she says after a minute and unplugs the devices. "What did you say?"

  "There are seventeen bots on the tower."

  "Shit. Inventory says twenty."

  "I think I already know where one is."

  A blinking ball of metal comes buzzing toward us, several tools jutting out of its front. I back away, preparing to take off in the opposite direction.

  "No, wait! You'll raise an alarm."

  "What am I supposed to do, wait for it to scan me?"

  Denise shrugs, pressing her back against the wall.

  I'm standing alone in the middle of the alley. The bot predictably takes an interest in me first. It stops two meters in front of me, scanning my head.

  "Identify yourself."

  I wince at the inhuman monotone. The voice triggers a vivid recollection of all TMC droids and robots I've ever dealt with. And of something else, too, something equally hated: the Onrysses, following Amharr everywhere like soulless bloodhounds.

  I grind my teeth, turn on my heel, and dart back into the alley.

  The bot gives chase and an earsplitting alarm blares out. Strobing white light flashes on the walls and ground before me.

  I take a corner, graze the wall with my hand, and hurl down a maintenance alley. I reach the end, kick my boot up and push off the wall to my left. Then I'm off into the next alley, the mechanical demon close on my tail.

  I jump over sloping pipes and twist around corners, running flat out. I skid across dumpsters, duck under passageways, and grapple around storage crates with my bare hands. Adrenalin fuels me, the rush burns my lungs. It's liberating.

  The bot keeps after me, undeterred, and I dash between buildings, dodge people, skip over garbage heaps. The chase getting harder, my energy burning up.

  I take a right into a broader alley, and realize too late it's a dead end. I reach the wall at full speed, run up against it for a couple of steps, grab a pipe traversing the alley and haul myself up.

  The bot adjusts its height, its shrill klaxon making me rabid.

  I spin around on the pipe, hurl my legs over and drop back into the alley, grabbing the bot with both hands on my way down. I land and crouch, smashing the bot against the pavement with the momentum of the fall. It cracks and sparks, but wobbles right back up, gyrating in brightly lit madness.

  My hands burn furiously.

  I jump and grab it again, holding it tightly against my knees, willing to crush it. It's buzzing and screeching, trying to break my bones and free itself. I press tighter.

  Behind the bot's blinding flashes, I can see its entrails glow white hot with energy. In almost an instant, I fully understand them. And I want them to burn.

  Bright pain stabs through my forearms, ripping a scream out of my chest. The bot drops to the ground. I stumble backward and fall. The bot is quiet and charred, a blackened ball of lifeless metal rolling slowly away from me across the pavement.

  I push back up, rub my hands against my overall. My skin's intact, but I have a brain-splitting headache. I kick the bot out of my way and head back to Denise. I constantly look back, checking if anyone saw me, if I'm being hunted. A few times I think I see a shadow duck behind crates or slither around corners, but I'm not sure. My head's spinning and hurts like a bitch. I can barely focus.

  I meet with Denise on the nearest public sidewalk, assure her I escaped in time, and we march on to the next tower. I don't mention a word about frying the bot.

  27

  General Hurst frowns at his projector—at the handsome young man there with short-cropped hair, a resolute jaw, and amethyst eyes, striking against his olive complexion. "Commander Kempton," Hurst greets him. "Good to meet you."

  The commander is calling in from Epsilon Eridani, a system that's otherwise in General Satou's jurisdiction. But his old friend is vacationing on Indira with his wife and husband, and delegated council duty to Hurst as a personal favor.

  "How are things on Hades, Commander?" Hurst asks casually, finding it refreshing to tend to some old-school TMC business after being on hold for so many years.

  "All in order, sir, apart from some strikes and uproars, and anti-Trust propaganda. Nothing unusual for this corner of space."

  Hurst frowns. "Then why did you contact me on a secure channel?"

  The commander lifts his neatly trimmed eyebrows. "It's come to my attention that a wanted person is currently stationed planetside, getting in touch with several delicate long-term surveillance targets."

  "Who're you talking about?"

  The young man glances quickly at something in his vicinity, then back at Hurst, not a single muscle of his face betraying his thoughts. "Professor Waylen Preston, sir. Former head of the Deep Space Probe Development Center on the Tau Ceti station, before the Raids. He's presumed to have been involved with the Dabaran Syndicate, but we've never been able to prove it. He was deported to 61 Cygni when the TMC retreated from Ceti. Spent over seven years there before we lost track of him."

  What are the odds? One of the terrorists directly involved in the Ceti fiasco. Maybe a good chance to tie up a loose end. Hurt grins inwardly. He folds his hands on the table top. "Any idea what he's doing there?"

  "He entered Erano a week ago, with seven others. We don't know where exactly they're quartered, or if they're still together. He's keeping a very low profile, sir."

  "You said he contacted someone?"

  "Indirectly. One of our undercover agents noticed unusual information transit and indicated him as a possible origin. Circumstantial evidence. I'm sending you the presumed contact list now."

  Hurst receives the file transfer through the secure channel. He gives it a cursory glance; none of the names look familiar. He files it away for further investigation. Then brings up Commander Kempton's personal record. It's impeccable. Awards, orders, no brawls or minor law-breaks, volunteered for extra training. A career dog.

  "Commander, what do you think I
should do about Preston?"

  The young man regards him for a couple of seconds, still betraying nothing. "Sir, with all due respect, I'm not in the position to offer my advice."

  "What's your personal opinion, then? Off the record."

  The commander hesitates. "With permission, sir. Given Preston's background, I would assume he poses a threat to the stability of the colony." Hurst nods approvingly, and the commander continues: "I would therefore upgrade surveillance and crowd inspection protocols. And I would try to inject someone into Preston's network directly."

  "And then?"

  "If he proves to be a threat, I would mobilize our ground units and apprehend him, sir."

  "Apprehend," Hurst snorts. "Not very effective with his kind, Commander. Only postpones the inevitable. If you confirm a threat, I want you to exterminate it."

  "Sir," the commander says gravely. "Planetside public transportation has suffered numerous sabotage attempts, with increased frequency as of late. There's been uncomfortable press, strikes, and demonstrations—even drops in TMC revenue and temporary funding cessation from the Trust. Not to mention the costs from the interrupted mining schedules..."

  "I get it, Commander, times are difficult. But the Dabaran Syndicate is no trifling thing."

  "What I mean to say, sir, is that times are always difficult on Erano. This has never been a quiet place. I'm a native. I understand the fragile balance here. How these people tick. My job involves treating potential rebellion stimulants with utmost care. Arresting and exterminating a notorious personage without good reason is going to cause even more difficulties. Dealing with terrorism in Erano is a delicate matter, sir."

  Hurst frowns at the projector. "What are you more concerned about? Public opinion, or dangerous terrorists running about freely in your colony?"

  The commander sighs. "Erano is always smoldering, always waiting for a good enough reason to burst into flames. If Preston intends to pour gasoline on my colony, the fire's going to be hard to extinguish indeed. But I don't want to pour it myself."

  "Remove the gasoline, then," Hurst offers, impatient now. "Aren't you capable of controlling your colony?"