Shooting the Rift - eARC

by Alex Stewart

  Sowerby bristled. “Now wait just a minute,” she said, her voice rising, until Remington put out a hand and took her arm.

  “Sarah.” His voice was calm, with an unmistakable undercurrent of warning. “The quicker these people can get on with their jobs, the quicker we’ll be on our way. I’m sure they’re well aware of what any damage at all to the Stacked Deck will mean.”

  But they’re my engines. No one knows the systems like I do.

  Exactly. Remington gave a faintly self-satisfied smile. So when you find something’s not been done right, and we complain our ship’s not been looked after properly, they’ll have to take your word for it. And pay us. If they don’t want the Guild arbitrator in.

  Sowerby nodded, a little grudgingly. Take your point.

  Rennau shook his head, in rueful admiration. You’re unbelievable. I swear to God you could find an angle in a straight line.

  Remington acknowledged this with the faintest of nods. It all depends how straight you want the line to be, Mik. If you’d been willing to bend things a bit more a couple of years back, you might still be the skipper.

  I doubt it. The expression of bonhomie was gone from Rennau’s eyes now. You’d still have found a way to bend it just that little bit more.

  What can I say. It’s a gift. Remington turned his attention to the rest of the group. “OK, let’s make ourselves comfortable while we wait for the Guild representative to turn up.”

  And comfortable, I have to admit, we made ourselves. The building, or set of tunnels to be more accurate, was more than large enough for all seventeen of us, even with Rolf and Lena among our number; though they did have to duck a lot more than they were used to aboard the Stacked Deck. I found a room for myself about three times the size of my cabin aboard the ship, which actually gave me room to walk round the bed and get to the closets, and spent a few minutes throwing things onto hangers and into drawers. Then I sat down on the bed, dived into my ‘sphere, and called up all the data I’d archived that might help me crack a handheld. If there wasn’t a node in the vicinity, that was the only way I was ever going to get hold of any useful information.

  I began with the way I’d got into Plubek’s, back in the Numarkut system. That was a promising start, but I’d never be able repeat so simple a trick here; for one thing there wasn’t a constant stream of data going in that I could watch for weaknesses. I’d picked up a few promising datanomes from Neville, but reverse engineering them into a key I could plug into my sneakware wasn’t going to be an easy job; and even when that was done, I was still going to need the genetic code of an authorized user, which I didn’t have a clue how to go about obtaining.

  Well, I’d just have to worry about that one later; for now I’d get on with everything else I could, so that if an opportunity presented itself later, I’d be ready to exploit it. So thinking, I started teasing out the datanomes I’d recorded while Neville was using his handheld, and began modifying them.

  “Getting comfortable?” My concentration shattered as Clio stuck her head round the door.

  “Settling in.” I stuck the sneakware away, behind my strongest datawall, and stood up. “How’s your room?”

  “Identical to this one, surprisingly.” She smiled, quietly. “It is a military base, after all.”

  “Quite.” I made for the door, and she stood aside to let me out into the corridor, which was decorated in standard Institutional Bland. Though there was a lock next to the handle, it never occurred to me to trip it. I’d been a Guilder long enough to trust my shipmates not to go in there without an invitation, and any Leaguers checking up might realize how unusual a locked room was, and assume I had something to hide. Which I most definitely did.

  The bedrooms had been arranged around a large communal area, which opened out into the square, providing an excellent view of the garden across the walkway. Comfortable chairs and sofas were scattered around the space, many of them flanked by a few strategically placed tables, and a well-stocked kitchen area occupied one corner; a facility several of the Stacked Deck’s crew had already availed themselves of, judging by the steaming mugs in their hands. Seeing Clio and me enter, Rennau waved us over from behind the counter. “Want anything?”

  “Not right now,” Clio said. “We were just going for a walk around. Get orientated.” Which was news to me, but news I was happy to go along with. There might just possibly be a node around here I could find if I looked hard enough, and with the two of us apparently wandering aimlessly, the risk of discovery and challenge would be greatly reduced.

  I nodded. “Might as well find out if any of the other crews know anything,” I added.

  “Nothing more than we do,” Remington cut in, from the sofa he was sharing with Sowerby. “I’ve been talking to some of the other skippers already. Same story. They took a contract from Ellie, good deal because it was a rush job, and the next thing they know they’re being boarded and brought here.”

  “Are they really sure she’s a Commonwealth agent?” I asked, trying to look ingenuous. “She didn’t look like one to me.” And Mallow definitely was. Perhaps he’d realized the Numarkut authorities were on to him, and deflected the finger of suspicion to point at an innocent co-worker.

  “I think that’s the point, Simon,” Remington said, trying not to look too amused. “Spies who look like spies tend not to be ones for very long.”

  “I guess not,” I said, trying not to think too hard about that. “But you know her . . .”

  “As a cargo broker,” Remington said, “nothing more.” Then he shrugged. “But I wouldn’t put it past her to have a little something going on the side. She’d just see it as another deal to be made.”

  He pinged a laconic message to my ‘sphere.

  You do realize they’re probably listening to this.

  And monitoring our ‘spheres, I added, more in the spirit of mischief than because I thought it was actually likely. If I really believed they were capable of doing that, I’d have purged the sneakware, and everything else incriminating I’d been collecting since my conversation with Aunt Jenny. But if Remington realized I was pulling his leg, he didn’t let on.

  “Enjoy your walk,” he said, as Clio and I walked past. “And if you can’t be good, be careful.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  In which I make some ill-advised remarks

  about my family history.

  Leaving our temporary quarters behind, Clio and I wandered around the square in a desultory spiral. As Neville had let slip earlier, there seemed to be four other crews already in residence; two Guild, and one each from a pair of Numarkut-registered shipping lines, who seemed to be having as little to do with the Guilders and each another as possible. As well as the five occupied sets of living quarters, which, at first glance, appeared to be identical (so far as we could tell without being invited in to see for ourselves), there were another fifteen ranged around the square, all shuttered and locked. Whether this meant the Leaguers were expecting a great many more unwilling guests, or simply started stowing us here because they found it convenient for some reason, I couldn’t tell, and could see no point in speculating about.

  We also found a small commissary, staffed by serving drones, where a few of our fellow guests were eating—but as neither of us felt particularly hungry, and Rennau had been banging pots and pans around before we set out, we politely declined their invitation to join them, and carried on walking after a brief exchange of pleasantries.

  “No hurry,” one of our new acquaintances, who’d introduced himself as Deeks of the Ebon Flow, said, with a philosophical shrug. “We’ll have plenty of time to get to know each other.”

  Everyone else seated around the table laughed, without much trace of humor. “Got that right,” one of them agreed. “Not a lot else to do around here except talk.”

  “Be seeing you.” Deeks waved us off with a cheery salute, and returned his attention to what might have been a steak sandwich.

  “They seemed nice,” Clio s
aid, as we wandered across the grass.

  I nodded, my mind not entirely on the conversation. There was the hatch we’d come in by, and there was another, diametrically opposite, which presumably led deeper into the base. A couple of bored-looking NI troopers were standing next to both of them, but in the kind of desultory fashion that made it all too plain they’d given up expecting trouble a long time ago. That might work to my advantage in some way, but I couldn’t see how at the moment.

  At any event, the two pressure hatches seemed the only routes in and out of the cavern we were being held in. I wondered if they might be opened from time to time to admit the serving drones from the commissary, but there was no sign of any entering or leaving that way. Which wasn’t all that much of a surprise; given their size, they probably just delivered any meals that had been ordered through a network of service pipes. Which would, of course, be far too narrow to crawl down, whatever you might have seen in the virts.

  “Looks like we’re stuck here,” I said, as we struck out across the lawn towards the fountain.

  “For a while,” Clio agreed, seating herself unhurriedly on one of the benches. She turned her head slowly, taking in our surroundings. “But I suppose there are worse places to be stuck.”

  An opinion I found myself progressively less inclined to agree with as the next few days crawled past in a haze of monotony. A few of the crew found old friends among the other Guilders interned with us, and took the opportunity to renew their acquaintance, but that wasn’t an option open to me; though I socialized with the other crews, lunching with Deeks and his cronies a couple of times, I never hit it off with anyone sufficiently well to establish a real friendship. Accordingly, I spent a lot of time in my own room, a rag across the handle, fiddling with datanomes, just in case I managed to find a way of accessing a handheld without the cooperation of its owner—hardly the most likely of prospects.

  Periodically, Clio would drag me from my lair, expressing concern about the amount of time I was spending alone, and chivvy me into taking a walk across the garden with her, which at least gave me some exercise; absorbed in the problem of cracking the handsets, I’d begun to neglect my training regime again.

  “The thing is, I’m bored,” I admitted, as we sat on one of the seats together, watching the rainbows ripple in the fountain. “There was always something to do aboard the ship.” Heaven help me, I was even beginning to miss the broom.

  “Well, the way I see it, you’ve got two choices,” she said briskly. “You can sit around feeling sorry for yourself, or you can find something else to do. If you’re supposed to be an athlete, don’t you need exercise?”

  “You’re right.” I looked around the wide open space surrounding us, really seeing its potential for the first time. “I could start running again here.” Something impossible aboard the Stacked Deck, and which would give me the perfect excuse to cover every inch of the place, trying to detect a node. “You’re amazing.” Buoyed with a sudden surge of optimism, I put my arm around her shoulders and hugged her briefly, the way I used to do with Tinkie.

  “You’re welcome.” She flushed, far more taken aback than I'd expected, and I disengaged a little awkwardly, conscious of having crossed an unspoken line. Since ruling her out as a romantic prospect I'd grown used to thinking of her purely as a friend, and she seemed to have made the same decision about me: now she'd started taking an interest in Neville, it would hardly be fair to complicate things for her. She cleared her throat. “Enjoy yourself.”

  Which I’m bound to say I did, adding several circuits of the cavern’s perimeter to my daily routine from then on; a habit which was to have far-reaching repercussions.

  Of course our captors hadn’t left us entirely to our own devices; every one of us was interviewed several times by polite men and women, generally in the uniforms of officers, and, on a couple of occasions, in the kind of sober civilian garb more suited to mid-level bureaucrats. They asked a lot of questions, which all boiled down to variations on two basic ones (“Are you a spy?” and “Do you think anyone else in your crew might be one?”), both of which I batted away with bland assurances of innocence, which seemed to be believed. In truth, I think, my lowly status aboard the Stacked Deck worked in my favor here, as the general dogsbody was hardly the most promising candidate for Ellie to have recruited for a covert mission into the heart of the League. I was also lucky in that my interrogators seemed convinced that anyone aboard the Stacked Deck working for the Commonwealth must have been recruited by Ellie on Numarkut, and once they’d been convinced that the only contact I’d had with their prime suspect had been boiling a kettle on her behalf, they seemed happy enough to cross me off their list.

  From time to time the inquisitors arrived accompanied by a white-haired man of indeterminate age, who turned out to be the long-awaited representative from the Guildhall on Freedom. Not that I ever found out much more about him than that: every time he turned up, he immediately disappeared into a private room with Remington and the other Guilder captains, though what they found to talk about I had no idea. How much money all this was going to end up costing the League, probably.

  Even Sowerby began to relax a little, although she continued to fret about the Stacked Deck’s power plant, until a petty officer turned up one morning to talk to her about some maintenance issues; after that she seemed a good deal happier. Particularly as he would pop by every few days thereafter, and the two of them would disappear into a corner of the communal space to discuss readouts from his handheld with great animation. Not unnaturally, I took a more than casual interest in this arrangement, feeling it would be the closest I was likely to come to one of the devices, but I never found an opportunity to try to crack it. Though I loitered hopefully in their vicinity for as long as I could without attracting attention, waiting for him to open a data channel I could exploit, he never did; and even if he had done so there was still the open ditch of the genetic tag to leap over.

  So musing, and seething with frustration, I began another run, hoping the physical activity would jar something loose in my brain. As always, I found the rhythm of running calmed me down, the familiar routine allowing me to lose myself in the moment.

  “Hey there,” called a vaguely familiar voice. By this time I’d become used to casual greetings from my fellow internees, a group which had since been supplemented by two more crews who’d been picked up not long after us; I’d become The Running Guy, a sight so familiar that most people barely even noticed me any more. “How’s it going?”

  “All good,” I began to respond reflexively, before it dawned on me that I was being addressed by one of the guards at the gate leading deeper into the body of the base. Which was unprecedented. Since we’d arrived, they’d been courteous enough, but from across a clearly defined divide; an easy assumption of authority on their part, and a faintly disdainful refusal to recognize it on ours. Then the penny dropped. It was Mokole, the trooper who’d saved me from being laminated to the carriageway when Lena had slipped getting out of the sled just after our arrival. I slowed, and began jogging in place. “How’s things with you?”

  “You know.” She shrugged. “Same old same old.”

  “Jas.” Her companion shot her a warning glance; it was hard to tell behind the visor obscuring his eyes, which was bleeding a small amount of dataflow into my ‘sphere from its connection to the targeting ‘ware embedded in his gun, but he looked a little older than she was. “You know what the Corporal said about fraternizing.”

  “Who’s fraternizing? I’m winning hearts and minds,” Mokole said, her teeth flashing white as she grinned at me.

  “You’ll have your work cut out with this lot,” I warned her. That trickle of data, running between weapon and eyeware, fascinated me, and I began recording it, looking for crackable datanomes. It was hardly a handheld, just a simple, functional link, but it might be a start. I smiled back, prolonging the conversation. “Unless you win them in a card game.”

  “Now there’s an id
ea.” The grin spread. “Found a buyer for my gun yet?”

  I shook my head, tracing the path between the weapon and her visor. Both of them were carrying handhelds, little beacons of fizzing information in the middle of my ‘sphere, but still impossible to get at. There was probably some interface between the three systems; I knew Tinkie had a head-up display built into her helmet, in case her neuroware link went down in the middle of a battle zone, and that was tied in to her company command net. The Leaguers probably had something similar, which meant the visors would be capable of receiving signals—but that still wouldn’t get me into a handheld, or, through one of those, into a node.

  “Too many around,” I said. “Not enough profit.” I tried poking her visor input, sneaking in along with the feedback from her weapon, but none of the datanomes quite fitted.

  She tapped the side of the eyeware irritably, and I abandoned the attempt, withdrawing the tendril.

  “What is it?” The other trooper was eyeing me suspiciously. “Is he doing something with that crap in his head?”

  “Don’t be daft.” Mokole looked at him scornfully, then back to me, with the first faint trace of suspicion beginning to appear on her face. “Are you?”

  “Of course not,” I assured her, truthfully enough. I’d stopped trying seconds before, which was almost a geological age in data time.

  “Just a glitch,” she told her companion. Her eyes unfocussed for a moment, as she concentrated on the inside of the visor. “Cleared now.”

  “It had better have.” The trooper glared at me suspiciously, and adjusted the weight of his weapon.

  “Nice running into you,” I said to Mokole, picking up my pace, preparatory to moving on. Now I came to think about it, the visor might be a lot easier to crack than a handheld—no genetic code to worry about for one thing. And if it really did have a battlefield commo system built in, maybe I could leapfrog to a node on that, bypassing the handheld entirely. Definitely worth thinking about. “Maybe I’ll see you again.”