Crystal Rebellion

by Doug J. Cooper

  “I’m guessing we just hit the ‘every few minutes’ mark,” he muttered.

  “I’m coming for you.” Criss made the statement but Sid knew it was a request, almost a plea.

  “Hold, Criss.” He stepped off the bench seat and onto the pedestrian bridge. “Cheryl, I can take one robot.”

  “Dammit, Sid. This isn’t a game.”

  Sid ran around the synbod and, standing behind it, scanned the ground for something he could use as a weapon. “We’re not killing a bunch of people to save me.”

  The synbod spied Juice. At least, he squared up to her and took deliberate steps in that direction.

  Sid held his hands in front of him, palms up, in a mock plea. “Are you kidding me?” Then, canting forward, he took three quick steps, leaped and spun in the air, swinging his leg in a graceful kick. Thwack. Toe pointed, his foot connected with the side of the synbod’s head.

  And then he felt the pain he might feel if he kicked a wall of jagged stone. Landing on the ground, Sid limped in a tight circle and groaned. “Ow. Shit that hurt.”

  The synbod turned around and made grabbing motions in Sid’s general direction. The random chop of his arms told Sid the synbod couldn’t see him.

  Replacing force with leverage, Sid dropped to the ground and shimmied to the synbod’s side. The synthetic man took a small lurching step to match each blind grab of his arms. Sid hooked the synbod’s forward leg as it lifted, and in a sweeping motion, yanked it back as hard as he could. Unbalanced, the synbod teetered. Sid kicked at its other leg and the synbod tripped, falling face-first to the ground.

  “See?” Sid said for Cheryl’s benefit. “I got this.”

  Then the synbod popped up to his hands and knees, spun in a tight circle, and shot his arm out, grabbing Sid’s ankle in a fierce grip.

  Frantic, Sid kicked at the synbod’s face with the heel of his free foot. But before his kick landed, the synbod grabbed that ankle as well.

  Sid, immobilized, felt the hair on the back of his neck bristle when the synbod made an eerie facial expression that blended a maniacal grin with an angry snarl.

  Reacting more than thinking, Sid sat up and launched a rapid boxing sequence at the synbod’s head. Punch. Punch. Punch. Then he stretched back on the ground and twisted his body hard to the side, seeking to wrench his legs free.

  Zwip. He recognized the faint sound of an energy bolt discharging from a personal weapon. The iron grip on his ankles relaxed.

  Looking up from the ground, he saw that the synbod had grown a small black spot on his face, just to the right of his nose. Set in unblemished skin, the glaring imperfection became the synbod’s new defining feature.

  “Was that you?” Sid asked Criss, disengaging his legs from the synbod’s hands. The energy bolt had pierced the synbod’s face, traveled down his neck, and reached the body cavity housing the three-gen crystal. The grinning snarl of the disabled synbod, still on his knees with his hands stretched forward, remained frozen on his face. “Nice shot!”

  “That wasn’t me.”

  Sid’s intuition guided him to turn and look down the pedestrian bridge toward Ag Port.

  His benefactor, alone on the expanse, turned away from him and started toward the market square. Festive lights from the square cast the person in silhouette. The distinct outline of a weapon on the right wrist drew Sid’s attention.

  Then the flashing sparkle of shiny metal lifted his eyes to a dirty mop of hair that spiked in different directions.

  As Bobbi Lava hurried away, she faded. And then she disappeared from sight.

  * * *

  Cheryl waited with Criss up in the medical care unit—one of the many configurations of the scout’s common room—while Sid carried Juice up from below. Criss had automated every medical delivery system on the ship, so Cheryl didn’t really have a defined role. She chose to play nurse anyway. I’d want her here for me.

  The sounds of footsteps preceded Sid, who hustled through the door carrying an unconscious Juice draped in his arms. Laying her on the medical table, he rolled her on her side and began removing her space coveralls.

  Cheryl helped, peeling the suit from around her legs. She and Sid had been on missions where together they tended to the wounded. They’d even watched a close friend die from mission injuries. But Juice was leadership and that raised the stakes.

  She started removing Juice’s blouse and paused. “You know she’s modest, Sid.”

  Sid looked over at Criss, whose face formed in sympathy. “I need to go change, anyway,” he said, fingering his coveralls. He started for the door and caught Cheryl’s eye. “Let me know as soon as she can have visitors?”

  Watching him leave the room, she noted a slight limp in his gait, presumably from kicking the synbod. You should let Criss look at that when he’s done here, she thought. She kept it to herself, though. Sid was too much of a cowboy to submit to something as unmanly as medical care.

  Undressing Juice, she revealed the wound. The impact point showed as a small round gash on the midline of her sternum. An angry purple bruise spread from there in both directions, the part to the right covering her entire breast.

  That looks awful, she thought, trying to imagine how a bottle could cause that sort of damage. Bending so her mouth was near Juice’s ear, she whispered, “It’s not bad at all. You’re going to be fine.” She wasn’t sure if Juice could hear her but needed the reassurance herself.

  Rising, she turned so her back was to the bed and used Sid’s trick of mouthing words without speaking. “You can fix this?”

  None of them had suffered a serious injury since they’d become leadership, so while she knew at an intellectual level that Criss had made tremendous progress in medical sciences, she’d never witnessed him in action.

  And as it turned out, his skills were remarkable.

  Duty-bound to keep his leadership in good health, Criss had allocated significant resources over many years to studying medicine. Along the way, he’d developed procedures for repairing anything on the body. He could even repair the human brain, though he couldn’t restore knowledge or memories. Those died with the original brain cells that held them.

  “She’ll be fine.” As Criss spoke, the sides of the bed folded up to create a tub around Juice, and that started filling with a murky, brownish liquid. A pillow lifted her head as the liquid level rose, and everything stopped when her face was the only part of her body exposed above the surface.

  Then a black corrugated slab hovering over the bed—Sid called it the waffle iron—sprouted hair. The side facing Juice did, at least.

  Millions of stalks—each a skinny wormlike tube that wiggled with its own independence—emerged from the surface as the slab lowered. Centered over Juice’s body, the slab sank beneath the surface of the liquid. As it neared Juice’s skin, the individual stalks attached to her, some at the skin surface and others at varying depths beneath the skin.

  Each stalk assumed control of a microregion of her body. Through each, Criss connected sensors, infused medicines, removed tissue, and performed a myriad of other actions required to restore health. Working together, the stalks performed miracles.

  “How long does it take?” asked Cheryl, fascinated by the spectacle.

  “She’ll be at seventy percent in an hour. But healing takes time. I’ll keep working until morning and should have her above ninety percent by then. The last step is natural healing, and that will trail out for about ten days.”

  Cheryl checked the time and realized morning was not that far away.

  “I’m sedating her and she won’t surface for hours. I’ll make sure you’re here when she wakes.” Juice’s face, relaxed as if asleep, showed no signs of the tense drama that had transpired since the bottle hit her.

  “I’d like to sit with her for a while.”

  “I’m about to brief Sid on Bobbi Lava.”

  Cheryl looked at the door and then back at Juice.

  “I’ll give you a thirty-minute head start
tomorrow morning before I wake her. You can be sitting here holding her hand when she surfaces.”

  “Deal.” Cheryl cast a last glance at Juice, then hurried down the passageway and onto the command bridge. Sid sat at the ops bench with the pilot’s chair turned toward Criss, who sat to the side in his overstuffed chair.

  She slipped into a seat behind the pilot’s chair. Sid got up, winked at her, and took the seat next to hers. You sweetie. She waited while he got settled, then reached over and gave his hand a squeeze.

  The surface of the ops bench glowed and came alive. Above it hovered a three-dimensional image of a room similar to the main living area of Alex’s apartment. Taken from an upper corner, it showed a perspective looking down and across the room.

  While the architecture hinted at a room like Alex’s, the contents were nothing like his. This one had more stuff. A lot more. And much of it looked like electronic salvage—mostly wafer clusters, slide boards, and power mounts.

  A large tech bench, its smooth surface littered with bits and pieces of a project, consumed the center of the space. Around the perimeter of the room, a colorful futon couch, three straight-back chairs, and two mismatched side tables sat wedged between a half-dozen floor-to-ceiling shelves, each filled to overflowing with gizmos and gadgets.

  There she is, thought Cheryl as Bobbi Lava—jewelry dancing from her ears, nose, and eyebrow—entered the room from the left. Crossing the floor, she flicked a shoulder and sent her satchel to the ground. A step later, she rolled both shoulders and held her arms straight back. Her coat joined her satchel on the floor.

  What a piece of work, thought Cheryl.

  Reaching the far wall, Bobbi snatched a chair, twirled it, and set it facing one of the side tables. Lifting a cloth draped across that table, she exposed a portable piano-style keyboard.

  She seated herself, leaned forward to make selections on a tiny panel on top of the keyboard, and positioned her fingers over the keys. Then, with an air of drama, she bowed her head and started playing. Cheryl recognized the piece as a classical work, though she didn’t know its name or the composer.

  Bobbi played for twenty seconds, then thirty. At the forty-second mark, Sid asked, “Why aren’t we skipping ahead to whatever comes next?”

  “This is what comes next,” said Criss. “She plays without a break for the next five hours.”

  “And we know she doesn’t. Show us.”

  Scrunching her eyebrows, Cheryl looked at Sid. His intuition suggested things to him that she couldn’t see. She turned back to Criss, who nodded once.

  The scene started as before, with Bobbi shedding personal items onto the floor as she walked across the room, followed by her preparations to play the piano. But when she leaned forward and made selections on the tiny panel on top, things changed.

  This time, the image shading diffused the way it did when Criss decoded a cloaked image, and Bobbi became two. An image projection continued to play classical music. Bobbi, now in a cloaked reality, stood up and, pulling shiny jewelry from her face as she walked, made for her bedroom.

  Moving to a lighted dressing table near her bed, she dropped the metal decorations into a small basket sitting among an assortment of decorative bottles and small boxes. As she viewed her own image, she reached up and peeled off her spikey mop of hair. Without looking, she flicked the piece on top of the jewelry.

  She patted her face with a warm wipe, teased her straight brown hair with her fingertips, then took a dab of lotion and with small swirls, massaged highlights into her cheeks. Switching to a pen-shaped instrument, she stroked the tip back and forth under each eye, then completed her routine by rubbing a dab of color on her lips.

  She looks a little like Juice, Cheryl thought of her slight frame and natural appearance, though Bobbi had more of a button nose and Juice had stronger cheekbones.

  Pulling off the rest of her clothes, Bobbi tossed them into a chute. Dressed only in panties, she opened her closet.

  Cheryl thrust out her hand and covered Sid’s eyes. Sid moved one of his giant paws over in a casual motion, and then darted in to tickle Cheryl’s stomach. Giggling, she pulled her hand back from his eyes to protect her tummy from his assault.

  By the time her attention was back on the image, Bobbi had dressed in a cream-colored blouse and gray slacks. She checked her reflected image a last time, then made for the apartment door.

  “Meet Joselyn Arpeggio,” said Criss. “She goes by Lyn.”

  Lyn collected Bobbi’s coat and satchel from the floor and stowed them in a cubby near the door. Then, hooking a different satchel over her shoulder, she exited the apartment.

  “She’s like a superhero,” said Sid. “Mild-mannered by day and metal-encrusted by night.”

  “I think both of her are cute in their own way,” said Cheryl. Turning to Criss, she asked, “So, I get that she has a secret life. But how is it that she happened to show up at the tram station in time to shoot the synbod?”

  “Part luck and part planning,” said Criss. “Since our arrival, I’ve been enhancing the relationship between Marcus Procopio and Bobbi Lava.”

  “You mean you use projected images to make Bobbi think she’s talking with her dad.” Sid looked at the scout’s ceiling and held a finger to his lip. “Let’s see, and you have Marcus tell her about big plans and that he desperately needs her help to pull it all off.”

  Criss gave a slight shrug. “Something like that. Most of her thinks it’s all an elaborate game dreamed up by Marcus. In any event, Bobbi now goes on patrol every day to take inventory. She monitors the Reds, Blues, and Greens as they interact with citizens, and she notes the basics—who, what, when, and where.”

  Criss turned to the ops bench. “Here she is from earlier today.”

  The projected image above the ops bench flickered and resolved to show Bobbi Lava walking through the market square. The diffused shading in the lifelike image signaled her concealment by a personal cloak.

  “It seems that when people prepare to immigrate to Mars,” Criss continued, “one of their first hard lessons is how expensive it is to move personal belongings up from Earth. So much of their stuff has to get left behind that esoteric items like cloaks and decoders don’t make it on anyone’s list, even as an afterthought.”

  Bobbi lifted her right arm and practice-aimed her wrist weapon.

  “She uses old technology, and everyone else is so focused on building a future, it doesn’t occur to them that someone might be lurking about in secret.”

  “Can’t the Kardish crystals see through her cloak?” asked Cheryl.

  Criss turned to them. “More news. I have confirmed that our three mystery crystals are the Triada themselves. Causal mapping verified it. And yes, they can see through the cloak.”

  It had been Sid who first suggested the Triada were Kardish crystals, but he’d lacked the evidence to prove it. Cheryl looked at him when Criss spoke, but he didn’t react to the news.

  Chapter 15

  Hidden by a personal cloak, Bobbi Lava sauntered on patrol in the market square. A Red, a Blue, and three Greens dashed past to her right. She stopped and turned. What the hell? As they disappeared into the crowd, she followed them, moving with caution.

  She lost them for a few moments and then spotted them running up the pedestrian walkway of the Ag Port tram station. Bobbi couldn’t see the passenger platform from her current vantage point, but she did hear a group of colonists from that direction shouting. The tram departed, and soon after, the commotion dwindled.

  “Marcus,” she called. “Are you there? Five synbods are headed to the Quarter and they’re definitely in a hurry.”

  Bobbi wiggled her right arm as she spoke, thrilled at the weight on her wrist. The weapon had been delivered just yesterday. It arrived without a note, and the packaging itself had no markings. She knew it had to be from Marcus. Who else would send something so fun?

  She quickened her step and approached the pedestrian bridge. Instead of entering, she wal
ked past and took up position next to a sturdy tree about twenty paces away.

  “I’ll watch for them,” said Marcus. “Hey. An alarm just went off. I’m going up to the street to see what I can.”

  “Okay.” Bobbi’s attention drifted after that, and she found herself watching a teenage couple laughing and enjoying each other on a park bench near the walkway.

  A brilliant flash and a distant rumble brought her to the present. Instinct drove her to crouch as intense light penetrated the Ag Port dome and, for a brief moment, illuminated everything, casting stark shadows.

  “Oh my god,” she shouted. “What was that?”

  “The synbods are attacking the Quarter.” Marcus seemed more focused than normal, but Bobbi didn’t stop to analyze how he was different. “I can see six of them. They’re ordering us back to our apartments and threatening those who don’t comply. Oh no! One just smacked poor Emma Talcott.”

  Her pulse pounded and she started a deliberate breathing pattern that helped calm her. “How does this make sense?”

  “It’s terrible,” said a voice that sounded like Marcus. Bobbi could hear sirens wailing and people screaming in the background. “Some of the militia have started fighting back. It would help us here if you guarded the Ag Port station. We can’t let any more of them join the battle.”

  “I’m here now,” said Bobbi. She watched a dozen emergency responders run across the pedestrian bridge and gather on the passenger platform. Racking her brain, she struggled to understand the bizarre events playing out in front of her.

  She approached the pedestrian bridge entrance and picked a spot to the side where she was out of the way but had a clear view. She’d never trusted the colony synbods, and Marcus had filled her head with conspiracy theories. Still, this doesn’t make sense.

  “What’s happening now?” she asked.

  “They’re walking the streets and giving orders. This is way more aggressive than martial law. They’re taking over.”

  “Wait,” said Bobbi. “A synbod dressed in a tunic is approaching the station. What should I do?”