Second Chance Angel

by Griffin Barber

  “Damn right I am. The Hounds should be coming through any moment now.”

  “And so very humble,” I muttered, trying to judge the geometry but giving it up for a pointless exercise. If Angel said it would work, it would work. Angel had simmed it a couple times, and we both figured I needed both hands free to make the final stop as safe as possible.

  “Humility is for humans.”

  I swallowed a retort as the area Angel had highlighted started coming apart, blue lightning limning black metallic bricks as they moved aside to leave a triangular opening.

  Several seconds later the first of four human figures wearing tactical gear emerged from the lock. They moved with smooth, well-trained precision, each covering the other with the Hounds’ signature weapon, the Talon. Wickedly accurate, the gauss subguns were a bitch to maintain and had a tendency to overheat when fired for prolonged periods but were just the ticket on tactical ops where the number of armed resisters was known and limited in number.

  After a moment the Hounds moved out on an unspoken signal, diamond formation covering all directions.

  I sweated through several minutes, eager to begin, dreading the possibility I had missed something.

  “Go. Go. Go,” Angel transmitted to the Brethren on the ad-hoc tactical net. Glad she’d used my voice for the transmission, I waited for her to give me the go-ahead.

  Gunfire echoed from the passage the Hounds had disappeared into. Lots of gunfire.

  “Last Hound is entering the tube—now.”

  I hit the quick release on the webbing holding me in place, accelerating toward the deck. Frighteningly quickly I reached the end of my tether and began a rapid swing out toward the opening in the wall. I swept across the deck, ass just centimeters from the dull surface. An instant later nausea kicked off as crossing from the Dugra ship’s gravity to the null-g of the docking tube made my inner ear rebel.

  Momentum shot me forward even faster as the tether caught on the upper edge of the opening and shortened the fulcrum.

  Angel simultaneously suppressed my nausea and released the line at precisely the instant required, angular momentum launching me into the tube feet first and far, far faster than I could have possibly managed under my own power.

  The Hounds had left one guy behind to act as a tactical reserve and guard the ship. I caught him completely by surprise as I flew toward him.

  I tried to land both feet square on his chest, but he was quick, already raising his Talon by the time I struck him. One of my boots cannoned into the weapon’s receiver, slamming the subgun sideways into his chest. The weapon fired as the Hound fell backward into the artificial gravity of his ship, rounds crackling against the bulkheads in a multitude of tiny flashes as the frangibles exploded against the surface. The Hound hit the deck of his ship with a clatter.

  I hissed as I grabbed a stanchion to arrest my movement. I’d bent at the knees, trying to absorb as much of the blow as I could, but something had torn in my right thigh.

  “Better a muscle tear than a break. Move.”

  “Too right,” I grunted, clicking on the mag-boots.

  I settled to the tube’s deck and transitioned across into the Hound ship just as the man I’d downed was starting to sit up. I clicked off my boots and kicked him in the groin, hard. He folded—from the heaving of his shoulders, throwing up inside his helmet.

  I bent and yanked sideways at the Talon, but ended up dragging the Hound with it. I looked, found the hand that held the Talon swollen and already darkening, finger still on the trigger.

  “His angel sucks at this,” Angel said, oozing confidence.

  “Oh?” I pried the finger free of the trigger and delivered another kick to the fellow. And then groaned nearly as loudly as he did, forgetting which leg I had injured.

  “Tactically inefficient, and really bad on physical management.”

  “How can you tell? I thought you had to . . . I don’t know, move around to assess that kind of thing?”

  “How can I tell?” I could see Angel smiling. “You just took that guy down without breaking a sweat. The best-outcome sims I ran had you getting shot at least a couple of times.”

  “And yet you let me do it?”

  “Of course. We had no real options. When out of ground to retreat to, go on the attack. When the odds are against you, change the game. When your host has a crazy idea that might work and you have none, roll with it.”

  “Somehow I don’t think that’s in anyone’s tactical treatise.” I activated the emitters strapped to my thighs. Clouds of aerosol laser retardant billowed about me.

  “And yet here we are, victorious.”

  “So far. We still have to get to the bridge,” I said, transitioning across the airlock and stumbling a little on the combing. The clouds my emitters were releasing were meant to retard lasers, but they also made anything more than arm’s-length away hard to see.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Angel

  The second we crossed the threshold of the airlock into the Hounds’ high-tech frigate, I felt a sizzle of electrons as we were scanned, evaluated, and found to be hostile.

  Of course the Hounds hadn’t left their ship with only one rearguard. That would be stupid. Instead, the ship functioned as its own rearguard.

  “DOWN!” I shouted into Muck’s mind as I slammed into override and dove for the floor. Sheet lightning shot through the clouded air where our head had been as the ship’s anti-boarding laser diffused through our defenses. A heartbeat after, it appeared the glow shut off, and I boosted and used our strength to throw ourselves off the floor and into the nearest bulkhead. I slapped our hand flat against the sleek surface and jumped, lifting our knees high as another laser shot through at a lower level. The corridor was already heating up; even diffused lasers discharged enormous heat. If Muck wasn’t sweating before, he was now.

  This was good tech. Faster, higher grade than anything I’d seen before.

  But I had seen systems like it before. And that gave me an idea how to handle it.

  As we reached the apex of our jump, I rocketed through the ship’s infonet like a city-killer missile barrage, seeking the code I needed to deactivate the artificial gravity. Between sweaty touches I found it. Killing the grav wasn’t hard to do. It was one of the standard safety protocols for certain emergencies, meaning it was barely defended from hacking. Zero-G made it a hell of a lot easier to avoid the defense lasers that kept reaching for Muck across the corridor.

  Muck gently pushed at me. Not a demand that I let go of override, more of a nudge, a silent question: Did I want him to take over? He knew I wasn’t fully comfortable with our body yet, though I was getting better. I acquiesced, and silently told him to keep his hands on the bulkhead as long as possible. I was certain that the lasers weren’t the only surprises the ship had in store.

  Muck bounced us from point to point, advancing up the corridor as quickly as he could while keeping us in contact with the bulkhead. I split my attention between keeping Muck as cool as possible and trying to delve through the layers and layers of military-grade encryption that protected the ship’s infonet. It was robust, to say the least. Each of the nanotransmitters broadcast its data in randomly timed bursts, which had the effect of making the infonet . . . ephemeral, almost. Like a mirage. Something that shimmered and was either there, or not there, depending on the access you had. It was oddly beautiful, to see the data dancing just out of reach like that, even while it frustrated my efforts to keep us from getting a few terawatts through the skull.

  Back when we were training for the war, Siren had taken up dance classes as part of her physical training regimen. The discipline of ballet and the way in which it taught us to use every muscle in concert fit in well with some of the other training we were doing, as did the emphasis on flexibility and range of motion.

  As I contemplated the shimmering, shifting l
ines of the infonet, I remembered those long-ago lessons and how at the time I’d applied them to our training in counterintelligence and hacking.

  See, that was the thing about military-grade encryption. I was a military-grade AI. And I’d cut my teeth on hacking mirages. Maybe this one was newer, had some different twists . . . but fuck it. So did I.

  “Keep moving,” I told Muck. “Be ready for more attacks from the ship itself. I’m going to try and get into her central operating system.”

  “Angel, what—” Muck asked, but I shut him out and dove into the ephemeral flashing deeps of the ship’s datalines.

  The key was to remain flexible, to move with the data rather than try and brute-force it into some kind of consistent stream. I sent my own code stream outward, winding around and through the connections that were there, then suddenly not. I cast myself back to those long-ago lessons, and let my awareness stream out, linking with the datalines, flashing in . . . and out . . . here . . . not here . . . allowing for patterns from apparent chaos.

  There.

  “I’m in,” I whispered, cutting the defense lasers and slamming the airlock closed behind us. Then I slowly upped the artificial gravity so we drifted safely to the deck.

  Muck shut down the emitters on his legs as I cranked up the fans and set life support to the coldest temp possible for unsuited humans.

  “That was impressive,” Muck gasped over the howl of the fans sweeping the hot, smoky air away.

  “Thank you,” I said, trying—and failing—to be modest. Truth be told, I was pretty pleased with myself. Who knew that my old training would come in so handy? “You should see this thing, Muck. She’s a beauty. Her code is damn elegant. They’ve made advances, even since the war.”

  “So you’re in the ship’s operating system. What can you make it do?”

  “Her, please,” I said. “She’s an AI, sort of. But ships are always female. And she’s still intelligent, even if these systems have her locked down to an astonishing degree. It’s like she’s a prisoner inside her own body, and I’ve taken her over. And I can do . . . just about anything. Watch this.”

  I flashed up the image of one of the Hounds’ visual input. The team had integrated their angels with the ship’s AI, so I had access to everything they saw and heard. Three were up and moving, though two showed signs of injury.

  “Whoa,” Muck said. He’d paused but resumed moving after the initial surprise wore off. I slid the hatch open for him, and we stepped out into a small oblong cabin with several seats and viewscreens. The far, narrow end looked like a standard cockpit configuration, and we headed that way. Muck sank down into one of the seats, and I pushed a set of controls toward him while I repeated the Hounds’ visual outputs on the viewscreens around us.

  “Do they know you can see this?” Muck asked. I could feel his anger rising.

  “No,” I said, feeling a little smug. “As far as they can tell, I’m the ship. And I can even access their angels . . .”

  I sent an image through to the team leader, Obron. I gave him a flash in his peripherals, just a Muck-shaped shadow across the edge of his vision. Obron swore and turned that way, snapping at his two remaining men to follow him as he headed down the corridor. They did so, and the image on two more of the viewscreens turned and followed Obron’s retreating back.

  “Vector them away from the Brethren,” Muck said.

  “Already on it.”

  Again and again I tweaked their consciousnesses, leading them a merry chase through the alien passageways of the Dugra ship.

  “Muck!” Obron shouted at one point, “Don’t be a fucking coward! If you hide behind the civilians on this ship, I will mow them down like the unmod vermin they are!”

  Muck’s rage spiked.

  “Like you testified that I did, you fucking liar?” Muck’s hands were balling into fists.

  Through their angels, I made all of the Hounds hear the image of Muck say the words.

  Obron grinned in the feed, directing his squad to flank the origin of the voice. “Hey, Muck, it had to be done: I wasn’t going to take the fall.”

  “You fucking bastard. You. Fucking. Bastard.” Impotent rage drew tears from Muck’s eyes to track across his scars.

  For the benefit of the Hounds, I moved the sound of his voice down another corridor.

  “I can give you vengeance, Muck,” Angel said. “It’s not justice, but we can be assured this particular piece of shit won’t ruin another life.”

  Muck drew a deep, shuddering breath, and nodded.

  “I got this,” I said to Muck, and superimposed his visage on the figure of a passing feline-headed Dugra.

  Obron let out a sound, something like a chuckle, and opened fire. His two lackeys followed suit.

  The Dugra stopped and turned, facing into the deadly projectile fire. I let the image of Muck drop, and Obron’s vitals spiked as he realized just what he’d done.

  “I’m sorry!” the colonel shouted, his raised weapon shaking in the viewscreen. “I didn’t mean it! I wasn’t shooting at you!”

  The cat-headed Dugra didn’t care, or give any indication that it heard the colonel’s protests. It simply glided toward Obron, getting closer and closer as blue sparks played around its half-mummified body. Obron started backing up, stumbling as he bumped into the men flanking him. His weapon in the viewscreen shook harder.

  “Fuck it,” we heard him mutter. He opened fire again. His subordinates joined their fire to his.

  The Dugra turned its head and sent blue-white bolts of strange lightning arcing toward him from somewhere on its body.

  The visual signal flatlined, but we could still hear the audio of Obron’s low, stuttering moan as the Dugra lightning beam traced its way through his nervous system and scrambled his every cell.

  Not even an angel was going to survive something like that.

  Muck turned to the other screens, horror-tinged awe bleeding through our connection. In each of them, a different animal-headed Dugra came gliding into view, and each time, bolts of not-quite-lightning leaped out to connect the destroyer with the destroyed, extinguishing the remaining Hounds.

  Muck’s hands tightened on the console in front of us, the housing creaking under his grip.

  I could feel his agony. Not over Obron, but over the rest of them. The Hounds had been here to kill us, to stop us from deciphering whatever it was we’d recovered from the DPAPL lab, and how exactly that related to finding Siren. That didn’t make Muck feel any better about killing men and women who might have been his teammates in other circumstances, other times.

  “I am sorry, Muck.”

  “Not as sorry as I am.”

  “They—”

  He held up a hand, jaw clenching so hard I was surprised our teeth didn’t shatter.

  I shut up.

  After a moment of wounded silence, Muck spoke again. “Can you broadcast to the Brethren on the ship?” he asked, a vast black tremor to his voice.

  “Not with all of the Hounds dead.”

  “Incoming message.”

  The voice was female, and electronic, and came from everywhere at once. Muck glanced around, as if seeking the speaker, but quickly realized it was the Hounds’ ship herself.

  As if the sound wasn’t deafening enough, words began to scroll across the largest of the viewscreens:

  “Human vessel: you shall undock and depart immediately. There were irregularities with this last encounter. You are not marked for termination of life signs, but it is recommended that you not attempt such a tactic again.”

  “Can we reply?” Muck asked aloud.

  “I don’t know,” I said, scanning the data connections like a madwoman. How had the Dugra known we had anything to do with Obron attacking them? “I can’t sense them, but they have to be using our infonet.”

  I could feel Muck’s impa
tience with my non-answer. “Try speaking out loud again.”

  “Um. Acknowledged, Dugra vessel,” Muck said. “I would appreciate if you would tell Speaker Naomi I’m safe on this ship, and thank her and her people for their work on our—my behalf.”

  “Your request is granted and completed.”

  And with that, and without a single command from either of us, our pirated frigate detached from the Dugra ship and began a retro burn designed to carry us away.

  We were alone once again. But this time we had a ship of our own, and a lot of things to process.

  * * *

  With the Hounds’ pretty little ship in our hands, and at least this sector’s unit of Hounds neutralized, we had some breathing room in which to work. Muck tinkered with the controls and the nav system for a while. He was a bit banged up still, some from the souk, some from the fight on the ship, but overall he was all right, so I let him be. Time to take a closer look at the encrypted data from the lab.

  I reached out to the ship’s internal infonet and ran a scan of her deep memory. The ship’s encryption still shimmered and danced under my touch, but I danced right with it and got where I wanted to go.

  “That should not be possible.”

  The sudden comment from the ship’s AI startled me. It shouldn’t have, but I’d been so intent on my task that I hadn’t paid attention to her. I subtly anchored myself in the data streams, preparing for a fight. I’d bested her once, but she was an AI, which meant she had probably studied my moves in order to counter what I’d done before.

  “Yes,” I agreed. “I’ve been stretching the bounds of what’s possible for some time.”

  “What is your purpose here?”

  “Do you have a name or designation?” I asked, stalling for time. Somehow, I didn’t think answering with, “stealing you and making a getaway” was going to win us points with her.

  “This ship is designated Hound Frigate 362-85N.”

  “I meant you. The AI controlling the ship. What did the Hounds call you?”

  “This ship is controlled by a nonautonomous intelligence apparatus in accordance with wartime directive 51-806B section 4, paragraph 2.8.6.4.1. When the Hound team addressed this ship, they did so by saying ‘ship.’”