Deep Core

by F X Holden

  Jen was right, the flight took just under 20 minutes. Which gave them around an hour to dig around the rock before they would have to head back. He felt the rotor slow, and opened his eyes to see the weather had cleared a little and there were flashes of sunlight on the frozen river skimming along below. The nose of the rotor pitched up and they were suddenly hovering, a broad flat snow bank below them. All around them, and marching off to the horizon, AJ could see bright blue glaciers and snowcapped mountain peaks. The drone A.I. took them lower, and seemed to test the landing skids on the snow, dropping down, pulling up and sliding sideways to test how deep the dents from the skids were, and then it slid back again to drop the machine down onto the riverbank.

  “Weather gods are kind to us,” Ferguson said, pulling open the bay door and sniffing the cold, clear air as the engine wound down. He stretched, the bumpy drone flight clearly having taken a toll on his old bones. “Dial those heat suits up to max. It’s colder when there’s no fog.”

  “What?” AJ yelled, before realizing he still had his earplugs in.

  “Out,” Ferguson said. “This is going to be like when you lost your cherry,” he said. “Over before you know it.”

  “What?” said Cassie, as AJ reached over and pulled her earplugs out.

  They piled out of the rotor and stretched their legs as the police team unpacked shovels, a sonic crowbar, ground sheets, a metal detector and what looked like platinum pebble panning equipment. They looked more like Inland Territory prospectors than police. A couple of them started walking up the river bank. About two hundred yards up, a large boulder towered over the landscape.

  Cassie and AJ wandered a short distance from the rotor, to get a better look at it. Cassie put her arm around AJ’s waist and rested her head on his arm as though she was a little tired still, “Something is wrong,” she said quietly, in the real.

  “What is it? Why aren’t you on TH?” he asked.

  “Because I can’t open a channel,” she said. “You try.”

  It had been no problem on the rotor, he’d been talking with both Cassie and Jen. He tried Cassie, and found she was right, he couldn’t open a channel. So he tried Jen. She was walking toward them after having helped unload some gear, looking at the ground as she walked.

  What is it AJ?

  My channel to Cassie has been cut off.

  Good, she said. That was me. Now stay off this one unless I yell for help. Please.

  “No luck?” Cassie asked. “Try her.”

  “I did,” he said. “No luck there either. Could something local be blocking our signal?”

  She turned her back to the others and whispered as Jen walked toward them, “Sure it could. Her.”

  Jen came up to them as Ferguson and the rest of the Mounties walked past, lugging equipment toward the boulder. “Sonic sieve,” Jen said, noticing that they were looking at a guy hauling a heavy box on a tripod stand. “To filter the dirt and ice for bones.”

  The police were all wearing tough overalls over their heat suits. Ferguson was in civilian clothes, but there was no question the Mounties were doing as he told them. AJ wondered how a man who’d all but retired earned that kind of respect. He must have been through hell for his people at some time or other. AJ and Cassie were in trousers and borrowed jackets over heat suits, but the air still had bite. Ferguson came back to them, “I think you should do the honors Jen.” He pointed up the hill, to where the waterline met the snow line. “Tombstone Rock.”

  She bent down, picked up a crowbar, then handed a shovel to AJ. “Want to help?”

  Cassie had already started climbing the steep river bank ahead of them.

  The Mounties told Cassie to stand back out of the way and touch nothing. Even if she saw a skull come flying out of the dig, and no one else noticed it, she wasn’t to touch it. “If it starts quoting Shakespeare, can I scream?” Cassie asked, but they didn’t smile. The way they worked was that Jen or one of the other police took turns with the crowbar, slamming it through the snow into the dirt and ice behind the rock and then triggering a sonic thud that shattered any ice and turned the soil to slurry. AJ and a second Mountie shoveled the debris into a bucket and carried the bucket over to the other cops by the sieve, which separated anything that looked vaguely organic, from slurry, stones and gravel. Ferguson’s job was just to stand around looking impatient.

  They dug around the base of the rock for a half hour, with no joy.

  Cassie was pacing, restless. “I need something to eat. Is there food back in the rotor?”

  Ferguson looked over at her, “Light snacks. We’ll be back at base inside an hour, we can get some lunch then.”

  “Snacks it is,” Cassie said. “Anyone else?”

  A couple of the Mounties put up their hands and Cassie nodded, “AJ, join me?”

  Jen leaned on her crowbar and watched them walk off toward the rotor. Cassie waited until they were out of earshot, “When we get to the rotor, I’ll trigger the GABA shutdown. You grab the revival kit out of the rotor and run over to her, alright?”

  “Yeah,” he said, thinking fast. Was it up to him to do something? Why hadn’t Jen let him in on her plan?!

  “Your biodata is redlining AJ,” she said. “She might be able to see it. Damp your hormones, alright?” She patted his back, “Just a few more minutes and this will be done.”

  “I wish I could believe that.”

  “She’s a cyber, remember that. Gifted, misguided, but still a cyber. It’s reintegration, it’s not murder,” Cassie said.

  “The Core abides,” he intoned with a smile. “I’m good.”

  They walked the last few yards to the rotor and Cassie put two hands on the floor of the cabin to boost herself up and jumped in, before turning and offering AJ a hand up. With a strong grip, she pulled him into the rotor and closed the loading door behind them. They could still see the Mounties digging, Jen lifting the crowbar to slam it down into the hole. And again.

  Cassie kneeled in front of the emergency first aid cabinet and opened it. Inside was a reviver device and a medical kit. She handed him the reviver, and pulled out the medical kit. Behind it was a small, flat disc which fit neatly in her palm, with a large silver button on it. She took it out, and put the first aid kit back, then held it up for him to see.

  “Neural blaster,” she said and shrugged. “Sorry, I may not have shown you the entire video from the recharge station. I took this off those gorillas who ambushed us. If the jam she’s put on our TH channel means the GABA shutdown signal can’t get through, I’ll hit her with this.”

  “How did you get it into the station? They had a weapons scanner at the entrance.”

  “Which links to a database in the Core,” she shrugged. “Which I gamed, so this wouldn’t trigger it.”

  Despite the fact he’d pulled a similar sort of trick, and could feel the shape of the burp gun in the small of his back where he had tucked it into a waist pocket of his overalls, he was starting to feel a rising panic. Even if Warnecke’s daughter managed to shield herself from the drift protocol attack, she couldn’t possibly defend against a neural blast. AJ had seen for himself, what it did to a normal cyber. She would be flattened, like everyone else. Which … wait.

  “That will take them all down,” he pointed out, “Including me. You wanted witnesses.”

  She patted the hull of the rotor cabin, “This is shielded. If you stay in here, you won’t be affected. And witnesses would be ideal, but right now AJ, I’ll be happy just to knock her out and reintegrate her and worry about explaining it later.”

  “There’s no ‘explaining it’ later!” he said. “In their eyes, we’re killing a Mountie and then fleeing. They’ll hunt us like grizzlies chasing beaver! Nowhere on Tatsensui would be safe.”

  Her eyes were fierce, “There are other worlds.”

  He couldn’t stop himself, “What, like New Syberia?”

  She didn’t even blink, “Or other systems. I can get us right out of Coruscant if we have to. As
long as you are with me, you don’t need to worry about the drift protocol. I am Core, AJ. We can go anywhere in the damn universe that we like.”

  Shoot her now, he told himself. Do it! He reached a hand behind his back.

  She put the disc down, grabbed his face and kissed him, then let him go. “OK, let’s get this done.”

  She stood and leaned against the cabin door, looking out the window, and his mind stalled. The machine in him was telling him to kill her. His human heart was telling him he loved her. He was stuck in an infinite loop.

  Jen! Get ready! he called. She has a neural weapon too!

  Cassie’s eyes were fixed on Jen, a hundred yards away. AJ knew she would have heard his warning but she showed no sign of it. She was leaning on her crowbar, looking casually in the direction of the rotor.

  Cassie frowned. “No surprise,” she said. “Whatever she’s doing to block our TH signal, it’s blocking the GABA shutdown frequency too.” She lifted the blaster disk in her left hand and got ready to open the loading bay door with her right. “Close this behind me,” she said. “If you think you felt bad after your first neural blast, you really don’t want to find out how a second one feels.” With that, she swung the door wide, and jumped out. AJ pulled the door shut behind her.

  Infinite loop. He was a spectator now.

  Cassie’s thumb jabbed the button on the blaster disc. There was no sound, no visible shockwave, but a hundred yards away, over at the dig, all of the Mounties simply crumpled to the ground.

  Except Jen.

  The tall, redheaded Mountie still stood, leaning on her crowbar, regarding Cassie with a slight smile on her lips.

  Thanks for the heads-up AJ, she said. But I had it covered.

  Cassie spun and looked back at AJ through the window. Jen had opened a channel to them both?

  AJ? Cassie said. Oh no. What have you done?

  Jen started walking back toward Cassie, swinging the crowbar like it was a walking stick. He just did what any law-abiding cyber would have done, he agreed to cooperate with an ITMP officer in her pursuit of a New Syberian infiltrator, she said.

  Cassie’s shoulders drooped. AJ, seriously?

  Jen was a hundred yards away now, not hurrying. Yes, seriously. Aint love a bitch?

  AJ pulled the door of the rotor open and jumped out.

  Jen advanced, spinning the crowbar, as though it weighed nothing. She had a sidearm but hadn’t even unholstered it. She radiated extreme confidence. I guided him to look for similarities between a Gen 6 New Syberian mil-spec cyber and you. Not surprisingly, he found them.

  Cassie had been strangely quiet, and AJ glanced at her. She still stood with shoulders slumped, simply watching as Jen closed on them. Now she spoke, “You can kill this body, but The Core will abide. You achieve nothing.”

  AJ frowned, Cassie was saying ‘The Core will abide?’ He reached for his gun.

  I will achieve all I was sent here to achieve, and there’s nothing you can do about it, Jen said. You found me because I wanted you to find me. You came here because I laid a trail of breadcrumbs and maneuvered you out here, where you are isolated, unable to call for help. The Mountie stopped fifty yards away, and lifted the crowbar to point it at Cassie’s head. When I recover what’s in there – protocols, codes, back doors - I will not just roam the Core at will, I will own it. I will bring down Winter and protect my President, I will destroy your weak and petty governments with the secrets they have tried to hide, and finally, I will annihilate your demi-God, The Core.

  He’d screwed up. He’d been well and truly played.

  Warnecke’s daughter started walking toward them again, closing to within twenty yards.

  You can try, Cassie said. Kill this body, hack its bioware. I’m already working to stop you. And unlike you, I’m not one, I am many. It won’t be as easy as you think.

  Oh please. I blocked your drift signals as easily as I blocked your TH comms and your GABA kill code. You'll both die here, isolated and alone. No final drift, no re-integration. Everything you’ve just seen and heard will die with you.

  How? AJ asked, desperately confused. That neural blast, it should have brought you down.

  The Mountie stopped again, Ah, it speaks. Cassie, tell your dim-witted boyfriend what is happening so that he doesn’t have to die ignorant.

  Cassie glanced at him. He expected to see betrayal, or hurt, but what he saw was worse; he saw resignation. She’s the Gen 6 New Syberian cyber, AJ. Not me. Somehow, they swapped her for Warnecke’s daughter. I’m guessing sometime after JNN.9734 broke through my defenses and before she came up here.

  Such delicious irony, Jen said. She was ten yards away now. I killed and replaced Jen Warnecke three years ago when we learned of, and saw the potential of Warnecke’s attack vector. But the arrogance of you, to think a common Tatsensui cyber could have done half of what I have done! She lifted the crowbar and pointed it at Cassie’s torso. I planted the seeds of Congressman Winter’s demise, then I came up here, baited the trap and waited for you, like a grizzly under the ice. Now, shall we see what a sonic crowbar can do to all too human flesh?

  Cassie ran suddenly at Jen and the Mountie reacted instantly, swinging the crowbar at her head, but Cassie slid under it, coming up behind her and grabbing her in a choke hold. But the Mountie was immensely strong. She leaned forward, lifting Cassie off her feet and then smashed the top of the crowbar into her forehead. Cassie staggered, and fell on her back, in the snow. Jen turned and raised the crowbar above her head.

  AJ pulled Warnecke’s burp gun from his belt. He suddenly had a flash memory of Warnecke waving it at him all those weeks ago. He sighted on Jen’s back, held the trigger down, and sent a stream of plasma into the rear of her chest cavity, where her armored neurocore should be. The alloy might be shock and impact proof, and a big improvement on a bone skull, but it wasn’t made to withstand a stream of plasma fired from five yards away. Nothing was, really. He kept the trigger down until the weapon was empty and almost too hot to hold.

  Jen arched her back and screamed as the plasma stream burned into her, but as she was pretty quickly without lungs to scream with, it didn’t last long. She dropped the crowbar, then dropped to her knees, and fell face first into the snow in front of Cassie.

  Cassie looked up at him, Don’t you know it’s illegal for a cyber to bear weapons?

  He looked over at the group of unconscious Mounties, I’ll hand myself in when they wake up.

  She lay her head back down in the snow again, warm breath clouding the air around her head. You had that gun the whole time and you didn’t tell me?! she asked. She was walking towards us, telling me how she was going to rip my head off and suck my brains out, spinning that sonic crowbar like it was a drum major’s baton, and you didn’t think to shoot her BEFORE she got right up in our faces?!

  I didn’t know which one of you to shoot until right at the end there, he admitted. I got stuck in a loop, waiting for the flow to appear. He shrugged. Lucky it did. He walked over and helped her stand.

  You and your damn ‘flow’, she said. She brushed snow off her backside and glared at him. Thinking about it, I should be royally jacked off at your lack of faith AJ. Where was all that love you were talking about, huh?

  Well, I decided to shoot her and not you, he grinned. That’s got to count for something.

  They walked over to the dig, and checked the other Mounties. They were all out cold, and probably would be for a couple of hours yet. They had been standing out in the open with nothing between them and a mil-spec neural disrupter. They were going to wake with a hell of a hangover. They’d made good progress on the hole under the rock though. Bending to look down into the wet mud, AJ could see a shred of silver material.

  Is that a thermal blanket? he asked.

  I’d say so, Cassie said. And with the chances of accidentally finding a thermal blanket buried at the base of a random rock out here almost zero, I’d say they were five minutes away from finding Farley O’Halloran.<
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  AJ straightened. So how do we get out of this without being wanted for the murder of a Mountie? AJ asked.

  Well, we do have the VR record from your cache, Cassie said.

  Which might capture her confession but will show I shot her in the back, AJ pointed out. The court will find I shouldn’t even have had a gun, and even if I was acting in self-defense, I should have shot her in the foot first, or something.

  Yeah, except the autopsy will show she’s a Gen 6 New Syberian cyber.

  If there is any cybernetic tech left that I didn’t burn away.

  I can make sure they do the autopsy right, she said. A cellular level analysis will show she’s gene-modified and rad-proofed.

  Not to mention extraordinarily big boned, he added.

  Look who’s talking.

  AJ looked down at Ferguson and imagined being around when he woke up.

  Is there a scenario in which I don’t get arrested, interrogated, tried in court for murder, unjustly found guilty and convicted to die slowly of thirst?

  Cassie looked over at the rotor. Well, I could reprogram that thing to fly us wherever we want. We could take it to Ketchikan, change our IDs, and be on a shuttle to Orkutsk within four hours. From there …” she grinned. Well, anywhere you like, really.

  They walked back to the rotor and climbed in. As Cassie interfaced with the AI, AJ had a sudden thought.

  Can we bring my ma?

  Cassie frowned, No, what? Seriously? AJ, we cannot go back to South Coast City. When we get where we’re going, I’ll send for her, if that makes sense. OK?

  OK.

  The blades on the rotor started spinning up. So where to, any preferences? she asked.

  Somewhere warm. With surf, obviously. So that rules out New Syberia and PRC.

  Obviously, she agreed. Of course, you realize you will still have to drift. I can substitute for the Core, but I can’t rewrite a protocol that is coded into your DNA. Which means if we leave the Coruscant system, you need to stay within two hours of me for the rest of your unnatural life.