Carson Mach 1: The Atlantis Ship

by A. C. Hadfield

  Mach rolled out of the way and pulled himself up to his feet, leaning against the bar. He reached over and grabbed another bottle of Gasmulch. He took a long draw and watched as the horan continued to jerk and twist, all the while trying to reach for his varied organs that now lay in a slump on the floor.

  He turned the volume of the jukebox down by tapping the control program on his smart-screen. The bartender stood up from her hiding position below it. She eyed Mach with that disapproving look again.

  “I’m sorry,” Mach said to her. “I’ll pay for it.”

  He held out his forearm and let her swipe the transaction rod over his smart-screen. It transferred thirty eros for the bottle.

  “Thanks,” Mach said, recognizing she had given him a discount.

  “I never liked Ralex,” she said, her thin lips showing the barest hint of a smile. “You better finish him off and go collect your bounty before more Invidian security turn up. You’ve caused quite the mess.”

  After slugging another shot, Mach placed his hand on her shoulder, mostly to steady himself. “They’re not damaged… much,” he said, nodding to the pile of inert droids. “A reboot and they’ll be fine… mostly.”

  “You better put the horan out of his misery. He’ll be like that for days, trying to regenerate.”

  With a sigh, Mach nodded. “I suppose you’re right, but given what his lot did to our people, a little bit of suffering is due, don’t you think?”

  Under her breath she said, “I do, but Carlo Laverna didn’t offer the bounty for suffering, did he?”

  “No, he didn’t. Oh well, I guess fun time’s over.”

  “For now,” the bartender said with a wink as she headed to the other end of the bar to serve a group of fidesians wearing a nice shade of panic and shock on their faces.

  Mach staggered over to the writhing horan. He bent over its body. “Ralex, my old buddy, I bet that stings? Well, I can help you with that.”

  The horan gurgled something deep in his throat in response.

  Bored with the situation now, Mach reloaded and fired his Stinger to put Ralex out of his misery. Using the smart-screen sleeve, he scanned the body for signs of life; there were none. He took a photo of the corpse and a recording of the scan and sent it to the head of the Lavernan crime syndicate, Carlo:

  Scans and evidence of the completed job—as promised. I’ve attached my secure eros account transfer credentials. I’d prefer cryptocurrency on this one. Don’t want it coming back to me if we get audited by Central Accounts.

  Within two ST—Salus Time—minutes, he received a response notification:

  Impressive work, Mach. When you want some more jobs, you know where to come. Funds have cleared. Enjoy your hangover.

  Mach smiled as he read his account notification. The Lavernans were many things, but they always paid what they promised, and in this case it seemed they’d given him a bonus. The job should have paid three hundred thousand eros, but they’d thrown in an extra fifty grand.

  They were trying to keep him sweet. The Lavernan Syndicate had been trying to recruit him for years, ever since he got court-martialed from the CW Defense Force. But these days, he preferred to be a freelancer; non-affiliation kept his options open.

  It also meant he knew who his enemies were: everyone.

  He waved goodbye to the bartender and exited The Tachyon into the sunny evening of Invidia. They’d only get two hours of darkness tonight and he intended to make the most of it. He decided to head for the beach and drink cocktails until he either passed out or got arrested.

  Just three steps away from The Tachyon he walked right into an Invidian security droid. With the BuzzKill stim wearing off, he had the reactions of a slug and couldn’t avoid the blow to the head that sent him crashing to the ground as the blackness of unconsciousness took over.

  Chapter Four

  Cold air wafted around Mach’s bare limbs, making his skin crawl. The bright light beyond his closed eyes made it seem as though he were behind a red curtain. At least that was an improvement on blackness.

  The pain in his head made him groan as he tried to move. His face hurt. His spine hurt. His legs, arms, feet, jaw and chest… hurt. At first he wondered if he had been in a ship crash or had decided on an unauthorized naked space walk.

  Carson Mach had done many odd things in his life, but never that… so why did it feel like it?

  He blinked his eyes, letting the light in slowly so his pupils had time to adjust. The prosthetic had no problem; it dilated automatically down to a tiny aperture if needed, but his real eye, that would take time to adjust.

  The hard surface he was slumped on told him exactly where he was even before his vision adjusted to the brightness: Invidia prison.

  Of course! It all came flooding back to him. And then he smiled when he thought of his three and a half grand sitting in an off-planet account.

  He was in the clink—again. The light gray surfaces only stained slightly but with old blood. A single hard bed and a shit-pan in the corner decorated the two-meter-square room.

  An electronic whir of servos grabbed his attention and reminded him in stark clarity of why his head and face hurt: the droid. “Was it you?” Mach groaned. He made out the bipedal form of the Invidian security droid—or sec-bot as most people called them—looking at him via a vid-screen on the east wall of the cell.

  This particular sec-bot had a snide attitude to it. Its singular orb of an eye, set within a narrow rectangular face, spun as it focused on Mach. Somewhere within its head lay a quantum chip running its AI program. It often surprised a lot of visitors to Invidia that these sec-bots had distinct personalities.

  Some people, mostly idiots, thought they were self-aware and conscious. Which Mach knew was utterly ridiculous. He had tested this theory so many times that he now knew most of the sec-bots by their serial number.

  This one, no. 8094-12, known as just 94-12, had arrested Mach on at least fifteen occasions, mostly due to Mach shooting it, shutting it down with EMPs, or messing with its code for shits and giggles. At no time during all that did it display any kind of self-preservation.

  It was just a big dumb robot.

  Mach knew he was getting stale, lazy, if he could be so lax as to be sucker punched and arrested by 94-12—the dumbest of all big dumb robots on the security force.

  “Carson Mach,” it said, with a strangely cheery male voice that wouldn’t be out of place in a church choir. “You’ve been arrested for…” It reeled off a long list of crimes for the next minute and a half, making Mach yawn.

  “Just tell me the damage,” Mach said. “How big’s the fine this time?”

  Given his little bonus from the Syndicate, he wasn’t too bothered. His bar tab was probably higher than his fine. Usually he’d give the warden a little ‘gift’ of ten k eros and he’d be on his way, after having had a nice night’s sleep and a delicious prison breakfast.

  It was a running joke on Invidia that if you wanted to take a date out for a nice meal you should get her arrested first.

  “Your fine, Carson Mach,” 94-12 said, “has the remaining balance of two point three million eros.”

  Mach didn’t think he heard correctly at first and ordered the stupid sec-bot to repeat. But to his horror, the numbers didn’t change. And there was a troubling word in that sentence too—remaining.

  Leaning forward, now feeling very much awake, Mach said, “What the hell are you talking about? That’s outrageous! I only killed one person this time, and the security droids will be fine after a reboot. There wasn’t even that much damage to the bar, and what in god’s name do you mean ‘remaining balance’?”

  “We have seized your ship and all of its possessions, the value of which we have assessed to be seven hundred thousand eros, leaving a remaining balance of—”

  “Yes, I heard you the second time!” Mach said, standing and walking around in circles in the tiny two-meter-square cell. A three-million-eros fine! It was simply… “Bullshit,” Mach
said, slapping his hand uselessly against the vid-screen. “I want to see the warden, right now.”

  “That won’t be possible.”

  “And why’s that, you waste of silicon?”

  “Warden Farage has been indicted on charges of fraud and sent to Summanus to serve out the rest of his life.”

  Summanus—the prison planet!

  Mach reeled back and slumped onto the hard bed. This wasn’t right; no one on Invidia was charged with fraud—ever. It was just how things worked here. It was currency for laws and for the most part it worked well. Invidia wasn’t even an affiliated planet under the governance of the CW.

  “Who even has the jurisdiction to do that?” Mach asked. Invidia didn’t even have its own government. The security force was privately funded by a treaty account set up by the various criminal families. As odd as it was, it worked out okay; even the families knew there had to be some kind of order, even if the punishment was financial.

  “Do you have sufficient funds to pay your fine?” the sec-bot asked.

  “No, you know I don’t; you stole all my gear. I’ve nothing else to give.” He didn’t mention his off-planet account. They’d have wiped out his CW account and pension, along with anything else they had found in his ship. He didn’t want to give the buggers his last remaining funds.

  “Sentencing will begin this afternoon in lieu of payment.”

  “This is madness! No one on Invidia has ever faced charges. We can work something out, I’m sure. A payment plan perhaps? Let me talk with the new warden.”

  Mach could have sworn that 94-12 smiled as he said so very cheerily, “I am the new warden. I’ll return in one hour to see if you have found the funds required for your fine. Good day, Carson Mach.”

  The vid-screen switched off just as Mach ripped the bed plank from the wall and threw it against the screen. The plank bounced off without harming the surface and clattered to the floor, knocking over the shit-pan.

  “Just great,” he yelled, slapping his palm against the wall.

  This was not what he had expected at all.

  He tried to call someone, but his smart-screen wouldn’t connect. They’d updated the security protocols, closing the loophole in the system he had often used to get in touch with Carlo or other heads of families.

  He’d need to find a new way out, hack into the system, but that would take far longer than the one hour that 94-12 had given him. There was no way he could cover the fine. In his off-planet account, he had just over nine hundred grand, and that was the sum of everything now that his ship had been reprocessed and sold on.

  A slight comfort came to him as he thought about the ship’s various problems that he’d managed to hide from the dock inspection during his last authentication. Whoever had bought it would soon realize the fusion motors were shot and the LightDrive barely functioned below two hundred HPL—hours per light-year—making it possibly the slowest FTL ship in the Salus Sphere and a prime target for raiders and pirates.

  He considered himself lucky 94-12 had gotten as much as he did for it.

  But it still didn’t help him out of this particular hole.

  There were few options left open to him. In time he may be able to hack some comms to Carlo and get a loan, or there was the option of breaking out, though that seemed as likely as busting someone out of Summanus, which to his knowledge had never been done.

  Perhaps if he could convince 94-12 to come and see him personally, he could try to override its functions… As that idea started to coalesce, his smart-screen around his forearm buzzed with an incoming notification.

  “Whoa…” he said, whistling as he looked at his screen and saw who it was calling him—Admiral Morgan.

  They hadn’t spoken in at least three or four years. At one time, Mach and Morgan were like father and son, the latter was his commanding officer during Mach’s entire career. Their unit had the highest kill and success rate of any CW military unit.

  Until the Situation happened and Mach was thrown out of the force.

  Morgan was then promoted to the admiralty and oversaw the naval fleet. Easy job these days, though, considering the peacetime. Mach always viewed it as a way for the CW hierarchy to keep Morgan out of trouble.

  He was a hero to the home Sol System for his efforts during the war when Earth and Mars were on the precipice of horan control. If it wasn’t for Morgan, the system would have fallen and humanity’s first home would be no more than a slave world.

  Mach, however, didn’t have such heroics to keep him nice and safe in a cushy role upstairs, so why, after all this time, would Morgan be calling him now? Given the changes to the warden and the fine system, it didn’t take a genius to realize these events were linked.

  The notification bleeped again. Mach tapped his finger on the screen, accepting the call. A hologram image of Admiral Morgan appeared above his screen.

  “Well, well,” Mach said. “It’s the old man. How are you doing?”

  He looked old, Mach thought. Not just regular old, but tired, worn out… as though lacking in vitality. It appeared a life in the pen-pushing admiralty wasn’t his kind of thing after all. The wrinkles around his eyes were deeper, craggy. His eyes were deeper set and shadowed by a low brow.

  “You look like you’ve had an interesting day,” Morgan said, an uneasy smile on his face that reminded Mach of those days when his lovers inevitably delivered their speech about how much they loved him and that’s why they had to leave.

  “It’s something bad, ain’t it, Morg?”

  The older man nodded his head.

  “We didn’t want to have to do this, but we had little choice. You wouldn’t have agreed otherwise, I’m sure of it. I know your feelings toward the CW Defense Force, and if we just came to you asking for help, you would quite rightly tell us to go ram our heads up our collective asses.”

  “You’re quite the mind reader these days, old friend. So you’re telling me that you arranged all this? The removal of the warden, the ridiculous fine?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “You know,” Mach said, shaking his head with disappointment. “Would it have killed you to have put our friendship, our history first, and give me a heads-up? At least have given me a choice. You know I can’t afford that fine.”

  “Yeah, I know. We know.”

  “And who exactly is we?” Mach asked. He leaned against the wall and dropped his arm for a moment. He was still hurting from his beating the night before.

  “Are you still there, Mach?”

  “Yeah, I’m still here. My arm hurts is all. So you better just get on with it. What do your bastard superiors want with me this time? Some crime they want to pin on me? A suicide mission into the NCZ?” The NCZ—Non-Combat Zone—was the ring around the Salus Sphere that the treaty between the Commonwealth and the Axis Combine listed as a safety zone.

  In truth, it had become a freeway for lawlessness. Occasionally, the CW would send out a number of scientific ships to scan some sector of space for the Hoffberg Protocol, the project to identify habitable planets outside of the Salus Sphere and the areas under the control of the Axis Combine.

  “None of that,” Morgan said, with what Mach thought was a slight tremble in his voice. Mach couldn’t tell if it was fear, nerves, or something else. He raised his arm to stare into the holographic eyes of his old friend.

  “So what is it? What do you want me for?”

  Morgan looked away for a moment, appeared to give someone a nod and returned to Mach. “Orbital Station Forty is no more.”

  Mach racked his brains. It had been quite a while since he had memorized all the CW orbitals and various stations. “Is that the one above Retsina?”

  “It was,” Morgan said.

  The two words echoed in Mach’s mind, birthing a hundred ideas and consequences. “War?” he uttered. “An Axis attack?” It made sense, really. Retsina was a small planet on the very edge of the Salus Sphere. The orbital provided secure communications and defensive netwo
rk systems. These stations created a first line of defense against any potential attack from the Axis and covered the entire collection of CW planets.

  “Not an Axis attack, no, something far more troubling.”

  “Just spit it out, old man. I’m running out of time here. Just tell me, what the hell’s happened and what do I need to do in order to get out of here.”

  “Just one thing,” Morgan said, looking at Mach directly so their eyes locked. “You must find, and disable… the Atlantis Ship.”

  At first Mach laughed, thinking Morgan was yanking his chain, but the seriousness with which the words were spoken told Mach he was deadly serious. The Atlantis ship was just a myth; everyone knew that. It was like the ghost ships of old. Tired, drunk, scared sailors would often see things in the fog and attribute it to a dread ship sailed by ghosts. The Atlantis ship was just the same thing.

  Mach had been in deep space enough to know the human mind often saw all kinds of weird shit out there. When the CW pushed its crew hard, especially during the conflicts with the Axis, people got stressed, saw things that weren’t there.

  The idea of this Atlantis ship just appearing and disappearing while leaving a wake of destruction behind was just the fever dreams of the scared or the insane. The myth had been around ever since humanity first settled a colony on Mars.

  “Did you hear me, Mach?”

  “Yeah, I heard you. I was just wondering what you’ve been drinking recently. Or have you taken to enjoying the benefits of stims in your old age?”

  “Dammit, Mach, I’m serious. We received a distress signal earlier just before the ship arrived and obliterated the station. We have a snippet of video too, if you don’t believe. An Ethan Bloom, one of the mechanics, managed to record a few seconds before he, along with most of the orbital, was sucked into the Atlantis ship’s closing wormhole.”

  Mach wanted to dispute it, say it was all a load of crap, but Morgan’s hologram changed to a 3D video of the recording. All Mach could see was floating debris passing over the head of Bloom’s helmet cam. When the mechanic looked up, the great looming shape of a dark ship completely filled the view. The thing looked… ancient was the only word Mach could come up with. It was of a design the likes of which he’d never seen before.