The Machine Awakes

by Adam Christopher

  Cait let out her breath and licked her dry lips and, turning once more to watch Flood at the other table, tried to speak again.

  “Where is my brother?” she spat between clenched teeth, the effort making her head thump and black stars flutter around the edge of her vision.

  “You’ll see him soon,” said Glass from somewhere out of sight. Cait turned her head back to the left, but all she could see was the edge of his long pale coat as he stood somewhere just behind her. Flood still hadn’t spoken. Cait couldn’t work out who was in charge of the group—it had seemed to be Flood, and she had called herself a High Priestess, but Glass seemed pretty chatty, and much more relaxed. He seemed out of place, the opposite of the tightly wound, fervent Flood. Maybe it was just a good cop, bad cop routine.

  And maybe they were behind it, behind her brother’s voice. Glass was psi-abled, apparently. So maybe it was them, faking it, using his dead voice to string her along.

  No, it’s okay. It’s really me, sis.

  Cait felt herself tense up.

  Don’t answer. They can’t hear me, but they’ll probably be able to hear you. I’m getting a little boost, is all. All part of the plan, don’t worry.

  Cait focused on her breathing. In, and out. In, and out.

  Remember that time when I climbed that tree in the front yard, and you told me not to but I wouldn’t listen? And you were right, because I slipped on the high branch and fell and cracked my arm on the ground. And then we both ended up in the hospital, because when Mom found us we were both laid out at the bottom of the tree, both of us with broken arms? We had to tell them we had both climbed the tree and fallen out, because there was no other explanation for why we had both got hurt.

  Tyler’s voice filled Cait’s head like warm morning light. It was him, had to be. His voice wasn’t faked. He really was alive. Which meant her captors were telling the truth.

  Cait screwed her eyes tight. A thousand thoughts crowded her mind. The members of the Morning Star were delusional. She knew that much. Everything they said about the Fleet, about the war, was a lie. Their worldview was skewed far, far into the realms of fantasy.

  But they were telling the truth about her brother. And if what they said had happened to him was true, what did that mean for everything else they said was going on?

  Were they actually right?

  Cait opened her eyes and pulled on the straps holding her wrists, enough to rattle the table. Flood’s face reappeared, floating over her own.

  “Time for your next task,” she said, “and the glorious future that awaits you.” Flood pursed her lips and turned her face as she looked down on Cait, like she was waiting for an answer.

  There it was. The crazy. The Morning Star disciples were psycho zealots. Samantha Flood a prime example.

  “Glorious future?” Cait whispered. “You really are one screwed-up bitch, aren’t you?”

  Cait flinched, waiting for the sting of the blow she was sure was coming as the High Priestess lost her very short temper again. But all Flood did was laugh.

  “You’ll understand soon enough,” she said. Then she stood up and vanished from Cait’s vision.

  The table jerked suddenly, and the room began to move, rotating slowly from right to left as the table to which Cait was strapped was turned over with the grinding hum of an electric motor. Cait pulled against the restraints on animal instinct, fight or flight, as she saw Glass standing nearby, and then Flood’s guard dogs, watching. She saw another table and then cables, thick and thin, trailing away from equipment.

  And then the table stopped with a shudder, and she was looking at floor. It was shiny, plasticky, covered in more of the cables.

  She felt the strap across her forehead tighten, removing her ability to turn her head. Her senses now cleared of the lingering effects of the drug by a fresh surge of adrenaline, she realized that there was nothing behind the back of her head and neck—there was an opening in the table, running from her occipital bone down to the middle of her shoulder blades.

  Now she knew what she was on—it was an operating table, the same kind used by the Fleet, when direct access to a psi-marine’s central nervous system was required. But she was not in a Fleet medical center. The equipment had to have been stolen, or someone had built a pretty good version of their own.

  Cait struggled against the restraints, but hanging upside down was disorienting, and the more she strained, the dizzier she felt.

  “Let’s get it over with,” she heard Glass say. Cait cried out in protest, screaming as many curse words as she knew at the bastards who were doing this to her. Then she felt something cold and wet applied to the back of her neck.

  And then she felt something exquisitely sharp, pain like nothing in the world, and the room and its contents were once more, thankfully, replaced by the infinite and pillow-soft blackness.

  16

  The Bureau bullpen was even fuller than before, if that was possible, thought Kodiak as he stood back to survey his work. On one side of the room, close to his desk—bathrobe from the safe house still on the back of his chair—he had wheeled in a new operations board, a sheet of translucent material four meters wide, two meters tall. With it, he could call up any data a holodisplay could, but with a real board, he could do something you couldn’t do with a hologram—stick things to it. Kodiak felt a little old-fashioned, but screw it, this was how he liked to work.

  The Fleet was in trouble. Big trouble. It had been from the moment their leader, Sebela, had fallen in front of millions of viewers at the Fleet Memorial. But now, with his replacement taken out the same way, the buzz of everyone working at the Bureau felt like it could tip over into full-blown panic. The work helped—for Kodiak too, burying himself in it, not allowing dangerous, fearful thoughts to cloud his judgment.

  But as he turned, arms folded, to look out across the bullpen, he began to feel better. The room was full of anxiety and stress as dozens of agents worked furiously, coordinating the city-wide lockdown and collating reports that came in from the marines and agents out there enforcing it, analyzing data from the crime scenes, examining forensic data.

  But that anxiety was good. That stress.

  If you weren’t afraid of failure, then something was wrong.

  Kodiak walked back to his desk, the holodisplay floating above it showing a stack of unread messages. Kodiak sat and began sifting through the most urgent ones.

  They were mostly reports on the lockdown. New Orem had been flooded with marines, who were conducting a building-to-building, door-to-door sweep. The city itself was, for all intents and purposes, closed and sealed: no one in or out, all road traffic stopped, bridges and tunnels sealed, air traffic likewise grounded and the public spaceport shut down. The Fleet’s own space facilities continued to run as required, more marines arriving and only vital supplies being sent on automatic, the cargo loaders checked and scanned manually before they headed to orbit and Earth’s quickspace jump point.

  The lockdown itself had actually been easy to implement, the process following a standard set of procedures and orders established in the wake of the Spider attack on Earth forty years before. That was the only time the war had struck at the heart of the Fleet, the surprise attack destroying the moon and most of the Southern Hemisphere. It had happened before Kodiak, Braben, and Avalon had been born, but there were agents in the bullpen who remembered that day well. The jagged shards of the moon had remained in the sky for a year afterward—a horrific memorial to the millions of dead and a reminder that humanity was fighting for its very existence—before they’d been mined, cleaned up by the Hollywood Mining Conglomerate. To save Earth from the devastating tidal effects of losing its only natural satellite, the Fleet had constructed a series of gravitational platforms, orbiting at a quarter of a million klicks.

  And now they had a new kind of conflict to deal with. Out there, on the Warworlds and in deep space, the Fleet engaged the Spiders. Here, on Earth, the very heart of the Fleet had been ripped out i
n a crisis unheard of in Fleet history.

  Kodiak felt that ever-present anxiety bloom in his chest. Not just one Admiral dead, two. This had to be the beginning of something much larger, a conspiracy designed to unravel the Fleet in its entirety. And then the Spiders really would win, and it wouldn’t just be the Southern Hemisphere burned away next time.

  Kodiak closed the last report and stood, moving back to the ops board. He tapped the surface, bringing up an image of Zworykin’s body, sprawling in the Fleet Admiral’s office. Face up. Eyes open. Black circle in the forehead, blood draining out underneath him. The sniper’s plasma bolt had been right on target, shattering the wall window as it passed through it and taking out the target with surgical precision. It had been the same with Sebela, at the Fleet Memorial. Ballistics evidence was scant at both scenes—the shooter had been an expert and had used a weapon appropriate to his level of skill—but even though the weapons report had been brief, the two men had been killed by the same gun, that much was clear.

  Kodiak frowned, tapped the board again. Next to Zworykin’s image appeared his predecessor, Sebela. In contrast to the crime scene photograph, Sebela’s picture was an official Fleet portrait, the Fleet Admiral looking out into the bullpen in a three-quarter turn, a faint smile on his lips. There were plenty of images taken at the Fleet Memorial. Kodiak had reviewed them all, but right now he didn’t feel the need to repeat the process.

  Kodiak dragged the two images over to one side, dragged their corners until they were roughly the same size, then reached for the pen sitting on the small sill that ran along the base of the board. Underneath the pair of pictures, he wrote SHADOW PROTOCOL in fluorescent green capitals and underlined it.

  “You think that’s important somehow?”

  Kodiak turned as Braben approached, holding two steaming cups of coffee. He held one out to Kodiak, then shifted his cup to the other hand and flexed his injured arm.

  “How you feeling?”

  Braben winked as he sipped his drink. “On the mend, my friend.” He pointed at the board with an index finger extended from the rim of his cup. “So…”

  Kodiak shrugged. “Is it important? Yes. No. Maybe. Whatever the Shadow Protocol is, it was bad enough to freak out some very important people.”

  Braben took another draw on his mug. “Enough for them to start knocking off Fleet Admirals?”

  Kodiak tapped the board with the pen. “We can’t discount it. Sebela announces the failure of a major project, one that’s a big old secret. Zworykin uses that moment of weakness to move his people into position and take over command. Then they’re both killed, one after the other. Could be a coincidence—”

  “Or could be connected.”

  “Right.”

  Braben lowered himself onto the edge of the nearest desk. Kodiak watched his partner as he stared at the pictures on the ops board.

  “At least this means it wasn’t Zworykin.”

  Kodiak frowned. “Unless something went wrong, the people he was working with deciding he was a liability as well.” He shrugged. “Maybe, I don’t know.”

  Braben reached forward to tap at the board, bringing up commands and scrolling menus. Soon, next to the pictures of the two victims, were displayed a dozen different items: a schematic map of the Fleet Memorial; photographs of the podium and tiered seating behind it from five different angles and distances; a schematic map of the Capitol Complex, and photographs of the exterior, including some taken from the rooftop opposite the Fleet Admiral’s office, the shooter’s likely position; a map of New Orem, a grid so tightly packed at this scale it looked more like a piece of abstract art than a map; lists of high-ranking Fleet officers and their photographs, some outlined in red—loyal to Zworykin—and some in blue—members of Sebela’s inner circle.

  Kodiak drained his coffee, wincing at the heat as he looked over the data. Everything they knew about the case was there in front of him. If only they could see the connections, start building a picture.

  Then he tapped the schematic of the building opposite the Fleet Admiral’s private office. “There’s no way the shooter could gain access to the roof if they didn’t have clearance.”

  Braben nodded. “We’re running through the security lists now, interviewing everybody who has access to that building, right down to the cleaning crews and maintenance. But we really need to look at the manifest, pronto. That’ll be a big help.”

  Kodiak glanced over Braben’s shoulder. “Speaking of which,” he said, as Commander Avalon walked over. Her expression was dark. Kodiak braced himself, wondering what fresh batch of bad news she was bringing from the emergency meeting of the Fleet Command Council.

  “Gentlemen,” she said.

  “So, how did it go?” asked Kodiak.

  Avalon pursed her lips. “As well as expected. With Zworykin and Sebela both dead, they’ve instituted emergency powers. Commander Hammerstein has been promoted to Admiral—he, Admiral Laverick, and Commandant Vaughn have formed a triumvirate to command the Fleet until the situation is resolved. It’s out on the lightspeed link, but a public statement will be issued in an hour.”

  Kodiak nodded. That was good, at least. The public needed reassurance, and fast—they needed to see the Fleet was handling the situation, that everything was, on the surface anyway, under some kind of control.

  “That makes three new targets for the shooter,” said Braben, looking at Avalon. He gestured to the ops board. “We don’t know who’s behind this—their motives, even their means. We don’t know what’s coming next. This could be just the beginning.”

  “That’s true,” said the chief. “And for the moment, the triumvirate is being taken to more secure facilities under the Capitol Complex. Access is going to be very tight.”

  “Okay,” said Kodiak. “Let’s start looking at the Fleet manifest then.”

  But Avalon shook her head. Kodiak looked at her, his eyes wide.

  “What?”

  “We don’t have clearance yet.”

  Kodiak’s jaw flapped. He looked at Braben, who rolled his neck and turned to their commander.

  “What do you mean, we don’t have clearance?” he asked. “Manifest access is SOP. So why don’t we have it now?”

  “Because someone doesn’t want us to have it,” said Kodiak.

  The pair looked at him.

  That clinched it. Something was going on, something in the Fleet Capitol Complex itself. Two Admirals removed. Maybe the start of something more.

  Avalon sighed and folded her arms. “Dammit,” she said. “There’s someone in authority, watching us.”

  “Right,” said Braben. “They would have known the Bureau would investigate, so now they’re running interference.”

  The three of them stood in silence for a moment, the chaos of the bullpen swirling around them as Kodiak let that information sink in. How far did it go? Who was involved? Was it the Fleet, or did the tendrils of the conspiracy’s network reach into the Bureau itself?

  Now there was a comforting thought. Then again, that was part of the reason for bringing him back from Helprin’s Gambit. Officially dead, with a clean new cover ID, anything he did would go under the radar.

  Which gave Kodiak another idea.

  He lowered his voice and pulled close to the other two, making sure his words were covered by the hubbub in the bullpen. “I have an idea.” He moved to the ops board and picked up the pen, then nodded at his colleagues to join him.

  Avalon raised her eyebrows. “I’m listening.”

  Kodiak smiled. “I’m not going to tell you.”

  The chief blinked, and looked at Braben. Braben shrugged, his brow creased in confusion.

  Kodiak waggled the pen at the chief. “Why did you bring me back from deep cover?”

  “Because this is a red ball situation, Von,” said the chief. “You’re a good agent. We need all hands on deck.”

  “Right,” said Kodiak. “And, as a consequence of my current legal status, I can stay off the radar
.”

  Avalon nodded. “Yes. Mike has clearance to get you anywhere, but your cover ID is a blank slate. If anyone is looking for you, they won’t find a thing.”

  “Which is exactly what we need right now.”

  A small grin started to creep up the chief’s face. “Do what you need to do,” she said.

  Kodiak matched her smile. He glanced at Braben. “You ready?”

  Braben raised an eyebrow. “Me?”

  “Yup. You heard the chief. You’re my clearance. And I’m going to need that where we’re going.”

  Braben sighed. “Are you going to tell me what your grand idea is?”

  Kodiak considered. He should tell him, at least. But … no, he was going to take a risk. He might be off the radar with his cover ID, but Braben wasn’t. And if someone was watching the investigation, the closer he kept things to his chest, the better. At least for now.

  “Sorry Mike, I can’t. You just need to trust me.”

  Braben’s response was quick. “With my life, Von. You know that.”

  Kodiak looked at the chief, who nodded. “Do what you need to do. Just report back when you have something, okay?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Kodiak said. He turned to Braben. “Ready?”

  Braben sighed and gestured ahead of him.

  “Lead the way, man.”

  17

  As he and Braben made their way through the Capitol Complex, Kodiak considered that this was exactly the kind of thing his cover identity had been designed for. Special Agent Von Kodiak was officially dead. He was now Consultant Analyst Nico Amell. Operating on a temporary security clearance granted by Commander Avalon, he was, to anyone outside the Bureau, just an anonymous agent accompanying Braben, the real lead investigator. If anyone was watching, they wouldn’t pay him much heed.

  That was the theory, anyway.

  With security on maximum alert, nearly every door in the Capitol between the Bureau and their destination required security clearance. For the purposes of the investigation, to ensure there were no delays, Braben had been granted level ten clearance—as high as Commander Avalon’s herself. Kodiak—as Amell—was classed as Braben’s assistant, meaning he could go wherever Braben went without requiring his own authorization. It was that very fact that had inspired Kodiak’s plan.