And ran at the window.
Kodiak watched, eyes wide in surprise, as the interrogator smacked head-first into the window with a loud thud. She bounced back and, tripping over her own feet, fell onto the floor of the interrogation room. Without pause, she pushed herself up and ran again. This time the impact didn’t throw her off her feet. Instead, hands braced against the panel, she began smashing her forehead into the window, again and again, right in front of Kodiak. The skin on the interrogator’s forehead split, blood splashing across the window.
Kodiak jolted back and thumbed his comm again, but was rewarded with another burst of ear-splitting static. His back hit the opposite wall and, unable to tear his eyes from the horror in the other room, he dragged himself sideways until he could reach the gallery’s in-built comm panel next to the door. He pressed the button.
“Emergency in interrogation room A!” he yelled. “Get someone down here now!”
He let go of the button and someone responded to the affirmative, but their voice was lost under a wash of white noise and something else … a rapid, mechanical staccato, the sharp rattle of a radiation meter running at full tilt.
The psi-interrogator’s face was a mess of torn skin and blood, each crash against the window spreading more and more gore. As she pulled back, it looked like she was looking right at Kodiak. He pushed himself against the back wall of the gallery, afraid that the interrogator was somehow going to smash the wall panel and climb into the gallery with him.
Reaching for the staser on his hip, he made for the door. He could get in and stun the interrogator and call for a medical team.
Kodiak left the room but was immediately pushed back by three armed agents as they ran past, heeding his request for help. He followed them down the short corridor and into the interrogation room. Immediately the agents fell into a firing stance, their weapons raised, but Kodiak yelled at them to keep back. He raised his staser and, as the interrogator turned to face him, to charge at him, he felled her with a single stun bolt.
Kodiak fought to control his breathing. His heart was racing, and his ears were filled with the blind roar of adrenaline. The three agents ran to the interrogator’s body, one of them calling for medical assistance.
Kodiak turned away, not wanting to look at the crushed remains of the interrogator’s face, his mind reeling with what had happened. He steadied himself on the edge of Caitlin’s bed. She was still out for the count, but her lips moved silently.
Kodiak held his breath and leaned closer, lowering his ear to her lips. Behind him, two medics arrived and rushed to the aid of the interrogator.
He squeezed the grip of his staser as he listened to Caitlin’s whispers.
“Eight-seven-nine-one-two-two-Juno-Juno.”
The coordinates.
“Eight-seven-nine-one-two-two-Juno-Juno.”
Whatever they were. Wherever they were.
“Eight-seven-nine-one-two-two-Juno-Juno.”
It was important.
“Eight-seven-nine-one-two-two-Juno-Juno.”
He had to know what was at the other end of them.
26
Less than a cycle later—just enough time to get at least something to eat and grab a couple of fitful hours of sleep—Kodiak found himself staring at the ops board in the Bureau bullpen. On display were the results of Caitlin Smith’s psi-interrogation. Whether he could call it a success or failure, he wasn’t sure, because now they had a psi-interrogator lying in the medical center with a smashed-up face and zero brain activity, the suspect she had interrogated sleeping peacefully in the unit next door.
The data extraction itself had gone well though, before everything had gone to shit. Specialized analysts had worked through the night to decode the raw feed, piecing together Caitlin’s story out of her own memories—memories of how she had decided to follow her brother into the Academy after learning he had been deployed early, fearful perhaps of being separated from her twin, with whom she shared a psychic connection, by such a gulf of space; how, eager to follow in his footsteps, she entered the Psi-Division and made it straight into Alpha One.
How, as soon as news arrived that Tyler Smith had been killed in battle, she knew, knew, that it was a lie. Despite the distance between them the brother and sister had maintained their connection—until his final battle, in which the Fleet lost Warworld 4114 to the Spiders. Their connection had been severed, suddenly, without warning.
But … he was alive. She knew it. Felt it. He may not have been able to talk to her anymore, but his mind was still out there.
Tyler Smith was alive. She just had to find him. The Fleet was covering up his fate—he was dead, they said, but she knew that was a lie. Enough to sow doubt. So much of what the Fleet did out there, as it struggled against impossible odds, was classified.
And that made her think. Think about what else they might be covering up.
Then came the contact. Mysterious and anonymous, an untraceable communiqué left on her personal computer. A contact that had said yes, Tyler was still alive. A contact that promised to not only reunite them, but to show her what the Fleet was really doing. A contact that demanded one task of her, to show her loyalty but also, said the nameless sender, to initiate a chain of events that would reveal the Fleet’s secrets to everyone.
She hadn’t known who “they” were. But over several nights of discussion, she began to think of them as her employers. She accepted the task she was given—she was a warrior, something she kept telling herself, one that was following new orders, fighting on a new front, not just to save her brother, or herself, but to save everyone.
Save them all from the real enemy: the Fleet itself.
So she left, abandoning her training, abandoning the Academy. She was so afraid, so desperate to escape. They would find her, she knew that—her Fleet manifest tag had been implanted on day one of her training—but … they didn’t. Either they weren’t looking, or they couldn’t track her tag. Somehow, they couldn’t find her.
And then, cycles later … she heard Tyler speak.
At first she’d thought it was her imagination, her experiences finally catching up with her, producing phantoms in her mind. But they talked, and she knew it was real, and she knew she’d been right. From the very beginning, she’d been right. Tyler was alive, somewhere, somehow.
Her employers left more instructions. They suggested hiding places. They left her packages.
They outlined the plan.
Kodiak frowned, and folded his arms. His eyes moved across the ops board.
Then he sighed. Caitlin Smith was young, naïve, foolish. Gullible, clearly. Her mind pushed by the shared trauma of her brother’s “death” on Warworld 4114, she had accepted her employers’ instructions without much question. All she wanted to do was get her brother back. She was single-minded to the point of pathology, unheeding of consequences.
All she wanted to do was get her brother back, and if that meant taking down the Fleet itself, then so be it.
Because the Fleet was lying to everyone, weren’t they? Tyler Smith was proof of that. Caitlin’s employers knew what was going on, and they were going to change things. No, they were going to fix things.
And all Caitlin Smith had to do was carry out one single task. Shoot the Fleet Admiral, save the world.
Caitlin had no idea who she was working for, who her employers were. According to the psi-interrogation report, when she found out she was working for a cell of the Morning Star, she began to have doubts. They were terrorists. Fanatics. A violent, chaotic organization that couldn’t be trusted, not now, not ever.
Except they knew where her brother was. They promised they would bring them back together and bring down the Fleet while they did it.
And then they operated on her.
Kodiak frowned. An Academy dropout gone rogue. A terrorist cell operating in New Orem. It was a workable theory, but there were two problems.
One, the Morning Star was, as far as Bureau intel went, little
more than an extremist group—officially categorized as a banned terrorist organization, but one that hadn’t been seen for … well, years. Their interests didn’t lie with the Fleet—or so it was believed. They claimed to be pilgrims searching for their missing god, a mission that took them way out to the very peripheries of Fleetspace.
They weren’t supposed to be a threat. And yet, here they were, operating a cell on Earth. A cell that had funding, equipment, weaponry. And more important, training.
None of that was in the Bureau’s intel. Either the intel was hopelessly out of date, or the Morning Star had got help from somewhere else. And that was a whole new kettle of fish; Kodiak felt a small, cold ball of anxiety grow in his stomach even as he considered the point.
Kodiak scratched his cheek as he considered the second problem: Caitlin Smith hadn’t carried out her assigned task. She hadn’t shot the Fleet Admiral—either of them. She had fled the first assassination without firing a single shot, and as far as she knew, the Morning Star seemed to think that she had pulled the trigger. Mission accomplished. The Bureau had her weapon, the sniper rifle with the hacked, pirated operating system. The weapon had been fired—she’d done that herself, according to the psi-interrogation report. A bluff to make the Morning Star think she had carried out her mission successfully.
The assassination of Zworykin, the Fleet Admiral’s self-declared successor, posed a real problem. The ousting of Sebela just a cycle before his death and the elevation of Zworykin to Fleet Admiral was unknown to the public. And according to Caitlin’s own memories, she didn’t have anything to do with his death—she didn’t even know about it.
Kodiak sighed and took a step back. Finding Caitlin and extracting the information from her mind had been vital to the investigation, if for just one piece of information it confirmed: that their original suspect, Tyler Smith, was alive. His tag had shown up at both crime scenes. That it had not appeared on the manifest before and after was still a mystery—but Caitlin’s own tag had also been inactive, only broadcasting again once it had been removed from her brainstem.
Something that was supposed to be impossible.
And of course, that wasn’t the only impossible thing Kodiak had experienced lately. Servitors that were perfect facsimiles were also supposed to be impossible, a thing straight out of science fiction. And yet one lay in parts down in a Bureau laboratory.
Nearby, Braben sat at his desk. Out of the corner of his eye, Kodiak could see the agent swiping his fingers across his datapad, faster and faster, until he sighed and let the pad fall to his desk with a clatter. Braben caught Kodiak’s eye, and Kodiak turned around from the board. It was early morning, but the bullpen was packed with agents and analysts, all deep in their work. The longer the situation went on, the worse it would get too, Kodiak knew that. The Fleet was teetering on the brink. The city was on lockdown. It was still red ball, everyone on duty.
And despite the activity, the chaos, Kodiak still felt like they were on the back foot. Caitlin’s data was useful, but it was a lot to process, and as Kodiak sighed, he tried to figure out the next step.
Braben leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “So she was telling the truth. She didn’t do it.”
Kodiak nodded, then pursed his lips, a new thought coming to the forefront of his mind. “That’s what she believes, anyway,” he said.
“You think she might be wrong? Like her memories were tampered with or something?”
“I don’t know,” said Kodiak. “She’s been through a lot, including surgery to have her tag removed. There’s a lot of tech involved that seems beyond what we have. Brainwashing, memory implantation … it seems like it could be possible.”
“I sense a ‘but’ coming.”
Kodiak nodded. “But it seems unlikely. Why bother going to all that trouble? Caitlin Smith’s knowledge that her brother is alive tallies with his manifest ID showing at the crime scenes.”
“A manifest ID that magically appeared and disappeared from the tracker.”
“Right. But if Tyler Smith is alive, and the tech exists to remove the tags surgically, without killing the subject, then why leave his in at all?”
Braben gave a sort of noncommittal shrug. Kodiak frowned. Not helpful.
He turned back to the ops board. The official Fleet photographs of the Smith twins were on display, next to the portraits of the two deceased Admirals. He moved close to Tyler Smith’s image.
He was the key.
“I get the feeling we’re still looking in the wrong place,” said Kodiak.
“Still think there’s a Fleet connection? An insider helping the terrorists?”
“Oh, there’s a Fleet connection all right.” He tapped Tyler Smith’s image, enlarging it. He turned to Braben. “Psi-Marine Tyler Smith is alive and well, despite the Fleet saying he was killed in action. That in itself doesn’t add up.”
Braben stroked his chinstrap beard. “Some kind of cover-up, then. A conspiracy.”
“Damn right,” said Kodiak, his expression dark. He began rearranging data on the ops board, then paused as he brought up an image. He tapped to enlarge it—it was grainy, distorted, a processed piece of data pulled from Caitlin’s visual cortex and reassembled in the computer. It showed a man, apparently wearing glasses. His body was indistinct, but he looked like he was wearing a long, pale coat.
The servitor, the one they’d cornered in the warehouse.
Braben stood from his desk and moved over to the ops board. He nodded at the image. “The mysterious Glass.”
“A servitor that looks like a real person,” said Kodiak. He could hardly believe he was saying it.
“According to her own memories, Caitlin Smith killed him. Or she thought she had. A little push with her mind and, pow, down he goes.”
Kodiak folded his arms. “You can see why she was fast-tracked through the Academy.” Kodiak replayed the moment the carrier had come up onto the roof of the building in Salt City. He’d watched with the other agents as Caitlin had sent her attackers flying without laying a finger on them.
Kodiak tapped the board and brought up a panel of text. He tapped again, and text began to scroll. It would have been too fast to read, except for the fact that the lines of text were an infinitely repeated sequence. Six numbers and two words.
Eight-seven-nine-one-two-two-Juno-Juno.
Braben shook his head. “And that,” he said, jabbing a finger at the board, “gives me the creeps, man.”
Kodiak nodded. He agreed with Braben’s comment—just seeing the sequence stirred a certain nervousness inside him. “It’s a message, not broadcast over the comms, or lightspeed link, but broadcast over the same psychic wavelengths used by the psi-marines. A broadcast powerful enough to overwhelm the gestalt the cadets created when we were looking for our suspects. Powerful enough that when the psi-interrogator heard it she was driven out of her mind.”
Braben put his hands in the pockets of his jacket and pushed them out, away from his body while he turtled his neck. “We haven’t been able to decode the coordinates yet—they’re proprietary, somewhere in the Jovian system. Jupiter and everything in orbit around it is private enterprise, owned by the Jovian Mining Corporation. The chief has put a request for an assist through to them. We should hear back soon.”
Kodiak frowned. Private enterprise. Well, great. Even with a war on—even with the Fleet’s command structure in danger of toppling altogether, dealing with private enterprise would be difficult. The independence of corporations was even enshrined in the Fleet’s constitution. Topping it off, the JMC was the largest corporation of them all, a political power bloc all its own. Getting their assistance was paramount—and they would get it, considering the circumstances, but that didn’t mean it was going to be easy.
“Good,” said Kodiak. “Because as soon as we know where those coordinates point, I’m going to take a look myself.”
Braben’s eyes widened, and he shook his head. “You’re not serious?”
<
br /> “I am,” said Kodiak. “And I’m going to take Caitlin Smith with me.”
27
“I told you, I don’t know what that means.”
Cait sat on the other side of the table from the Bureau agents. Her wrists were manacled. She still ached all over, her neck stiff and encased in a thin plastiform medical collar to accelerate the healing of her surgical wound. She felt rested, physically at least—although she knew that was because she’d lain, sedated, in a medical unit rather than any kind of natural sleep.
She was torn inside. On the one hand, being in Fleet custody was actually a good thing. Her ordeal at the hands of the Morning Star was in the past, and the results of the psi-interrogation would show she hadn’t killed anybody. All she wanted was to get her brother back. They would know that he was alive. And if he was alive, then maybe there were others officially listed as killed in action who were still alive too.
But maybe they knew that. There was the problem: the Morning Star had promised to expose the secrets of the Fleet, secrets so dark and terrible it would cause the military-industrial complex to collapse.
The fact that Tyler was alive—and presumably others too—was likely one facet of that terrible truth.
A truth the Fleet wanted to keep very well hidden indeed. Which meant being in Fleet custody was perhaps worse than being used by the Morning Star. Which meant, Cait thought, there was a good chance she wasn’t making it out of this building alive.
The agent called Michael Braben narrowed his eyes at her as he sipped his coffee. The other guy, Kodiak, looked like he hadn’t slept in days. He was sucking in his bottom lip, his eyes wide. Clearly he was expecting her to give a different answer.
Cait sighed. She moved her hands, rattling the manacles against the tabletop. “Look, I’m telling the truth. Didn’t your interrogator suck it out of my brain already?”
The two agents glanced sideways at each other. Not for the first time in her life, Cait wished her wild talent enabled her to listen in to their thoughts, but that kind of direct telepathy was impossible, even for someone special like her. The best she could do, with a little concentration, was to reach out and get a very general sense of what someone else was feeling, thanks to the low-level psi-field every living mind broadcast. But even that didn’t tell her anything she couldn’t pick up with her normal senses. Kodiak was tired and annoyed. Braben’s emotions ran a little hotter … underneath his own quiet anger was something else. Fear, perhaps. It was hard to read.
The Machine Awakes Page 20
