The Machine Awakes

by Adam Christopher

  “I think I’m seeing double,” said Cait, craning her neck around.

  Glass was halfway across the deck itself when he stopped and turned around. Behind him, beyond the rippling force shield, the Jovian atmosphere was in turmoil, a maelstrom of dark red and blue clouds whipped by hurricane winds. Farther out on the deck sat two Bureau shuttles, parked with their noses almost touching. The shuttles were identical in every way—a dull blue-black, roughly triangular in shape with a sloping delta wing. Fleet standard. One shuttle had brought Kodiak and Cait. The other, Kodiak realized, had been flown in by Braben.

  Lightning, silent and brilliant, cracked across the sky. Cait flinched.

  “Come on,” said Kodiak, adjusting Cait in his arms. As they headed to one of the shuttles, Kodiak couldn’t resist looking up. The refinery, while apparently stable again, had sunk deeper into the Jovian atmosphere. At this altitude, it was far from the picturesque sunset it had been when they had arrived. The raging storm around them was a tumult, a tempestuous mix of multicolored clouds spinning and tearing like oil floating on water. Kodiak hoped they’d be able to fly out through the storm. But they had no choice.

  They reached the front landing gear of the shuttle on the right, Glass supporting Cait while Kodiak busied himself with the access controls. As the access ramp descended, Kodiak picked Cait up and carried her aboard, the servitor following close behind.

  Kodiak set her down in the doorway to the shuttle’s cockpit.

  “Ah, dammit,” he said, looking around as he stood up.

  The cockpit had the standard pilot and co-pilot positions, but behind them, instead of seats for passengers, was a sarcophagus-like object with a curved top.

  “You picked the wrong shuttle,” said Cait.

  Kodiak nodded and ducked forward to the pilot’s position. Cait struggled to her feet, leaning on the sarcophagus while Kodiak studied the control panel.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “This shuttle is the same as the other. Fleet standard.” He turned to Cait. “Fly this thing out past the planet’s magnetosphere and call for help. Glass will look after you, right?”

  The servitor bowed its assent.

  Cait stared down at the sarcophagus, her face lit by the blue glow coming from a window in the top of the object. “This isn’t Fleet standard. What the hell is it?”

  Kodiak joined her and peered into the object’s window. It was empty, but the interior was padded. He had a sinking feeling he knew exactly what it was.

  “Cold storage for your brother,” he said.

  Cait’s expression creased in confusion. “What?”

  Kodiak waved at her and helped her get into the co-pilot’s seat.

  “Caviezel called Tyler his ‘experiment’—some project using the contract his company has to repatriate the Fleet’s war dead.” Kodiak stood, scratched his cheek as he thought it over. “Tyler was supposed to have been killed in action, but instead he was grabbed—kidnapped—by Caviezel for his own use.”

  “Flood said the Fleet was lying about the war. Could that be it?”

  Kodiak shrugged. “Sounds like it. The Morning Star has a lot of strange beliefs about the war, but I don’t think the Fleet is to blame for this. This was Caviezel.”

  “The Fleet allowed it to happen,” said Cait, her expression dark.

  Kodiak frowned. “Maybe. But not deliberately.” He leaned over the pilot’s seat and set a prelaunch sequence into the control panel. There was a harsh clump from outside as the docking clamps disengaged.

  “Okay,” said Kodiak, looking over his shoulder at Glass. “Can you fly this?”

  Cait turned in the co-pilot’s chair. “Hey, I can fly a shuttle.”

  The servitor moved over to the pilot’s position and seated himself. “You have been through significant trauma, Ms. Smith,” it said. “It seems prudent I pilot this vehicle.”

  Cait slumped in her seat as Kodiak patted Glass on the shoulder. “As soon as you signal the Fleet, don’t hang around. Push out of the Jovian system and wait for them to pick you up.” He glanced at Cait. “Commander Avalon is waiting for you to call. She’ll send help. Stay out of the way and they’ll get you into an infirmary on one of the U-Stars.” He nodded at Glass. “There will be a medical kit aboard the shuttle. Do your best to patch her up, okay?”

  “Understood, Mr. Kodiak. But hurry—the wake of the orbital relay will be fading. You need to get after Agent Braben at once.”

  Kodiak felt his lip curl. “Yeah, he’s not so much an agent now, is he.”

  Cait sat straight back against her chair and began strapping herself in, wincing in pain, gasping at the effort. “Get out of here. Go!”

  Kodiak nodded. “I’ll bring Tyler back, don’t worry.”

  He left the shuttle, punching the access ramp control on the front landing gear as he passed, and headed to the other ship.

  * * *

  Glass piloted the shuttle away from the JMC refinery with textbook skill. As the barrage of lightning continued outside the ship, the shuttle rocking as it was buffeted by the hurricane winds, Cait watched the scrambled readout from the shuttle’s comms deck. She glanced at the navcom display, which showed the simple escape vector Kodiak had set. The refinery had sunk a long way into Jupiter. They needed to clear the planet and then keep going, as far as seven million kilometers out to be sure they were clear of Jupiter’s giant magnetosphere and the interference generated by the JMC mines. They had a long way to go, but once clear, all she had to do was open the lightspeed link and talk to Earth.

  She leaned back in the soft seat and took a deep breath. Thanks to the emergency hypo Glass had emptied into her neck, the pain had eased to an all-over ache, like that time she’d gone ten rounds with an Academy combat servitor and had had her ass kicked five ways to Sunday.

  The shuttle now following the escape vector, Glass turned from the controls and got on with cleaning her up. She winced, unable to stop her body jerking as the servitor wiped the blood from her face and neck. The sudden movement made her neck sing in pain. The feeling passed after a few seconds, falling to a steady white-hot burn from where the computer’s interface spike had plugged into her. Glass gently pushed her to lean forward and began patching the wound. As it did, Cait looked up.

  The view through the front screens was darkening rapidly, the turbulence fading as the shuttle rocketed through Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. Soon stars were visible and a couple of dark shadows that the scrambled navcom managed to identify as the moons Io and Autonome.

  The sensor readings showed something else too. An alarm sounded. Cait jumped in her seat, her body screaming in protest. She unclipped her seat’s harness now that the rough journey through Jupiter’s churning atmosphere had passed, resting on her forearms on the console as Glass set down the medical kit and returned to the pilot’s position.

  Hands on the shuttle’s yoke, the servitor glanced at the sensor panel briefly.

  “I don’t want to alarm you, Ms. Smith, but I think there is something behind us.”

  Cait nodded. “There sure is,” she said. She reached over and adjusted the sensory array to get more data. The shuttle continued to speed into open space in front of them, but the alert sounded again. Something was coming up behind them. Something big.

  “Oh, crap,” Cait whispered.

  “Ms. Smith?”

  Cait flicked a control and the front screen switched to show the rear view. The starscape vanished, replaced by the orange, almost featureless expanse of the top of Jupiter’s cloud deck. In the bottom right was a square, black object, the top of the JMC refinery.

  Above it, in the center of the screen, the orange clouds rippled, a dark stain slowly growing in the center.

  “What is that?” Cait whispered. But she knew the answer already. She just didn’t want to believe it. She felt her pain ease as a surge of adrenaline mixed with the painkillers. She narrowed her eyes, fighting against the dizziness the mix caused.

  And then her eyes widened
as the machine rose from the Jovian cloud deck.

  Black, spherical, the surface studded with smaller structures and panels, sensor arrays, antennae. It rose up out of the atmosphere, dwarfing the city-sized refinery framed against it.

  Then darker spots, farther out, positioned at intervals around the central body. The spots grew until giant straight columns emerged from the clouds, growing in size and moving, reconfiguring themselves as they slid out from the main body and unfolded into giant legs.

  Cait counted them.

  There were eight.

  The Spider was complete. A giant war machine, constructed out of the Sigma robot gas mines that had been seeded around Jupiter by the JMC. The Lucifer machine, built by Caviezel.

  “I advise we proceed with the utmost urgency, Ms. Smith,” said Glass.

  Cait nodded, the fear and adrenaline pumping through her body, making her forget about her pain, her injuries. “Punch it!”

  The servitor pulled the yoke with one hand and slid the shuttle’s throttle forward with the other. The shuttle’s drive roared, and with a sudden burst of acceleration, they sped toward open space.

  PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY

  Standing in the shadows on a high rooftop in the middle of the night, collar up, eyes open, waiting for a contact seemed like the worst cliché in the world. And yet, thought Special Agent Von Kodiak, here I am.

  Of course, it was cliché because it really was the best time and place for a secret meeting. And the Bureau had many informants, contacts, even spies, not just across New Orem and even Salt City, but across all of Fleetspace. Furtive meetings in dark corners were a common occurrence. They could be dangerous liaisons, but also valuable ones.

  But tonight … well, this was a different kind of meeting, thought Kodiak. There was no informer en route, no mole or whistleblower hiding in the shadows on the rooftop. He was here to meet someone very special indeed. The message he’d received was surprising, but genuine. There was a time and a date and a place and a number. Time and date were no problem, and while he’d had to look up the place, he had found it easily enough. The number though, he knew already. Six digits. A Bureau badge number.

  199900.

  “You’re early,” said Laurel Avalon, appearing out of the shadows to Kodiak’s left. He smiled and gave a nonchalant shrug.

  “I didn’t have anything else to do,” he said. Like him, Avalon was wearing a long coat, although with her red hair catching the wind, it wasn’t much of a disguise. Then again, standing on a dark rooftop at the edge of New Orem, it was highly unlikely anyone was watching. Which was exactly the point.

  Avalon walked close to the edge of the roof. Kodiak followed. Together, they leaned on the railing. Kodiak cast his eye over the cityscape before them. New Orem stretched from horizon to horizon, with the glowing white cluster of skyscrapers of the Fleet capital directly ahead of them, right on the horizon itself.

  “You didn’t drag me right over to the other side of the city just to admire the view,” said Kodiak.

  Beside him, the Bureau Chief chuckled. “It is a nice view.”

  Kodiak nodded. “Point.”

  “But no, I didn’t.” Avalon stood up from the rail and turned around, leaning back into it. “I wanted to ask you something. Something important.”

  Kodiak stared out at the city. “Something so important you had to ask me on a rooftop at four in the morning?”

  She nodded. “We’re off the surveillance drone flight path for the next twenty minutes. Nobody can see us or hear our conversation.”

  “I’m not sure I like the sound of this, Laurel.”

  “I’m sure you won’t,” she said.

  Kodiak smiled. “So what do you want me to do?”

  “I need to send you undercover. Deep undercover. It’s a long mission, one that will require you to make a lot of sacrifices. It’s dangerous and difficult. But it’s also important.”

  Kodiak, still leaning, looked up at the chief. “Why me?”

  “Because I think you can do it. Because you’re an experienced senior agent. Because you’re good at your job. Because I can trust you.”

  “Can I get that in writing?”

  Avalon smiled. “And because you have no family.”

  Kodiak sniffed the night air. Ah, that was it. Sure, he was good at his job. So were a lot of agents. Braben, for instance. The chief said she could trust him, and as flattering as that was, he really hoped she could say that about a lot of agents. But he also had no family and few friends, at least outside the Bureau. So if anyone had to disappear for a while, go somewhere deep, he was the ideal choice.

  “Okay,” he said. “How deep we talking?”

  Avalon paused before answering. Kodiak watched her eyes glittering in the dark as she spoke, her expression now deadly serious.

  “We’re going to take down Zenner Helprin.”

  Kodiak pursed his lips. “Sorry, for a moment there I thought you said Zenner Helprin.”

  Avalon said nothing, just kept her eyes locked on Kodiak’s. After a moment more, Kodiak found himself having to look away, back out over the city.

  Zenner Helprin? Seriously?

  “Helprin runs the biggest crime syndicate in the whole of Fleetspace,” he said.

  Avalon nodded. “Exactly. He’ll be a big scalp for the Bureau. For the whole Fleet.”

  “So how do I do it? You said deep cover, so I guess I’ll be joining his little enterprise?”

  “Yes,” said the chief. “You’ll buy your way in. We’ve been working on a two-year operational plan.”

  Kodiak whistled. “Two years is a long time.”

  “It is. But I think you can do it.”

  “Helprin has eyes everywhere. He’ll know who I am and that I’m from the Bureau.”

  Avalon nodded. “We’re counting on it.”

  Kodiak raised an eyebrow. “Explain?”

  “You’re going to go rogue. You’re going to gain access to an evidence server, lift five billion credits, and hand it right to him.”

  Kodiak’s jaw flapped as he processed that little piece of information. Five billion credits? He began to wonder whether this rooftop meeting was just a fever dream and any second now he’d wake up, damp sheets twisted around his feet, alarm clock a couple of minutes away from heralding another day at the office.

  “With a theft that size, you’ll immediately become one of the Bureau’s most wanted,” Avalon continued. “But you’ll be safe. Nobody is going to know where you are, except me.”

  “Safe?” Kodiak laughed. “Helprin will shoot me on sight.”

  Avalon shook her head. “Helprin’s weakness is his greed. That much money, he’ll install you into his inner circle almost straight away.”

  “I can’t just walk in and hand it over,” said Kodiak. “He’ll know it’s a set-up. It’s too obvious.”

  “We have a contact waiting for you. He’ll give you the intro and will vouch for you.”

  “What makes you so sure Helprin will listen to them?”

  Avalon smiled in the night. “We’ve had this informant in Helprin’s inner circle for years, Von. Helprin listens to him, believe me.”

  “Okay, fine.” Kodiak rubbed his cheeks. “And once I’m in, then what?”

  “Then you’re on your own,” said Avalon. “You find a way to take him down, and you take him down.”

  Kodiak drew breath to speak, but the chief held up a hand.

  “And we have an exit strategy if something goes wrong.”

  Kodiak let his breath out. He shook his head and leaned back on the railing. The cityscape at night sure was a pretty view.

  He had the feeling he should soak it in. He might not be seeing it for a while.

  Seconds passed, then minutes. Eventually Avalon turned back around and grabbed the rail. Together, the agent and his chief enjoyed the quiet and the solitude. Then Avalon glanced up into the sky.

  “Time’s up. We’ll have company in a couple of minutes.” She turned to face
Kodiak. “This is our chance to make a difference. To do something right. You in?”

  Kodiak stood and stretched.

  Then he nodded. “I’m in.”

  God help me, I’m in.

  PART THREE

  879122-JUNO-JUNO

  41

  The Freezer was an apt description, thought Kodiak as he slowly edged his way down a metal passageway, every surface tinged with frost. Fortunately for him, the shuttle had a full complement of survival suits, because as his breath plumed in front of him in great white clouds, he knew it would have been impossible to walk through the facility for as long as he had wearing just the jumpsuit and vest he’d signed out from the Bureau uniform stores. The icy floor was hellishly slippery, but the thick soles of his boots had kept their grip so far. So long as he didn’t move too quickly—

  A sound, behind him. Kodiak spun around and slid, but remained upright as he knocked the wall with his shoulder. Staser raised, he looked back the way he came, but there was no one there.

  Eight-seven-nine-one-two-two-Juno-Juno—like the JMC refinery—appeared to be an entirely automated facility and, so far, completely deserted. Which suited Kodiak just fine. He’d come here alone, having sent Cait and Glass off in the other shuttle. Just one man venturing into the unknown. The odds were against him. He knew they were. But he also knew he had no alternative. He couldn’t call for help, not from within Jupiter’s magnetosphere, which the JMC was using as a comms shield to isolate the Spider AI. But he couldn’t wait for the Fleet to arrive either.

  No. He had to stop Braben. He had to get Tyler back. He had to find out what the hell Caviezel was keeping here, in the secret company facility hidden under the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa.

  Kodiak sniffed, the cold air making his sinuses ache, then turned and kept on down the corridor.

  The Freezer may have been empty like the refinery, devoid of staff, but unlike the large facility, which was spacious and even inviting, the feeling of isolation here was intense. The Freezer was functional, plain. This wasn’t a place that entertained high-ranking officials come to renegotiate gas contracts. This place was a secret, and so far nothing but a warren of passageways buried in the crust of the moon.