by Joshua Guess
Unable to do anything else, Dex gamed out the possibilities going forward from here. None were appealing, from random slavers bound for an unaffiliated fringe planet where such things still happened to the very worst thing he could think of.
Someone on Threnody paying to have him hunted down and brought back. It was not unheard of. While only a few dozen escapees still wandered the colonies and planets of the Alliance, they represented a remainder rather than a full population. His infrequent trips to shared message boards for those lucky few almost always showed a new missing person report among the posts. Threnody was famous for its isolationism even if the superior attitude behind it was leading the society toward war with Alliance planets, but it also gave the leadership there a sense of ownership over every citizen. They put a lot of effort into taking back what they saw as theirs.
It was why Dex stayed on Captain Stone’s crew. That, and the loyalty and affection he had for them. Being on the move, on a private vessel, was the best possible protection for someone like him.
His brain worked in overclock mode for a long few minutes as the shuttle powered up through the atmosphere. He was so deep into the bifurcated paths ahead of him that he never noticed the stasis field activate around his jump seat.
The last thought in his head as the space around him forced his metabolic processes to slow down to human normal then far below them was that the last thing he’d said to Iona had been a snide remark.
Then the universe went black, and Dex knew nothing at all.
3
The gas didn’t bother Iona at all. While her artificial cells utilized oxygen, they were immune to all but a few chemicals. She could have rushed the door and chased them down, but the calculus was much the same for her as it had clearly been for Dex. Outnumbered and unarmed, the chance she could defeat five armored enemies before one of them hurt or killed him was minimal.
She knew this for a fact, as her deep mind ran the simulations dozens of times in the five seconds after the door closed.
Iona surged to her feet and thought furiously. For a sim like her, this meant jacking the speed of the billions of processor cells that made up her artificial neurons to the highest speed possible. The world around her slowed to a near halt, motes of dust freezing in the air as her surface mind merged with her deep mind in a rare dive.
A handful of milliseconds later, her situation and options were laid out. In function this wasn’t much different from how a human mind worked. Iona just did it more efficiently and orders of magnitude faster.
The Seraphim was not in orbit, or even in the local system. Iona could not contact it directly thanks to the limited use of entanglement communication systems like the Ansible integrated into her body. This didn’t mean she couldn’t get a message out, just that she would have to be creative.
Iona blasted out an emergency alert in the shared machine language used by all sims. The content was shorthand but not brief, pinging every one of her siblings outfitted with an Ansible. She summarized the situation and asked for anyone near Nolan to pass the information along to the Seraphim.
Responses came back in less than a second. Iona let her deep mind handle them, filing away information as she walked to the more traditional communication terminal cleverly tucked into the wooden corner desk.
The rest of the crew were on planet and responded to the emergency alert she sent them as close to instantly as living beings were capable of. Batta, clearly in some stage of recovery from a night at a brothel, popped up on the screen shirtless and bleary-eyed. Krieger and Spencer shared a second screen, their relationship now in the open.
“Iona? What’s wrong?” Batta asked, wiping a hand wearily across his chestnut skin and down his dark beard.
“Dex was kidnapped,” she said. “Five men, less than two minutes ago. I couldn’t h-help him.” Here she had to pause, her voice close to breaking. She tried to ignore the shocked expressions on the faces of her crewmates, then pretended they were aimed at her words rather than the overt loss of emotional control. She took two deep breaths, steadying herself. Iona was trained to operate a starship by herself in almost any situation. She’d done it through combat and more close scrapes than any other sim she knew, and most of that in the last two months.
But nothing prepared her for the guilt of having to hold back. Logically she knew it was the right call, but she was not wholly a creature of logic. Perhaps the feeling was strong because she was in a relationship with Dex, but among the background scenarios running through her deep mind were dozens of similar situations where other members of the crew were the victim.
Every time, echoes of that same guilt. The idea that she should have done something persisted, flying in the face of all the data.
“I’ve sent out a call to other sims,” she continued. “The captain and Commander Cho will be informed shortly. Batta, I need you to contact anyone on this planet you can and find out if we can close the local gate. Spencer, if you can get me access to the planetary government feeds, I might be able to sort out the ship. If I do, Krieger can help me work out their possible courses.”
It was only after she said the words that Iona thought about them. She was the lowest ranked of the bridge crew, even within the informal structure the captain preferred. Giving orders to the others might rankle, no matter how logical they were.
“I’m on it,” Batta said, leaping up from the silken sheets. He was pulling on clothes as fast as he could, and didn’t bother to look at the screen as he spoke. “Anything else you think of, let me know. I’ll make it happen.”
“I will, thank you,” Iona said, closing the connection.
Krieger muttered something to Spencer and rushed away. Iona cocked her head. Spencer smiled. “He’s going to order us a transport. There should be a local office for the planetary government here in Bacchus, but what you’re asking me to do requires face-to-face work if we want it done fast. Won’t be subtle, and I’m probably going to burn through some favors here, but I’ll find a way.”
Spencer, once a freelance intelligence agent and, Iona suspected, something much darker, was very good at her job. Machine or flesh, no one was perfect, however. Iona knew someone higher up in the Ghost Fleet command structure had asked Spencer to keep an eye on Iona. It was so subtle that even she almost missed it. Small changes in behavior, shifts in body language, and a lucky moment where Iona caught her sending an encrypted message through a familiar set of back channels used by Fleet admirals.
It didn’t bother her. When a race of sentient machines created by man choose to wage war, it would be foolish not to take a second look at similar beings living in your own house.
Instead of suspicion, however, Spencer’s eyes were full of compassion. “We’ll get him back. Don’t worry about that.”
“Thank you,” Iona said. “But I suppose you’ve known him longer. It can’t be any easier for you.”
Spencer’s smile grew predatory. “Honey, what we’re going through isn’t shit compared to what the captain will do to these fuckers once we catch them. Trust me.”
*
Batta picked her up an hour later. The time was not wasted; Iona spent most of it submerged in every flow of data at her disposal. What she couldn’t link to directly through a wireless connection, she brought up on the terminal. At one point she had sixty separate feeds just on the screen.
Commercial space flight data was more helpful than expected. By following the open transmissions of every dock and flight controller on this side of the planet, she was able to work out a few facts. The most important of which was the presence of an unregistered shuttle that vanished from sensors as it crossed the ocean back to Rome colony. The disappearing act didn’t bother her—the new coating on Seraphim let the ship switch into light absorption mode, functionally turning the vessel into a black body. The trick was nothing new.
It gave her a starting point, and that was what mattered. Batta drove the ground car at a speed that might have worried her if the larger
circumstances weren’t so dire, giving a status report as they moved through the terraformed wilds toward Atherton.
“I couldn’t get them to close the gate, exactly,” he said. “I explained what’s going on and suggested a temporary problem with the gate pylons might be convenient for us. This system gets a lot of traffic. A few hours is all they’d give us.”
Iona nodded, slightly distracted by the remaining feeds coursing through her brain. “It’s more than I expected. I assume the transit authority is willing to do a random inspection if we find them a suspect?”
Batta chuckled. “For someone raised on a navy carrier, you seem to know how the real world works pretty well.”
“That’s because I was raised by the navy,” Iona corrected. “When I ended up on the Ueshiba, we did a lot of those inspections. It was a destroyer assigned to an intelligence unit. Best way to get aboard a ship we wanted a look at was for the locals to call us in for help.”
Batta scratched his beard, making the ground car wobble slightly. “You know, that kind of shit is why I took my retirement the first chance I got. Now that I’m on the other side, I gotta admit it’s useful.”
“That remains to be seen,” Iona said. An alert popped up in her field of vision, signed by Spencer. “Ah, I just got access to the government feeds. Hang on.”
The flood of data only took her a few seconds to model. In real time this was almost nothing. For her it was a subjective eternity. Encrypted satellite feeds, everything from military defense platforms to civilian entertainment hubs, came together in a web of information. The web expanded as more and more data flowed in.
She focused on the most useful active assets available to her, which were the sensor feeds on the dozens of colony drones in orbit. Every place human beings lived used them; the tiny ships worked together to create a real-time net showing the movement of any object larger than a tennis ball floating within their field of view. With dozens of ships coming and going at any given time, knowing locations and confirming flight paths meant preventing collisions and making sure no loose debris wreaked havoc.
Combined with the passive satellite feeds, the model in Iona’s head was as detailed and clear as any map. She didn’t ignore the ships she could easily see, but she did make them second priority. One of them was surely the destination for the shuttle, after all.
Her primary interest became the stars themselves as well as the planet below. She knew from practical experience that the stealth coating was best defeated with a pure visual inspection. A ship passing in front of another body, no matter how black it was, would still block visible light as it moved. A human would have had trouble making distinctions amid all that darkness, but not Iona.
Within five seconds, the shuttle was in her sight. It crept around the far side of the planet toward the transit hub, around which floated half a dozen large ships. At a guess, the most likely destination was the older freighter parked closest to the shuttle’s flight path.
She rattled off a quick message to Spencer, identifying the ship, and turned the model around in her head to watch the approach from a different angle.
It would be okay. The shuttle would dock, and they could be held until a team got aboard to—
The shuttle lunged forward, a black streak against the bright planet below, and performed a maneuver Krieger himself would find grudging respect for. The tiny ship burned its engines hard, only cutting them for a fraction of a second before flipping and burning even harder to slow its approach. This itself was only of mild interest, except for the fact that the last bit of the deceleration maneuver happened as the freighter flipped on its side in a move too nimble for its size. Normally a braking burn stopped well before this kind of approach, but the blue fire kept right on going as the belly of the freighter, bay already open to space, swallowed the shuttle whole.
It was dangerous. Stupidly so. No one would try such a thing without a dire need or ample warning—and these people pulled it off flawlessly. They knew what they were doing.
The freighter broke orbit at once, conventional engines causing the thing to lurch away with that same impossible speed and dexterity. Iona sent a ping to every system she was connected to, demanding active scans of the thing.
As it left her visual field, she saw something that broke her heart.
“We’re going to lose him,” Iona said dejectedly. “The ship his shuttle docked with has its own gate pylons. By the time we get back to Atherton, Dex will be in the Cascade.”
4
They kept him sedated through the trip, which was a smart call on their part. When Dex woke up, it took all his willpower not to use the gifts his genetics gave him to lash out, however futile a gesture it might be. His first conscious thoughts were to wonder where he was both in a general and specific sense.
Obviously, he was in another star system. Iona would have reported his abduction immediately, and no single ship could withstand the sort of scrutiny that would fall like a hammer from the colonial administration looking for a kidnapping on their own soil. If he could get a look outside, there was at least the possibility he’d get lucky and spot some clue about his location.
Which brought up the other problem: Dex was cocooned in perfect darkness. His arms and legs were stilled by something. Not wrapped or restrained, and not held perfectly still by a stasis field. He could feel them, flex the muscles, but movement of any kind was impossible. Except for the thin breathing mask over his face, his entire body was gripped by an invisible hand. Slightly pliable, like flesh or—
“Oh, fuck me,” Dex whispered hoarsely to himself. He knew where he was.
Escape pod. More precisely, the kind commonly referred to as a drop pod. The normal kind had supplies and you could sit in them, making them like tiny spaceships with limited propulsion. Drop pods, something Dex had only seen on video or read about, were the cheap alternative designed for planet-bound orbital vessels. The idea was that if your ship wasn’t going to leave orbit, a small coffin-sized pod was more than enough to toss a survivor through the atmosphere and get them to safety.
The worst of these were called Tombs, because the reactive foam inside them felt like death was holding you in his hand. Just like Dex’s surroundings held him.
Was he moving? Hard to judge. If he was, it was ballistic. No acceleration pushed on him, and the only sound was his own ragged breathing. It wasn’t exactly sensory deprivation, but close enough to set his mind on edge. The lack of external stimulus grated on his nerves and took away all context. Time was harder to judge this way—and Dex would know. One of the exercises used to train him back home was a box not dissimilar to the one he was in now.
So he did what he had always done then, and counted.
He said them aloud, thought them, even imagined them in a complex array of imaginary fonts and colors. It helped him pass the time in a structured way, even if the silence only lasted another four hundred and thirty two seconds. That was when the shaking started.
Intellectually Dex understood what was happening. He felt the tiny thrusters adjust the position of the Tomb for atmospheric reentry. The deep thrum of rapidly thickening air buffeting the capsule filled his entire world. The noise was incredible even through the foam surrounding his head.
Dex stopped counting. Why bother? There was no doubt his current circumstances were interesting enough to keep his attention.
The deeply logical part of him tracked and analyzed everything happening around him, judging time since entry and ticking away boxes on the thickness and density of the atmospheres of all the worlds he’d read about. These were background processes he could no more stop than another man could choose not to breathe. Doing the math was intrinsic.
The rest of him was utterly terrified.
After the horrendous noise died down, a muffled rustling noise like a blanket being snapped open could be heard, then a harsh jerk. That would be the parachute deploying. Even centuries after discovering how to warp gravity itself, some of the classics wer
e too efficient to give up. Hell, the wheel never went out of style.
He expected his next stop to be the ground. A well-aimed drop pod was a dart thrown from orbit that could hit a bullseye a kilometer on a side. If they bothered to aim, that is, though Dex thought it likely. Abducting him and hauling him across the stars just to kill him with a dunk in the middle of an ocean would be a convoluted and wasteful method of execution.
It was also not the style of Threnody’s ruling class. Nor was being returned home this way; his people would never trust outsiders to fling anything at their planet this way.
Whatever other logical conclusions Dex might have come to were cut off by a hard metallic thunk against the side of the pod. A quick lateral yank turned into a more gentle sideways movement. It took him a few seconds to understand this development: a capture system. Something had hooked the pod and was drawing it in.
*
The moment the sides of the Tomb blew away, Dex was blasted with decontamination fog. The harsh chemicals burned his throat, but he had no choice as the room was saturated.
“Move forward,” a voice said. Dex complied.
An unseen door opened, a low surge of air pressure gasping from it to keep the aerosol away. The chamber beyond was a secondary decon room, this time using flash radiation bulbs. Dex should have expected it since most fog systems worked in tandem with the odd purple light show bathing him now.
“Continue to move forward,” said the same voice from another speaker. “Retrieve the kit waiting at the next door, then move through it once the door opens.”
The voice sounded bored, and it pissed Dex off. Here he was, kidnapped and on an alien world, taken from everything he knew and loved, and this asshole couldn’t even find it interesting.
“Eat a bowl full of assholes,” Dex said, stopping.
