Borderlander

by Joshua Guess

  She waved at the screen, bringing up video of the Smith moving in its impossibly graceful way. “That’s something we’ll have to keep an eye on as we continue hunting Drummer and the rest of the Red Hand. The kind of threat presented by a group that can walk through firewalls as if they didn’t exist can’t be overstated. That said, what you’re seeing here might warrant us dropping our pursuit, because I think it represents a much bigger threat.”

  Sharp glanced at Grant, raising an eyebrow. “You share her assessment?”

  Grant gave a slight nod. “If anything, she’s underselling it. Once you hear the pitch, I think you’ll agree.”

  Iona cleared her throat. “Commander Cho was crucial in helping us figure this part out. What you’re seeing here is the sort of reactionless drive the Children use for their ships. It’s technology we’ve been unable to replicate even though we know it’s possible. We can warp space and create artificial gravity, but this is in between the two. Travel that doesn’t require a warp bubble or reaction mass, but not in a ship run by the Children. This is a fully human crew.”

  Sharp put up a hand to stop her. “Can we be sure of that? We know they enslave people, fill them with nanomachines to control them.”

  “This is nothing like that,” Iona said with a quick shake of the head. “I talked to a few of these guys. The slaves you’re thinking of were basically puppets, and you could tell what they were at a glance. How the Smith got this technology is a question we definitely need to answer, because whoever has it will get an advantage in any fight.”

  Iona brought up another data set. “This is the code for the program the Red Hand are using to hack into systems. It probably looks like gibberish to you, but it’s almost as advanced as my own core heuristics. It’s no AI, but close. I did the research, and it bridges a gap in technology no one else has managed to until now. It’s got the ability to adapt and learn without actually being self-aware like me or the Children. It’s so far ahead of what the rest of humanity is doing that I have to suspect it’s from an outside source.”

  “Outside humanity,” Sharp said flatly. “Alien, then.”

  “It’s possible that just as we’re seeing technology the Children also possess, some unknown third party is gifting criminals with equally advanced tech in a different area,” Iona conceded. “But it seems much more likely that this also comes from the same source. I think the Children have been playing a more subtle game than any of us have imagined. They’re giving the elements of our society that cause the most chaos and disruption the tools to make doing so much worse.”

  Grant saw the moment Sharp went from reasonable skepticism to grudging belief. He of all people knew the dangers posed by the Children. Their biological weapons made it obvious how easily the Alliance could be infiltrated. The appearance of new technologies in the hands of the criminal element was exactly the sort of information the Ghost Fleet existed to discover.

  “I’m sold,” Sharp said with a guarded tone in his voice. Grant knew him well enough to understand he wasn’t going to like what came next. “You’re wrong on what I think your focus should be on, though. Now more than ever, you need to run down the rest of the Red Hand and find Drummer. He’ll be able to tell you where this tech came from, and that might give us more leads on Dex.”

  “How’s that?” Grant asked.

  Iona, to his surprise, wasn’t angry. She nodded along with Sharp. “Yes, that makes sense. If Drummer can give us his source, it might lead us to whoever supplied the Smith with their engines.”

  Grant cleared his throat pointedly. “That much is obvious, but how does that actually help us find Dex? We already know the Smith took him, so wouldn’t it be more efficient if we just went after them?”

  “Think about it,” Iona said, seemingly unconcerned about speaking to her captain like he was an academy student. “A reactionless drive can’t just be something they bought, and do you think a gang of crooks would kidnap people with no ransom demands when a ship like that gives them so many other options? Taking people invites a ludicrous amount of risk.”

  Sharp chuckled grimly. “No kidding. We’ve had a black notice for them in every system in the Alliance for ten days now. Disable on sight. So far they haven’t popped back up anywhere we have eyes.”

  “Ah,” Grant said, realization dawning. “You think the kidnappings are the payment for the drive. That whoever is supplying the technology, whether it’s the Children themselves or through an intermediary, is actually who will have the prisoners.”

  Iona nodded. “The Smith and her crew are probably middlemen, and their damn engines make them way more nimble than us. We could chase after them, but none of us know enough about their ship to make disabling them likely. For all we know, a PDC round through whatever powers that drive might annihilate the whole ship. And that’s if they decided to show their faces.”

  Sharp leaned in toward Grant, a familiar predatory smile on his face. “Don’t think we won’t have people looking for them anyway, Grant. We’ll leak that our analysts determined a series of missing persons cases might be linked to the ship and maybe even put up a bounty for it to be taken intact. We’ll come at this from different angles, but together. I don’t want to leave a man behind any more than you do.”

  “Fine,” Grant said somewhat grudgingly. “Iona, if you’re okay with this, then I guess so am I.”

  She nodded. “It’s reasonable, but I also think it has a good chance of actually working.”

  “Great,” Sharp said. “If that’s settled, I have some urgent messages to send out. I’ll wheedle the admirals into giving us the budget for a cash reward.”

  The determination in his voice reminded Grant why he’d taken Sharp’s offer to join the Ghost Fleet in the first place. Yeah, there were larger considerations like the fate of the human race. No point denying those played a big role in the decision. But though Grant still resented Sharp a little for the emotional manipulation the older man used to ensure the crew joined, Sharp’s fierce dedication to the cause—safeguarding as many human lives as possible with the resources he could put together—made Grant like him despite any other factor.

  It took a while longer to hammer out the details, but in the end they had a plan.

  15

  On the shore of an unknown planet, a hundred meters from where he landed on it, Dex slept. In that sleep, he dreamed.

  *

  He ran through the corridor at a speed that would have left an Olympic sprinter in a fit of jealous rage centuries before. Hardened bones barely creaked beneath the strain of artificially dense muscle and tendons as he pushed himself forward with relentless effort. When an enemy popped out of a doorway, Dex barely slowed as he twisted out of the way of a strike, palm detonating against the jaw of the enemy and shattering it. Ten meters further in, a pair of bodies moved into the narrow passage. In the space between heartbeats, Dex judged the angles and the available time and did the math. His left leg pushed with exactly the right amount of force, launching him up and to the side where his right could catch on the corridor wall.

  With a graceful leap, Dex corkscrewed through the air almost carelessly, as if he belonged there. His hands darted out and slapped the heads of the men below together before the momentum of his jump flipped him over completely.

  The rest of the trip was just as effortless. For Dex, clearing the hallway and reaching his target wasn’t the life-and-death struggle the rest of his cohorts faced. His mind attacked it for the series of math and physics problems it was, nothing more complicated than following a line from point A to B.

  When he reached the end, half a dozen groaning bodies lay behind him. The lights came up and his proctor stepped out from a room paneled in displays. Dex knew the room got the feeds from the corridor test, a battery of observational data measuring every aspect of the environment and his physiology. The corridor was a replica of the central passage found in Alliance destroyers, one of many such replicas used to train children like Dex for what was c
oming.

  Children? No. Not any longer. Dex was an adult now. The time would soon come when he could no longer avoid the duty he was created for. To lead other children molded by the rulers of Threnody as weapons into glorious battle against the enemy.

  Dex knew the propaganda. Parroted it back to them. He understood its purpose. He believed none of it.

  The proctor was nameless as all proctors were. He was identified by an alphanumeric sequence on his breast. Dex knew it by heart but never used the identifier. Why bother? As a class, proctors were meant to be null entities. Being nameless discouraged their wards from forming attachments. If they wanted to be interchangeable cogs, he was happy to oblige.

  “Your time was excellent,” the proctor said. “The fastest so far. You’re more than ready for a mission. The good news is that the timetable has been moved up. We’ll be deploying you within the next month.”

  “That’s not much time to prepare,” Dex said evenly. He betrayed no hint of his true feelings, not even to the sensors monitoring the smallest changes in his physiology. Any variation would be attributed to surprise at the news.

  The proctor shrugged. “We’ve opened up trade with the Alliance to get our foot in the door. Our contracts with independent vessels will allow us to move you and your team off planet with no one the wiser. It might even be the one in port now, for all I know. Doesn’t matter. This first mission will be a simple one. It won’t require much planning.”

  Dex knew perfectly well why isolated Threnody was finally trading with the larger community outside its lone system. He’d originally planned to escape three months from now, after hoarding enough stolen goods to bribe his way off the planet. Precious metals were solid currency anywhere you went, but the amounts Dex could pilfer were small.

  But now he had to try something desperate. Something—

  *

  He woke with a start as a wall of sound slammed into him. A dull, powerful roar filled the world. Dex looked up at the sky and in the fading light found a bright spot. No—a cluster of them. Ships coming in, or pods? It was impossible to tell until they got closer.

  There was nowhere for him to hide, not really. The wavy landscape offered some protection from the ground, but he assumed given the giant experiment he lived in that he was constantly under observation. Still, he moved further from the structure, grabbing up the pieces of gear he’d brought with him to evaporate seawater and collect salt before taking off at a full run.

  He came to a halt nearly half a kilometer away. From atop a dune he was able to make out the pair of drop ships landing, sandy soil blown away to create massive dust clouds. Three pods screeched through the atmosphere behind them, though Dex had no idea why pods would be dropped if ships were already on the way down. The capture system sent out its tendrils and hooked the pods as soon as their chutes deployed, hauling them into the collection area of the structure.

  Dex thought about waiting to see who might emerge from the ships, then thought better of it. This couldn’t be a good sign, and he had a suspicion so strong it bordered on premonition that if he gave the people inside the ships a chance, they’d kill him on the spot.

  Hitching his pack tight against his shoulders, Dex did the only thing he could and ran at top speed toward the camp. He pulled part of a ration from his pocket as he raced away from the ships, finishing the cube of protein that had been his lunch. Running without stopping would require a lot of energy, after all.

  The run took a subjective eternity. Based on the size of the drop ships, the people inside could easily have brought land vehicles with them. Even now, armed men could be closing in on him, aiming at his back through the scopes of smart guns able to shoot individual petals off a flower a kilometer away. The thought sent a ripple of nausea through his belly, but it didn’t stop him. Dex was above all else a pragmatist, and nothing he could do would stop a bullet if one was coming for him.

  The possibilities unfolded in front of him like a decision tree, and Dex skidded to a stop. In his haste to warn the other prisoners he’d let fear overwhelm his logic. He didn’t need to tell them about the ships. They would already know. There was no way to miss the noise; anyone who grew up on a planet would have immediately looked up at the familiar thunder of ships aerobraking. His priorities shifted between seconds, going from the dumbly obvious need to tell everyone what they already knew to doing what he was uniquely positioned to do: gather information.

  His fear changed gears as well. The icy ball of terror weighing down his gut became more personal as he made the decision to reverse course. This was going to be dangerous as hell for him. Death could come at any moment.

  But then, how was that any different from possibly being shot in the back? At least this way he would face the threat directly. Maybe even discover something useful.

  Years of training and testing, deeply repressed through months of intense effort, began to unlock and drift to the surface. Dex hadn’t faced this sort of danger for a long while now, but a part of him felt a bit grateful for the terrors he suffered on Threnody. They might save his life.

  They might save other lives, for that matter.

  Dex took a deep breath and moved toward the danger, hoping he was up to the challenge.

  16

  They hung in the darkness, unseen as they observed the enemy. The opinion of what lay in front of them was shared by the entire crew.

  “Not to beat a dead horse here,” Grant said, “but if we get into a fight with that thing, we’re all fucked.”

  Fen joined the bridge crew to bask in the grudgingly impressive horror laid out before them. Thanks to the trove of data taken from the Red Hand, they’d been able to pinpoint the group’s base of operations. A pirate band so large needed a central depot, and the thing in front of them certainly fit the description. Situated on a ball of rock and ice three hundred kilometers across in the middle of a transit system with one gate, one planet, and a reasonably large belt of loose rocks, it was as hidden and safe as any base of its kind could be. No one using the system as a transit stop between Cascade jumps would bother scanning the interior at the level of detail needed to notice the base.

  Which Grant considered a shame from a purely professional point of view. The base itself wasn’t much as such things went, a warren of fortified domes half-buried in the regolith with tunnels and landing pads haphazardly added. No different from any other unauthorized settlement. It might even have started life that way. There were so many of them around the Alliance that the government had given up all pretense of trying to control their growth. No, the actual base was fairly standard for its kind.

  The defenses, on the other hand, were not.

  Twelve rail guns sat on their rotating platforms in a circle surrounding the main structure almost four kilometers across. Interspersed between them were at least twice as many missile pods, each containing anywhere from four to a full dozen depending on their make. As if that weren’t enough protection on the ground, some enterprising and probably insane engineer had stripped the torpedo tubes and launch systems from what looked like a destroyer and integrated them into the planetoid.

  Hovering in orbit were four state of the art defense platforms with bleeding edge sensor packages, each housing four precision PDC pods that between them could pick off any number of projectiles moving slower than an appreciable fraction of the speed of light.

  “Yeah,” Fen said, arms crossed over her chest. “That sounds about right. Where’d they get all this shit? Pirates don’t usually have this kind of hardware.”

  Grant glanced at Iona, who twitched slightly as she mentally fetched the file. A quarter of the monitor showed the source of the weapons in the deathtrap in front of them.

  “About three months ago they hit a munitions shipment headed for a new colony world. What you’re seeing here was about a quarter of the initial planetary defense network for that colony. Probably sold the rest.”

  Fen pointed at the torpedo tubes. “Those didn’t come from a
defense net.”

  “No, they didn’t,” Grant agreed. “They came from the decommissioned destroyer being used to transport the cargo. From the outside, no one was supposed to know it wasn’t a fully operational war ship. These guys being who they are, they clearly did. The transport company running the cargo bought the old destroyer with a special waiver from the Navy specifically for this purpose. It should have worked. Would have, without the inside information.”

  From the comm station, Spencer cleared her throat. “Sir, now that we’ve confirmed with our own eyes how well defended this place is, I have to say—again—that we should leave this one to the Navy. We know Drummer isn’t here. We know the families of some of the Red Hand are, so we can’t just drop a rock on the place and call it a day. Our options are limited and none of them are good.”

  Grant tapped his fingers against his mouth. She was right, of course. An assault would either get them all killed or cause untold deaths, possibly including innocents, below. But time was a factor. The window during which Drummer and the rest of the Red Hand were unaware the crew of the Seraphim knew about the base was narrowing by the minute.

  To catch Drummer, Grant had to take away all his safe places. “The whole point of us being here is that we know he isn’t, Abby,” he replied. “If Drummer gates in on whatever ship he’s hiding on and manages to get inside that defensive perimeter, we’ll never scrape him out alive. Right now we’re invisible to them, just a black dot in space. We need to figure out a way to disable this base and keep him on the move. Eventually we’ll run him down by pure attrition. He only has so many ships.”

  Spencer, however, wasn’t done. “Sir, we just don’t have any good choices. We’ve got a lot of firepower, but the only thing that can get through their defenses are rail gun shots. They’re of limited use here. Can’t do enough damage to disable the base, and as soon as we fire we’ll give our position away. Our best bet is to—”