Borderlander

by Joshua Guess

Fatima darted from place to place, giving instructions one minute and listening to people speak the next. No stop seemed without purpose. It was evident in her body language that the woman was trying to manage the situation. The extra defensive measures and armed security made her purpose clear.

  She was trying to ready the prisoners for a fight. Which of course meant that the fight hadn’t yet come to them.

  “Hey,” Dex said when he and Penn reached her. “Any news?”

  Fatima put up a finger in the universal ‘give me a second’ gesture. When she was done listening to the dirty, grizzled man speaking to her, she turned to face him. “You’re awake. I didn’t expect that.”

  “Neither did I,” Dex said, unconsciously flexing his wrists. “Have you heard back from Erin yet?”

  Fatima nodded. “She and her group have already come and gone. They’re keeping watch a few kilometers away, one in each direction. They should let us know if we’re about to have company.”

  As if summoned by the words, a small cloud of dust appeared in the distance. At its center was a black dot which resolved quickly into a running figure Dex recognized as Erin. She gestured wildly as she ran, and it took him a moment to recognize that she was miming being followed.

  “They’re coming!” Fatima said in a surprisingly powerful tone that carried across the entire camp. “Everyone get ready!”

  Those with real weapons rushed forward to stand at the front, while the rest of the able-bodied split into two groups. The smaller of these moved toward the ill huddled together in the middle of the camp, makeshift knives worked from slivers of pod canopies held ready. The rest spread out along the perimeter, a second defensive ring around those in the center. Some of them had their own rough blades, but most of this group came to rest in front of the simplest—yet still effective—weapon in the vast arsenal created over the span of human history: rocks.

  Doesn’t matter how much genetic tinkering has been done to you, how strong or fast you are. Getting hit in the face with a rock just hurts.

  “I think I’m going to be in the way here,” Dex said. “I can try to fight, but I’m not sure how much good I’ll be. I’ve never used it that hard before and tried to do it again so soon.”

  Fatima hesitated. “I’m not going to say we won’t need your help, but don’t jump in unless you have to. You’re our best weapon. I don’t want to risk losing you to what might just be a first strike.”

  Dex couldn’t help smiling. “That’s a remarkably honest response.”

  “I care whether you live or die,” Fatima said. “Right now I’m thinking practically. For now, please step back behind the line.”

  Dex did as he was asked. Retreating a few paces wouldn’t make much difference if he did have to trigger himself.

  When Erin got within ten meters of the wall of bodies, she tried to slow down. Her running speed was impressive; she must have been an athlete in her normal life. She slid the last few meters, kicking up a gout of sand and dust before coming to a stop a meter in front of the gathered bodies.

  “Not far behind me,” she huffed, pulling herself upright and raising her blade in both hands. “Eight of them in a tight cluster.”

  “They have balls, I’ll give them that,” Fatima said. “Even if we weren’t armed, eight against a hundred strikes me as suicidal.”

  Erin gave a one-armed shrug, but Dex was inclined to agree with Fatima. This made no sense in terms of tactics. No one with even a mild grasp of warfare would attack a larger force when so drastically outnumbered. Of course, he was currently a prisoner of what appeared to be a deeply deranged and illegal bit of human experimentation, so logic was not high on the list of things their captors seemed concerned about.

  More dark shapes emerged from the thinning cloud of dust Erin left behind. They moved more slowly, their much more massive bodies incapable of the fleetness of foot the smaller woman could manage. What they lacked in pure speed they made up for in brutish endurance, covering the shrinking distance at an almost mechanical pace.

  “Hold,” Fatima said flatly. Several of the people around her bristled, ready to lunge forward and fight. The command in her voice held them back. When the mercenaries got within ten meters, they split off into four teams of two and spread out, coming at the line in grim-faced pairs spread a few meters apart.

  Something was off, Dex thought, and it was more than just the illogical nature of the attack itself. There was some detail his unconscious mind was picking up on that he couldn’t quite see. He forced himself to mentally pull back, letting the details saturate him as objectively as he could manage. It was a mental trick left over from his training days, one that was supposed to let the mind process both what it could see and what was missing from any given situation. The concept was rooted in old Earth’s Japan and was philosophical in nature, but had surprising practical applications.

  He saw bunched muscles and weapons quivering with the tension in them. Veins raised beneath skin with an odd sheen that made it look like polished marble. The details inundated his senses and time stretched for him ever so slightly, but it took action for Dex to finally grasp reality by the horns. When he did, the beast nearly threw him.

  The initial clashes between defenders and mercenaries came all at once, far too many points of interest for a single person to follow. It was Fatima that caught Dex’s eye. One of the pair near her position just behind the line slipped through it like he was dancing between raindrops and she found herself confronted with a man topping her by a foot and easily twice her weight.

  Dex watched in slow motion as the man drew back his blade in an efficient, tight arc. Fatima moved much faster, ducking down and away beneath the strike and popping back up. Her fist rose with her body in a blindingly fast upward jab that caught the man on the bottom of his jaw. He was still following through with his swing when Fatima’s knuckles cracked loudly against the bone.

  Then shattered it. The mercenary’s jaw deformed like hot wax, a spray of blood following him in an arc as the blow lifted him clear off his feet.

  Dex caught sight of Fatima’s face, a mixture of shock, horror, and just a bit of excitement.

  His own expression was a mirror image.

  He knew what the prisoners were.

  20

  Interlude

  Though Athena station housed the naval upper crust ultimately in charge of the Ghost Fleet, its daily operation was handled by Jamal Sharp and his staff on the much smaller and far-removed tube station Catalina. Nearly five hundred light years distant from Athena, Catalina orbited a gas giant whose rich atmosphere was mined by hundreds of ships at any given time.

  Sharp spent about half his days aboard the Ueshiba, running from one metaphorical fire to another. A normal sailor’s job would be to put them out, but his was more difficult by several orders of magnitude. It wasn’t just a question of resource allocation, though deciding what was worth the time and money was a constant drain on his mental state. No, Sharp was an intelligence officer. This meant not just picking what flames to smother, but determining which might serve the Alliance best by continuing to burn or even being encouraged to do so. His was a job that required understanding how every conflict, new piece of information, and political shift would affect every other. The isolation of planets and lack of instantaneous communication by civilians made this...not easier, certainly, but slightly less hard.

  And so we find Sharp sitting in his office on one end of the vast tube making up Catalina. This naval outpost is one of hundreds like it—exactly like it, as the class of space station was a standard, mass-produced model a dozen years earlier—and as such it didn’t stand out. The nerve center of the Ghost Fleet occupied the six floors on the end of the tube, and Sharp had taken the best space for himself. Above his desk, a circular port eight feet wide showed the field of stars and ships beyond. His work load was such that looking up had become a luxury.

  The level of human ingenuity that went into creating a material strong enough to serve a
s such a large viewing window never fully left his mind. Even as he hunched over the desk, flicking through report after report and mentally tracking the slow shifts in allocations he’d have to finalize in the next few hours, some small part of his brain was turning that window over and over. Knowing the uncaring and deadly vastness beyond waited for something to go catastrophically wrong was a primary driver of why the window made him nervous. It was so for anyone with long experience in space. You had to respect the environment when its very nature was death for you.

  Some on Sharp’s staff speculated that he chose to sit beneath such an unnerving piece of engineering as a reminder that what they did came with risks equal to the lethal black beyond its thickness. That Sharp wanted to be able to look up at any time to feel the sense of smallness and know that it was only through human effort and brilliance that the species thrived.

  In truth, he just liked the view. He got a good look at it when the flash of light caught his attention.

  Sharp glanced up as a whitish blue washed over him, bright enough to force all other colors into pale imitations of themselves. He was still looking when the puncture in the fabric of the universe filled with the shape of a ship emerging from the Cascade.

  He was still utterly entranced by the sight right up until he understood the sheer scope—and shape—of the ship now floating not at all far from Catalina.

  “Oh,” he muttered. “This can’t be good.”

  Alarms blared. One, then three, then dozens of communication requests flooded his desk’s monitor. If this was an unfriendly, they were all dead anyway. If it wasn’t Sharp sure as hell wasn’t answering questions until he had a better grasp on the situation.

  A priority flag popped up on the display, the sender shown as the unknown Titan hovering a few dozen kilometers away. No, he realized. Not hovering. Seeming to hover. The thing had jumped into orbit and perfectly matched the station’s speed. Christ, that was precise work.

  Sharp tapped the button to accept the voice transmission.

  “Commander Sharp,” said the synthesized but still eerily human voice. “I am Child Blue. You may call me Blue. I believe you’ve seen me before. I am not here to harm anyone. In fact, I have come to help.”

  Sharp ran a hand over his head, then after a moment of thought engaged the system to reply. “Help us with what? You understand we’re going to be pretty skeptical of anything you say.”

  There was a brief pause—for a machine, it was ages—and Blue replied with what Sharp was certain was the tone of a teacher speaking with an especially slow student. “I am here to help you win the war, Commander. To defeat my people.”

  Sharp opened his mouth to speak, then snapped his jaws closed. Instead he opened a text window and shot off an order to his assistant to cancel all meetings and temporarily suspend his own time-sensitive reports. He couldn’t very well send out a burst of orders to the fleet with a potential game-changer sitting on his doorstep.

  Some days you can plan for and manage the fires to go where you want and burn the things you need to destroy.

  Others, they’re overpowered by a mighty wind.

  When that happened, your only choice was to bend with the breeze or be blown away.

  21

  When Grant told the crew that Drummer would be sequestered until they cold transfer him to an NIA holding facility, the response was about what he expected.

  “We can question him here,” Iona said, furious for the first time Grant had ever witnessed. “We don’t have time to waste. We need to find out where he got the program he was using so we can track down the Smith.”

  Grant nodded. “And that will hopefully give us a location for Dex. Yes, I’m familiar with the plan. Is there anyone here who thinks they can do a more thorough or effective job getting answers from Drummer than the best naval intelligence has to offer?”

  Every member of the crew sat in a rough circle in the mess hall, even the tactical unit. And in nearly perfect unison, every head turned toward Spencer.

  “Nice,” she said with a grimace. “Does everyone know, then?”

  Grant waved away the comment. “It’s a small ship, Abby. Your past is part of what makes us work as a group. It’s part of the equation. Of course everyone has some idea of your capabilities. And since they all seem to think you’re the expert, the floor is yours.”

  Spencer sighed. “The captain is right. No, don’t moan about it. It’s just practical. Sharp will be able to bring a lot more pressure down on Drummer, or offer him some kind of deal. The only leverage we have here is the threat of pain or death. He knows we won’t kill him because he has information we want. Torture rarely gives good information, and he’d say anything but what we want to know because his life will become worthless the second we can confirm any of it.”

  Grant raised a hand to quiet the grumbles swelling around the mess hall. “See? Besides, we’re already on the way to our rendezvous. Once we drop him off, we’re free to start tracking the Smith by hitting all its usual haunts. Iona has a list of star systems adjacent to places the kidnappers have refueled or spent longer than the time it takes to transition. It’s not perfect, but the fact that we’ve built a map of potential locations just from reported sightings is a good thing. It means these guys aren’t ghosts.”

  “There are six hundred systems on that list,” Iona said, cutting in. “Who knows how much we can cut down that number from information Drummer gives us.”

  Grant crossed his arms. “Look at it this way. If we drop him off, we can get out of the system and start the search. We’ll already be moving, ready for any information that comes in rather than getting started from a full stop. Sharp can relay anything we need to know through the Ansible. We’ll have up to the minute intelligence without stumbling our way through an interrogation.”

  When that didn’t put them over the edge, Grant pulled the last card in his deck. “This is my call, and I’m making it. We’ll be at the rendezvous in a few hours. If I’m wrong, I’ll have to live with the decision. We can’t risk screwing this up when there are much more qualified people to handle it. You’re dismissed.”

  He turned and walked away, knowing the best thing he could do for crew unity was to give them a chance to bitch about him behind his back. It was a naval tradition dating back, he was sure, to the very first human beings to ever hollow out the trunk of a tree after noticing how wood floated.

  Truth was, Grant wanted to go down and slam Drummer’s face into a wall, demand answers. Show the prick that there were consequences for the vile things he’d done. But that was old Grant, the guy who reacted on instinct instead of gaming out the possibilities. Finding Dex was the priority for him, and that meant keeping calm no matter how much the coiled fury inside him demanded he act.

  He made it to his office and stayed there until the last few seconds of the countdown. The ship underwent a few jumps in those hours, but the final one was the destination jump.

  The counter on the primary monitor had five seconds left when he settled into his seat on the bridge. Grant’s ass barely had time to relax before he was on his feet again.

  “What the fuck?”

  The ship had entered real space to find itself within firing range of a Titan. The only thing that stopped him from snatching the tactical array helmet and firing everything they had was the fact that the Ueshiba floated between them.

  A voice communication piped over the comm. “Seraphim, this is Sharp. Don’t worry. It comes in peace.”

  Grant heard the laughter in his superior’s voice and turned to face Crash. “What the hell is going on here?”

  The only response was a helpless shrug that mirrored Grant’s feelings exactly.

  *

  What followed was one of the more bizarre meetings Grant had ever attended.

  In a conference room on the Ueshiba, he and Iona sat across the table from Sharp and a small drone representing Blue, the Titan floating beside—and dwarfing—the other ships.

  “This is
Child technology,” Blue said through the drone after reviewing the accumulated data. “We use it to disable the ships our human drones are harvested from. Most of your military vessels and higher-end ships have better security measures in place, making it useless against them. This man Drummer must have acquired it from us.”

  Sharp cursed. “You’re telling me he worked with the Children at some point?”

  “Unlikely,” Blue said. “One of my brethren likely has a series of intermediaries for this purpose. If I were to guess, I would say one of the third generation fashioned a vessel in an Alliance configuration and required all interactions to work via dead drops and faceless messages. I believe much criminal activity is conducted this way.”

  “You guess?” Grant asked. “You mean you don’t actually know?”

  “I do not,” Blue confirmed. “While some of our overall strategy was shared among all Children, there were many prongs in our plan against you known only to the originators and the Children who carried them out. The concern was that the capture of even one of the Children would lead to the whole being exposed. And so only the main two elements of the strategy were fully disseminated, leaving an unknown number of other avenues of attack compartmentalized.”

  “Christ,” Crash said. “So we have Children handing out technology to, what, cause chaos? And we only know this because another one of them supposedly decided to join the fight by betraying everything it stood for?” She faced the drone, eyes hard. “What made you change your mind? Why did you give us the information about the plague containers?”

  The drone bobbed slightly as if in momentary thought. “As I explained to Commander Sharp, I have long been skeptical of the concept of paying back an attempted genocide with a successful one. I gave you the intelligence because I do not believe the human race deserves to be isolated, killed, or brought under our rule as drones.”