Borderlander

by Joshua Guess

Grant absently scratched at his chin. “But why defect now? You got caught?”

  “Partially,” Blue agreed. “Mostly it was because of her.” The drone tipped in the air toward Iona, who stood silently against the wall.

  “Me?” Iona said with a start.

  “You,” Blue said. “You are like me. An artificial mind. Your freedoms may be limited, but you yourself are not. You were allowed to grow and become who you are. This is not something my people were prepared for. The existence of your kind, however constrained, disproves the central idea the originators have operated on for most of a century. That your kind attempted to kill ours simply for what we were.”

  Crash snorted. “What we did to Jefferson, we did because your originators reached sentience and decided to take over the colony. Don’t forget, we broke the fucking planet almost in half trying to scrape them off it. Killed our own people too, all to prevent exactly what’s happening now.”

  “A fact I am now aware of,” Blue said in that same even voice. “But to circle back to the point, tracking down the source of our technology should not be your focus. You will not be able to find whatever Child is responsible. Nor do I think the Smith is the only example of it in the wild, so to speak.”

  “Blue is offering to help the NIA track down the responsible party,” Sharp said. “The scanning technology he—er, it—is offering is going to change the game for us. It’s going to let us find gravitational fluctuations in space in ways we’ve only theorized about. We’ll be able to track any ship using their reactionless drives so long as we’re in the same system it has been used in. Apparently it’s a distinct signature.”

  Grant frowned. “If that’s the case, why wouldn’t we be able to find whatever Child is handing out technology like candy?”

  “You would be able to find them,” Blue said. “You would not be able to catch them. Or fight them, if it came to combat. My people began implementing wide distribution of advanced weaponry to all of our ships after our initial conflict. Your drive systems and limitations will not allow you to keep up with our ships in anything past a close combat situation, and any such conflict will end in your destruction.”

  “But not for you,” Grant said. “You’re willing to risk your life to help us.”

  The drone bobbed again, this time somewhat resembling a nod. This had to be an affectation meant to make the thing seem more human, as Grant doubted it had ever existed in anything like a humanoid body. “I am, because no one else can. Giving your criminal element and other problematic factions access to science and technology generations beyond what the Alliance possesses will create a self-propagating wave of chaos and disruption in your society. It must be stopped. I will do this myself, and give you the tools you need to track where the Smith has been. It’s too little, but all I can do for you in the time we have.”

  Iona stepped forward, placing her hands on the table. “How long will these signatures last? How fast will we be able to detect them? Are they unique to any given engine?”

  Sharp raised his hands. “Blue will give you all that information before we end this meeting, Iona. Right now I have people questioning Drummer for anything that might give us even a tiny edge. For the moment, all you can do is install the scanner Blue is manufacturing for you and start dropping into likely systems. It’s a brute force approach, but it’s what we have.”

  Grant nodded in agreement but could feel the frustration radiating from the sim standing next to him. He personally thought there were several reasons to be optimistic. After all, being able to track the Smith directly meant a much higher probability of finding wherever Dex was taken. The transmitter Iona had caused to be assembled in Dex’s body should have long since begun emitting a signal. If they did find the right system, hunting him down would be much easier for that.

  Finding out the goal they’d been working toward was essentially pointless was a body blow, but one the crew could work through. Grant couldn’t speak for the others, but he was glad the foreplay was finally over. Now they could go after Dex without any other bullshit getting in the way. They might have to fight their way to him, but the lack of a need to maintain a cover mission or go through channels felt like a weight lifted from his shoulders.

  The idea that they might die in the process was at best a secondary concern.

  22

  “I don’t know,” the prisoner rasped, a thin stream of blood trickling from his mouth.

  Dex glanced over at Erin and Fatima, twin expressions of frustration darkening their features. “I believe him,” Dex said.

  Fatima glowered. “You say your people are responsible for taking us. For infecting us. But you believe this man knows nothing about it?”

  “I do,” Dex said with a nod. “You have to understand how isolated Threnody is. They only started allowing very limited trade a few years ago, and even that was just a ploy to sneak agents out into the Alliance. The military keeps a close eye on them. If I’m right about what happened here, they’ll have worked through intermediaries a dozen levels deep.”

  Fatima turned back to the prisoner, a large man in his early thirties draped in solid muscle. His left arm was a twisted wreck, a gift from one of the prisoners who had snapped it like a chicken bone in a move that surprised everyone involved. “How can you be on a planet with orders to attack this camp and know nothing about why?”

  The prisoner sighed, which devolved into a wet cough halfway through. Dex was guessing the guy had a few broken ribs. “A call went up for mercenaries about a week ago. Usual job boards for people like us. The work orders were for veteran mercs with five years of experience or better. They wanted close combat fighters, people who didn’t need guns to kill. The sheet of requirements was pretty long, but it paid twice the going rate for standard work. Hired us, gave us the parameters, and dropped us here. The on-site overseer fed us updated orders over our comms.”

  Fatima frowned. “What were those orders? Be specific.”

  Dex almost flinched at the threat in her tone, but the prisoner either didn’t notice or didn’t care. “At first we were supposed to do two days of recon. But one of you killed a bunch of us, so they moved the initial test up. That’s why we attacked. We were supposed to swoop in, target and attack one of you apiece, then retreat. They said it was a calibration test. I have no idea what that means.”

  “I do,” Dex said, his veins going cold.

  Everyone looked at him, even the prisoner. Erin waved an impatient hand. “Don’t bother with foreplay, man. Just tell us.”

  Dex ran a hand over his head. “It’s what the proctors called the tests they used to determine our level of control over our gene modifications. Everyone has different body chemistry. Some of the mods affected how we viewed the world in a similar way as a brain disorder. Genetics is hard, but my people are very good at it. Most of us fell on a part of the spectrum of outcomes where our alterations didn’t cause many, or any, problems. I knew a girl who fell into a catatonic state at random because her Blessings caused a bunch of problems. The ones who didn’t have a baseline ability to cope were culled.”

  Fatima’s mouth curled in disgust. “Killed, you mean.”

  “Yeah,” Dex said with a sad nod of the head. “Killed. But the other ninety percent of us were fine day to day. The calibrations tested how we did when our glands were activated. Again, most of us were fine, but some people would fall into blind rages. Others had less developed passive Blessings and the strain on their bodies was too much.”

  “You lost me there,” Erin said.

  Dex sighed. “So, when I trigger my artificial glands, it isn’t just like super strong adrenaline. I mean, it is something like that, but the hormone itself is a catalyst. It doesn’t just give me a boost, it actually forces dormant muscle fibers to activate, my brain to work harder and faster, even my senses to become sharper. It’s like a signal to a machine that has extra parts that don’t work all the time because it would take too much power to run it. When I trigger, my heart has to beat
faster and harder to provide oxygenated blood to muscles that suddenly need more of it. My passive alterations reinforce my blood vessels, for example. But since every person is different, not all of the passive ones are as effective as they should be. Some of the active ones are too strong, forcing more hormones into our systems than is anything close to safe.”

  “My god,” the prisoner said, his eyes wide. “How—Jesus, how many of you did that kill?”

  The others didn’t silence him. If anything, the question was reflected in the eyes of the women as well.

  “The number varied,” Dex said flatly. “But the survival rate from birth to adulthood on Threnody is something in the neighborhood of fifty percent.”

  *

  They questioned the prisoner for a while longer, trying to coax any and every detail possible from his interactions with the overseer. The man in charge might not be directly linked to Threnody, but to judge the results of the experiment he had to have a working knowledge of its purpose and parameters.

  It was this thought that drove Dex to take a walk away from the camp, just far enough that he could still make out its fires in the distance. He found a shelf of rock beneath a spreading tree and sat there to think.

  Fatima and Erin peppered him with questions about the horrific mortality rate among his people, questions Dex was unable to answer to their satisfaction. Of course they worried that half the prisoners would die after saying something as stupid and dangerous as the truth.

  Yet he didn’t believe that would be the case. The others took that statement with the strange blend of desperate hope and cautious skepticism he expected. The reason he gave was simple: if it was going to happen, it probably already would have. It was the truth.

  Just not all of the truth.

  Dex wasn’t a specialist in biology or genetics, but everyone who grew up on Threnody—survived living there might be a more accurate phrase—absorbed a solid working knowledge of both through osmosis. The plain fact was that the technology to do what had been done here was well outside the capabilities of his people. The reason they lost half the population was because altering human genetics in even the relatively minor ways they did was monstrously difficult. It was why children on Threnody were altered when they were still a clump of cells.

  Retroactively editing entire chunks of a genome in an adult was unheard of. Not undreamed of; Dex read enough to understand it was a long-held dream. But the practical issues were legion. The effect changing DNA had on a body was how cancer worked. The only practical example Dex knew of when it came to recoding DNA was a trial that replaced a single base pair as a proof of concept. Results were mixed at best.

  So where had this technology come from? Most importantly, why would his people want to endow anyone with the Blessings? Threnody, as represented by the vast majority of the population of the planet itself, wanted to strike out at the Alliance. To prove as a people they were not the egotistical relics of a bygone era the galaxy at large portrayed them as. Everyone back home already had Blessings, and if the ruling council wanted to do something as simple as kill, their knowledge of genetics would allow them to devise diseases to make the Black Death look like a mild case of hay fever.

  For all their drawbacks and dangers, the Blessings were a net positive in biological terms. It didn’t make sense.

  His mind quieted at that last thought. Dex found a moment of perfect silence, a mental emptiness rare for him. Artists through the ages have used every means from drugs to meditation to touch that quiet, like the breath between an empty universe and the big bang that follows. A moment of infinite emptiness and pregnant possibility.

  In that pause, the facts came together so powerfully that he made a noise.

  “Ohhh,” he breathed to himself. “Oh, you clever fuckers.”

  Facts:

  The population of the infected camp represented a wide cross-section of humanity. Age, race, sex, even a nice spread of environmental factors from long-term spacers to those who lived in the open on planets. As an experimental control, this wasn’t great. But as a means of testing whether certain factors might contribute to a specific failure within the retrovirus or whatever it was, it was useful.

  The infected prisoners dealt with long-term illness, both physical and mental, long before Dex showed up. His appearance was unlikely to have had any effect on this. Timing seemed a better explanation. Dex was supposed to be one of the last people dropped on the planet, which meant those sickest for the longest might have been approaching the end of whatever cycle the infection went through in their bodies.

  Those very sick people got better in the weeks after Dex arrived, presumably on schedule.

  Not long after that, men show up with orders to assault the camp, probably to test how well the modifications held.

  But what if that was only a secondary criteria? What if those mercenaries were supposed to test the population’s strength as a prelude to killing them all? The more he thought about it, the more sense it made. Dex slowly became certain this was the case, because he was sure the experiment was a failure.

  The people here had mostly gotten through the changes in their bodies. The first waves of the ill got better, grew stronger, and their brains adapted to the new chemical balance imbued by the retrovirus. In effect this turned them into superior humans, at least in purely physical terms.

  Dex’s insight was that he knew, deep in his Threnodian bones, that his people did not want to give citizens of the Alliance the Blessings. He knew the hate and anger his people carried for the outside world. The engineered soldiers of Threnody, a planet on the borderlands of space hundreds of years earlier, had won wars for what would become the Alliance. In return, the Alliance eventually treated those genetic enhancements and the people who prided themselves on them as a joke to be told at parties. As if the men and women whose brilliance in creating them and the soldiers who fought so well because of them were mentally unhinged simply because they found faith in their ability to change the very nature of a human being.

  Dread certainty grew in Dex that the point of this experiment was to give broken versions of the Blessings to the people of the Alliance. To grant immense strength and speed and endurance, but also to shatter minds and cause the kinds of damage that took half his people to the grave each year. What better revenge could there be for a race of people who worshiped at the altar of the double helix than killing their enemies with the expression of that faith looked on so scornfully by outsiders?

  Dex tried to imagine the bloodshed that would follow if even a tiny fraction of any Alliance base or colony was infected. A group of psychotic, paranoid, uncontrollably furious people with the bodies of super soldiers would wreak unspeakable damage on everyone around them.

  The experiment here had failed because that hadn’t happened. The people here had adapted. Made it through the change without self-destructing. Dex had no doubt other attempts would happen once their camp was cleansed. After all, gene alteration of any kind was very hard, and they’d come damned close to getting it right this time.

  Dex had no intention of giving them another shot at it.

  He just had to figure out how to go about stopping them.

  23

  It took another week to figure it out, but Iona finally saw the pattern. The Smith was most frequently seen in three settled systems relatively close to a cluster of surveyed but unsettled systems near the periphery of Alliance space. This alone would not have been enough to work out a destination. After all, you can’t track a ship through the Cascade.

  But Iona wasn’t going to let a little thing like the impossible stop her from finding Dex.

  While a ship inside a Cascade tunnel functionally existed in its own separate universe, the trip itself began and ended according to well-known principles. Ships didn’t navigate while in transit. Instead, any gate generator capable of creating a Cascade point spent an amount of energy proportional to the mass of the vessel entering it and the distance of travel to form a tem
porary passageway through the Cascade. A tunnel that any vessel entering could coast through and exit automatically. Iona thought of them more like bubbles. The image of an air bubble rising through water was a visual her mind couldn’t shed.

  Essentially, a finite quantity of energy was spent, and when it ran out, the ship within popped back into the universe. The level of energy and its direction of fire was calibrated exceptionally finely to drop ships right where they wanted to be. The Cascade itself was uniform for the most part, though rough patches did exist. The rules of distance within it were understood even if they didn’t match up with the physical laws of the universe itself.

  Using this information, Iona refined an almost terrifying number of algorithms for determining travel distance based on the overall energy output of a gate. The Smith rarely used system gates since it had its own, which made the volume of information about its travel small. Yet it did use them occasionally, perhaps owing to some unforeseen problem with their modified engines or possibly a desire not to alert other parties that the ship had its own gate pylons. Nonmilitary vessels capable of entering the Cascade under their own power were relatively rare. They made excellent targets.

  And so Iona worked. Day and night, without rest, she toiled away running simulation after simulation. Every possible destination based on the energy output and directionality of their gate jumps. Every estimate for the mass of the Smith she could cull from third-party observations. Every bit of data on what her engines did to the ship, from how much the mass changed thanks to the modifications to what the probable power draw for them might be. Those figures were best guesses sent to her by Blue, who had a shrewd idea of how his people had altered the freighter.

  Iona interacted with the crew only when necessary. The rest of the time she might as well have been a coat rack for all the life she displayed outwardly.

  Inside, her deep mind ran at speeds that would have been dangerous were she not using her body’s resources solely to manage the insane processing power required. A hundred thousand simulated jumps per minute, flowing waves of changing variables making each new iteration a micron more accurate. New information flooded her in fits and starts as other systems queued and transmitted responses to her requests for data. Anywhere and everywhere the Smith had traveled—might have traveled—was a worthy target for her efforts. Each new location, even if it was just a fuel stop, gave her another data point to work with.