The Elderon Chronicles Box Set

by Tarah Benner

“Porter!” Tripp hollers, making my eardrums throb.

  I’m sort of shocked that Porter left. Wasn’t he just acting all concerned?

  “Now I’m trapped in my own office,” Tripp mutters, “while the man who murdered my father does what he likes on my space station.”

  A second later, Porter dashes back in, holding a bottle of bourbon in what looks like some kind of protective gel sac — presumably to keep the bottle from breaking in the event that the artificial gravity is interrupted.

  “I think you’ve had enough,” I say, shooting Tripp a pointed look.

  “Not yet,” he slurs, snapping his fingers at Porter. “I’m an orphan now, Maggie . . . at the tender age of twenty-nine.”

  I’m a little taken aback. I’ve never seen Tripp this way.

  Porter hesitates, still clutching the bottle. Clearly he’s thinking Tripp’s had enough, too — otherwise he’d be following orders without so much as a question. Ping just looks uncomfortable.

  “Well, don’t just stand there,” says Tripp, glaring at Porter.

  Porter seems to cave, shuffling across the room to pour his boss another drink.

  “Look, I have a plan,” I say, ignoring the strong scent of alcohol wafting off of Tripp. “Is that desktop secure?”

  “It’s air-gapped,” says Ping. “We’re working off another one that’s connected to the network. I took the battery out.”

  “Good,” I say, turning back to Tripp. “I need you to get a message to the police. Clear Jonah’s name so he can go to the air force and explain what’s going on. They’ll send reinforcements to help the Space Force. We met a guy who’s developed a weapon that can incapacitate the bots. If we had a few of those, we could launch an attack and take out the humanoids before Mordecai knew what was happening.”

  But Tripp doesn’t appear to be listening. He takes another swig from his glass, and I resist the urge to knock it out of his hand.

  “Mordecai can’t fight a war on two fronts,” I continue. “If we strike while he’s occupied with an attack from the outside, we might be able to take out the bots.”

  “Won’t work,” Tripp mumbles.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I can’t get any messages out.”

  “Somebody must be able to get a message out,” I say. “The press corps is sending out Mordecai’s propaganda videos.”

  “She’s right,” says Ping, regaining some of his trademark enthusiasm. I can tell his usual sunny demeanor has been dimmed by Tripp’s drunken misery.

  “The press corps is being watched,” says Tripp. “We’ll never get a message out.”

  “We got you a message without Mordecai intercepting it,” I say. “We’ll find another way.”

  “Can’t be done.”

  “What about those dead agents?” I ask, rounding on Porter. As the resident busybody of Maverick, he should at least be able to provide some information. “Their superiors must be waiting for an update. How long before they send in backup?”

  “I don’t know,” says Porter. “Their agencies are probably occupied with all the new terror attacks on Earth. Mordecai took responsibility, so they’re probably looking for him.”

  “Exactly.”

  “On Earth,” Porter adds. “They have no reason to believe he’s here.”

  “What about the Impetus launch?” I ask. “No one wanted to know why Maverick was sending a nearly empty shuttle into space?”

  Tripp shakes his head. “The Impetus is a private shuttle owned by Maverick Enterprises. It’s none of the feds’ business.”

  “It still launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base without any prior authorization. Won’t they be trying to reach you to figure out what the hell is going on?”

  “Probably . . . Hell, there could be a warrant for my arrest, too. Good luck with that . . . The air force can kiss my rosy ass.”

  I fall into silence, stewing with annoyance. I know that Tripp is grieving, but he’s acting like a child. Not only that, but he seems to have poisoned everyone around him with his shitty attitude. Am I the only one who hasn’t given up?

  “Face it, Mags,” says Tripp, downing another swig of bourbon and waggling two fingers to summon Porter. “We can’t get your boyfriend out of jail, and we can’t get a message out. The bots have taken over . . . The Space Force is useless . . .”

  I glance at Ping, who seems to deflate again under the weight of Tripp’s prognosis.

  Tripp reaches behind him for another highball glass and slams it down in front of me. “This is Mordecai’s colony now . . . We’re just living in it.”

  9

  Maggie

  As Porter leaves to get a new bottle of bourbon for Tripp, a tidal wave of despair crashes over me.

  Tripp has given up. He saw the carnage in BlumBot. He watched Mordecai murder his father. He witnessed the bot massacre and sat helplessly as Mordecai took control of the space station. Now he’s trapped in his own office.

  A moment later, Porter reappears and offers me some bourbon. I down the drink and cringe as the alcohol burns the back of my throat.

  This bottle probably cost more than I make in a month, and still it tastes like shit. I’ve never been into hard alcohol, but the longer I sit here stewing in the taste of bourbon and the scent of stale sweat, the more the fire inside me grows.

  Mordecai is a coward. He’s a spoiled brat who never got enough love as a child, and now he’s taking his resentment out on the world. Everyone is afraid of him — even his own sister — and look where that fear has gotten us.

  Maybe it’s the bourbon talking. Maybe I’m just sick of losing. I shake my head in a burst of fury and slam my glass down on the table.

  “That’s it,” I say, getting to my feet and swiping the glass out of Tripp’s hand.

  “What the —”

  I kick him in the shin.

  “Ow!”

  “Get up! Put some pants on! This is pathetic.”

  Ping’s eyebrows shoot into his hair. He hasn’t touched his own drink, but he sets it down anyway.

  “I just lost my father, Maggie,” says Tripp in a miserable voice. “I reserve the right to be pathetic.”

  “You know as well as I do that Strom would blow a fucking gasket if he saw his only son lying on the couch drunk while a psychopath took over his space station.”

  I get a tiny twitch of guilt as the harshness of the words pour out of me, but I swallow down my remorse and fix Tripp with a stern look. “Get up.”

  Tripp doesn’t say a word. He pulls himself up until he’s halfway vertical, but he looks pitiful and a little scared.

  “Get him some coffee,” I say to Porter. “And a shower.”

  Porter nods, looking a little impressed, and scurries off down the hallway.

  “What’s the plan, Maggie?” asks Tripp.

  “First we need to figure out where Mordecai is keeping Ziva.”

  “I can tell you where he’s keeping her.”

  “Inside BlumBot?”

  Tripp nods slowly.

  “Then we need to get her out. As long as Mordecai is holding her hostage, he controls the bots.”

  “Good luck,” says Tripp. “The place will be swarming. He’ll have the exit completely blocked — no way in or out.”

  “Then we’ll have to get creative.”

  I rack my brain, trying to think. There has to be another way out. So many people worked at BlumBot. There has to be an emergency exit.

  “Can you get us eyes on Ziva?” I ask.

  “I could if Mordecai hadn’t blocked my access.”

  Tripp is the definition of unhelpful. I round on Ping. “Can you hack into the security feeds?”

  Ping quirks an eyebrow. “You have to ask?”

  I grin.

  Ping seems overjoyed to have a concrete task. He gets up and hobbles over to the desktop still connected to the network and starts clacking away. I watch as he pulls up a matrix of all the security feeds inside the colony. The reverse images of the h
allways, fitness center, and dining hall surround his head.

  Finally he gets to BlumBot, and I see Ziva pacing. She’s alone in what looks like an empty office. There’s no one in there with her — just a desk and a chair.

  Ping pulls up a blueprint of the middle deck, and I scan the maze of lines for another way out. There appears to be some kind of escape hatch leading to the lower deck.

  “What’s below that?” I say to Ping, scanning the mosaic of feeds.

  He pulls up a few feeds coming from cameras on the lower deck. Squinting at the docking zone, my brain identifies a familiar face.

  It’s a woman dressed as a bot, but she doesn’t move like a bot. It’s the woman from the shuttle, and my heart leaps into my throat. She’s exiting the docking zone carrying a long black case. It looks almost like an instrument, but something tells me it’s more sinister than that.

  “Switch to the feed of the mall,” I say to Ping, watching as she takes the escalator.

  Ping flips through thumbnails from all the feeds on that deck, and I stop him when the imposter’s face appears.

  She isn’t exactly hard to spot. With the colony still on lockdown, the mall is empty. No one sees the woman as she rides the escalator up to one of the cafés and sets the case down on a table.

  Ping and I watch in puzzled silence as she opens the lid and takes out what looks like pieces of a rifle.

  “Is that . . .”

  She begins to put the pieces together, and my worst fears are confirmed. Everything I thought I knew about this woman comes crashing down around me. She isn’t our ally. She’s here to kill.

  “Call the Space Force,” I say to Ping. “Get someone up there now.”

  Ping doesn’t hesitate. He immediately calls down to the defense sector, trying to reach someone in the war room.

  “Pick up, pick up . . .”

  But they aren’t picking up.

  I was right. She isn’t a bot. But she isn’t from the government, either. She’s a rogue agent. She’s here alone. And she’s come to hurt humans.

  “Who is that?” I demand, freezing the video feed. The woman’s face is tilted up toward the camera. She’s looking to see if she’s being watched.

  “Only one way to find out,” says Ping, still waiting for the Space Force to answer. He pulls his fingers apart over the woman’s face so that a small red square frames her head. He holds down a finger over the projection, and a little hourglass pops up to run a facial-recognition check.

  A bar to the left of the video feed slides out, and half a dozen women’s pictures appear. The photos are covered in little red dots — points the facial-recognition software uses to identify a match.

  Finally the desktop gives off a friendly ding, and a new photo appears. It’s the woman all right. I recognize her long braids and dark eyes. But the words beneath her name don’t make any sense.

  “No way,” says Ping, sitting back in his chair. “Jade Armaz . . . I thought she was dead.”

  “Who’s Jade Armaz?”

  Ping looks surprised. Even Tripp looks somber at this news.

  “Jade Armaz,” says Tripp, as if I should know her. “She’s the founder of the Bureau for Chaos.”

  I’d never pick a drunk to help me ambush a potential shooter, but it’s all I’m working with at the moment. Neither the Space Force nor emergency dispatch would answer our calls, and Ping can’t walk on a broken leg.

  There’s only one man I’d want by my side for something like this, and he’s three hundred miles away on Earth. A drunk and surly Tripp will have to suffice. He’s really just moral support.

  We’re in the air ducts crawling toward Jade’s last location, and my breathing is shallow and erratic.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” slurs Tripp, his voice echoing in the duct.

  “What doesn’t make sense?” Me preparing to confront a shooter?

  “Physical attacks aren’t really their thing. The Bureau was all about cyber crimes.”

  “And this woman is the founder? She started it all?” That seems like a pretty big deal.

  “I mean . . . supposedly.”

  “Supposedly?”

  “The Bureau for Chaos isn’t registered with the SEC, Mags. These organizations are always decentralized — opaque. They keep them that way on purpose. Jade Armaz is only well-known because she made some vigilante videos railing against corporate America. She fell off the radar in the late sixties. No one has seen or heard from her since.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “Not really,” says Tripp. “These people are usually making terrorist threats from their parents’ basements. They fall off the radar, and a dozen more losers pick up right where they left off.”

  “And that’s what you think happened to Jade?”

  “How should I know? I have too many things to think about without worrying about some pissed-off hacker.”

  “She’s a terrorist.”

  “Whatever,” says Tripp, a little too loudly. “That’s why we hired an army of pen-testers. It’s why I created the Space Force.”

  “A whole lot of good that’s done.”

  “Hey,” Tripp slurs. “If you don’t like it, why don’t you ask Sergeant Asswipe why his team can’t handle a psycho like Mordecai? He’s only one person.”

  I take a deep breath. Tripp is drunk. He just lost his dad. It wouldn’t be fair to remind him that he’s the one who brought a bunch of vulnerable bots aboard without the Space Force’s knowledge. It would be unfair to remind him that it was his unwillingness to pay human employees that got him in this mess.

  Fuming, I make Tripp wait so I can climb ahead. He only makes one inappropriate comment about my ass before I get us to the first-class suites.

  The first duct I come to, I hear Pacman sound effects drifting through the vent. Taking a deep breath, I bang on the vent cover.

  The Pacman sound effects stop. I bang again — louder this time — and I hear a computer chair rolling back. A pair of bare feet appear in front of me, and I wonder whom they might be attached to.

  “Hey! Down here!”

  The pair of feet shift back on the rug, and two dark eyes stare back at me. They belong to a nerdy-looking Indian guy with glossy black hair. He’s shirtless, wearing only a pair of plaid pajama bottoms, and looks totally confused.

  “Let us out!” I call. “It’s an emergency.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Tripp Van de Graaf — pleasure,” says Tripp, squeezing in beside me and pressing his face against the vent. “I hate to ask you to let us in at such an ungodly hour —”

  “It’s eight a.m.,” I mutter.

  “But the fate of this entire colony could rest in your sticky hands.”

  “Tripp!”

  The man just stares back at us in shock. Either he’s been up all night playing Pacman, or this is how he starts his day. Whose suite did we accidentally drop into?

  The man straightens up, and for a moment I think we’ve lost him. But then he reappears to the side of the vent, and I hear him trying to loosen the screws. Tripp waggles his eyebrows, but I recoil in disgust. I’m starting to feel drunk just from breathing the same air, and he never did take a shower. It’s at least ninety degrees inside the air duct, and an armed assassin is skulking around the colony.

  Finally the man manages to get the vent cover off, and I tumble out into the room. His suite smells like corn chips, energy drinks, and body odor, which I guess is all you can expect when you put a bunch of nerds under house arrest.

  “We were never here,” I say, shooting Pajamas a threatening look.

  The man just stares back, completely shocked to have Tripp Van de Graaf standing in his suite.

  “Thank you for your hospitality,” slurs Tripp. “Next time you want a space walk, you just let me know.”

  I roll my eyes, shove past Tripp, and touch my brand-new Optix. It isn’t registered to anyone yet, and Ping is standing by.

  “Middle deck,” says Ping. “S
ector G. Moving toward the dining hall.”

  He ends the call immediately just as we discussed. That way if Mordecai intercepts the message, he won’t have any clue who’s speaking or what it means. I pull out Jonah’s handgun and chamber a round, and Tripp eyes me warily.

  I can tell he thinks I’ve lost my mind, but if we don’t stop Jade, no one will.

  I start jogging down the hall in the direction Ping indicated while Tripp huffs drunkenly behind. I run into the nearest stairwell, taking the steps two at a time. My body is protesting with its aches and fatigue, but soon I’m half a flight ahead of him.

  I burst out of the stairwell, breathing hard, and see the woman striding toward the dining hall.

  She’s definitely shorter than the average bot, still wearing those towering heels. She looks odd walking down the hallway in that short white dress toting an automatic rifle.

  Steeling myself for the worst, I stop where I’m standing and raise my weapon. “Jade Armaz. Freeze!”

  Jade slows her pace but doesn’t stop moving. I can sense her listening, but she doesn’t surrender. She turns to look over her shoulder, eyes glinting with the spark of a challenge. She pivots the rest of her body toward me, holding her weapon with ease.

  My mouth goes dry, but I hold my ground.

  “Drop it or I’ll shoot.”

  The corner of Jade’s mouth twitches into a smirk, and I see the flicker of madness — the woman who started the Bureau for Chaos.

  Her dark eyes study my face, as though looking for that killer instinct and finding mine lacking.

  “Drop it.”

  Jade breaks into a wide grin, and I have a horrible feeling that she’s calling my bluff. “No.”

  I swallow, but it seems I have no saliva left. I am officially out of options. “I’ll shoot.”

  Something like amusement twinkles in her eyes. Jade is enjoying this.

  “No . . . I don’t think you will.”

  Now she’s done it — she’s called me out. She just took my last option off the table, and a surge of manic energy rips through my body.

  Everything that’s happened in the past two days seems to come to a sudden head. All the fighting, confusion, terror, and heartache is imprinted in my bones. I’m hurting, I’m frustrated, and I’m scared, but most of all I am pissed.