by M. D. Cooper
He still did them.
CHAPTER ONE
STELLAR DATE: 08.29.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Night Park, Fresno Heights Residential Area
REGION: Cruithne Station, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
Cruithne was a mess.
Brit Sykes stood on the edge of Night Park, most of which was cordoned off by construction barriers. The usual bright mix of the vendors’ colored tents was like a paint spill, everything misshapen and smashed together. From where she stood, Brit could see the massive plascrete tree standing in the fountain marking the center point of the park. The black forms of crows in the plascrete branches looked down on construction workers and merchants trying to salvage what was left of their wares.
The signs of the firefight were everywhere; visible as bloodstains and long scorches left by pulse weapons, as well as splintered holes from projectiles and grenades.
She had missed Andy and the kids by two days. She had been in the habit of scanning the port manifests of every port she visited for a couple years now, and had experienced a moment of silent panic when Sunny Skies came up on the list but she couldn’t find where it had left. Later, while investigating the mass exodus of ships from Cruithne, she had found a new light freighter named the Worry’s End. It carried the same profile as Andy’s ship, and she understood what had happened.
A worker walked past her, giving her a wary look. Brit was dressed in black armor as sleek and supple as leather but with kinetic hardening capabilities. A low-slung holster rested on one hip—carrying a projectile pistol that was against station regs. Strangely, no one seemed to care, even after the recent fighting—that was the charm of Cruithne. It never changed, even when it really should.
A series of throwing knives lined the small of her back, serving double-duty as scallops in the armor. Her helmet hung from a clip on the other side of her belt. She’d cut her hair short and it stood out in spiky feathers on her head. Brit supposed she didn’t look much different than one of the wiry crows looking down from the fountain.
The armor was new—well, new to Brit—and she was glad to have it when on a station like Cruithne. Not only did it serve as an EV suit, but it also had additional antennae embedded within to boost her Link capabilities, alongside signal-scattering capabilities capable of hiding her from sensors. It had been designed for long range TSF surveillance operations that might involve clinging to the side of a ship for days.
There’s nothing to be learned here, Brit thought as she turned from the station workers, soldiers, and merchants. Anything interesting has long since been cleaned up.
Of course, if anything had been worth hiding, she knew exactly where it would be.
She left Night Park and took a maglev down to the shopping promenade where the Heartbridge clinic—the same one she had bombed the year before—now stood with open doors, accepting a line of residents with various ailments or injuries from the battle.
Brit took up a position near a bench, and watched a mother with two little girls, probably eight or nine, wondering how similar Tim might be to them. One of the girls seemed to already hold the weight of the world in her eyes, while the other couldn’t stop gamboling around like a colt, swinging her arms and singing a random song.
The mother carried herself with easy grace, laying a hand on the sad girl’s shoulder while tracking the wild girl with a smile. Brit’s hand fell to the butt of her pistol, and she wondered what her disconnect was; that she often took pleasure in her warrior’s grace, but had felt so awkward around her own children.
She pushed the thoughts away. She was here for a reason. The clinic was just a nerve point among many, and she needed to extract information about Heartbridge’s current status. The newsfeeds were on fire with their boosted stories about the loss of their mega-hospital the Benevolent Hand, which Brit knew to have been a battle juggernaut with a close-combat capability rivaling the TSF’s best squadrons.
Brit took a spot in the line waiting to enter the clinic, a few people back from the mother with the girls. It soon became clear that the sad-looking girl was the reason they were waiting in line. The girl glanced at her once, eyes going wide at the sight of Brit’s armor and weapon. Brit gave her a wink but the girl only looked away quickly and then got distracted when her sister pulled her hair.
Apparently seeing armed and armored figures was common enough on Cruithne that the surprise didn’t last long.
Brit crossed her arms and looked out into the promenade, watching people walk by. She had come back to Cruithne because Heartbridge had suffered a confusing loss here. In studying the flight manifests of the ships leaving during the space battle that had led to Benevolent Hand’s destruction, it had become clear that the whole thing had been a massive screening operation to hide something leaving the asteroid.
What she couldn’t seem to find was what was being hidden. If she had learned anything about Heartbridge over the last two years, it would have something to do with AI. Not that Heartbridge was much different than at least ten other major corporations pursuing AI technologies. What made Heartbridge unique was they had the biological resources to create and maintain a place like Fortress 8221.
After months of following logistical trails—the kind of things large corporations had difficult hiding since they still needed mundane resources like fuel and food—she was nearly certain Heartbridge was responsible for 8221. While the knowledge wasn’t much different than what she had known when she had left Andy on High Terra, she now understood how they had used pirates to secure their test subjects, how they had created extensive separation between their operation and the rest of their corporate activities so that everything was wrapped in layers of deniability. She had proved her hypothesis and now it was time to move forward.
Brit had become certain Heartbridge had established a second development facility after the loss of 8221. For a long time, she’d thought it might have been hidden on the Benevolent Hand. However, after the ship’s destruction, the communications traffic she was monitoring didn’t indicate any change in the company’s logistical operations consistent with the loss of such a facility.
It took half an hour to reach the first triage desk. The girls were gone and Brit had been left to watch an old man with a hacking cough that left traces of blood on the handkerchief he squeezed in one fist.
She made an excuse about knee pain, looking directly at the nurse whose eyes flashed with augments, knowing she was being recorded but also trusting her armor to break up the recording’s visual patterns, providing the visual of an entirely different person on any recordings. People at places like Heartbridge relied so much on mods and augmented reality, that they barely looked at anything with the Mark I eyeball. If you could mess with their data streams, it made them easy to fool.
In another ten minutes, she was in one of the ceramic-walled treatment rooms with a bored tech who didn’t even make eye contact with her as he held out the data pad he used to scan her knee.
The tech looked up from his pad with a frown. “There’s nothing wrong with your knee except a whole lot of scarring,” he said.
From her seated position on the ceramic bench, Brit kicked the tech neatly on the chin, snapping the back of his head against the wall. He crumpled to the floor, data pad resting in his lap.
What was it Andy used to say? Our scars make us? He liked those kinds of sentimental aphorisms, as if words made things real. It might as well have been Charlie Sykes talking through his son.
The smooth wall of the exam room hid a sliding door that gave way under one of Brit’s pilfered security tokens. She moved quickly down the revealed hallway, looking for the datacenter that should be located at the rear of the facility—if it followed standard Heartbridge design.
During the last two years, Brit had spent a lot of time within Heartbridge facilities, learning their corporate lingo. She sometimes found herself admiring the thought they put into simple things like space design. Every clinic followed the same basic p
atterns. A tech could serve nearly anywhere in the Sol System and perform their duties, find files, and know where the restrooms were located. A patient knew what to expect every time.
Even their corporate offices were made of the same white ceramic that reminded her of an ancient surgery theater, ready to be sluiced clean of blood and any other biological embarrassments. Nothing stuck to surfaces at Heartbridge, which was an ideal that served as their corporate philosophy—in spirit, if not official doctrine.
Brit smiled to herself. Andy would appreciate the metaphor.
Brit turned a corner and was met with the reinforced door she expected. Accessing its administrative system, she bypassed the local control and pulled up a menu that only applied to remote access requests. In a minute, the seals released and the door swung open to reveal the on-site data repository. Brit stepped inside and pulled the door closed behind her, enjoying the cool air in the server area.
She didn’t have much time before the tech either woke up or someone found him. As much as she would have liked to check on the current data streams passing through the server, she pulled up a series of protocols she knew applied to the Heartbridge special projects division. After searching among various data sets, she found the channel she was looking for and leaned against the smooth wall as she started recording.
Lists of supplies, loading manifests, employee schedules and human resource requests ran across her Link. She paused every minute or so to review some interesting bit of information but let the rest fall into her storage banks. She would review all of it later, look for patterns and anomalies.
The purpose of this breach—as with most of her investigations over the past year—was to find the location of Heartbridge’s new research facility. She hoped the recent catastrophe on the Benevolent Hand would lead to a slip in their data security. Someone would speak out of emotion, rather than care, and reveal the location of the new lab. Or perhaps someone would complain about live shipments from some remote station where human specimens could be found cheaply and without any concern over official inquiries.
To aid in this search, Brit maintained a list of ongoing local conflicts throughout Sol, waiting for the moment when Heartbridge would try to exploit a refugee crisis or some other similar situation where the value of human life approached zero.
Brit had learned a few months ago, that as long as she searched for the name Cal Kraft, she would find what she was looking for. He had recently been reassigned to the Benevolent Hand, but that hadn’t changed his involvement in the special projects division.
The tap she had on the exam room’s hidden door alerted her to an attempted breach a moment before a series of dull thuds echoed down the corridor.
Brit accelerated her search, only looking at items which met her ideal parameters, anything that jumped out off the baseline.
She paused on a fuel purchasing report. Five cargo ships had been dispatched from High Terra, and three from Eros with invoices for twice the necessary amount of fuel to reach their stated destinations.
The two leaving Eros had flight paths logged for Ceres. Yet—as far as Brit knew, at least—Ceres was the one place Heartbridge didn’t run clinics, what with the Anderson Collective controlling all corporate activity on the dwarf planet.
Ceres was like the opposite-world of Cruithne, controlled by an autocratic corporate board responsible for accomplishing great things like their Mini Black Hole, while also limiting the population’s access to the rest of Sol. Not that anyone in the Collective cared—they were part of the New Project, as they liked to say.
Brit quickly copied the manifest information from freighters, including registry and crew data, and logged off the data stream. She stood, stretched her sore shoulders, and pulled a mag-grenade from a pocket in her armor. She set the grenade’s timer and fixed it to the center of the server stack, then left the room, closing the ceramic door behind her.
“Hey!” someone shouted.
At the end of the hallway near the exam room entrance, three soldiers in iridescent body armor came around the corner. They knelt in firing positions and raised what looked like projectile rifles.
Heartbridge had no apparent concern for station policies, either.
The hallway was a dead end on the data room. Brit spun to grab the door she had just closed. She managed to get behind it as a barrage of bullets struck the ceramic surface. Shards exploded off the door, filling the air with pale dust.
Brit grabbed the helmet from her waist and pulled it over her head. The HUD immediately oriented itself and brought up battle statistics on the hallway, the weapons it identified, and the bio signatures on her attackers. Their armor appeared to have similar kinetic dampening capabilities as hers, so she could dump bullets on them all day with little effect.
Reaching for two more grenades, Brit configured the devices for area concussion and tossed them for maximum bounce out into the narrow hallway.
“Grenade!” someone shouted.
She heard scuffling sounds on the other side of the door as the Heartbridge guards took cover. The grenades weren’t intended for them, however. The two explosions radiated hard concussive waves, amplified within the narrow hallway. A heavy crash followed the explosions as the ceiling collapsed.
Brit pushed the door open and found the hallway filled with dust and floating debris. Her HUD outlined the walls and floor, revealing the ceiling to be a mess of broken support systems and the maintenance passage all Heartbridge facilities had above this corridor. Using the walls, she kicked herself up into the maintenance shaft and scrambled away from the guards. Shouts behind her indicated they knew she had fled into the shaft.
Her armor hardened across her lower stomach as she took fire from below. Brit threw herself forward in the dust-filled space—the only filthy part of Heartbridge’s clinic.
From her current position, the shaft only went deeper into the clinic. The sounds of the guards pushing through the debris in the hallway meant she was being followed and couldn’t go back. Brit brought up the generic clinic schematics—praying this one didn’t deviate—and took a left down the first intersection, then a right. The passage came to a dead end with a pressure door beneath where she lay.
Brit unlatched its fasteners, and fell through, landing on the desk in the triage lobby.
This time the woman working the desk paid rapt attention, sputtering as Brit gave the room a quick scan. One of the women at the front gave a fearful gasp as Brit’s helmeted head turned toward her and pulled a disinterested-looking boy close against her side.
Three people were carrying pulse weapons, and she suspected there would be another half dozen chemical slug throwers in the crowd.
This was Cruithne after all.
Still, no one made an aggressive move; guarded, cautious, fearful, yes, but no aggression.
“Ma’am!” the girl at the desk finally managed to articulate. “Get off my desk!”
“Sorry,” Brit said through her armor’s speakers as she leapt off into a space that had cleared before her. “Got a bit lost back there. Place is like a maze with all the white.”
Brit strode out of the clinic, and onto the promenade. She spared a glance over her shoulder; at the crowd milling about, at the woman at the desk trying to clean the debris—including the maintenance hatch—away so she could resume her work.
Now that’s unflappable.
Then a Heartbridge soldier crashed through the opening and fell on the desk, before rolling onto the woman.
Good thing she’s at a clinic, Brit thought as she doubletimed it down the promenade. She had just made it twenty meters when the dull thud of the grenade she had planted in the clinic’s data room exploded, the concussive blast echoing down the wide corridor.
People all around her stopped to look toward the source of the sound. Brit glanced back so she wouldn’t seem out of place. She was too far away now to make out the bored boy’s new expression. Maybe watching something explode would have a formative effect on him; sha
ke him out of his lethargy?
Maybe that’s what Tim would be like now: bored by the world, more interested in some pre-Link game he could play all the time that kept him staring into the distance, half-aware of the world around him, a rat clawing a food bar for some entertainment company’s promised reward.
She didn’t dwell on the thought as she pulled off her helmet, clipped it onto her belt once more, reached into her satchel, and pulled out a loose, diaphanous green robe. She pulled it over her shoulders and drew the hood over her head. Slowing her gait and moving through the crowd with deliberate calm.
Her armor’s dampening had done the trick; though she wasn’t masking her face, a pair of Heartbridge soldiers didn’t even slow as they rushed past. Brit allowed herself a small smile of satisfaction. Any day she got to beard the dragon in its lair was a good one.
Brit pulled up departure manifests schedules from the Port Authority’s net. There weren’t a lot of ships on Cruithne at the moment, and none were going to High Terra—which was just as well. Unless she were to find a fast cutter, High Terra was weeks away. Eros on the other hand was close, nearing the aphelion of its orbit.
Brit was worried there would be no ships headed there either, Eros wasn’t exactly the sort of place people who stopped at Cruithne traveled to, but three vessels had Eros logged as their next stop. Maybe some of the local thugs were going to try their hands at more legitimate trade after the latest dust up.
Either way, there was one departing in the next three hours—just enough time for Brit to get to the docks and secure a berth.
CHAPTER TWO
STELLAR DATE: 09.13.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sunny Skies
REGION: Approaching Mars, Marsian Protectorate, InnerSol
Cara had to protect her dad from these women.
Fran had been the most prickly in the two weeks since the Sunny Skies had escaped Cruithne within a swarm of pirate freighters. The technician’s shining artificial eyes flashed green as she seemed to look through people to the systems all around her, focused on repairing the blown-up portions of the ship, its battered airlocks, the hobbled AI, even threatening to ‘look into’ the comm systems bugs that made it possible for Cara to eavesdrop on Link conversations.
