by M. D. Cooper
Lyssa said. Her thoughts were getting mixed up. She thought this would have gone differently. She didn’t understand what Valih wanted. She thought they would see her as one of them. She hadn’t looked at the situation from their perspectives, tried to look out from the dark. She had already become something different than she had been before becoming part of Andy.
Was this what Dr. Jickson meant about driving each other mad? Was she already losing her mind?
Lyssa didn’t have an answer. She had wanted to help. She had failed to predict the possible outcomes of her actions and now everything was spiraling away. She closed the ports to the three AI and fled back inside herself, wiping away the darkness. She sat beside a stony creek with tall fir trees all around, hugging her knees and looking at the rushing water, swirling away like her frustrating thoughts.
She wished she had someone to talk to. Was that something she had learned from living with humans? That problems could be solved together? When Andy felt bad, he sought out Fran. When Cara was sad, she looked for her father. She thought about what it was like when Andy had held the dog, Em, and looked down into his brown eyes. There was no way they could understand each other and yet there it was: a caring that bridged the gap between species.
Lyssa felt more confused than ever. She found herself actually missing Fred. While he might have been annoying, she knew what to expect from him.
She activated the bird social sim and sat with the opening sequence of the game hanging in her mind. She wanted to play the game but didn’t see the point in doing it alone. She was frustrated the other three Weapon Born hadn’t been easier to talk to.
What was wrong with her?
Taking a chance, she reached out over the ship-board channel. “Cara,” she said. “Are you there?”
There was no answer. She thought she was going to have to ask again, when Cara said, “Lyssa? Isn’t my dad asleep?”
“Yes. He’s sleeping.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m—I’m lonely. Would you like to play a game with me?”
“A game?”
She could hear in Cara’s voice that the request surprised her. She had to be sitting at the communications console in the command deck, scanning the EM wavelengths the way she liked to do.
“What kind of game?” Cara asked.
“It’s a dating simulator with birds.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
Lyssa found herself grinning. “Neither do I, really. Would you like to play?”
“Sure,” Cara said. “Can I load it on the holodisplay up here?”
“You have to promise you won’t get mad and quit if you don’t get a date to prom,” Lyssa said.
“Why would I do that?”
“That’s what Fred at Mars 1 did. But he didn’t understand the game.”
“Isn’t dating stupid?” Cara asked.
“Mating rituals seem necessary. They do persist among your kind.”
“And birds, I guess,” Cara said.
They were halfway through the first section of the game when the proximity sensors shrieked in alarm.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
STELLAR DATE: 09.21.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Mercy’s Intent
REGION: En route to Clinic 46, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
“Kylan,” Cal Kraft said. “Tell me what you remember.”
Petral Dulan’s face contorted in a mask of fear and pain. “I remember killing so many of them. My arms and hands were all guns. Everywhere I turned, I shot them and shot them. I walked slowly down hallways. It was an empty place. They kept coming from around corners and outdoors and I shot them. They exploded or just fell over.”
“Who were they?”
“Soldiers. I don’t know. People in armor running at me. But the armor didn’t do any good.”
Cal nodded. They were sitting on either side of a small room, off the crew quarters of the Mercy’s Intent. All the surfaces in the room were covered in dense padding. Cal held a kill-switch shaped like a worry stone in one hand, ready to immobilize Dulan if she tried to attack him across the close space. Their knees were nearly touching.
He searched her face for signs she was fighting the intruder, a tremor behind the blue eyes. The dancing intelligence had been replaced by Kylan’s impassive stare, the numbness of a teenage boy ripped out of his life and cast adrift. Dulan’s wasn’t the first body he’d inhabited but he still looked lost.
“That isn’t the last thing you remember,” Craft said softly.
“They killed me,” Kylan said. “I was at the end of a long hallway shooting at them. They were behind some kind of shield with a big gun. It cut into me. I couldn’t fight back.”
“It was a plasma chaingun,” Kraft said. “Those monsters have the power to take down a small ship. You stood against it for nearly a minute. You should be proud.”
“It hurt,” Kylan said. “I was made of metal but I felt it cut into my arms and then my side. It burned. I was on fire.” His voice rose in pitch as he spoke.
“Kylan,” Cal said. “Listen to my voice. You’re here with me now.”
This part of the job appealed to Kraft. It spoke to something deep inside him; the kid trapped in the airlock who decided to live. Maybe he, too, had become bodiless after that experience. He remembered the terror on the boy’s face when he’d torn the helmet free. He’d found gloves on a girl already dead. He’d only gotten one magboot off a struggling boy but it had been enough.
What were their names?
Cal might remember if he tried hard enough but it didn’t matter. Kylan might remember his brother and sister and mother if he tried hard enough, too, if Cal pushed him. But it didn’t matter anymore. The boy had become something new and powerful.
The combination of the AI implant and the limbic overlay had turned Dulan into a marionette. So far, she had been the most successful experiment.
Cal had watched her for hours, waiting for the moment of searing self-destruction when she tried to claw her eyes out, tear the flesh off her skull. But it never came. Kylan remained in control, slipping quickly into mastery over her long arms and legs, so much different than his body. The previous failures had been boys similar to him. Since they were able to communicate with Kylan during the transition process, it was easy to think he was the one overcoming any obstacles that arose. It was the host that made it possible, though. Until now, they had all fought and died.
Why not Dulan?
A holodisplay floating near the wall next to Cal showed spectrum activity around Kylan. His Link with the ship’s network was plain enough. Cal had isolated those signals and set the system to look for other outbound requests. He suspected Dulan was biding her time, waiting somewhere in the dark to test her own Link. The technicians couldn’t tell him if it was possible or not. The likelihood depended on her. If an AI could Link to the outside world while implanted in a human, there was no physical reason the human mind couldn’t do so as well, even if the AI had control of their body.
He had plenty of time to observe and talk to Kylan. They were still five days out from their destination, an outpost between Jupiter and the Trojan asteroids that trailed at the planet’s fifth lagrange point. It was technically in the JC, but with nothing else around for millions of kilometers, no one ever had reason to pass by—though that was changing as the outer planets came into alignment.
There was a special clinic on the asteroid where Heartbridge had been testing the limbic overlays. He would do two things there: let the technicians get a look at Dulan, and monitor traffic out of Ceres for the W
orry’s End.
Cal leaned back and threw an arm across the top of the stiff couch. A range of emotions continued to play across Dulan’s face, struggling from pathetic to joyful and then back to sad.
“Let me ask you something, Kylan,” Cal said. Dulan’s eyebrows went up and her moist blue eyes fixed on him.
“Yes?” the boy asked in Dulan’s voice.
“What do you remember about your mother?”
“My mother?”
“Katherine Carthage. Owner of Carthage Shipping.”
A tear slipped from Dulan’s right eye. “I don’t know that name,” Kylan said.
A flicker of what looked like anger bent the edge of Dulan’s mouth. Cal smiled, leaning forward to get a better look. Was that her? The flicker faded and Dulan’s lip trembled. The kid started sobbing openly, which made Dulan look wretched. Her black hair wasn’t any less matted than it had been in the jail cell. He didn’t have anyone on board trained to perform any kind of personal care. He let his gaze go up and down her body for a second, considering what it would be like to bathe her.
When he met Kylan’s teary gaze, he shook his head, smirking. He wasn’t interested in confusing the kid any more, and he didn’t relish the idea of outright abusing Kylan. They had a tough job to do, and they would do it. He didn’t need to traumatize a boy just to get his hands on Petral Dulan. She belonged to him now. He could take his time.
He wondered if he took more pleasure in possessing a thing than using it. The use of things seemed to always end in disappointment.
A message request came over his Link with the Heartbridge board auth keys and Cal accepted without hesitation.
In the intricate hierarchy of the Heartbridge administration, they shared mostly equal status. Gallagher had a son with an eating disorder that therapy couldn’t seem to help; that meant she would never truly go the distance for the company. Her tragedy also made her an inviolate spokesperson for the company, and she served as spokesperson during the worst company events, like the discovery of Clinic 8221 by the TSF. The clinic where Kylan had become Weapon Born.
Cal considered the various timelines he kept balanced in the back of his mind. he said.
Cal frowned. It wasn’t like Jirl to make veiled threats.
Cal immediately switched to news feeds and caught the flood of firsthand reports from ships fleeing the Ceres Ring. Images of the secondary ring collapsing into the planetoid rushed through his mind. Alongside the mass of personal broadcasts came the Anderson Collective’s official propaganda report, which attributed the accident to a meteorite strike.
He looked at Petral Dulan. Kylan had stopped crying and now sat staring into the middle distance. The completely vacant expression was gone, replaced by a sort of peace in spite of the tear-tracks running down her face.
The Link closed and Cal leaned back again and rubbed his chin. Jirl had made a second threat with the note about his hands being dirty. Was something changing on the board?
Cal let his head fall back against the padded wall. What did any of their politics matter? He had a ship. He had resources. He had interesting work for as long as he could do it. He had a man to capture and something valuable to regain. Did life get any better?
He looked at Dulan again, letting his gaze rest on her legs. Kylan sat like a male with his knees spread. It made Dulan’s thighs especially attractive. He remembered the pistol she kept hidden inside her augmented left thigh. Too bad the M1G guards had confiscated the weapon.
Dropping back into the frantic cloud of transmissions leaving Ceres, he floated on the wildness of it. He wondered who had caused the ‘accident’ and marveled at what an excellent catalyst it had become. The waves were spreading all across OuterSol already. The Anderson Collective was vulnerable to a meteor strike? A dumb story. He much preferred the idea of sabotage. That was grand thinking.
It was also far too much of a coincidence that the destruction had occurred when his target had been passing through. It only served to cement his belief that Andy Sykes, and the Worry’s End were somehow in the middle of all this.
Cal closed his eyes and drifted among the reports from Ceres, the gruesome details popping like fireworks in his mind’s eye.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
STELLAR DATE: 09.21.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Mortal Chance
REGION: En route to Clinic 46, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
Brit stared at the display as the sensor data returned the precise location of their destination, what Fugia Wong called Clinic 46. Their braking burn was complete, and now the attitude thrusters would take them the rest of the way in.
Though their destination drifted alone between Jupiter and the Trojan asteroids, it was surrounded by a cloud of dust and loose debris that scattered returns from any passive and active scanning. It was the perfect location to hide something. The facility couldn’t be much larger than a frigate, built into the side of an asteroid with a radius of just under a kilometer. In these later periods of expansion, an object that large would have been crushed for ore, which was probably what had led to the debris field.
&n
bsp; “I have destination data, Captain,” she called over the ship channel. “You want to notify them of our approach?”
Harm didn’t answer. Brit waited another minute. From across the command deck, Rina gave her a nod.
“She’s out,” Brit said. “Are you ready?”
“You’re really going through with this? All we have to do is drop off the extra cargo.”
Fugia Wong’s plan consisted of an additional crate filled with specialized broadcast equipment that would paint the outpost for a million kilometers with a low-power signal the local equipment wouldn’t detect.
“I’m not convinced that’s going to work,” Brit said. “This is what I came for. I’m not going to trust the job to anyone else.” She gave Rina a smile. They had been over the plan several times but Smith hadn’t been willing to give up on swaying Brit out of the one-way trip.
“The course is fixed,” Brit said. “If they follow their approach plan, we should get a contact ping in another ten-thousand kilometers. After that, it’s all automatic.”
“I know how to fly the ship,” Rina said.
“You look nervous.”
“I’m not nervous. I’m concerned.” Rina sighed. “Obviously you’re going to do this. We need to get you under shielding before their sensors pick up our biometrics.”
Brit would need to spend most of the inbound trip in one of the radiation-shielded cargo airlocks. Once they were within range, she would move to the hull and then cross to the asteroid in free-fall. It was the kind of long-range reconnaissance mission she had been trained for in the TSF Special Operations. Her EV armor wasn’t ideal for the task—she would only have about thirty minutes to reach some kind of atmosphere on Clinic 46—but it offered a strong compromise between combat effectiveness and survivability.
Standing, Brit grabbed her helmet off the top of the pilot’s console and hooked it to her utility harness. She did a last check on her armor—the two pulse pistols at her waist, five proximity grenades, a projectile rifle with close-fight scope, and her knives. She also carried a small lock-breaking terminal capable of scanning a local spectrum and adjust to approximate security tokens. She carried the thing even though a grenade usually served the purpose. She would want to maintain stealth as long as possible.
