by M. D. Cooper
Rina gave her a thumbs-up, which Brit returned as she stepped into the outside corridor. Down near the cargo bay, she found Captain Harm stumbling toward her in the access tunnel. The captain’s was flushed and her eyes bleary.
“What are you all dressed up for?” Harm asked.
“Ready for external ops. You didn’t hire a cargo handler, remember?”
Harm frowned. “We don’t need a cargo handler. It’s all done by drones. Heartbridge does everything with drones.”
“I’m just being careful, Captain. We’ve come all this way and I don’t want anything getting in the way of my payday. Heartbridge says the cargo’s damaged and none of us are getting paid.”
“Right,” Harm slurred. “About that. I just checked the cargo and we had a stowaway. I don’t know when we picked up an extra crate but it wasn’t Heartbridge.”
Brit swallowed, keeping her voice even. “Extra crate?” she said. No one had expected the captain to start following protocol by checking the manifest prior to delivery.
“Yeah. Weird thing. It looked just like the other ones but wasn’t on the manifest.” She squinted and reached for the wall to hold herself upright. “Maybe we picked it up on Ceres? Nah, that doesn’t make sense. I must not have noticed it before. I hadn’t checked since Eros. Doesn’t matter.”
“What did you do with it?” Brit asked.
“Spaced it. I don’t have time to deal with stowaway cargo. Who knows what might have been in there? I don’t want to take the fall for some terrorist anti-anti-corporatist or something.”
Brit took a deep breath to calm herself. There would be no attack from outside the outpost. The mission was all on her.
“How long ago did you toss it, Captain?”
Harm shrugged. “I don’t know. Fifteen minutes or something. It’s still in their space, which is bad enough. I’ll have to report it when we get close enough.”
“True,” Brit said.
“It’s going to get flooded with radiation from the engine, whatever it is.” She laughed. “That’ll take care of any kind of bug somebody tried to slip on board.”
Brit checked the time. She only had a few more minutes to get to the shielded airlock and wait out initial scans from the outpost.
“I don’t know how we didn’t catch it, Captain,” she said. “You saved our asses there.”
“Damn right I did.”
“Looks like we’ve got about four hours before we arrive. You want to take a nap?”
“Nap?” Harm said. She rubbed her face with a trembling hand. “I don’t want a nap. I want to go back to the galley and have a few more drinks. Why don’t you come with me, Sykes? It seems like I haven’t seen you in a week.”
“Been busy, Captain. I’ve got a few more sections to check and then I’ll come find you in the galley. You think you’ll still be there?”
“Oh, I’ll still be there,” Harm said emphatically. She stumbled and caught the wall again, then carefully turned to follow the corridor back toward the galley, one hand trailing on the bulkhead for support. Brit watched her, recalling one of the stories she had told a few weeks ago when still relatively sober, about running combat missions with the M1G. She wouldn’t come out and say it, but she had led attacks on JC settlers in the asteroid belt.
Brit said grimly.
Brit shook her head.
There was a pause as Rina didn’t answer immediately. She had sounded like she wanted to keep grousing Brit until she couldn’t anymore, so the silence was confusing.
Rina shared the sensor data over the Link and Brit saw the debris field they had been tracking since they first came within range of the outpost. Now, though, as they grew closer, stronger element returns were indicated strange concentrations. Was it a junk yard?
The debris resolved into specific returns, followed by registry pings.
Brit sprinted the last ten meters to the cargo airlock and threw herself inside the wide opening. She slapped the control panel and fumbled with her helmet as the lock cycled closed.
As the doors met, closing her off from the rest of the ship, a last message from Rina reached her before the link went was cut off:
The helmet sealed, and Brit’s link picked up the interior display. She leaned against the wall and crossed her arms, forcing herself to think. She had a two hour wait, and then she’d open the doors on the big dark between the Mortal Chance and Clinic 46.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
STELLAR DATE: 09.21.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Clinic 46
REGION: Jovian L1 Hildas Asteroids, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
Clinic 46 was generally divided between research and fleet operations, with sections between for barracks, medical facilities and recreation areas. Fleet operations was purely functions, and Cal preferred the wide corridor that ran the length of the research section, the bulkheads sheathed in the familiar Heartbridge white ceramic, its walls lined with thick windows that almost always had something intriguing on the other side.
As he passed the research areas, he glanced into rooms filled with rows of examination lounges, surgery theaters, organ growth baths, forests of pale, replicating silicon neurons, and other experiments he hadn’t been briefed on yet.
Petral Dulan followed behind him, dressed in a striking cobalt-blue shipsuit with knee-high black boots. Her thick mane of black hair had been washed and pulled back with a single silver band. The look would have been perfect if she didn’t walk like a teenage boy with shoulders pulled forward and head hunched. Cal kept telling Kylan to stand up straight and put his shoulders back but the kid inevitably fell into the same depressed shamble.
Cal reached a room with an open door and walked through it to find a group of researchers readying an examination couch for Kylan.
“You want me to lie down there?” the AI asked with the woman’s voice. Cal frowned, finding himself irritated by Kylan’s listless tone. He wanted more of the fiery woman he’d found in the M1G prison cell.
“Let’s get started,” the lead neurologist said.
The excited researchers gathered around as Kylan answered questions, connected to the local network via his link, and ultimately verified that, yes, he was able to communicate with Petral.
“She has her own room,” Kylan had said, obviously enjoying the attention. “I keep the door closed but I can hear her through the walls. I don’t think she’s angry anymore.”
The lead neurologist was especially fascinated by how fast Kylan adapted to controlling Dulan.
As they stood watching the boy in the woma
n’s body through a thick pane of glass, the scientist asked, “This was Jickson’s prototype?”
“His plans,” Cal said. “I don’t have his autosurgeon.”
“Do you know where it is? I would like to see the actual equipment.”
After following the leads on Cruithne, Cal was certain the portable surgery was still aboard Captain Sykes’ ship. Cal had withheld the information that Sykes might be as close to Clinic 46 as he was ever going to be.
The scientist frowned, nodding toward the window. “But this is the first test of his method?”
“That’s not something I can confirm or deny,” Cal said.
While the technicians ran tests with Kylan and Petral, Cal went down to the recreation center to float in the middle of a pool. When he was finished, he toweled off and walked down through the fleet bays in his wet swimsuit, looking at the racks of fighter drones pulled inside the station for maintenance. The weapons pods on either side of their blunt noses looked like sightless eyes. They reminded him of vids he’d seen of bats in caves back on Terra. A fabricator took up the back quarter of the bay. The outpost had enough raw materials on hand to build another hundred drones an hour for at least ten hours, each one equipped with plasma cannons and close-attack lasers.
Past the observation window stood a narrow door with a security panel requiring the highest admin-level clearance on the station. Cal passed his token to the panel and the door slid open for him, revealing a short ante-chamber set with bio-sensors and two pulse turrets in the upper corners. He waited as the door slid closed behind him and the system verified his signature. The blunt barrels on the turrets rotated through a warm-up sequence that provided a nice sense of impending death. Just as the two barrels converged on his head, the far door slid open on another room.
The technicians called this room the Nursery. It was long and narrow, lined with four tiers of short shelves with inset grooves where hundreds of silver cylinders the size of test tubes rested, round ends facing out. The other end of the tube connected to a network that provided power and the constricted neural interface between each Weapon Born and a thousand drone fighters arranged in squadrons on the outer skin of Clinic 46. In addition to the fighters, there were heavy gun systems, missile batteries and directed-energy weapons mounted on mobile platforms. Clinic 46 was more than a research station.
Four years ago, this place would have been Heartbridge Corporation’s final insurance. Now it was only one of a growing number of outposts in the JC, two even farther out past Uranus, and three in the rubble of Mercury.
Cal ran his fingers lightly across the silver ends of the cylinders, not quite touching them, but close enough to feel the electric warmth. He had known a woman once who believed in the passage of energy between two people, and had tried to demonstrate by holding her palm just above his. He’d had to admit he felt something, even if he didn’t believe her religion. He felt that same heat now.
They were lucky, really, he thought. Depending on how things worked out, they might live forever. These street kids and lost souls. Certain types of SAI had been developed to pilot colony ships, but they required massive resources, huge nodes nestled within their ships. One of these cylinders in a drone might leave the Milky Way in a thousand years, living inside its own dream. Or they might lay waste to Calisto, to the M1R, to Terra. Heartbridge would never admit a plan like that, but the board liked the idea of the possibility. They enjoyed the pretense of power without its use.
What had Jirl said? He was the type who liked to get his hands dirty.
He’d take it.
Leaving the room, Cal reset the security system and stood in the middle of the corridor alone. The fleet bays were typically empty; there was no need for human intervention down here once everything was arranged. The technicians might sneak down to get drunk or sleep with each other away from the barracks, but otherwise this was machine space. Clean. Orderly. There were no chickens wandering the corridors, or vines or flies to approximate anything natural.
A ping on his Link brought up one of the security personnel from the outpost command deck.
That would give him time to go back to the room he had been assigned and change clothes, listen to some music, think about Petral Dulan without a teenage boy mucking up her body’s natural ballet.
The name meant nothing to Cal.
Cal closed the connection and followed his wet footprints back up to the recreation section. He stood on the edge of the pool for a few minutes, then dove in the water and floated near the bottom of the pool, looking up at the lights warped by the water. Sounds stretched and compressed.
He hated that Petral had made him think about Mercury again, remember what it was like to be small and hungry and worth no more than someone’s bet. No one had bet on him to survive. And then he’d turned the station reactor into a bomb.
Cal thought of the faces of the mining crew, the smells of sweat and curry, scorched oil and silicon. The smells of humans trapped in tubes with the big dark outside, crawling all over each other like rats. Leaving Terra was supposed to represent a forward leap in human evolution but nothing had changed. It was the dreaming Weapon Born that represented change.
A thin stream of bubbles left his nose. He recalled Andy Sykes sitting at the table next to Petral. A man who had taken his family into the dark as though it was some kind of gesture toward the future.
Cal stopped himself. He didn’t know what Sykes knew or felt. He knew next to nothing about the man other than his TSF record, that he had chosen to marry and have children, and that he had accepted a deal from Ngoba Starl that had pulled him into the biggest damn mess of his life, whether he realized it or not.
He wondered if the accident at Ceres was really the first attack. It was coming. He didn’t know where. The Cho. The Collective. M1R. Why wouldn’t they go for the gravity wells first? Wouldn’t machines maximize the effect of their opening assault?
His lungs were burning when he kicked for the lights, and he broke the surface of the water gasping. Cal swept his hair out of his eyes and swam toward the edge of the pool, enjoying the reminder that he was alive.
When he was back in his apartment, he had the technicians send Kylan down. He was sitting in a straight-backed chair next to the room’s small kitchen table when Petral walked through the front door, shoulders slumped forward. Cal didn’t bother even addressing the boy.
“Because I could not stop for death,” Cal said in a clear voice.
Kylan froze, eyes glazed. The door slid closed behind him.
“He kindly stopped for me,” Cal finished.
Petral blinked rapidly, eyes growing wet. She looked around the bare room, frowning. She opened and closed her hands. She straightened, posture immediately different. She was confident and angry.
Her gaze fell on Cal and she reached for the throat of her shipsuit, peeling the fastener down so the suit opened down to her navel.
She reached inside her thigh, then growled in frustration, remembering that the weapon was gone.
Cal smiled. “You think we’d leave you with a weapon? The M1G didn’t find it, but I remembered you pulling that cannon out back on Cruithne.”
“Where am I?” Petral demanded.
“You don’t know? Kylan made it sound like you never lost consciousness.”
“You’re a monster,” Petral said, voice low. “You’re going to pay for this. I’m going to erase you from existence.”
“I already don’t exist. It doesn’t matter what you do to me.” Cal motioned toward the second chair on the other side of the
table. “You could take a seat. You look silly standing there. I have bourbon if you’d like some.”
Petral sent a straight kick at his head.
Cal snapped his head back and to the side and rotated out of the seat, pulling the chair with him. He held it up like a lion tamer as Petral stepped backward into a ready stance.
“It doesn’t matter what you do to me,” Cal said. “Everything’s already in motion. All I wanted to do was talk for a little bit. Have a little company. That’s all.”
“I’m not your puppet.”
Cal gave her a half-smile. “Yes, you are, Petral.” He ran straight at her with the chair, catching her between its legs with a cross-piece at her throat, and driving her back into the wall near the door. She tried to slide down the wall to get at his legs but he lowered the chair with her, forcing her into a sitting position. He set a knee on the chair’s back to pin her leg.
Petral screamed and scratched at his face and shoulders. Cal pulled out of her reach but didn’t release the chair.
Cal shook his head. “I guess I’m not going to get what I want,” he said. “Damn.”
Petral’s face twisted in fury. She wedged an arm under one side of the chair and tried to lever her hips to roll out from under his weight. The fragrance of soap from her hair reached his nose, sending a tremor through his chest.
Cal adjusted and continued to hold her, then finally said, “Fine.” He repeated the code phrase, low this time.
Petral’s hands continued to reach for him but the fight drained immediately. Her face went slack, and then Kylan came back. He blinked and looked around, down at the chair and then at Cal.
“What did I do?” he asked.
“Everything,” Cal said bitterly. He let go of the chair and sat on the floor.
“You shouldn’t let her out,” Kylan said. “She’s mad.”
Cal didn’t bother to look at the kid. He felt a pit open in his stomach. He felt like he’d answered a question he didn’t want to know.
