by M. D. Cooper
“Get up and put the chair back,” he said. “Then hand me that whiskey bottle.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
STELLAR DATE: 09.21.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Clinic 46
REGION: Jovian L1 Hildas Asteroids, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
Brit released the maglocks in her boots and kicked into the dark. Her HUD painted the space around her with objects and information, but didn’t do a good job of hiding the immediate feeling that she had let go of the world.
She knew this feeling, watching the object below her spin faster and faster as her relative velocity changed. She knew when she grew close to her destination, she would be met by the feeling that she’d be torn apart in the transition. But it would work. It had worked before. She had to know and trust that systems like her EV armor, her HUD, her Link, would operate as designed.
She spread her hands, looking at her pale gloves against the black. Below her, the hull of the Mortal Chance shone with reflected light, brighter than she had expected. As she drifted farther away from the ship, she turned her attention forward to where Clinic 46 waited in the dark, a green point on the HUD with distance indicators counting down.
The numerals of the adjusted date were visible in the corner of her HUD as well, and after several minutes of looking at the numbers her stomach tightened. It was almost Cara’s birthday. A wave of sadness passed over her but she quickly pushed her emotions down, reassuring herself for the thousandth time that her work was important and that Cara would understand. It had only been two years, after all. There were people in the TSF who had been deployed longer. Imagine the people on the FGT ships dealing with distance and relativity? They would never see their loved ones again.
A call might be nice, she thought, and berated herself because she didn’t know if she was going to live beyond this mission. Was she going to hijack a signal out of the Heartbridge outpost and send her daughter a frantic message on an open channel? That would make Cara famous.
She wondered what Cara thought of her. She had always been too hard on her daughter. Harder than she had been on Tim, certainly. But he’d been a baby, and then such a happy little boy without a care in the world. Her girl couldn’t be so carefree. Brit had seen too much of the real world, the dark side of the organ farms and the pirate slave ships, the people who lived beneath the clean surfaces of High Terra. Maybe that was part of what she loved about Andy. He had come up from the mud and still had that smile on his face. He smiled despite what he knew about the world. And he looked damn sexy in TSF armor with a rifle under his arm.
Brit smiled in the dark, thinking of Andy, thinking how much Tim was going to look like him. They would all be together again soon if she could get through this mission. Shut down this Clinic and then catch the Mortal Chance back to the Cho. Or if she couldn’t catch the Mortal Chance, she was going to have make another jump to one of those ships out there. What were they? The registries had come back from all across Inner and OuterSol, most marked as relief vessels of some kind. Was this a Heartbridge parking lot? Few of the ships registered more than storage-level activity.
She turned her attention to the outpost, which was growing now. It flashed as it spun, showing various communication units and a wide fabricated band that looked like the main facility. Brit felt pressure on her shoulders as the EV suit made the first correction thrust. There would be nearly a thousand more. She couldn’t withstand a real burn but also didn’t want to do anything that might appear on the station’s sensor systems. She needed to float in as gently as a piece of random debris.
Spectrum static hissed in her ears, growing more pronounced with the closing distance. The murmurs of various systems ghosted in her helmet.
An hour later, arms and legs turned to jelly by velocity adjustments, Brit set down on the slowly spinning body of Clinic 46, a lumpy piece of rock nearly covered in human construction. Her HUD displayed a passable schematic of the place as she had flown in, and when she was finally able to lock her magboots to something metal, she already knew the location of the nearest maintenance vent. She couldn’t risk activating an airlock, so she planned on moving in through the station’s system of refuse vents. She had already watched several masses of trash float off into the dark, their trajectories carefully set to thread the surrounding armada.
It took nearly an hour to find a refuse portal, then wait for it to open and spew plas and bits of alloy. Before the stream ended, Brit threw herself into the middle of it and activated her EV thrusters. She was jabbed in the chest and abdomen by three heavy pieces of metal shooting out with the power of decompression. She blinked, bearing the pain, as she settled down in the bottom of the receptacle and locked her boots. The vent hung open for nearly five minutes before it finally cycled closed and sealed, filling the space with environmental gasses.
The refuse mechanism hadn’t been designed with many safety features Brit could find. It only opened in one direction and refused to budge when she tried to force it. She didn’t want to use a grenade, so opted for the terminal hacker. The little device sat scrolling through machine language before it finally settled on an architecture that meant nothing to Brit except that a dialog box asked her “Open or Close?” She chose open and the interior panel rotated to the side, showing her a blank stretch of corridor.
Brit waited, listening through her helmet’s enhanced sensors. She ran an IR scan for latent human activity and found nothing, so she climbed out of the trash bin and relocked its port.
The corridor reminded her of a Heartbridge Clinic. It was made of the same smooth white ceramic material, with vents along the ceiling and what looked like drains in the floor. Evenly spaces white lights pierced her vision so that it hurt to look up. Her HUD adjusted for the glare, making the white walls look gray.
Based on the information she had from 8221 and other Heartbridge facilities, she knew the area where any children might be held would be in an isolated section containing all the necessities of a barracks. Brit crouched against the wall as her HUD made assumptions about the shape of the asteroid and the construction it had viewed from the outside, along with the radiant signatures. It recommended a left turn to move toward the center of the asteroid.
Taking one of the pulse pistols from her waist, Brit set her armor for combat mode and moved quickly down the corridor, HUD scanning for sensors or human activity.
As she moved from section to section, she found it disconcerting how much the place reminded her of 8221. She passed sections of long hallways with doors that opened on the same type of network rooms she had seen before, followed by rooms with rows of examination couches as if the children were made to watch each other as they were connected to various test systems. Several rooms had their white walls covered in handwritten notes and diagrams, scrawling out phrases like “Inherent rejection predictive modeling” and “Negative choice processing” followed by trees of connected equations. Her HUD snapped copies as she passed. It was all evidence.
Brit considered broadcasting all of it on an open channel as she found it; but she hadn’t found anyone alive yet, hadn’t rescued any kids. She couldn’t risk giving herself away until she found the kids. Once she was in the fight, then a broadcast would have an effect. She thought about Fugia Wong’s transmitter floating out there somewhere. It wouldn’t do any good to hope it might bring her help; hope wasn’t a plan.
She passed rooms hung with organic silica structures, looking at first like massive spider webs. As she spent more time following the shapes, she realized they were neurons branching into and out of each other.
Brit was turning a corner into a larger corridor after just passing through a kitchen area, still devoid of people, when she nearly collided with a woman in a blue shipsuit. Brit fell back, raising her pistol.
The woman stared at her, then pulled her long black hair out of her eyes with both hands like parting curtains. Her posture was strange, shoulders at different heights, and her mouth hung open.
“
I know you,” the woman said.
Brit steadied the pistol. Something about the woman was off, as though she was an experiment of some kind. She certainly didn’t look like any kind of researcher. Brit decided to play along. The woman might be able to tell her where the other test subjects were held.
“How do you know me?” she asked.
“I saw you before.”
“Before?”
“In the other place. You were dressed more like a soldier then. You had white armor.”
Brit froze. She tried to fit the idea of this woman knowing her with the assault on 8221. Had one of the subjects not been freed? Had Heartbridge used surveillance data to train later generations of AI?
“What’s your name?” Brit asked slowly.
The woman perked up slightly. “My name’s Kylan.”
“Did we meet before, Kylan?” The name was one which was burned into Brit’s mind. Kylan Carthage, one of the children from 8221. One of the children they had killed in the fighting. How was he before her once more? Did they make copies of the children’s minds?
“No.” The woman shook her head and her hair fell in her eyes again. She moved the hair out of her way like it was a foreign object. “Well, we didn’t talk. I tried to talk to other people there but I didn’t talk to you.”
The woman wasn’t making any sense and Brit threw a worried glance down the corridor past Kylan’s shoulder. This was taking too long.
“Can you show me where the others are?”
“The others?” Kylan asked. “I guess. Are you sure?”
“It’s why I’m here.”
Kylan’s moist gaze hung on her for a second, then she turned and walked back the way she had come. “It’s this way.”
Brit kept her pistol ready and followed, checking side to side as Kylan walked obliviously through intersections.
They entered a series of corridors lined with what looked like small apartments. Each door had set of chairs or a bench next to it, as if people would sit in the white corridor and talk to each other. Seeing the residential area, Brit realized she hadn’t seen one live plant since entering the outpost.
“In there,” Kylan said, pointing at a door. “Do you want to go in?”
Brit drew back, not trusting the situation. “This isn’t what I mean,” she said. “Is there a test area where there are other people like you? Kids? I know they’re testing kids here.”
“I don’t think there are any kids here,” Kylan said. “There are doctors. I talked to them. There are other Weapon Born. Is that who you’re looking for?”
“Weapon Born?” Brit asked, now all but certain that somehow there was the mind of a young boy inside this woman. Was it really a woman? If not, it was the most convincing synthetic she had ever seen.
“The Seeds. I was a seed before I was put inside her.” She put her hands on her stomach.
Brit glanced at the apartment door. “Back away, Kylan,” she said. “Come over here by me.” She didn’t want her activating a motion sensor and opening the door.
The woman-boy followed Brit’s command. When they were far enough away from the door that Brit was sure it wouldn’t open on its own, she lowered the pistol slightly, allowing herself to relax for a second.
“Where are the Seeds?” she asked.
Kylan looked happy to offer the information. “Down in the fleet bays. Do you want me to show you?”
Brit nodded, glancing at the closed apartment door. “I would like that very much,” she said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
STELLAR DATE: 09.22.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sunny Skies
REGION: Jovian L1 Hildas Asteroids, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
Andy dropped into the pilot’s seat and pulled up the holodisplay and the proximity sensors. Three red dots were on a vector for Sunny Skies, moving just fast enough to be long-range missiles or ships about to fire missiles and then cut a braking burn. He hit the all-quarters alert and shouted for Fran over his Link.
“Dad!” Cara shouted from the communications console, clapping her hands over her ears. “I can’t hear anything. Do we have to have the alert on?”
“We need to let the others know,” he said, still staring at the holodisplay. “You can quiet it in here.”
Cara took on hand off her ear and made an adjustment on her console. The alarm dropped to a barely audible.
“Are you getting anything off them?” Andy asked. “High-power broadcasts? Anything?”
“I’m showing a continuous signal stream from each of them,” Cara said. “I’m triangulating now.”
“Continuous?” Andy asked.
“Yeah, it’s weird.”
“They’re drones.”
“Why would there be drones so far out? I didn’t pick up anything from a larger ship.” Cara frowned as her hands moved over her console, making her look like Brit for an instant. “I don’t see any other ships.”
“I don’t want to guess right now,” Andy said.
“Talk the plan,” Cara scolded. “You said in stressful situations we should think out loud so we know what everybody’s thinking. I think those ships are communicating with something nearby.”
“Cara, we’re in the in the dead space between the belt and Jupiter, past the Hildas asteroids. There’s nothing out there.”
“What’s our position?” Fugia Wong asked from the doorway.
“Position?” Andy demanded. “Relative to what?”
“Callisto and Ceres.” The calm in Wong’s voice made Andy give her a second glance. She looked strangely pleased with herself.
“What are you up to?” Andy said. “Do you know something about this?”
“I know you’re under attack,” Fugia said. “What surprised me is how long it took.”
“Who’s attacking us?”
“You’re sure it’s not pirates coming after their dog?”
Andy expanded the holodisplay to fill the center of the command deck so it showed Callisto and Ceres at its far opposite edges. Sunny Skies was a blue square in the middle, velocity and vector information following along in shifting numerals. The three red dots continued to approach on a path from the middle of the asteroid belt, holding a tight formation.
“Where’s the other ship?” Andy said.
“There is no other ship,” Wong said. “There’s an outpost.”
“There’s nothing out here. We would have picked up their beacon.”
Fugia inclined her head, giving Andy a sardonic smile that said he was being naive. “Heartbridge has a research station out here they call Clinic 46. Most shipping traveling between Ceres and Callisto passes within range of its attack fleet. However, they don’t usually let anyone know that.”
“How do you know about it then?”
Fugia shrugged. “It’s my business to know.”
Andy stiffened in the pilot’s seat, gripping the worn armrests. “They passed us at Mars. Heartbridge knew we had to come here.” He shook his head. “No, they had people on M1R. They tried to put the ship on lockdown.”
“I think an organization like Heartbridge can do two things at once,” Wong said.
“You think? Or you know?” Andy pushed himself out of his seat and stood over Wong. “This is starting to feel like you’re pulling strings. How about I go grab your senator and put her out the airlock?”
The humor dropped from Wong’s face. “We’re not enemies, Captain Sykes. You won’t do that.”
“You think I won’t? You’re playing games with my family. You think I’ll choose your cru
sade over my children?” Andy put his right hand on his pistol, edged the trigger guard with this finger. He became aware of Cara watching him from the other side of the room.
“You chose this path, Captain Sykes. You chose to help the AI.”
“I didn’t choose to help anything. I chose to transport cargo from one place to another.”
“Is that true? Is Lyssa cargo?” She raised her voice. “Are you a machine, Lyssa?”
Andy narrowed his eyes. “That’s not fair.”
From an overhead speaker, Lyssa’s voice emerged clear and calm. “Andy will do what he must to protect his family. I understand that.” There was a burst of static, followed by, “I support this. I wouldn’t ask him to do anything else.”
Wong glanced at the ceiling. She seemed stricken by what Lyssa had said, on the edge of tears.
Lyssa said.
Lyssa said.
Fran walked through the door from the corridor and looked at Fugia and Andy. “I thought the passengers were on lock down?”
“Fugia says we’re within attack range of a Heartbridge outpost and that’s who we’ve got incoming.”
