The Cronian Incident (The Formist Book 1)

by Matthew Williams

  “No,” Amaru said, sounding unconvinced. “They simply want to be ready in case it comes to that.”

  “Open conflict? Kind of inevitable when you want to overthrow a local government.”

  “It’s inevitable when you want things to change, Ward. These people aren’t a bunch of murderers, just realists.”

  Valeri turned to look back at them. Apparently, their little discussion was reaching the front of the line. Luckily, she didn’t seem too concerned about it and kept moving them ahead. As they passed various catwalks leading to other points in the facility, some of their train fell away. By the time they reached their destination, it was only the three of them left.

  “It’s in here,” Valeri said, pointing to a sealed door. There was a slight crust of ice where the two segments came together. Whatever lay beyond, it was being kept at temperatures even lower than their frosty surroundings.

  “Cryotubes?” Ward ventured. Valeri seemed impressed.

  “Very good, sir. We got a deal on them from some spacers. We figured we should have some around in case we needed to keep anyone in stasis. Only needed one so far. Our mutual friend.”

  Valeri slapped a panel located next to the doors. They parted, letting out a gust of icy particles. A heavy mist followed, clearing quickly, revealing a series of tubes arranged side by side. All were dark and inactive but one, located towards the far end of the room. Ward proceeded to the one that was lit from the inside and had a control panel with active display lights.

  Sure enough, the face of Doctor Lee was visible inside. His body was naked, save for a few tastefully placed articles of clothing. His face, though pale and inert, looked entirely serene. To the casual observer, he might seem very much alive. But the displays were clear on that much.

  Heart rate, respiration, brain activity. They were all flatlined and at zero. All that was left of him now was a perfectly preserved corpse.

  “Hey, Lee,” Ward whispered. “Good to meet you at last.”

  Amaru came to his side. She surprised him by lacing her fingers around his arm. Ward reciprocated and placed his hand on top of hers. Seeing Lee again had to be difficult for her. At one time, she had cared for the man. They had been friends and at one point, lovers too. No matter what else he had done or planned to do, he was currently dead to the universe.

  Valeri came around to the other end of the tube. She quickly put things back to business. “So how does this happen, Ward? Can you access his implants remotely?”

  “Yes, but’s it’s a little more complicated than that. I’m going to need you to bring his temperature up first. I’m also going to need you to stimulate his heart and thin his blood.”

  Valeri looked at Amaru, frowning, then back to Ward. “Why? Can’t you just. . .” She gestured vaguely, implying some act of remote interfacing she clearly didn’t understand.

  Ward chuckled, removing his arm from Amaru’s grasp and pulling off his jacket before rolling up one sleeve, exposing some veins.

  “His blood needs to be moving if I’m going to be able to interface with his brain. Once I get some of my nanobots into him, they can travel to his implant and activate it. Then I can start accessing the file.”

  Valeri looked at Amaru again. Her frown was only getting bigger. “You mean, you want to thaw him so you can give his body a transfusion?”

  “Yes. Right now, his implants are as dead as he is. The upside is, they can be turned back on easily. It needs to be done properly.”

  Valeri seemed at a loss for words. Her expression became one of both irritation and borderline disgust. “Why didn’t you tell me it was going to be this, ghoulish?”

  “You asked if the information could be recovered,” Amaru replied. “Short of cracking open his skull and digging into his brain, this is the only way.”

  “We could do that,” Ward admitted. “Assuming you have a neurosurgeon around, or just someone with really steady hands and the right equipment. Removing a neural loom is like trying to pull veins from a fish. Not exactly easy unless you’ve done it before.”

  Valeri looked to be on the edge of being physically sick. Perhaps it was a matter of personal sensibilities, or some sense of religious conviction – the idea a dead body was sacred and not to be disturbed. Either way, the thought of digging into Lee’s corpse to interface with his biomachinery seemed rather sickening.

  “God, you people are disgusting!” she said, reaching to the cryounit’s terminal. Rather heatedly, she keyed in the proper sequence to begin the revival sequence. Slowly, very slowly, the unit began to raise the temperature inside the tube, bringing Lee’s body to a gentle thaw. Valeri turned around and headed for the door, pausing before exiting. “I’ll have to get a medic in here if we’re going to do this your way. I’m sure they’ve got defibs and a hypo. Don’t go anywhere.”

  The doors closed behind her, leaving Ward and Amaru alone with Lee. They both looked back at him, sorrow shaded on Amaru’s face. Ward reached down and took her hand in his. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, yes, fine,” she said. “I was just remembering something.”

  When she didn’t volunteer anything more, Ward prompted her. “The nightmares?” he asked, raising a subject she had broached when they had first arrived on Titan.

  “Yes, those.”

  “Is it him, then? The dead people you see?”

  She shook her head. “It was on Ganymede, years ago. I was working with some ice miners in those days, doing freelance analytical work. One day, a team of miners died when a vein they were digging into collapsed. They were being pushed to make a quota, and this is what happened.” She waved at Lee’s still-frozen body. “I remember seeing the bodies being pulled out and laid on the deck. Right before they covered them and hauled them away, I saw the faces. They had been down in the ice for days before they had been retrieved. Their blood had congealed, their skin turned blue. They looked so horrible.”

  Ward released his hand, putting his arm around her. She accepted the embrace and laid her head on his shoulder. She kept talking, letting him know all the grim details. Eventually, it all came back to Lee.

  “I remembered thinking about their faces the day he told me what Emile and the rest of them had planned. I couldn’t believe it. I don’t think I even reacted. Which was probably for the best, since I had to convince him I was on board with it. I thought I knew this man, knew what he was capable of. I wanted to kill him right then and there.”

  “But instead, you contacted these people and worked out a deal to expose him,” Ward said quietly.

  She nodded against his shoulder. “Finch set it up. She makes it a policy not to know who these people are or what they’re doing. But she knows how to put the word out when she needs to. Next thing I know, they’re grabbing me on some dark street corner, asking me what I can do for them.”

  Ward thought back to the footage of Lee being taken down on the platform, about the entire conversation he had had with Boyagan. Amaru had kept a stony face throughout the entire process. Ever since he had met her that first time, he had thought she was a skilled liar, someone for whom true feelings only came through on occasion and entirely by accident.

  Now he knew how completely wrong he had been. It was the things she had seen that had made her good at concealing her true self. She wasn’t really a liar at all, just someone who had seen too much.

  “We’re going to blow this thing wide open,” Ward promised, tightening his hold on her. “We’ll make sure everyone knows exactly what kind of people Emile and his Formists are.”

  Thirty-Four

  As promised, Valeri returned with a medical technician. They had the necessary gear with them – a defibrillator, a hypospray, and all necessary items to complete the procedure. As soon as Lee’s temperature was high enough, they opened the seal on the unit and got to work.

  Once applied, a patch began applying electrical stimuli needed to get his heart going at a gentle rhythm. Anticoagulants were administered, thinning his blood to
the point it could be pumped. Ward gave the medic a blood sample, which they then proceeded to inject into Lee’s body.

  Ward leaned over the unmoving Lee as the tiny machines did their work. Their signals were reaching him directly, receiving the instruction to locate and activate Lee’s neural loom. All the while, Valeri and Amaru stood by and waited. Amaru watched him intently, while Valeri tried not to vomit.

  “Got it,” he said, as soon as Lee’s implants began to chime at him. “Okay, here’s where things get interesting.”

  Time quickly became irrelevant as Ward’s mind began connecting virtually to Lee’s. All the information he had filed away, all the memories that were backed up, every synapse – the sum total of Lee’s connection, rendered in virtual format aboard an artificial neural net. It all opened to him. Ward was overwhelmed by the sheer barrage of information, and not a bit was being uploaded yet.

  He heard himself grunt aloud. A hand descended on him.

  “Are you all right?” It was Amaru asking, a disembodied voice as his visual field was blinded due to the mental images he was processing.

  “I’m okay. There’s a lot to take in.”

  “Well, take your time,” she said.

  “Or don’t,” Valeri interjected. “No offense, but we’re kind of on a clock here, people.”

  Ward tried to ignore her and kept searching. Through the vast forest of data, he kept looking for what would surely be the tallest, most looming architecture. A quantum sleeve whose size and contents would surely dwarf everything else in its midst.

  Soon, his efforts were rewarded. There, on a virtual landscape only existing within his mind, a massive volume of data loomed. Even compressed, it still stood out like a gleaming tower amidst vastly simpler structures. Ward reached out to it mentally and embraced it. At first, its surface resisted. There were no countermeasures to reach out and attack him, just a construct as unyielding to his touch as a stone wall.

  Ward paused for a second to chastise himself for neglecting this all-important detail. Held in awe of the greatest data he had ever seen, he had forgotten it would only respond with the proper prompt.

  Looking within, he called for the key. Once again, his mind was consumed by a virtual image – a bright, shining representation of pure data. It emerged from his being to interface with the sleeve, which had the effect of opening and decompressing the entire volume. What had been a single architecture morphed into an all-encompassing wall of light. Enveloping him, the sleeve became accessible and uploaded into his mind.

  In the real world, he not only grunted again, but faltered. Amaru was there to grab him by the arm, preventing him from falling face-first onto Lee’s body. It took only seconds for the file transfer to finish, but the effect left Ward both drained and overawed. As his vision returned, it was like coming back from a drug-induced hallucination, or perhaps a searing moment of divine revelation.

  Amaru spoke first. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah,” mumbled Ward.

  “Did you get it?” asked Valeri.

  “Yeah,” Ward said again. “The sleeve is here.” He tapped at his skull, which felt distinctly crowded.

  “And you’re going to do what you said? You’re going to make a copy for us?”

  “Of course.” Ward had to pause. The experience had left him short of breath. Once he got his wind back, he raised the one issue they hadn’t yet covered. “But even once you have the information, you’re not going to be able to read it. It’s still heavily encrypted and would take a small army of quantum processors to crack it.”

  “You let us worry about that. Right now, you’ve got your own problems.”

  Ward looked at Amaru, who nodded. So, they had a plan in place, did they? Ward wanted to ask, but thought better of it. Valeri was correct, of course. Based on what Amaru had said earlier, they needed to get this information back to Pinter forthwith. The elder Formist would have no trouble accessing it, given time. Whatever these revolutionaries had planned for it was beyond Ward’s concern or his business.

  For the first time in a while, he felt the comforting sensation of self-interest. As long as they got out of the Cronian system at this point, or found a way to chime Pinter before running afoul of Adler, they would be safe for the time being.

  “Well then, I guess there’s only one thing left to do. Show me to one of your terminals and I’ll get to work on –”

  Ward was interrupted for a transmission coming from Valeri’s bracelet. The voice on the other end was shouting panicked words, not all of them in the same language. Valeri raised it to chest level and tapped at a key.

  “Gimbal? What’s going on out there?”

  “V!” came a panicked shout. “We’re under attack! They’ve taken the landing bay and are at the pressure doors! They’re trying to come in!”

  “They?” she said, her voice filled with venom. “Who is it? Gendarmes?”

  “We don’t know! They’re armed and their coming. I think they’re Extropian!”

  Valeri’s eyes fixed on Ward. Though the room hadn’t ceased being an icebox for one second, it was if everything had become much colder in an instant. Ward looked from Amaru, to Valeri, to the medic. All stared at him with the exact same look in their eyes.

  Only Valeri could sum it up in words. “You son of a bitch. You led them here.”

  “No! I –”

  Before he finished issuing his denial, before he even reacted, Valeri’s shock stick was out of her holster and slamming him in the chest. Ward cried out in pain as the jolt stabbed him in the solar plexus. He crumpled to the floor, the wind knocked out of him and his nerves screaming from the addition of several thousand unwanted volts.

  Amaru tried to intervene, only for Valeri to push her aside. She was standing over Ward now, her stick ready to administer more punishment. It was only the screaming from her wrist that kept her momentarily occupied.

  “They’re through the doors! I say again, they’re through the doors! THEY’RE COMING INSIDE!”

  Thirty-Five

  From his position on his hands and knees, Ward was barely conscious enough to hear the ruckus from the other side of the doors. The reports poured from Valeri’s bracelet, with the one named Gimbal screaming out more damning indications of who their enemy was.

  “They’re closing in! Dammit, we can’t stop them, they’re moving too fast and their suits just keep shrugging off our shots!”

  Ward was also very much aware of the fight brewing between Valeri and Amaru. The former had his gun out and pointed at the back of his head. Amaru, bless her heart, was complicating things by being in the way and trying to reason with Valeri.

  “Stop it! He couldn’t have –”

  “Bullshit! He led them right to us! There’s no other explanation.”

  “We jammed his comlink. There’s no way they could have traced it.”

  “Then he must have had something else. Something we didn’t plan for!”

  “V . . . this is murder.”

  “Damn right it is!” she yelled, pushing Amaru aside again. “I might not be able to do much about those assholes out there. But there’s one Extro I can kill right here!”

  “No! They must have found us another way,” pleaded Amaru.

  “Do you honestly believe that?”

  The Rutger was poised mere inches from the back of his head. Ward turned his head slowly until his eyes filled with the ominous black circle of the muzzle, Valeri’s finger trembled against the trigger assembly. Amaru had her distracted, splitting her attention between the pleading doctor and his defenseless body. Briefly, Ward considered commanding his augments to speed up his reflexes. He might grab the Rutger away from her before she fired. Given the way the noise of the firefight was approaching them, it might very well come to that.

  Ward’s head came up and his eyes locked onto Valeri’s. He saw doubt there, alongside the marked lack of animosity as well. Could she still be willing to extend the benefit of doubt to him?

&nbs
p; Amaru seemed to think so too. Her next words were directed at Ward. “There is another way they could have found us, yes?”

  Ward quickly thought back to his last communication with Adler, and when Valeria had put the dampening field up. It was entirely possible Adler had been completely unconvinced by his report, had chosen to move the ship in closer to spy on him directly. Then again, he may have ordered his people to set course for the surface the moment the signal was lost, picking up Ward’s trail from his last known location. They would have been hard pressed, but it was conceivable they had got close enough in time to spot the hopper and follow them in.

  But of course, they would have had to been planning to do so all along. They would’ve had to have known key details about these people’s operation in advance. Which meant someone else had been feeding them information. Somebody who was in the know.

  “Yeah, it’s possible,” Ward replied, condensing it all down for her. “If they had some idea where we were coming from and where we were headed, they could have followed us here. I couldn’t have told them. I had no idea where you were taking me.”

  “Bullshit,” said Valeri. “The timing is too perfect. We’ve been here for years, and the moment you step in, they’re on top of us. That is no coincidence!”

  “You’re right, it isn’t,” agreed Ward. “Until now, they didn’t know where you were hiding Lee. The fact you brought me here would have been all the indication they needed.”

  Valeri still didn’t believe him, but his words were having an effect. She hadn’t killed him yet, and that was something. Even better, Ward’s systems were functioning again. An overlay had come up, the option for activating his defense protocol flashing at him for instructions. Ward kept it there, but didn’t activate. Valeri would make her choice soon, and he would need to be ready. But he wouldn’t jump yet.

  “You’ve been jamming any signals in and out since we met. There’s no way I could have told them where we were headed. If anybody’s been helping them, it’s not me.”

  Valeri slowly shook her head.