Rubicon: Aurora Resonant Book Two (Aurora Rhapsody 8)

by G. S. Jennsen

  He’d been in no condition to talk about whatever had happened last night, but she assumed the absence of any panicked messages from Mia, irate messages from Malcolm, concerned messages from her mother or stern messages from Administrator Latro meant no permanent damage had been done and life continued on.

  One eyelid opened a crack, and a sliver of crimson iris peered out at her. For the briefest second it appeared alien. Foreign. She banished the notion and smiled. “Good morning, priyazn.”

  “Is it? Morning and/or good?” He winced sheepishly as he reached for her, and she scooted closer and slipped into his arms. “Anyone waiting outside the ship to arrest me?”

  “Because of the bar fight, or Malcolm?”

  He opened the other eye, carefully. “Either?”

  There aren’t, are there, Valkyrie?

  I’m pleased to report an empty platform.

  Thanks.

  “No. I think you’re in the clear. I’m sure it wasn’t their first bar fight.” She ran the pad of her thumb along his cheek. “Whatever he said to you, he’s wrong.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  She briefly contemplated getting up, throwing on some clothes and going to find Malcolm just to punch him in the gut. It would definitely make her feel better. But it wouldn’t help anything, while she could help Caleb.

  “I know him, I know you and I know what happened with Winslow. You did what you felt was right, and I think it probably was. Hard decisions—choices—don’t always fit inside the neat little sanctioned box Malcolm wishes they did.”

  “No, they don’t. I refuse to be sorry for what I did. But I am…” he lifted a hand and concentrated on it until a faint crimson halo appeared, then banished the halo and brought the hand up to cover hers resting on his chest “…cautious. Or I’m trying to be.

  “ ‘The first and greatest punishment of the sinner is the conscience of sin’—that was the passphrase Division used for access to its most closely guarded information. The bosses were being clever, because it’s a quote from Lucius Annaeus Seneca, but it also served as a subtle reminder. To always be cognizant of our actions, and to mind the blurry line between necessary evils and the turpitudes they’re meant to combat.”

  With a sigh he squeezed her hand and rolled onto his side to face her. “I believe it was my right to eliminate Winslow, but that was under the old rules. This power I wield now? Using it I can do things I shouldn’t have the right to do. No one should. What if it is changing me?”

  Uncertainty weighed down his features. “Look at my eyes. Can you still see the man I was in them?”

  She’d stared into them a thousand times. In the last while she’d watched them transform a little more each day. They were now almost pure, deep crimson, with the sapphire flecks but a highlight instead of the other way around. He knew this; he wasn’t asking about the color.

  “On the second night you were on board the Siyane—forever ago and not so long ago at all—I tried to convince myself I was not going to get led astray by a pair of pretty blue eyes. Well, I got led astray all right, but it wasn’t by your pretty blue eyes. It was by your unexpectedly tender heart, your fierceness of spirit, your patently delicious body…” her lips curled up playfully “…by your indomitable soul. If any of that has changed, it’s been to grow stronger.”

  His mouth met hers with urgency to deliver a message of relief, gratitude and love far better than words could.

  When he drew back, though, he still looked too grave. “But you’ll tell me, won’t you? If I go too far or start to lose my bearings, you’ll take off those kid gloves you’re currently wearing and yell sense into me?”

  “You bet I will. I’ll pitch a fine fit.” She lifted her head and glanced at the stairwell, from where a delightful aroma had drifted down to fill the air. “We should get up. Someone’s cooking breakfast.”

  Kennedy was standing at the kitchen counter inspecting a tray of steaming hot orange croissants when they arrived upstairs. Noah sat on the couch with the med kit positioned in front of him, replacing the medwrap strip on his nose.

  “So, everyone’s alive and in one piece this morning. Good, since we have work to do. After breakfast, obviously.” Alex offered a grateful smile as Kennedy piled the croissants high on a plate and brought them over to the kitchen table.

  Rather than sit, Alex propped on the edge of the table and grabbed a croissant. “While you boys were causing trouble last night, Ken and I constructed and successfully field-tested a workable mechanism for wormhole creation and traversal, thank you very much.”

  Noah nodded, then grimaced and touched his nose. “Sure. Of course you did. Because you two can do that sort of thing in a single day.”

  Kennedy shrugged as she sat down at the table. “A couple of hours, really.”

  “At most. But now we need to make it practical. We need to devise a way to get the power to the entire fleet.”

  Alex paused to take another bite of her croissant. Kennedy used to make them during university, but she didn’t recall them being so good. “Initial thought? Most of the ships have Rifters installed. The resident Artificials can roll out the new code easily enough. Could they set up a toggle and have the Rifter do double duty like we did on the Siyane?”

  Kennedy shook her head. “As an official independent contractor of AEGIS, I cannot in good conscience recommend such a course of action until months of tests—or at least weeks—have been performed. This mechanism is highly volatile and subject to blowing things up. Activating it on twenty thousand separate ships at the same time is asking for disaster.”

  “Impressive channeling of my mom there.”

  “Thanks, but I’m serious.”

  Alex scowled, but conceded the point. “Okay, fine. So how about one big Caeles Prism—big enough to generate a consistent supply of enough power to move the largest ships? It’ll need a power transmitter, and the ships will need receivers.”

  “They have those. And they’re tunable, which is perfect, since it means each ship can take only the power it needs for its own traversal. As for transmitting the power, we’d need to fit the Caeles Prism with a capture module and pair it to a broadcaster. The ships have most of those components, too, but they’re using them for other things. Also, they’re too small. We need a big one.”

  Noah grabbed a second, or maybe third, croissant. “I can throw something together.”

  Everyone stared at him expectantly.

  “The AEGIS supply ship carries enough spare parts for me to build a lattice-style capture module to encase this…what did you call it, a ‘Caeles Prism’?…without fencing in the power output. Attach some DELs at periodic junctions to transmit the power out, and you ought to be good to go.”

  Caleb nodded. “Kind of like what the Kats use on Portal Prime. It could work.”

  Alex frowned. “What are DELs?”

  “Small mobile drone orbs ASCEND invented. Everyone was quite busy while you were gone, ushering in a new era of innovation and progress and whatnot.”

  She rolled her eyes at Kennedy. “I’d expect no less. All right, Miss Official Independent Contractor. Assuming Noah can build an attachment that will get the power out to the ships, what’s our next step?”

  “First, we should test moving the Siyane using the independent module instead of its own Rifter, to confirm the power transfer works. Then we’ll need to find a couple of Prevo volunteers in the AEGIS fleet to test it across multiple ships simultaneously. We’ll gradually scale up the tests, amping up the power produced and adding more ships.”

  Alex made a face. “Ugh. How long will all that take? In case you didn’t notice, we’ve kind of picked a fight with the neighborhood bully.”

  Kennedy poked Noah lightly in the shoulder. “How long will it take you to build the power capture-and-transfer mechanism?”

  “Factoring in the time needed to shuttle up to the supply ship and back, plus a shower…seven hours?”

  “Alex, I assume it won’t t
ake a significant amount of time for the Artificials to install whatever new code they’ll need?”

  “Counting transmission time and reading the instructions? Twelve seconds.”

  “Then based on the turnaround time of recent roll-outs of new equipment at the Presidio, all told, about thirty-eight hours and twelve seconds.”

  Alex reached for another croissant, only to discover the plate was empty. “Oh. Well…that’s not so long.”

  39

  PALAEMON

  ANARCH POST EPSILON

  * * *

  “HELP ME PUSH THE TABLE over against the wall.”

  “Why do we need to move it?”

  Devon shrugged. “I’ve learned from experience that you don’t know how big of a mess you’re going to make until you make it. I don’t want to destroy any post property if I can avoid it. This is the emptiest place I could find, but there’s still the table and chairs to worry about.”

  Emily gave him an uncertain look, but she relented and joined him on one side of the table. Devon leaned in and put some muscle into it, and together they maneuvered the long conference table across the room until it abutted the far wall.

  “Why don’t we do this outside, then?”

  He started dragging chairs over to line up next to the table. “It’s breakfast time local, so someone would see us. I’m also trying to be discreet.”

  “And if you blow up half the wing of the building like you did at the hospital?”

  “At least I tried to be discreet?”

  She giggled and stopped him by the row of chairs to give him a kiss. “Fair enough. Are we ready now? Finally?”

  “As ready as we’re apt to be.” He removed the small oval gadget one of the anarch techs had given him to tinker with from his bag and placed it on the floor in the center of the room—shit, the floor. If he expected to think and act in five dimensions, he really shouldn’t forget to do so in three dimensions first.

  He retrieved one of the chairs from where he’d just put it by the wall and dragged it to the middle of the room, then placed the module on the seat.

  Emily frowned. “I thought we weren’t destroying any of their property?”

  “I’m trying to protect the floor. The chair’s small enough that if it’s damaged, we can get rid of the evidence. A crater in the floor, not so much.”

  He retreated until his back touched the wall opposite the table and other chairs while motioning for Emily to stand beside him. If the furniture did get wrecked, he didn’t want them to catch any shrapnel. He also activated his personal defense shield in case they did.

  He grasped her hand in his. “Ready? Shield on?”

  She nodded, and he slipped into sidespace…then a little farther. The alien circuitry weaving through the interior of the object lit up against its casing like an old-fashioned x-ray image.

  On your whim, Annie.

  The power built up within him, boosted by more power flowing in from Emily and Yves—then leapt across sidespace into the circuitry.

  Sparks ignited around the oval object as a sharp hissing noise reverberated off the walls. It bounced and shook, dancing across the chair seat until it tumbled off the edge to the floor and fell silent.

  The light from the circuity within it blinked out, leaving only the chrome of the pseudometal casing.

  He opened his eyes in normal space. “Damn, the room didn’t blow up.”

  This was our hope, was it not?

  “Isn’t that a good thing?”

  “Annie says the same thing. It’s definitely for the best, but the inner rebel in me gets a kick out of a good explosion.”

  Emily laughed. “See? This is what I was missing. Also, thank you for not going stir-crazy and blowing up our apartment on Romane.”

  “You bet.” He pushed off the wall to go pick up the object and inspect it. Cracks had formed in the outer casing, but it had nominally held together. Still, the gadget was well and truly dead. Agreed, Annie?

  Yes. The circuitry required for it to function has been not merely disabled, but destroyed at a quantum level.

  Excellent.

  He returned the now-inert object to his bag. “All right, next step. Let’s go find Harper.”

  Emily glanced pointedly around the room. “Shouldn’t we put everything back where we found it first?”

  Devon sighed.

  The idea had come to him on the Siyane, when Alex had pointed out their goal was to move things, not explode them, and Emily had admonished him not to explode himself. Both points were well taken.

  Alex appeared to have the ‘moving things’ well in hand, so he might as well concentrate on the possibilities which arose from exploding things. He did have some experience at it.

  The problem—or the first problem—was that most Amaranthean technology was, at a core design level, significantly more advanced than their own. For starters, it utilized five dimensions, as they’d learned in the most torturous manner possible from the Anaden-derived virus that had infected Emily.

  But Mia had powered through the obstacle to a cure, and though Devon had been in no condition to help at the time, once Emily was better he’d gone back and exhaustively studied the virus and its counter.

  Once he’d gotten here, he’d befriended several of the techs at the post. Hackers liked to boast to other hackers, no matter the species, and he’d encouraged the inclination. They’d shown him not only the basics of how their systems operated, but some tricks and secrets as well.

  In giving him a look at a few snippets of code and circuit design, they’d shown him and Annie far more than they’d realized.

  He started paying attention when the door to the larger of the conference rooms AEGIS had appropriated opened. The meeting was breaking up, and people began filing out.

  Most of them headed directly across the atrium toward the main exit, and he and Emily loitered off to the right, out of the way. He offered a greeting or two, but he didn’t want to get waylaid by anyone. When Harper and Lekkas broke off from the group and exited a side door, he and Emily followed.

  Lekkas sensed them approach because of the Noesis, and Harper sensed them approach because she was a ninja. Both women turned around well before he and Emily reached them on the pavilion.

  He motioned for them to keep going and fell in beside Harper. “How did the meeting go?”

  The Marine looked at him as if he’d asked about the political and societal ramifications of Francis Ronalds’ invention of the electrical telegraph. “What?”

  “I need to borrow a Reverb.”

  She stopped cold with a groan. “Not a fucking chance.”

  “Why not?”

  “Those insidious little devices have already gotten me in enough trouble. I don’t need more.”

  “I’m not going to kill anyone with it.” Discovering via a faint, stray Noesis thought from Morgan that Caleb had killed Winslow using one had left Devon feeling…uncomfortable. Not because he hadn’t wanted Winslow dead—he’d wanted it so much he’d very nearly done the deed himself—but more because the calm, cold, matter-of-fact way in which Caleb had disposed of the terrorist was…it should have been disconcerting. It possibly wasn’t, which in itself had been disconcerting.

  Devon had been traveling down a path darkening gray in color when Emily was attacked, and he’d been headed down it for a while. He thought, and hoped, that taking care of her, that simply being with her since then, had nudged him a fair distance back toward the middle of the road.

  On the other hand, he was about to make a solid genius effort at turning a deadly weapon deadlier, so perhaps not.

  Morgan had kept walking for a few strides, but now she pivoted and retraced her steps to rejoin Harper while giving him a strange look. “You are a crafty one, Devon. I’ll give you that.” She put a hand on Harper’s arm. “Actually, he kind of has a good reason for asking for one. Just follow procedures and document the transfer. That way he’s the only one who will get in trouble if trouble happens.�
�

  Devon didn’t know specifically what all the crankiness was about, and he didn’t bother to probe Morgan’s mind to find out, despite the fact that she’d clearly been probing his. “Sure, I’ll sign whatever. I’ll even promise in writing not to kill any humans with it.”

  Morgan eyed him sideways, but Harper didn’t seem to notice; she was too busy scowling. “No. You’re a civilian, and civilians aren’t authorized to possess RRF weapons.”

  He gazed plaintively at Morgan until she relented. “Fine. I’ll authorize an exception and check it out to him myself.”

  “Why the hell?”

  She winced apologetically at Harper, then jerked her head in his direction. “Because he’s got a hell of an idea, and I’m curious to see if he can pull it off.”

  40

  SIYANE

  PALAEMON

  ANARCH POST EPSILON

  * * *

  ‘EREN IS HERE AND ASKING TO COME ABOARD.’

  Alex glanced up in surprise, then groaned. “Eren….” She’d completely forgotten about Mesme’s message expressing concern as to Eren’s well-being. It had been days ago—before Akeso, before inventing the Caeles Prism, before Malcolm’s tantrum and its fallout.

  “As in ‘right outside’ here?”

  ‘Yes.’

  Well, she’d find out soon enough how guilty she needed to feel about the lapse. Caleb shrugged assent. They’d sent Kennedy and Noah off half an hour earlier and had just finished cleaning the cabins and themselves up.

  “Okay. Let him in.”

  Eren sauntered in wearing what passed for Anaden casual wear: loose flowing pants and a vest in muted bronze and caramel. It was a notable departure from his usual black and blacker. His hair was likewise loosely bound and draped over one shoulder, exposing a face devoid of its usual aloof insolence. “Morning, mates.”

  Alex frowned at him. “You’re awfully bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning.”

  Eren twisted around to inspect his ass. “ ‘Bushy-tailed’? Did I catch an extra appendage on the last regenesis?”