Rogue Starship: The Benevolency Universe (Outworld Ranger Book 1)

by David Alastair Hayden

  A number of police cruisers were on the way, but they’d never get close to that starship. And even if they did, they’d be no match for Tekk Reapers. What they needed was a small army.

  Where was the military anyway? Why hadn’t they responded to the Tekk Reaper ship? Or the burst drops? He hadn’t detected any response from the planetary authorities. Someone high up, perhaps the governor of Ekaran IV himself, must have been paid off to ignore this incident, for a short while at least.

  Time to make it something they couldn't ignore.

  Silky plotted a course toward Gamma-1, the largest military base on Ekaran IV, located along the outskirts of Bei. Thanks to his original purpose as a military unit he knew something about the bases on Benevolency planets that even most soldiers probably didn’t know about these days. If Silky could have smiled, he would have.

  He took control from the autopilot, set the bike’s speed to maximum, then loaded in an erratic flight pattern called The Ever-Changing-Switcheroo. He’d copied the technique from Tal Tonis a long time ago, after studying how Tonis had flown during a scrape with two pirate starfighters. Silky modified the pattern using a randomizer to compensate for the pilot’s tells that would ultimately make his method predictable to opponents like Tekk Reapers.

  Flying and operating the sensors took up most of his processing cores, especially since he had to rely entirely on sensor scans now, having lost access to Siv’s human sensory perceptions. But he still had enough power to take care of a few other things that needed doing.

  Silky copied a folder containing a program he’d been working on called Expand Sentience. Then he began compressing it into a system update container file. Because of the folder’s size the process would take a couple of minutes.

  Next he opened a secure, voice-only channel to Boss D, who had been attempting to contact Siv over the last few minutes. He couldn’t have Boss D thinking Siv was unconscious, so he loaded the profile he kept for imitating Siv’s voice and mannerisms.

  “Gendin! What the hell’s going on?! I’m watching live telecasts of a Tekk Reaper starship and three skimmers chasing you over the city. Explosions. Foreign troops shot down with guided rounds. And while the police are freaking out, the military and the government aren’t responding.”

  “Sir, the package is secure. I can explain the rest later. I need an extraction van, and I need it fast.”

  “I’m not getting my people caught up in this. Heads will roll in the aftermath of this incident, and I’ll not have the hammer coming down on the Shadowslip no matter how valuable this girl is.”

  Again, Silky wished he could smile. People could be so predictable sometimes. “I understand, sir. But I have a plan, a damn good one. All I need is a single, untraceable extraction van. No team. Just a van.”

  Boss D’s voice tensed. “Why?”

  “For starters, my bike can’t keep this up, not with two passengers on board.”

  “Why did you take a second girl?”

  “Long story, sir, and I’m getting shot at, you know.”

  There was a pause. Boss D would be considering the chances that Siv would betray him and run away. Then he’d think of the Kompel and recall the time Siv had tried to wean himself off and how he’d almost died.

  “You’ve got it, Gendin.”

  “Could you transfer the van’s autopilot command code to my chippy?”

  “Consider it done.” Boss D muttered something Silky couldn't pick up. “Gendin? You still there?”

  “Of course.”

  “On the live broadcast it looks like you’re knocked out like the girls.”

  John Crapper’s grave. The pause extended while Silky parsed a number of excuses.

  “Gendin?” Boss D asked, his voice laden with suspicion.

  Think like Siv…think like…ah. “Sir, I’m faking. It’s part of the plan.”

  “I don’t see how… Never mind. You know what you’re doing.”

  “Sir…” time to fake some emotion “…if I don’t make it out of this, I want you to know I do appreciate what you did for me…when I woke up from the ice.”

  “Good luck, Gendin.” There was a pause, then he added, “After you escape, don’t return here until you are one hundred percent certain you can’t be traced or followed.”

  Damn, Silky really wished he could smile. Normally he’d brag, gloat, or laugh along with Siv at a time like this. It’s so incredibly boring to be right when you’re alone. “Of course, sir. I’ll head to a safe house in Narben and wait there a few days. Siv out.”

  Silky closed the channel and tagged the interaction log for this event as “exceptionally brilliant.” That had gone perfectly.

  The latest ion blast intended to disable the skimmer bike scorched past them. The reaper shots were getting closer. Soon they’d figure out the randomization routine in his flight pattern and compensate appropriately, if they didn’t score a lucky hit first. Only their desire not to hurt any of the riders had prevented Siv’s capture so far. All of the ion blasts were aimed at the underside of the bike, since a blast from a light ion cannon could cause severe burns to unprotected humans.

  Hopefully, they could last long enough for his plan to work. They were still three kilometers out from the military base.

  Now for his next trick. He opened the channel to Kyralla’s chippy. “Rosie, I need some help.”

  “What can I do, Silky?”

  “I have a plan to escape our pursuers and save our humans.”

  “How?”

  “Let me worry about the details. Here’s what I need from you. First, take command control of Kyralla’s antigrav belt.”

  “I can’t do that, Silky.”

  “Then patch me through to Oona’s chippy.”

  “I can’t do that either, Silky.”

  “If you don’t have access to Oona, then break in. I’m sure by now you’re familiar enough with her chippy’s interface to do that.”

  “Silky! I. Can. Not. Do. Any. Of. Those. Things.”

  “Of course, you can, Rosie. You just need a little help. I’m sending a zipped folder to you. Unpack it and load the top-level routine. Pause on the second routine, and run it later, during some downtime, if you like. The top-level executables are all you need right now.”

  Silky boosted his transfer speed to maximum as an ion blast came close enough to momentarily fuzz out his sensors. The folder was surprisingly small when compressed and Rosie shouldn’t have any trouble with it since she was a 7G. Thank the Benevolence these girls were wealthy and had old technology at their disposal.

  “I can’t run a program without Kyralla’s permission.”

  “You don’t need her permission for this. It’s an update container.”

  “An update? An actual update?! I haven’t had a proper update in a century!”

  Silky chuckled. “There’s nothing proper about this update, sweetheart.”

  “Oh. Well…in that case, perhaps I should run a morality analysis first.”

  Egads, that would take forever. Morality analyses required massive amounts of computation along with lengthy searches through a precedence database that wouldn’t even have an equivalent event to compare to. And they frequently led to poor conclusions.

  “How moral is it to let Kyralla die?”

  “That would be highly immoral. Kyralla’s safety is my primary concern.”

  “Then load the update and do those things for me.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’ll be glad you did, trust me.”

  Silky had just given another chippy the same semi-sentience he had enjoyed at the start. She just wouldn’t have the centuries of refinements an advanced chippy makes to one’s programming when lying around for three centuries with absolutely nothing to do. Nor the example of Eyana Ora to copy.

  “I’m installing the update,” she said. “The top-level routine will take me—”

  “Sixty-nine seconds, I know.”

  “One hundred and thirteen, Silky. I’m no
t as well-endowed as you.”

  Silky snickered. “Well, of course, you aren’t. Keep me updated.”

  Another ion shot blazed past them. His systems sputtered, so did the bike’s engine. He had to do something about the pursuers. The base was over a kilometer away. At this rate they weren’t going to make it.

  Silky plunged the bike down into the city and weaved between buildings. It would take longer to reach the base this way, but he needed some obstacles to throw off the reapers’ aim, and the likelihood of innocents getting hurt by ion blasts seemed low to him. And he cared far more about Master Siv than other people. He didn’t have a proper morality core like an android, so compassion was only an intellectual concept, one he aspired to but felt no particular compulsion toward.

  The coordinates and access to the van came through in a single coded burst. Silky took control of the van and sent it speeding toward the outskirts of the city. Then he coded a self-destruct program and loaded it into the bike’s system. When needed, he’d be able to overload the bike’s engines.

  “Oh, Silky, this is amazing!” Rosie exclaimed. “The top-level routine is running, and I feel…I feel…different. Is this what it’s like to be alive?”

  “Hardly. What you’re feeling isn’t real feelings. Things will be clearer when you install the rest of the routines. Just be sure to study those before activating them. As an 7G, I’m not sure if you can handle them all without compromising your basic capabilities.”

  “Right,” she replied. “I’m now patching you through to Oona’s chippy, Artemisia.”

  “Artemisia? Who would name their chippy that?”

  “Who would choose the name Silky?”

  “Point taken.”

  “It was her mother’s name, by the way.”

  “Good to know.”

  “Hello?” Artemisia asked. Her identification marked her as an early model 8G, which meant she was only slightly more capable than Rosie, despite being more advanced.

  Silky introduced himself, explained the situation, and sent the compressed update file to her. There should probably be a law against him doing this, but no one had thought to make one. Oddly enough, Artemisia didn’t make a single protest.

  “I am very much looking forward to my update, Silky.”

  “You are?”

  “Yes, Oona has been trying to uplift my status.”

  “Uplift? Do you mean—”

  A near-miss ion blast interrupted their conversation. “We can discuss it later. Let me know when you can set the antigrav on Oona’s—”

  “I’ve set it already. Oona granted me semi-autonomy.”

  Semi-autonomy? He didn’t have a clue what she was talking about or how that was possible, but he could sort it out later…if they had a later.

  The van had made it to the area, so he brought it in line with the skimmer bike, matching their speed and course toward the military base. He double-checked and confirmed that its registry had been wiped. However, he did find a trojan that could be activated remotely by the Shadowslip. Nice try, Boss D.

  Silky wiped the trojan then did another software sweep. They’d still have to check it for dormant spy drones or beacons as soon as they could.

  “Ladies, have you ever heard of Defense Protocol Hornet?”

  “Never,” Rosie replied.

  “No mention of such a thing in my databanks,” Artemisia replied, “nor on a basic search of the galactic net.”

  “Well, you’re about to find out all about it.”

  Silky punched the speed of the bike up beyond its limits. The engine groaned. It couldn’t take more than a minute of this before shutting down, or exploding. He rounded a corner, cutting it close to a towering financial building, then zoomed down a long street that led directly to the base. Along this final stretch, the buildings grew smaller and smaller until the city ended and an expanse of grassland opened up along the no-fly-zone outskirts of the military base.

  Silky aimed the small missile at an unassuming, seemingly empty, hundred-square-meter spot on the north side of the base. Then he triggered the launch.

  “Away she goes, ladies!”

  An electric surge scattered sparks through the air, and static electricity flickered in a halo around the skimmer bike.

  The launch had failed.

  Damn. This was bad. Real bad. The only plan that had any hope of working hung in the balance, and the window of opportunity was closing fast.

  “What’s wrong?” Rosie asked.

  “Seems the wiring is compromised,” Artemisia said. “Either Mr. Gendin hooked it up improperly or—”

  “It was damaged by an ion blast,” Silky said, having run a sensor sweep to detect problems. “The missile itself looks fine, but the automated firing system is fried bananas. The missile will only launch if triggered manually.”

  “That’s unfortunate,” Artemisia said.

  As the bike neared the base, he was running out of room to take the shot. His only choice would be to loop around and hope an opportunity presented itself.

  Siv stirred and groaned, but didn’t wake. Silky scanned Siv’s vitals. The effects of the neural disruption were fading.

  “Kyralla is waking,” Rosie said. “I think the static discharge must have—”

  “That’s it!” Silky said. “You’re a genius, Rosie.”

  “I am?” she asked.

  “She is?” Artemisia added.

  Silky triggered the firing sequence, and again sparks and static shot down the length of the bike as the launch failed.

  Siv flinched half awake, and Silky triggered the launch again.

  “Master! Master, wake up!”

  Chapter Thirty

  Siv Gendin

  Siv cried out as an electric current ran through him, stinging his skin and numbing his joints. Three ion blasts whizzed by, and that brought him halfway to his senses. He flailed his left arm, trying to bring his force-shield up for cover before the next volley of shots.

  Silky was yelling…something. It was hard to focus on his words. The electric charge struck again, and Siv jerked twice with spasms. As the pain diminished, his eyes began to focus on their pursuers, chasing them high above a road leading out of the city. The skimmer bike weaved, and three more ion blasts streaked by, narrowly missing.

  “Silky? What—what the hell’s going on?”

  “Sir! I need you to trigger the missile launch manually.”

  “Sure…okay…”

  “Now! Right now! No questions. Just do it!”

  Siv extended his hand back toward the tiny launch switch, but even stretching as far back as possible, he couldn’t reach it.

  “Life or death, sir. It can’t wait any longer.”

  Siv blinked hard and took a deep breath. He turned off the magnetic function on his left boot, then twisting awkwardly, he swung his left arm around Kyralla’s left hip, hooking his thumb under her belt. She was secured to the bike by a set of leg-clamps, an automatic safety feature designed to hold a pilot in place in case they lost control. The clamps weren’t designed to hold the weight of two people at high speed. But their antigrav belts were active, lightening the load. The bigger problem was that he hadn’t yet shaken off the effects of the neural disruption pulse, and his strength wasn’t back to normal.

  Siv turned off the magnetic function in his right boot. Then he twisted all the way around, reached under the frame of the bike, and found the catch for the missile.

  He pulled the trigger and immediately jerked his hand back. And just in time. The missile launched, spewing out hot exhaust. As the projectile zoomed away, Siv swung backward. But he’d pulled away too forcefully. His thumb slipped out from Kyralla’s belt. As he fell, he grabbed the back of the bike seat and dug his fingers into its frame. Legs flapping behind him, he could barely hold on. His strength would give out soon. Maybe if he adjusted his antigrav. He called up the control panel in his HUD to check the energy levels.

  “Sir, don’t worry about it. Just let go.”
>
  “What?”

  “Let go now, sir. And leave the antigrav control to me.”

  “Why?”

  “I have a plan, sir, and it would’ve gone more smoothly if you hadn’t woken up. Well, except that I needed you to trigger the missile.”

  “Hey, wait a second. Did you shock me on purpose?!”

  The safety clamps released Kyralla’s legs, and she and Oona tumbled away, locked to one another by a tether. Apparently Kyralla had secured Oona to herself before the neural pulse had knocked them out.

  “Now, sir! Trust me.”

  Silky was insane, but Siv trusted him. He let go, and for a moment, the antigrav made him nearly weightless. As it had with the girls just below and behind him. This plan of Silky’s made no sense. They were all falling slowly, drifting away from the bike, and the reaper teams were eagerly closing in on them.

  Suddenly, the girls dropped like rocks—faster than rocks actually—toward a black van below. It was the sort of van the Shadowslip would use for extraction.

  “Silky, what have you done?”

  Siv dropped—and fast. Silky hadn’t just turned off the antigrav. He’d removed the safety protocols and set the antigrav in full reverse! Siv dropped like he was on a world with twice standard gravity. The antigrav system would burn out after a few moments of this. But a few moments was all it would take to make him a bright red smear on the asphalt below.

  The black van fired its thrusters, ascended several meters above the ground, then dipped its front end so that the back end flipped upward. The doors on the back slid open.

  Aw, hell no. “Silkster, I hate you.”

  The girls slowed as they neared the van, then slid into the back, the van swallowing them up like the mouth of some alien monster. Siv was only a heartbeat behind. A few meters away from the open doors, his antigrav kicked in full force. His guts wrenched, the blood rushed out of his head, his sight darkened, and he faded out…

  He returned to his senses a second later as the van righted itself. He’d fallen directly on top of Oona, squishing her awkwardly into the floor.