A Fistful of Credits: Stories from the Four Horsemen Universe (The Revelations Cycle Book 5)

by Chris Kennedy

  As she moved, her pinplants kept up a running toll of how quickly she was expending the nanites in her subcutaneous booster. Fast was the answer. Fucking fast. Too fucking fast. She hurried more, climbing up the ship’s exterior against gravity. With her terrible vision, she risked missing a handhold and dying the loneliest death ever. Or she’d be instantly incinerated by the hellfire of the Capricorn’s fusion torch. So, she moved on and didn’t think about permanent damage or the radiation she was soaking up.

  She reached the airlock and burned more precious seconds with her slate before opening the hatch and diving inside. The hatch had to be operable from the outside—that was a basic safety requirement dating back hundreds of years—but normally it would have set off an alarm on the bridge. The outer door closed silently, and the lock screamed as air flooded in. Sweet, fresh, life-giving air!

  Jeanne got to unsteady feet and stumbled to the door. She had almost no feeling in her limbs and she reached up and pealed the ice, and the contacts which had concealed her identity, away from her thankfully intact eyes. As she opened the inner hatch, she hoped she’d successfully prevented the alarm from sounding; right now, she was in no state for a fight. The booster—billions of nanites released into her bloodstream to repair damage from being exposed to direct vacuum—was 90% expended.

  It didn’t sound as though an alert had gone off, she noted as she accessed the computer once again. Indeed, it looked as though the locals believed she’d thrown herself into space to die. She smiled at the thought; they really had no idea! She hurried down to the nearest lifepod. A little reprogramming, and she’d be on her way to the surface before anyone realised what she’d done...

  “Stop,” a voice ordered. “Now.”

  She looked up and froze. A man was standing there, his gun aimed at her. He was just out of reach...she knew from his pose he understood precisely how dangerous she was. If she moved—and failed—she’d be stunned, time and time again. And that would be the end.

  “You’re some kind of secret agent,” the man said. A security officer, then. Probably ex-merc. “You have nanite boosters, or you wouldn’t have survived to climb up two decks. I guess you probably work for the Earth government.”

  “Yes,” Jeanne said. There was no point in trying to deny it. The boosters were well beyond what anyone but a high-level operator could afford. Even mercs didn’t use them. Her little stunt in space had probably burned half a million credits’ worth of nanites. The way she felt, she wished she had another loaded booster. But the devices had their limits. “I suggest you let me go.”

  The man kept his weapon trained on her. “Why?”

  Jeanne shrugged, suddenly feeling very tired. “My superiors believe Talus needs a new government,” she said. “It doesn’t do humanity any good the way it is. My job was to get the ball rolling. As for who betrayed me...” She shrugged. There had been a leak, a very high-level leak. They’d known precisely who they were looking for, and what ship she was arriving on. But there was nothing she could do about that now.

  “One escape pod will never make it down to the surface without being tracked,” the man pointed out.

  “It will if dozens more are launched at the same time,” Jeanne said. She met his eyes. “Let me go or stun me now. Time is not on our side.”

  The man eyed her for a long moment, then motioned to the lifepod. “Go.”

  Jeanne didn’t hesitate. She climbed into the lifepod and closed the hatch. A moment later, the boosters fired...

  * * *

  “The lifepods are launching,” Captain Richardson said over his pinplants. “All of them!”

  Clever, Allen thought. He wondered, absently, if anyone would realise he’d spoken to Jeanne before she left. She’d done enough damage to the network to make it hard for anyone to say anything with certainty. They won’t dare shoot them down.

  “She must have left a booby trap in the system,” he said, out loud. Ivan was wasting his time with the spacesuit, but there was no need to call him back too early. “I dare say we will have to check the entire network carefully.”

  The captain snorted. “Once we dock,” he said. “We will go over the whole affair very carefully.”

  So you can find a way to cover your ass, Allen thought. And explain your refusal to shut down the computer network. My recommendations are recorded in the computer. He smiled. I might just come out of this smelling of roses!

  He shrugged as he returned to his office. Had he done the right thing?

  He had a feeling he’d never know.

  * * *

  Jeanne allowed herself a giggle as the lifepod fell through the atmosphere and landed in a field 50 miles from the nearest city. The other lifepods were targeted to land closer, much closer, to the city center...if she understood the locals properly, they’d be so interested in those pods, she might be able to slip into the city before she was caught. It would give her time to hide before they found the final lifepod.

  She clambered out of the pod as soon as it landed, then hurried into the forest. She’d hide for a while, listening to the local transmissions and preparing for her insertion into the city proper. And then...

  Her smile widened and took on a predatory edge. And then the real work could begin.

  # # # # #

  Chris’ Introduction to:

  INFORMATION OVERLOAD by Charity Ayres

  I first met Charity at an event at the Suffolk (VA) library. The library was a lot further off the beaten path than I thought it was going to be, and the number of people who came by that day could generously be labeled as “sparse.” Since there weren’t many people interested in the ten or so authors sitting around at tables in the lobby, we had plenty of time to walk around and meet each other, and I realized there was only one other serious author beside myself there—Charity Ayres.

  Since then, I’ve watched as she continued to write and expand her following, while working as a high school teacher during the day. Anyone who knows teachers (my mom taught high school for over 40 years) knows they have more homework than the kids, so I find her struggle to work, write, and still be mom for her family (and dad, too, when her husband is deployed with the navy) to be incredibly admirable. She once told me her most note-worthy accomplishment was completing four novel-length works and still remaining sane. I might qualify the ‘sane’ with a ‘mostly,’ but that’s just because of the way our relationship works. If you’d like to know more about her, you can find it at http://www.authorcharityayres.com.

  In all seriousness, though, Charity is a hard-worker, and I’m happy to have her in this book. Her story expands the Four Horsemen universe by taking a look inside one of the other guilds, and the value of information in the future…

  INFORMATION OVERLOAD by Charity Ayres

  “Are you ignoring my instructions, Major Stephens?”

  The “again” was implied, even if it went unspoken as Commander Janna McCloud continued to type at the console. The grunted response came a few heartbeats later than she expected but was cut-off as though someone had slapped a hand down to stop the sound.

  “No, Commander.”

  So much in those two words caught McCloud’s attention. Her hands froze over the keyboard as she inspected the tired, droopy-eyed man to her right. His dirty-blond hair was sticking out at odd nap-matted angles. McCloud had woken him when the computer systems went offline.

  McCloud swatted her braid away as it floated in front of her, more through misdirected anger than annoyance. Stephens yawned into the back of his hand as he gripped her seat and leaned over her to see the screen scroll through her typed commands. She wanted to raise her voice or bark a directive at the major but managed to restrain herself. Experience with the younger man had shown that neither would do anything to improve the tense dynamic.

  Damn south colony recruits. The men that came from that quadrant were always so cocky, and the women tried too damn hard to find shortcuts through the ranks. Neither seemed to last long.

 
McCloud lifted her eyes to the roughly-welded patch several feet above her head in the control room. She traced the lines in her mind to keep from snapping at him, but the mantra never completely quieted her thoughts.

  “I’m a bit confused as to why you’re still here,” she finally gritted out, her fingers once again flying across the keyboard.

  “They didn’t have any other recruits available for your crew,” Stephens said as he raked his hands through his hair in what she assumed was an attempt to de-snarl it. “To be honest, I think some say this ship is cursed.”

  McCloud rolled her eyes. “That’s not what I meant.” Line after line continued to scroll across the screen. “What are you still doing in the cockpit?”

  Stephens blinked slowly.

  “Right. You need it spelled out. Get down to engineering and see what’s taking the CHENG so long.” Her quiet words came out without inflection. McCloud was proud of how calm and emotionless she sounded, despite the desire to let the words roar out of her. At least she knew Chief Engineer Diggs would tell her what the hell was going on without hesitation or attitude…beyond what was reasonable for him, anyway.

  Stephens said nothing before launching himself away from her seat and floating across to the cubbies on the other side. He opened one of the four re-worked metal doors and pulled out a pair of gravity boots. A moment later, she heard the cymbal-clash of boots on the wire-grate floor as Stephens finally did as he was told. The sound was so loud, she half-imagined the young man was stomping away like an angry toddler. She grinned and wondered if a pacifier would solve her problems.

  The continuing sound of gravity boot treads banging down to the next level was a symphony to her overwrought nerves. McCloud refocused on the screen in front of her and kept typing in different commands, hoping to fix the garbage of mismatched letters and symbols that rolled across the primitive green face. Voice commands had stopped working first, then they had begun displaying garbled text, and now they had an almost complete loss of sensors and communication links. Life support and basic shielding sputtered along on emergency power and were the only reasons she hadn’t activated a full system hard reboot…but she couldn’t wait much longer. If she did reboot, she ran the risk the system would not come back up before their oxygen ran out; there also wouldn’t be any insulation from the cold of space. Not wanting either of these outcomes, she continued to try manual patch after manual patch, while hoping Diggs would be able to find a fixable equipment malfunction.

  If thoughts could conjure a person, McCloud’s thoughts just had; curses and grunts preceded the individual who carried her hopes for a quick resolution.

  “Hell’s fire, Cloud,” Chief Engineer Diggs said. “I can’t find a fracking thing wrong with this giant piece of shit they call a ship.”

  McCloud lifted her gaze from the rolling script on the screen to face the demon-bear of a man. Digg’s hair stuck out in curly tufts of black and gray over a broad face with a flat nose. His beard looked as though he had been using it to clean the passageways. Blue eyes that ordinarily peered out from under bushy brows with mischief now held the cold morass of space ice. There was likely to be some equipment that had gotten a good kick; either that or the major she had sent, which would have been far more preferable.

  “Well, it isn’t like we can dock at a spaceport and get help,” McCloud stated coolly. “We can’t even dial in to ask right now.”

  They grumbled back and forth as they sorted their efforts; her voice was cold, and his snarling. Were it anyone else, their discussion would have become an all-out brawl.

  “Did you find any shorts?” She knew he had checked even before the words left her mouth.

  “Could only check physical links and circuits in the dungeon,” he said as he shook his head. “None of the computers are responding to commands.”

  She tapped her fingers. The CHENG was the next best thing to having another systems tech onboard; if he said the backup systems in the engineering department weren’t responding, he wasn’t blowing smoke. Just the same, the Merc Guild was going to be more pissy than usual if they showed up late; she’d been told the information they carried was perishable.

  “Okay. Stephens can...” she began. She realized that the major had not come up with Diggs. “Where’s Stephens?”

  “He veered off partway back, saying he was going to check some of the physical pathways aft.” Diggs shrugged, but his blue eyes indicated he knew she wouldn’t like the newbie messing with anything without her approval.

  “Of course he did.” Her words were a bare whisper of ice.

  Diggs’s white teeth shined through his whiskers like tiny pinpricks of light, and his eyes flickered again. McCloud knew Diggs’s nose had been broken in a few fights, and she was sure it could take further damage. She barely managed to convince herself not to test the theory; the bastard enjoyed getting her temper up way too much.

  “Find him and send him up, CHENG. Encourage him not to get lost along the way.” Each word came out as though she were spelling them instead of speaking. “I need him in here to keep entering code to help the system reconnect,” she added as she turned back to the screen. “I’ll meet you in the dungeon, afterward. We can check the physical connections in the belly after that.”

  Diggs zipped through the circular access hatch in the floor and down the ladder like the space monkey he was.

  Her fingers flew across the keyboard, sounding like surface weapons fire. One line of code after another pulsed on the tiny green screen. It was the only one not filled with garble and was only there as a back-up. The builders had never really imagined anyone having to use the ancient bit of technology; it was likely older than she and Diggs combined.

  After what seemed like an endless amount of coding later, steps sounded behind McCloud.

  “Stephens, keep typing so I can check the relays.” She neither looked up nor paused to give the command.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The assent was quiet and slow, but she didn’t have time to address his sullen attitude. McCloud slid out from the station and hurried to meet Diggs. She grabbed her braided hair as it drifted out behind her, curled the strands around her fingers, and worked it into a knot looped to the back of her head. If she was going to crawl around in the ship’s belly, she didn’t need her hair getting tangled in gears or around lines. One of the first times she had gone in to do repairs, her hair had gotten caught and had shorted out several of the systems when she tried to jerk it free. Lesson learned.

  She went aft, entered the belly of the ship, and started pulling out the gear she needed. With the systems offline, it would only be so long before they began to have serious issues besides their tardiness. It would likely start with life support, assuming no one showed up to take pot-shots at them; they were adrift and what little shielding they had operational wouldn’t take much damage before it failed. If it weren’t a death sentence to do so, McCloud would have shifted some power to amplify the homing beacon.

  And of course, it had to happen just after the scheduled communications check.

  She shook her head at the timing. With that sort of bad luck, most of the life support would be gone before anyone even wondered if there were a problem. She half-hoped that Diggs, who had been monitoring communications just before everything went down, had forgotten to check in. She knew it was unlikely but had never asked in the chaos.

  “Diggs, I’m going to gear up and climb into the rigging,” she called as she entered engineering, or ‘the dungeon’ as they called it. The vertical piping and crossing of different systems made it look like an oversized jail. The grid-like pattern even blocked most of the lighting, enhancing the feeling. She never understood how someone as massive as the CHENG could be comfortable in such a space. At least on the bridge, she could see the stars on a monitor if she so chose.

  McCloud pulled on shock-proof coveralls and a tool belt. Despite being the commander, it wasn’t unusual for her to take the job, because she was the only one
small enough to fit through the insignificant spaces between some of the relays. For a crew this size, it wasn’t unusual for her to do anything that needed doing.

  Before Stephens had been assigned to Black Relay, it had been her, Diggs, and Lieutenant Garrous running information. Garrous had been built as much like a gorilla as Diggs was a bear. Thankfully, the man had been excellent in the control room and in monitoring the helm. The ship practically jumped to do whatever the man wanted without prompting. Unfortunately, he had been so good that someone had noticed, and Garrous had been promoted and transferred to a cushy desk job where fewer people would try to kill him, not that she would call that job safe by any means. Since Garrous had left, they had run through a string of south colony recruits, but none of them had worked out.

  “Diggs, I need you to monitor the lead and tighten the harness for me. Get your ass out here,” she called, with more than a little annoyance in her tone. Her voice echoed within the cavernous space, and she paused and listened. No response came, nor did she hear the sound of his boot treads approaching.

  Any other day, she would have assumed he was going to pull something, but even Diggs knew the situation was serious. She took off the tool belt that connected to the harness, clipped it around a handrail to keep it in place, and tied the coveralls around it. She wove in and out of the piping and relays, heading in the direction of the CHENG’s ‘office,’ which was where the back-up systems were.

  No movement or sound greeted her from the darkened space. The only light was from the monitors that continued to scroll garbled text. She shook her head. None of what was happening made sense. Were they docked, she would have assumed someone had hacked into them. But en route?