What would they say to each other after doing something like that? She hadn’t expected Fran to do that with her dad, hadn’t even been sure the woman liked any of them. Now, rethinking all the previous interactions between them, it became more clear what Fran was doing. She had liked her dad from the start.
In the midst of her wandering thoughts, Cara caught an unexpected sound/feeling cross the channel.
Her dad’s voice surprised her, saying, “Lyssa?”
The name jarred her memory of Dr. Jickson crying on the edge of her bed. It had only been a little while ago but already felt like another life. As her dad’s voice faded away in the low static that filled the hacked channel, Cara could have sworn she felt something answer, not with words but with a flicker of what felt like fear. She had known without a doubt that Lyssa was real, then. She was hiding.
Cara kept the speaker pressed to her ear. Eventually, Tim got tired of trying to listen and sat down cross-legged on the floor with his dolphin across one leg, reading the poetry book. He turned the pages slowly, showing more care than she thought he was capable of.
When she heard Dad and Fran coming back up the corridor, talking in low voices, Cara reset the terminal and stepped into the hallway.
“Are you going back up?” she asked, clasping her hands behind her back.
Her dad was obviously distracted. He was flushed, and looked like he didn’t know where to be in relation to Fran, who appeared quite relaxed.
“Back up?” Andy said. “Oh, the command deck. Sure.” He blinked. “Don’t forget your brother.”
*****
“We’ve got fast movers,” Fran said.
“Distance?” her dad asked in his flat voice.
“Still two hundred thousand klicks.”
“They’re checking us. Or wait. Who’s between us and them?”
“Plenty of ships. They’ve already passed four heavy freighters on the same vector. They ignored them.”
“So, there’s still a possibility they don’t know we’re here. Has anything pinged our registry?”
“Nothing in the log.”
Cara knew ‘fast movers’ meant missiles. Her dad had used the term while telling stories from his TSF days. Back then, he had been the one firing fast movers at pirate ships. He’d explained that close combat between ships was actually rare. Most fought with missiles, beams, and rail guns over vast distances.
“You can’t outrun a missile,” he’d said. “It doesn’t care about g-forces that will turn you into mush,” and then he’d tickled her, which seemed like a gruesome thing to do, now that she thought about it. Her dad didn’t like to sugarcoat his stories, though he’d tried to hide other things from them, like when they were almost out of food or the ship was sputtering to a breakdown.
In just the last year, Cara felt like most things she hadn’t understood before were coming into focus and making sense. The systems on Sunny Skies all had an order, even when they weren’t working right. She understood the steps her dad took to troubleshoot a problem or override a failed system to get another one to work. She understood more about the ways people communicated using words and emotions. She could read her dad better, even when he was trying to keep his worries and dread from them. She understood that silence often said more than words.
She’d known immediately that Ngoba Starl’s pained ranting was hiding something else. She spent most of her time watching Fran and her dad, trying to figure out if they heard it or not. Starl had been laughing the whole time, even when he was sobbing and choking, pretending to be hurt. Or that was her hypothesis, anyway. She hoped to meet the fancy-dressing gangster again someday to ask him about it. He seemed like the type to want to talk about his deceptions, bask in how smart he was.
While Cara had never met her Grandpa Charlie, she’d seen plenty of pictures and even been able to talk to him via audio feed once when she was seven. Her dad liked to say what a good people person Charlie was, how he could read someone in ten seconds.
“He always knew what people really wanted, regardless what they might say,” her dad had explained.
“You mean people are liars?” Cara had asked.
“No. It’s just that most people don’t talk about those kinds of things, about what they really want. And they don’t ever admit them to other people. You have to read between the lines to hear what they’re really saying.”
“What are you really saying?” Cara had asked, and that made her dad laugh with a thoughtful expression in his eyes.
“I just got a ping,” Fran announced. “Not the Benevolent Hand, but one of their close attack fighters.”
“They’re deploying already. How close are the missiles now?”
“The point defense cannons should have them any second.”
“Should,” Andy repeated.
Fran gave him another one of her self-assured smiles. She trusted the ship more than he did.
“All right,” Andy said. “PDCs are online and tracking. Looks like thirty seconds to engagement.” He bit his lip. “This is going to tell them exactly what we’ve got. The close attack fighters will go for the PDCs first.”
“What else have we got?”
“I can try chaff.”
“You better hurry up and do it.”
If her dad hadn’t been in robot-mode, he might have rolled his eyes. Instead, his hands entered commands into his console so fast Cara couldn’t tell what he was doing. A new visual flashed in the holodisplay, showing what she thought was Sunny Skies engulfed in a cloud of sparkling lights. The image of Sunny Skies seemed to repeat across the display.
Two bright red points appeared on the edge of the holodisplay.
Cara reached out for Tim’s hand, pulling it away from his book.
“What?” he complained.
The missiles flew directly into one of the ghost versions of Sunny Skies and flared out.
Fran whooped. “Nice!” she shouted. “That’s all right!”
Andy nodded. “The close attack fighters should be in range shortly. Can the engines give us anything else?”
It was weird to hear her dad ask all these questions aloud when he usually checked these sorts of things himself. Cara wondered if it was something he had learned in the TSF, where he said they had communicated about everything so everyone would know what was going on. “Combat is no time to be stuck in your own head,” he’d said once. Explaining that sometimes people froze. If you said something aloud it made you remember what you had trained to do. Made it easier to slip into robot-mode and do what had to be done.
“I can pulse our acceleration,” Fran said. “It’ll give us a little bit, but we’re not going to outrun them.”
“How about braking?”
“That’s our only advantage that I can see. Our mass-to-drive ratio is a thousand times better than theirs.”
Andy nodded, gaze rapt on his console.
“So their close fighters identified us,” Andy said, thinking aloud again. “It’s safe to assume they’ve relayed that information.” He glanced at Fran. “What’s going on with the Benevolent Hand’s velocity?”
“Stable,” she said. “They’re gaining.”
“We need an asteroid to drop in their path,” Andy said.
“My kingdom for some space junk,” she said, some joke that her dad seemed to get. For the first time since Benevolent Hand had moved, he smiled.
“We’re going to have to take on their close fighters. No way around it. I want you to cut our acceleration curve.”
“Why?”
“We’re going to limp a little bit to draw them out.”
Fran gave him a hard look. “You sure about that?”
“The other weapon we have besides the cannons is the high-power comm array. It won’t do much against something the size of Benevolent Hand but it’ll fry a smaller ship. We need to get them close to use it.”
“You seem to forget they have guns, too.”
“I haven’t forgotten. You can enter th
e command or I can do it.”
“I trust you,” Fran said, sounding like she was trying to convince herself even though her dad hadn’t asked.
“That’s good,” he answered, slipping back into robot-mode.
As soon as the three red icons indicating the combat fighters entered her dad’s display, it seemed like the rest of the maneuver happened before Cara could take another breath. Fran sent the command to the engines and the icons jumped forward, passing through one of the ghost ships created by the countermeasures. While the missiles had been dumb enough to attack chaff, the fighters blew through the illusion.
“They’re firing on us,” Fran said.
“First strafing run,” Andy said. “Testing our weapons set. Responding with three cannons.”
One of the icons blinked out.
“You got one of them!” Fran shouted.
“Let’s see if they hang back or come in strong,” Andy said. He watched the display for a few more seconds before nodding to himself. “They’re impatient,” he said. “I wonder what that tells us about our Heartbridge friends.”
He tried the point defense cannons a second time, opening all twelve. The fighters anticipated the move and didn’t take any damage. Her dad bit his lip.
When the fighters came around again, her dad pulled up a different screen that controlled broadcast frequencies on the main communications array. He activated the high-power microwave transmitter but only in standby mode.
“Flash batteries are up.”
“What should we say to them, Cara?” he asked.
Cara blinked, unprepared for a question. “Hello?” she asked.
“Hello sounds good. Direct and to the point. I’ll add Goodbye as a closing statement.”
When the two ships were within striking distance of Sunny Skies, he sent the message. Cara’s tiny speaker squawked with static as her channel suffered bleedover from the high-power signal as a gigawatt of microwaves hit the two fighters.
Cara knew that small ships like fighters only had electrostatic shields that couldn’t deflect a high-powered microwave burst at this range. It would be like an EMP burst striking them.
The two icons didn’t disappear but both continued on the vector they had been following toward Sunny Skies, shooting off into open space beyond.
“Goodbye,” Andy said. “Any update on the Benevolent Hand?”
“Still gaining.”
“I’m not excited about wasting fuel for a braking maneuver but I don’t see another option. The question is when to execute. We don’t want them recognizing what we’re doing and slowing alongside us.”
“So if they do overshoot us,” Fran said. “What then?”
“Then we’ve got more time to figure it out,” Andy said.
“Aye aye, Captain,” she said.
Chapter Thirty-Three
STELLAR DATE: 9.11.2963 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Object 8221
REGION: Near the Mars Protectorate Border, InnerSol
Eighteen Years Earlier
None of the kids on the lounges could be woken up. Their vital signs were healthy and they all looked fed, if a bit thin, all with a similar pale, nearly-translucent quality to their skin.
The girl Andy tried to wake up had blue veins on her eyelids. As he watched, her eyes shifted beneath her closed lids in REM sleep. Several neural pads lined her temples, running to filament cables that fed into a console next to her bed. The console’s screen was dark.
“What the fuck is this?” Arsel said. “Where’d they get all these kids?”
“You think it’s an organ farm?” Andy said.
“This is would be the cleanest organ farm I’ve ever heard about,” Arsel said, looking around with renewed disgust. “Who’s going to spend this kind of money on skin pigs?”
“Gourmets,” Brit said.
Arsel spat. “Where do they even get this many kids?”
Brit shrugged, ice-blue gaze taking in the room. “The same places people who do this kind of things have always found kids. The question is what are they doing and is it illegal?”
“We’re not cops,” Andy said.
“So I guess these are refugees,” Arsel said. “Easy enough. Let’s get them evacuated so we can get back to the fight.” She stepped toward the nearest bed and grabbed the cables hanging off the boy’s head.
Before Andy could tell her to wait, she tore the neural pads off the kid’s head. Instead of waking up, he started seizing, shoulders and knees jerking violently.
“Shit,” Arsel said.
“We’re not equipped to deal with this,” Brit said. “We need to secure the room and keep moving.”
“Uh, yeah, OK,” Arsel said.
“Wait,” Andy said. “What if one these kids is a Carthage?”
The boy Arsel has disconnected gurgled, mouth foaming, but didn’t wake up. Andy crossed the room to push Arsel out of the way and roll the boy on his side, head rested against an elbow so he wouldn’t choke on his vomit.
“You forget your basic first aid?” he asked.
“I don’t have time for that shit.”
“So you’re just lazy,” Andy replied.
Arsel surged forward, shoving her face in his. “Did you want to make out, Sykes? I’ll bite those lips off.”
Andy looked at her, keeping his calm. “Don’t get pissed at me because you fucked up. You could have killed that kid. We need to keep our heads on straight. Are you squared away? You’re acting crazy.”
Arsel sneered but pulled back slightly. She didn’t want to fight him and he knew it.
“We don’t have time for this shit,” she said. “There’s nobody behind us but our own. No need to secure the room. We need to keep moving.”
“I’m calling in the location,” Andy said. “They’ll be sending more breach teams soon.”
“I don’t know,” Brit said. “Sounds like most of the action is outside. It’s starting to look like this whole place is automated. They put all their money in fighting drones.”
“Maybe,” Andy said. “I still think we need to check all these kids. We need to know if one of them is a Carthage or not.”
“Fine,” Arsel spat. “You take those rows and I’ll get these by the door. Let’s move.”
Andy jogged down the row of couches, scanning faces as he went, as well as checking for any kid missing a finger. When he reached the end of the room, he’d counted thirty couches in the column. He quickly did the math and came up with two-hundred and ten kids in the room. None of them stirred as he went past.
When none of them found any of the Carthage kids, they met back at the door and went out into the hallway. Andy pulled the door closed and attached a lock-bolt to seal it.
“Where’s the rest of the team?” Brit said.
“Fifty meters ahead,” Arsel said, checking her Link. “More corridors with labs like this one, more kids plugged in like batteries.”
Andy caught the images over the Link just as Arsel saw them. The labs were identical. The other teams had also found more network banks and rooms full of high-powered transmission equipment, indicating the station was being controlled remotely.
“Pirates, my ass,” Arsel said.
“Didn’t I already say that?” Andy asked, shooting her a grin.
She still wasn’t happy with him, but didn’t threaten to hit him as he’d expected.
“Looks like there’s an open area twenty meters down one of the corridors we passed already,” Brit said. “We should go clear that space if the other teams have already moved ahead.”
“Right,” Andy said. He called in the plan to their squad leader and received permission to deviate.
The three of them fell into a stick formation, Arsel at the lead, Brit in the rear and Andy in the middle checking every door they passed and sealing with his plasma torch.
“God, it’s quiet,” he said, realizing the only sound he had heard for the last hour was their own footsteps, cursing and heavy breathing. Even the
labs full of sleeping kids had been quiet.
“Maybe this is some form of hell,” Arsel said.
“Maybe it’s heaven,” Brit countered. “Everyone’s floating on a cloud in some simulation, strumming harps.”
“I’ll be with my virgins,” Andy said, sealing another room.
“Why do you get the virgins?” Arsel said.
“You didn’t call them first. You prefer hell, apparently.”
“More interesting,” Brit said.
Andy glanced at her. “You say that now.”
They had reached the edge of another intersection. Arsel had just reached the corner as Andy looked back at Brit, flashing his crooked grin, when a blue-white electron beam struck Arsel in the head and neck, burning away half her upper body and sending slivers of lightning through the air.
“Fire!” Brit yelled, voice filling the corridor and screaming across the Link.
Andy stumbled backward, landing on one knee. He raised his rifle and lobbed three splash grenades into the intersection near Arsel’s body. The explosions made her corpse jump, arms flapping.
As the grenades went off, Andy fell back two more steps, taking a position on the opposite side of the corridor as Brit. They had no cover, and the nearest intersection was ten meters behind them. He had sealed the one door between them and the rear hallways.
A high squealing noise like something wet sucking against tile filled the far end of the corridor and into the intersection stepped a squat mech with a heavy, square-shaped body and rotating cannons for arms. It stopped in the middle of the corridor and squatted on its thick legs. The cannons wound up, squealing.
Andy didn’t have time to think about Brit. He launched two more grenades he knew would have little effect, and turned to run for the intersection behind them. He hadn’t made it three steps when slugs caught him between the shoulders and across the backs of his legs. His armor held but he was knocked forward, sprawling on the floor. He nearly lost his rifle.
Rolling on his back in time to see Brit leaping over him, he rose with the rifle between his knees and filled the hallway with beamfire. The blue bolts of energy seemed to float too slowly down the corridor as his breath raged in his helmet, and then a wall of lightning filled the area where the mech had been standing. In the storm of arcing electricity, the cannons squealed again.
Lyssa's Dream - A Hard Science Fiction AI Adventure (The Sentience Wars - Origins Book 1) Page 24
