Lyssa's Dream - A Hard Science Fiction AI Adventure (The Sentience Wars - Origins Book 1)
Page 26
In another minute, she turned to Cara’s dad with wide eyes. Cara thought she looked like she’d seen a ghost.
“They’re going after the Benevolent Hand in a suicide run.”
He pursed his lips. “What have they got to make that work?”
“They’ve got a mining nuke.”
Cara’s dad shook his head, not looking impressed. “If it’s a tunneling charge, that might do some damage. It’s a plan, I guess. Have they broadcast the radius, at least? What kind of timeline are we looking at?”
“The ship is Flitter Cane. They’re pulling off non-essential crew now.”
“They don’t have anything with an onboard AI that could pilot it?”
“They don’t want to risk external control. Besides, three Lowspin ships volunteered. They want revenge for Starl.”
“He’s not dead.”
She shrugged. “I guess they don’t know that.”
“So, they ram the Benevolent Hand, set off the nuke. We hope it knocks a hole in the cruiser. That doesn’t stop all the close fighters they still have deployed.”
“What’s it matter? We can burn out of here like we’d planned on, right?”
Cara’s dad nodded, obviously still thinking through possible hazards. “Right,” he mused. “If I was the Benevolent Hand and I saw suicide bombers coming my way, what would I do?”
“Could you do anything?” Fran frowned abruptly. “Why are you assuming they’ll do anything? How are they going to know?”
“I think they’ve known everything Lowspin was going to do this whole time. They’ve probably got fifty spies in your syndicate. So, if that’s happening and they can’t stop it, they’ll want to use the resources they have left; which is Zanda.”
His gaze shifted to the holodisplay with their path through the swarm outlined in bright blue. Cara’s dad rubbed his face, suddenly looking tired.
The only way to push through catastrophe: Talk through the plan.
“Mom’s not going to answer,” Cara shouted. She couldn’t stop herself. Her dad’s pain wouldn’t let her keep the words inside. “She’s gone. We know she’s not dead. We know she left. Stop hoping she’ll come back! We’re still here!”
Cara surprised herself with her anger. She clenched her fists and looked up from the floor where she had fixed her gaze. Tears stung her eyes. Her dad stared at her from the console, the holodisplay sparkling above his head like an angry cloud.
Slowly, he unfastened the harness holding him to the seat and walked across the command deck so he could wrap his arms around her. Cara didn’t know when she had started crying. She buried her face in his shoulder. Then Tim burrowed his way into the hug as well.
Her dad pulled away to look at her, wiping tears from the side of her face with his rough hands.
“I never said she was dead,” he said, voice catching. “I said she was gone.” He shook his head, eyes also wet. “She might come back, Cara. That’s the truth. Sometimes I wish she was dead because then I could stop thinking about it.”
Andy picked up the bit of wire running from the communications console to her earbud. “I should have known you might be able to pick up other things with this. That’s pretty genius. We need to patent it when we’re done with all this.” He released a heavy breath. “What did you hear?”
Cara searched for the right words. “You just keep saying her name. ‘Brit, Brit. What do I do, Brit? What now, Brit?’” She gave him a sheepish look. “‘Fuck you, Brit.’”
His eyes widened and he held up a finger. “I know you’re quoting, but you don’t use that word unless you cut your hand off, you understand me?”
Fran stifled a laugh from the other side of the room.
Cara nodded. She wrapped her arms around his neck and hugged him again.
“And I know you’re still here,” he said, tousling Tim’s hair. “I have a problem with something— They’re called circular thoughts. Sometimes you get a thought in your head and it doesn’t want to go away. You think it’s gone and then something brings it back, and you move from that bad thought to another one, until you come back to the first one. I’m getting better but that’s what your Link interceptor was probably picking up.”
He glanced at Fran. “At least I hope so.”
Fran looked at Cara and blushed bright red. It was the first time she had seemed embarrassed about anything since Cara had met her.
“All right,” Andy said, standing. “If Fran’s friends are going to do what they say they are, then we need to keep moving. It’s going to get bumpy for a while. You guys stay strapped in. Wait. Does anyone need to use the latrine?”
Fran raised her hand. Tim raised his, too.
“Hurry up then. We’ve maybe got ten minutes before we hit the swarm again. If I need to run evasive maneuvers, I’ll call it over the main intercom.”
Tim took Fran’s hand at the command deck door, which made her smile in a strange way. When her dad settled back into his chair, Cara was glad to be alone with him, even if she felt like a bomb had gone off in her heart, leaving her exhausted in a good way.
She put the mini speaker back in her ear and started scanning channels again. This time the entire spectrum was full of chatter.
Chapter Thirty-Five
STELLAR DATE: 10.02.2968 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: TSS Aggression’s Cost
REGION: High Terra, Earth, Terran Hegemony
Thirteen Years Earlier
The mission they came to call Fortress 8221 didn’t end with any easy answers. Kylan Carthage was considered a casualty while Yandi and Urvin went home to appear on several news streams with their tearful mother. The other children were absorbed by some social program SolGov maintained for orphaned children that Brit later determined didn’t exist. She was convinced they had been retaken by whatever shell company had run the fortress, re-acquiring its valuable assets.
In the five years since the mission, Brit only became more obsessed with trying to track down other groups of lost kids. When she couldn’t find any public records, she even took the risk of trying TSF channels, calling in favors with several intel officers and finally Captain Transon, who had been transferred back to headquarters on High Terra, and promoted three years later to Major.
They were out for dinner in a zone near her parents’ neighborhood when Transon’s message came through. The evening had been going well enough, the restaurant overlooking a small park with a reflecting pond and frogs singing to each other.
Transon’s response was kind, but had basically told her to drop it.
Andy was on a short pass from his current duty running close fighter support for smuggling interdiction. It was easy duty for a captain. His missions took him between High Terra, Cruithne and Kafflin, an object that sat in a rough transfer orbit between Earth and Venus that had become a favorite for pirates.
The missions were predictable enough. He was never in much danger beyond the normal rigors of space travel. Breach teams were mostly enlisted and he was their bus driver. Still, it took him away from Brit and he found himself missing her more and more.
“I don’t understand how five hundred kids just disappear,” she complained bitterly, closing the message after Andy had read it. “Everyone wants to pretend they were never there. We saw them.”
He nodded. They had been down this road before and experience proved it didn’t end well. She was growing more disillusioned with the TSF while still volunteering for increasingly dangerous missions. After being attached to a Special Operatio
ns unit for nearly two years, deploying for months at a time when Andy couldn’t contact her or know where she was, she had finally put in a packet for a branch transfer to Special Ops. The application was still under review.
Andy hadn’t allowed himself to really consider what they would do if she was accepted. In reality, he knew it would end their relationship and he wasn’t quite ready for that yet. He wanted to enjoy things as they were now for a while longer.
Andy took her hand and pressed her fingers into his. Their palms were warm against one another.
“How’s your fish?” he asked.
She gave him a bored look, turning her face to gaze out at the park below the terrace.
“Dry,” she said. “Don’t change the subject. This is important.”
“You don’t have to tell me that,” he said. “I’m the one with Kylan Carthage’s voice in my dreams.”
Andy stopped himself. This was where the discussion turned into argument. He had let the kids go and he was the one with more right to be angry about all of it. He had listened to Kylan as he died, not Brit. In a way, her continued obsession with 8221 forced him to relive that helplessness over and over again.
“You know they didn’t destroy the station,” Brit said.
“They destroyed it a month after it was cleared. You saw the report same as I did.”
Brit shook her head. “It’s still there. I got a return from a research telescope.”
“You what?”
“I hired time on a long-range telescope and verified it’s still there. It was a lot cheaper than I’d thought it would be.”
“What are you going to do when Intel comes around to ask you questions about that?”
“How will they ever know? Are you going to tell them?”
“No,” Andy said. “But you need to be careful. This is starting to look like an obsession, Brit. I’m not the only one who’s mentioned it.”
Her eyes glimmered as she looked at the park. “You’d be glad if I failed psych, wouldn’t you? Then my application to Special Ops would get denied.”
Andy let go of her hand and leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms. His appetite was gone. He looked around for the waiter. “That’s not what I said. If that’s what you want to do, you should go do it. I’m not going to stop you.”
“But you don’t want me to go?”
“So I would rather my girlfriend was somewhere I could see her instead of deployed for a year doing life-threatening shit in Special Ops. That really sucks for me to feel that way, right?”
“I never asked you to love me, Andy.”
He stared at her, not knowing what to say. Sometimes she made him feel like the only person in the universe, until she’d follow her warmth with a slap from nowhere. And she knew the exact words to use.
“I already told you I supported your application.” He took the napkin from his lap and threw it over his half-eaten steak. “If you think you need to push me away, then you do what you need to do. Loving you doesn’t mean trapping you, Brit. Maybe I was an idiot when I believed that you loved me, too.”
She looked at him. Her eyes were wet with tears. “It feels like we’re at a place where we have to make a decision, Andy. I can’t help what I want. I have to do this. I understand if you can’t come with me.”
He frowned slightly, not understanding if she was talking about the Special Ops application or the kids from 8221.
“Back home,” he said, “people used to just disappear. You go around to find a friend and his mom tells you he slipped into the river and didn’t come back up, that maybe a gator got him.” He laughed sadly. “All this technology, and that’s how I grew up. You know there were gangs that grabbed kids out of my neighborhood, too. My dad made my sister and me stay indoors some nights. He wouldn’t tell us why but he had a sense about those kinds of things. They liked ten to thirteen-year-olds the best. They brought the highest prices. If you were older than that, they could still sell you to bio-harvesters. What’s it matter? The poor will just make more. We’re cheap. It’s shitty but it’s life, and I need to keep living mine.”
“You don’t mean that,” she said softly, holding herself still.
“It’s how I get by, Brit. I thought you already knew that.” He motioned toward the restaurant and the manicured park. “All this can go away at any moment. I feel that more now than I ever have. You remember when you asked me if I wanted to have kids?”
She wiped her face and nodded. He felt like he was hitting her with words, even after what she’d said to him. She hunched over her plate.
“I said yes, and I meant it. As shitty as this world is, I still think kids are the only answer. We have to keep them safe. I can’t help those kids on 8221, Brit. But I’ll be damned if I let my own kids fall into that situation. I’d die first. My dad taught me that, and they tried to say he was dumb.”
He had been looking at the park as he talked. When his gaze returned to Brit, her eyes were nearly black under the moonlight.
“I’m pregnant,” she said abruptly. “I was going to take care of it but I haven’t been able to. Every time I think about it, I think about the future and how it’s just a blank wall for me. All that’s there is you.” Her voice broke. “You say you don’t want to trap me, but I’m the one trapping you. And now this.”
Andy opened his mouth to speak but didn’t know what to say. Brit buried her face in her hands. In his peripheral vision, he caught the waiter hovering, unsure whether to approach or not. Andy waved him away.
Going around the table, he pulled Brit’s chair out and sank to his knees next to her, pressing his head against her stomach. She was still has lean as ever.
“I haven’t taken precautions,” Brit was saying. “I didn’t think I could get pregnant. I haven’t saved any eggs, even. I hadn’t even considered this could happen. My mother couldn’t carry me. They used an artificial womb.”
Andy lifted his face from her stomach and wrapped his arms around her. He was already thirty A little more than a decade in the TSF had blinked by. The conversation Brit had started—about being at a ‘turning point’ in their relationship—was one most of his friends had experienced before break-ups, before drifting apart. He knew he didn’t want that.
“Andy,” she said, her voice distant. “We can’t have a baby and stay in the TSF.”
“Why not? People do it. We’ll get station assignment. We could request High Terra and be near your parents. Maybe we could even get down to Earth to see my family.”
“If we’re going to do this, I don’t want to stay in the TSF. I’ve been thinking about that and it’s the only way I can do it.”
His mind immediately moved to what he might do if they weren’t in the TSF. Commercial pilot, maybe? Trainer? They both had buddies who had left the service for successful careers on the outside. They could call in favors. Make a new life.
When Brit talked about the future being a blank wall, Andy felt instead that all of Sol seemed wide open. Life outside the TSF could be anything they wanted.
“All right,” he said. “You know me, though. I need to make a plan.”
She smiled and kissed him, then clung to him as he pulled her against his chest.
* * * * *
While Brit’s obsession with 8221 never disappeared completely, pregnancy eventually softened her focus. When Andy thought he was about to find her poring over some old news report, she was reading a child-development guide, or talking with other parents-to-be. She debated the benefits of natural birth or artificial womb. While she continued to exercise daily, her intensity eased and she chose yoga over Jujitsu.
They requested, and were granted, duty stations on High Terra. Andy took a position training recent academy graduates. He found he enjoyed teaching immensely, even when some of the lieutenants struck him as entitled shits. He maintained his even smile while explaining the realities of modern combat.
“Yes, you will be on a breach team,” he told every new class. “You will s
uck dirt and learn to love grenades. You will need to learn to use a rifle like any grunt. If you want to live, anyway. If you want to accomplish the mission. You’re officers. What do you do?”
He couldn’t help but smile as they shouted as one: “Accomplish the mission, sir!”
As the months passed and Brit’s belly grew, until he finally felt the baby kicking, he started to imagine a life outside the TSF. They spent nights talking about where they might live, from Mars to the moons of Jupiter.
“You want our daughter to be a Marsian?” Brit had asked, sounding appalled.
“What’s wrong with being Marsian? There’s a ton of work on Mars.”
“They’re so— pedantic. Robotic. They don’t do anything but what they’re told.”
“You know what we used to say about High Terrans?” Andy asked, reaching out to flick her nose. “You shit gold. Do you shit gold?”
“Of course, I do,” Brit said. “It’s what our economy is based on, dummy.”
“Well, give me some of that gold,” he said. “I need to buy a ship.” He squeezed one of her ass cheeks and she swatted him, laughing.
* * * * *
Cara was born on a Monday morning in September. When Brit had finally gone to sleep and the various nurses came in for their checks, Andy sat in a window bench seat with his daughter wrapped in a swaddling blanket made of some fuzzy material. Her eyes were the same startling blue as Brit’s. She kept wrinkling her forehead, looking at him with such intensity that he wondered what she really saw, even though he knew her world was only a blur of voices and color. Eventually she fell asleep, leaving him alone in the room listening to her light breathing and Brit’s exhausted snore.
In a way, his world had compressed itself into this room, but he felt everything had become so much bigger than it had ever been.
He found himself thinking about Kathryne Carthage in the news stream with her surviving kids, talking about what a brave boy Kylan had been. Andy had never told Brit that he suspected the Carthage company had been operating 8221 and through some fluke the CEO’s own kids had been caught up in the monstrosity her company had created. He didn’t know why he believed that. Kathryne Carthage’s pain had certainly appeared real. Maybe it was his base pessimism.