Fox Hunt (Fox Meridian Book 1)

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘I think it’s because if you kill someone here, there’s nowhere to run. If you want to kill someone in Luna City, you need to be damn sure no one is going to figure out it was you.’

  Fox turned her attention back to her drinking companion. ‘Lenora, very few people who commit outright murder think they’re going to get caught until after that eventuality becomes a possibility.’

  ‘Not even the impulse killers?’

  ‘Well, they don’t know they need to worry about it until it’s too late. Rule of thumb: criminals don’t worry over getting locked up, either because they don’t think they will or they know it’s part of the job.’

  6th January.

  Facilities on the Moon stuck to an Earth calendar because people had evolved to live in a twenty-four hour, cyclic environment. If you allowed the day to be almost seven hundred and ten hours long, given some time to adjust and acclimatise, people tended to go a bit funny. Various definitions of ‘funny’ had been used over the years, but a lot of them involved sleep deprivation and psychosis. So it was the same lunar day when Fox opened her eyes the following morning on Earth time.

  Fox viewed that kind of thing as likely to bring on psychosis as well, but that was what virtual assistants were there for, right? Hers almost blocked out the overhead virtual display of Earthlight she had programmed in with various important data elements. She was reminded that it was January sixth, that Christmas decorations should be taken down before midnight, and that her first appointment was at nine. It told her that it was now zero-seven-thirty, that the shower had been turned on and set for twenty-two degrees, and that she had requested breakfast in the hotel restaurant this morning at zero-eight-hundred. The local news panel told her about maintenance operations being carried out in City Quadrant Three for the next seven days.

  She pushed all of it aside and cleared out the overhead view as she pulled the sheets back and rolled out of bed. A shower would clear the sleep from her brain and coffee would get it up to speed, and then she could deal with all the daily details on her way to the debriefing.

  On the other hand, she did call up her notes from the simulation session they had run the previous afternoon while the water soaked into her hair. Then, eyes still closed, she pushed that to one side and pulled an image of the shower stall up to check what the inventory of shower products was like before deciding on a lightly perfumed, frequent-use shampoo and restoring the notes window. No one who really knew Fox would have described her as vain: she could afford not to take excessive care of her appearance given her natural advantages in that area, but many who knew her would have been surprised to discover that she did actually put some effort into it. Her orange hair was a case in point: the colour was natural from the orange-red crown to the far paler, near-white tips, not dyed as a few had suggested, but she did like to make sure it was washed right. In microgravity, that was especially important because the thin strands got everywhere; at least the Moon had enough gravity to make hair issues less common. Showers, however, were a little odd: the drops tended to be bigger and they fell slower. It was weird what you had to adjust to in lowered gravity, and it was not just the way it threw your walking tempo right off.

  Shutting off the water with a thought, she stepped back and engaged the air dryers, and contemplated Driscoll’s performance. The simulator software was good, one of the best training sims MarTech Services produced, and it came with an array of useful tools for the teacher. She could, for example, see where Driscoll’s attention had been focused throughout the exercise, and she could see, right there, a bad habit he was going to have to get over.

  ~~~

  ‘Back on Earth you were frontline, Lieutenant? You were one of the guys breaking in the door?’ Fox was smiling as she said it and Driscoll knew he was being set up for a dressing down, but somehow the smile made it seem like it was not too bad.

  ‘Yes, sir. I ran a twelve-man unit, but we always operated as three teams of four, and we didn’t have manpower to w– to spare on someone sitting back and coordinating.’

  ‘Didn’t have this military-class TacNet software either.’ She grinned at him. ‘I know I miss it. Used to rely on it in the Army and the UNTPP had something similar. NAPA could really do with getting up to speed.’

  ‘It seems… Yeah, it could be really useful.’

  ‘Uh-huh, but you need to use it. Now, this goes for all of you, but it goes double for your CO. All of you need to get used to this tactical software, find out what it can do for you, and what it can’t do for you. You, Lieutenant, need to learn to love it and stop sweating the detail you think you need and can only get by watching the cameras.’

  ‘But I can’t get a real overview of what the teams are doing without…’

  Driscoll trailed off as Fox turned and a virtual display appeared behind her on the wall. It showed the TacNet graphics from the previous day with all eight camera feeds, miniaturised, on the sides. ‘This is what I’d suggest,’ she said, ‘but you can play around with it and see what suits you best. The tactical system gives you all the overview you can want and having the team views off at the sides lets you get a picture of what they’re all seeing without paying too much attention to exactly what they’re seeing. You can always enlarge an individual view if you need extra detail momentarily.’

  ‘And if I’d had something like that in-view, I could have seen Cutter getting attacked and maybe done something about it in time.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe, but Cutter shouldn’t have been where he was anyway. You were letting your enthusiasm get in the way of procedure. In a situation like that, unless you have absolute identification of anyone you find, they should be considered hostile and cuffed. Securing them should have taken priority over the security system.’

  ‘I don’t get the setup though,’ Belthorpe said. ‘I mean, they didn’t know when we were coming in, so were they just supposed to be sitting there waiting for us?’

  Fox smiled. ‘What makes you think you had surprise?’

  ‘Well… All the cameras were down…’ He watched her shaking her head and frowned. ‘The cameras weren’t down?’

  ‘The interior cameras were down. You checked the feeds from those and got nothing so you assumed the internal security system was out. They could still access the external cameras. So while the lieutenant was watching you all stacking up, so was I, playing terrorist leader. They knew exactly when you were coming in and that it was happening on two fronts.’

  ‘Well, shit,’ Belthorpe grumbled.

  Fox was still smiling. ‘This was your first exercise as a unit under realistic conditions and I did not make it easy for you. You screwed up, but you’re learning and there’s plenty you did right. And, frankly, it’s way better that you get it all horribly wrong now, and learn from it, and get better, than doing this for real and ending up in body bags.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ Driscoll muttered.

  ‘Too damn right. Now, we’re going to go through this step by tedious step and work out how we could have done it better, even if it was done right the first time, so I hope you all had plenty of coffee this morning.’

  Tranquillity Base, 11th January.

  It was the last Sunday of Fox’s stay on the Moon and she was indulging herself. They had worked through until the late evening the night before to make best use of their time, but regulations demanded one day off in a week, at least, and she had never been to the Armstrong Lunar History Facility in Mare Tranquillitatis. In the half-dozen times she had been up there, not once had she had the spare time to go to what many considered to be the most important museum in the solar system. Pierce had suggested that this fact was verging on the criminal.

  Fox was not quite so sure, but it was something to do. A short hop via local, sub-orbital shuttle and she was at Tranquillity Base in Sinus Amoris. The UN had declared much of the Sea of Tranquillity to be an international treasure; all the original Apollo landing sites were managed, secured, and monitored by a UNTPP unit which ensured that no
one disturbed them. There had been some talk of allowing helium-3 mining in the area, but no one was expecting that to pass. So you could not actually get near the landing sites except via telepresence tours, and the museum itself had a lot of replicas in it rather than real objects. You could look at a carefully built replica of the Eagle lander. You could compare surface activity suits down through the decades from the bulky A7L suits of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which had brought Armstrong and Aldrin to the lunar surface, through the later EMU suits used on the Space Shuttle, to the Z-series suits with their progression to more and more advanced material usage which made them thinner and more usable. There was a very, very large exhibit on spaceship bathroom technology through the ages.

  There was a huge collection of displays, often showing video taken from the actual missions, of the history of lunar colonisation. That most often meant the history of the Shackleton crater area which had been viewed as the best target site for a colonisation effort since the early years of the century. The south pole of the Moon was actually inside the crater, which was over four kilometres deep. Light never reached the bottom, while there were peaks around the rim which were nearly always in light. It was almost the definition of an extreme environment, but people had landed there, dug tunnels into the surface near the edge, hunted water in the depths of the crater, and turned the place into the commercial centre it now was.

  It was all terribly historic, and after an hour of it, Fox had come to the conclusion that seeing models of Chinese lunar shuttles she had seen a million times before was not doing anything for her. She went back to the main base and found the spa.

  Tranquillity had been set up as a recreation centre. There was a domed structure up on the surface where you could sit and look up at a real view of Earth. Whether you got a good view depended on the relative position of the Sun and lunar administration limited the time anyone spent up there, especially during periods of high solar activity, because of the radiation, but there was something romantic about the place and it had been a popular honeymoon spot for decades. The facility management had, eventually, bowed to pressure and put in some private rooms to one side of the dome, primarily to avoid embarrassing other guests: the lure of making love with the entire world watching had been far too much for far too many.

  Fox made do with a massage and the solarium fifty metres under the surface. She was already on medication to stave off any ill effects from the reduced gravity and did not want to be taking chelating agents for the radiation exposure as well. So she lay in the simulated sunlight, without the more dangerous wavelengths of course, and allowed a very well-trained android masseur to work synthetic hands over her muscles.

  ‘Madam is comfortable?’ The voice was a quality baritone, smooth and soft. The frame was sculpted, looking more like a mannequin than a human, but between the synthetic flesh hands and the voice, you could believe you were being worked on by a man.

  ‘Madam is fine. You have good hands.’

  ‘The Tranquillity Spa prides itself on quality of experience and I take pride in my work, whichever frame I happen to be assigned to for my shift.’

  That was sort of interesting. ‘You’re an AI-four?’ Class 4 AIs, capable of truly independent thought, emotional responses, and creativity, were still relatively uncommon.

  ‘The Tranquillity Spa is an equal opportunities employer and class fours are more common on the Moon than you might expect to find on Earth. We have advantages here.’

  ‘No worries about the gravity or the radiation. Quite happy to swap bodies if required. And the lunar population is reputed to be more open to artificial life. Didn’t I hear something about them voting through regulations on artificial organics recently?’

  ‘The “Bioroid Act?” Yes. It gives the same rights as any other sentient to any artificially manufactured life form, assuming that it can be defined as sentient. It’s an extension of a similar law governing AIs.’

  ‘Very egalitarian, especially considering that that kind of thing is probably a decade away from being a real issue.’

  The robot had a slight burr in its synthesis when it chuckled. ‘It is also a matter of selfishness. Humans find themselves rapidly displaced by synthetic life, especially when companies are allowed to cut corners when dealing with non-humans. Equality gives you organics a chance to compete.’

  Fox chuckled in turn. ‘I hadn’t thought of it like that, but you’re right. Especially up here. I’ve got a class four sitting at home waiting for me to get back. I’m supposed to be testing it out as a personal assistant for MarTech, but then I got sent to the Moon before I could really get the hang of using a PA. Always just used a basic VA on my implant.’

  ‘I think,’ the masseur said, ‘that you will find the experience quite different, and far more beneficial. At some point it will become common practice for people to run fully sentient AIs on implants. The technology is not quite ready yet, but when it is I think you humans will wonder how you ever did without us.’

  ‘I already rely on my VA almost too much. I’m not sure what the added intelligence is going to do for me.’

  ‘I hope you enjoy finding out. If Madam would turn over, I shall employ my talented hands on her front.’

  Fox turned. Looking up at the sculpted plastic mask with its illuminated blue eyes was not quite the same, but he did have talented hands.

  Luna City.

  Her feeling of relaxed contentedness lasted until Fox was stepping off the shuttle. Hepburn and Pierce were waiting for her in the arrivals lounge, in uniform and looking serious. She wondered vaguely why they had waited this long to tell her whatever they had to tell her.

  ‘Driscoll wanted to let you get your feet back in the city before we dumped this on you,’ Hepburn said as she walked toward them.

  ‘I was wondering. What’s going on?’

  ‘Ninety-eight minutes ago a group of armed men accompanied by military cyberframes invaded one of the office structures in quadrant two.’

  Fox frowned. ‘They hit an office, on a Sunday?’

  ‘It has the access for New Moon Data Security’s vault in it,’ Pierce explained. ‘They have a deep shaft with a big storage vault at the bottom and they put data storage media down there. It’s write-only stuff, meant for very long-term storage of data large corporations and governments don’t want to lose.’

  ‘These guys are threatening to blow it up if their demands aren’t met,’ Hepburn went on. ‘Driscoll wants your help on assessing the situation and it’s been cleared past admin.’

  ‘Taking the term “practical exercise” a little too far, but sure, of course.’ Fox saw a notification of briefing data arriving from Pierce before she had even got the sentence out.

  ‘These guys seem like professionals,’ Hepburn said, ‘but they’re making political demands.’

  ‘Oh good,’ Fox replied as they set off into the city proper. ‘Professionals are so much easier to work with, but I hate the political cases.’

  ~~~

  Fox walked among the figures of the four attackers as they made their way across the concourse outside the New Moon offices. Three men, one woman, all of them in fairly heavy combat suits. You could only determine the genders by looking at the hip movement when they walked. And they walked. There was no running, just determined, controlled motion.

  ‘These guys know what they’re doing,’ she said aloud. She was watching as two small, but very functional, combat drones provided the necessary shock, launching micromissiles at the reception frontage. ‘Security guard taken hostage?’

  ‘Killed,’ Driscoll replied. To Fox, his voice came out of nowhere: he was not in the simulation with her and had his attention focused on the live data feeds from the environment. ‘They don’t have hostages. Human ones anyway. They’ve cut all the security feeds in and out of the structure.’

  ‘A bunch like this isn’t going to be left blind… No, there, that’s what they’re using.’

  Driscoll’s body appeared beside
Fox. ‘You spotted something?’

  Fox nodded and pointed at the view through the shattered window. She had frozen the playback to make it easier to see the figures within. Something vaguely circular and flattened was dropping from the back of one of the men. ‘That’s a Bosluis-class scout frame. Six legs and a pointed snout. They’ve got good stealth characteristics, excellent sensors.’

  ‘Armament?’

  ‘Not on those models, but they’ll put one of these Bumblebees somewhere at the back. Someone goes in the front, it’ll pop up and they’ll get a missile in the face.’ Sure enough, as the scene advanced again and the louse-like robot vanished into cover, one of the airborne robots dropped into concealment behind some seating at the back of the room. The team vanished into an elevator and the scene froze again. ‘Do we have anything else on them?’

  ‘Not from inside. They disabled all the network connectivity as soon as they got down to the next level. We don’t know where they are or what they’re doing. We got a video giving their demands.’ The scene around them collapsed leaving them standing in the police operations room where Driscoll was directing operations, but the virtual panel which appeared to display the video was still shared between their vision fields.

  A hard-faced man, his hair shaved back to near-bald, appeared. He had hard grey-blue eyes, a hooked nose which had been broken more than once, and sharp-edged cheekbones. And Fox’s facial recognition software supplied a match before he started speaking, but she waited to hear what was said.

  ‘These are the demands of United Anarchy.’ He had an Afrikaans accent, which was getting to be rare these days. ‘We want the immediate release of all UA members in custody in Cold Harbour, free access to all secured data sites of the American, Canadian, Russian, and Chinese governments, and twenty million Canadian dollars to be paid into our designated accounts. We also want a shuttle made ready to return us to Earth. You have twenty-four hours to meet these demands.’