Jumper's Hope: Central Galactic Concordance Book 4

by Carol Van Natta

  He smiled. It sounded just like something she’d say, probably with a touch of asperity. She’d always hated inactivity.

  J: Kams are spies the CPS tailors for each mission with body mods and personality overlays that take over the conscious mind for the duration. The tech and procedures are black-hole secrets. The CPS recruits people with a flexible mind and tolerance for the brain hardware and multiple chimera implants. After each mission, they’re supposed to download the memories and remove the overlay, and give us downtime to recover. Dixon Davidro only followed procedure when it suited him.

  He subvocalized the words carefully, in case the subject triggered the fiery protective subroutine in his neural net, but it didn’t even twitch. Jess-the-medic suggested that the forbidden subject plus a strong emotional shock would be needed. Otherwise, an innocent casual conversation could fracture a whole mission.

  K: Do all Kam vets have “friends”?

  J: Maybe? I only talked to a few. Not something to admit to the CPS if we wanted to retire with any memories at all. Most Kams are decommissioned early on disability. Probably should have happened with me, had Davidro been paying attention.

  K: What happened to your consciousness while the overlay was in the pilot’s seat?

  J: Deep sleep. Wake up, and suddenly it’s four, six, or eight months later, different room, modified body, constant flashes of déjà vu for no reason. Downtime intervals were like a series of holovid vignettes. I kept a secret journal, for continuity. Not sure it helped.

  After he’d left active duty, he couldn’t bring himself to destroy the journal like he should have. Not counting his savings and the fictional service record, it was his only souvenir of his years of actual service.

  He gently lifted the muscular cat off his chest and sat up. The cat started licking its hind leg with remarkable flexibility, inspiring Jess to lean forward, stretching his fingertips toward his toes, then spread his legs wide and doing the same, repeating the sequence several more times. The cat made it look easy, but his muscles felt heavy and stiff. Cadroy needed to spend more time in the ship’s passenger gym, since Jess didn’t have farm work to keep himself in shape. Left to his own devices, he’d rather play with all the shipcomps and create code, so farm labor—or gym exercise—was good for him. It helped with the bleedover headaches, too.

  K: Modified body? Gender, too?

  J: Don’t know about other Kams, but they always kept me in the male-to-neutral range. Sometimes drastic mods, like thirty centimeters shorter, skinny, Asian features, and embossed, light-up body art. Usually just skin color, hair, height. My final exit body mod is as close to unaltered me as I could guess. I wasn’t fully grown when I enlisted.

  K: Even your mismatched eyes?

  He’d almost forgotten about his eyes until Kerzanna had reminded him back in Branimir’s spaceport. For Cadroy, he’d used drops to temporarily color his green left eye to match the brown in his right.

  J: Both should be brown, but body shop missed it. I let it go. Kam body shops hurt.

  K: Sync that. Jumper medics think pain builds fortitude. Healers are good, though. Another question: Major body mods are expensive. Why doesn’t Kam Corps just hire more spies?

  Before he could answer, she sent another ping about company, meaning she was no longer free to chat. How she tolerated being cooped up in the small, featureless nav pod for long hours was a mystery to him, considering her claustrophobia. Parts of him liked ships and the bustle of urban environments, but Jess-the-man preferred wide-open spaces and the smell of fresh air.

  He got to his feet and brushed off his chest and the back of his pants as he watched the cat saunter out of the room, tail confidently high. He made a deal with himself that if he spent thirty minutes with the gravity weights and thirty on the treadmill, he’d take a shower with real hot water instead of using the usual sonic dry-chem. He smiled briefly. It would be just like Cadroy to charge it to his cousin’s tab, too.

  He’d given a lot of thought over the years as to why the CPS didn’t hire more spies, especially on the days the bleedovers left him paralyzed with pain, or he’d had to work around some new quirk of the bioware in his brain so he could function as Jess-the-man. He’d decided against doing a cost-benefit analysis because it wouldn’t change anything. Considering what CPS drugs and leashes did to minders and what CPS service mods did to Jumpers, he’d concluded the CPS’s unofficial motto was that the ends justified the means. All willing recruits believed the CPS knew what the right ends were. He didn’t think he did any more.

  The small, brightly lit dining hall buzzed with background music and the pleasant hum of conversation, punctuated by the sound of clinking glassware. Jess’s formerly empty table was filling up as more passengers arrived for the ship’s first meal. He used the last bite of flatcake to mop up the sweet-and-sour syrup before popping it into his mouth. The Faraón’s buffet-style cuisine wouldn’t win any prizes, but it was edible and plentiful, and the ship’s hydroponics section supplied a good variety. He folded a few bits of mild sausage into a napkin to offer to the ship’s—or more specifically, the captain’s—yellow cat, who he’d been told was called LZ. The smaller, sleeker, ebony-colored cat, called Igandea, after the heroine of a popular fantasy serial, preferred orange melon, and stole chunks from the buffet if it was left unguarded.

  Jess plowed through a full plate, but Hunter Solano, the gregarious, athletic woman seated next to him in a dusty purple lounge suit, only drank coffee. She said she only came for the company. He thought she might be a minder of some sort, maybe an empath, though he couldn’t have said how he knew. Remnant knowledge from a bleedover, probably.

  Across the round table from them was a thick-bodied, impeccably groomed woman who’d introduced herself as Henrietta Lily Dowyer, seated next to a pinch-faced teenager she’d introduced as Hollandia, her daughter. Jess hadn’t met them before, despite five days on the small ship together. Hollandia laughed with a loose-limbed young man named Pandrus, two chairs over, about a new trendy song that poked fun at the equally trendy Ayorinn’s Legacy that resurged in popularity every few years.

  “That song,” announced Dowyer loudly to the whole table, “should be outlawed and purged. Ayorinn’s Legacy is dangerous. It riles up the minders so they riot.” Dowyer stabbed her spoon toward Hollandia. “When the minders take over the Concordance High Council, you’ll have to get permission to have children if you aren’t one of them.” Dowyer’s punctilious English diction made her statements sound all the more ridiculous. Her tone made it clear she disdained minders as subhuman or worse.

  “Oh, hell, here we go again,” muttered Hunter.

  Hollandia flushed and rolled her eyes. “Careful, Mother, your conspiracy theories are showing again.” Her tone was sharp and bitter.

  Dowyer continued as if she hadn’t heard. “After that, they’ll make slaves of the nulls. That’s what they call non-minders like us. There will be no natural people left.” She sipped delicately from her teacup. Her body language said she unequivocally believed what she was saying.

  An unreadable expression crossed Hollandia’s face, and her lips thinned. The other passenger at the table, an older, gender-neutral person named Ameya, hunched and looked down as they shredded a sweet roll.

  Cadroy, or more precisely, the overlay remnant of a gambler that made Cadroy’s personality believable, wanted to leap to the defense of the minders at the table, which likely included everyone except himself and the hateful Dowyer, but Jess-the-man knew it was a lost cause. A hypercube’s worth of facts only strengthened a true believer’s shield of faith.

  Dowyer, apparently dissatisfied with their responses, sniffed. “If you don’t believe me, just ask the survivors of Rashad Tarana.”

  Jess was used to the horrific events of thirty-eight years ago being invoked for all sorts of inappropriate comparisons, but hearing that it had been caused by a legendary minder forecaster was new.

  “Let me get this straight,” said Hunter, sans he
r usual geniality. “You think Ayorinn’s poetic predictions about the future of civilization work backward in time? That he somehow caused a messianic, murderous psychopath to invent an apocalyptic religion and recruit followers, spend twenty years conquering the whole planet under the noses of the galactic government, and kill millions through war, torture, and starvation to enact his vision of the road to spiritual paradise?”

  “Not at all,” responded Dowyer, blithely waving dismissive fingers at the atrocity. “Those so-called Rashad Tarana ‘victims’ are all rich, you know. I met one once. She seemed perfectly fine to me.” Dowyer dabbed at the corners of her mouth with her napkin. “No, Maisie Ntombi was executed on galactic simulcast because she was a scapegoat. She knew the real truth.”

  Everyone at the table, Jess included, stared at her, slack-jawed.

  Hunter recovered the fastest. “What truth is that?”

  “That criminal, militant minders had taken control of the planet and were about to take over the entire Concordance and destroy the galactic peace forever. The so-called ‘religion’ was a fiction for the gullible masses.” She folded her napkin into a thin triangle. “Besides, statistically speaking, not nearly that many people could possibly have died that fast when the planet got accidentally poisoned.”

  As everyone who’d watched the very public, live-broadcast trial knew, Subgeneral Ntombi’s unleashing of the planet-poisoning scatter array had been the opposite of accidental. She’d done it to hide the seventy-percent casualty rate she and the Space Div fleet she commanded had carelessly caused when implementing High Council orders to forcibly remove and replace the murderous Rashad Tarana dictatorship. The horror that was Rashad Tarana had been the unlucky convergence of insanity, greed, egregious bureaucratic negligence, arrogance, incompetence, and malfeasance. It was a shared cultural memory across the Concordance, and no Rashad Tarana survivor over the age of two would ever forget it unless cleaned of the memories.

  “R-i-i-i-ight,” said Hunter sarcastically. “Tell me, what’s it like in whatever galaxy you’re from? The one where they make up shit as they go along?”

  Dowyer ignored Hunter’s sarcastic question. Hollandia stood up, looking miserably embarrassed. She mumbled something about going to her room and left. After a long moment, Pandrus abandoned his nearly full plate and left as well. If it bothered Dowyer that she’d offended everyone at the table, she hid it well as she continued to cut her slice of ham into precise cubes.

  Hunter shook her head and muttered about history teachers needing to improve their game if they were going to counter the crazies of the universe.

  Jess gave up trying to pretend his head didn’t hurt from the bleedover and finished his meal quickly. He needed to check in with Kerzanna, but maybe after that, he’d have the shipcomp “accidentally” send information to Hollandia about how to declare her independence from her deeply warped mother the day she turned seventeen.

  CHAPTER 12

  * Interstellar: “Faraón Azul” Ship Day 05 * GDAT: 3242.009 *

  “TRANSIT WARNING. TEN minutes to transit exit. Transit warning. Ten minutes to transit exit.”

  The ship’s artificial voice sounded in the nav pod and over the navcomp earwire Kerzanna wore while on duty. The crew got similar alerts through their shipcomp earwires.

  Malámselah grinned at her. “Are you excited?” He liked to move around, so he usually waited to the last minute to web himself into the pilot’s seat.

  Kerzanna nodded, smiling at his enthusiasm. He probably played with the birthday toys more than his twin boys did. For the sake of her cover story, she added, “I just hope it works right.”

  “We’ll be fine.” His eyes glazed a little as he interacted with one of the ship’s systems via his skulljack.

  Kerzanna thought so, too, but just in case, she’d readied a few contingency solutions and tagged them as “exercises,” as if they’d come from one of the dozen textbooks he’d forwarded to her. The ship’s faster-than-light drive was an older, reliable KUSP, but the BEQram system drive had a history of extra visits to the repair dock.

  She sent Jess the ping she’d readied to tell him the packet drop was imminent. He’d tried to explain what he was doing with the code fragments and insertion thingies, but she got lost about thirty seconds into it. All she knew was that he needed the packet drops, so she told him about them. After the drop, she planned to tell him about her idea for using his methods for another purpose.

  At the two-minute warning, she brought up the holo map, her plot simulation, and a copy of the pilot’s real-time holo display, and added a calculation algo she could adjust on the fly. Malámselah nodded his approval and webbed into his pilot’s seat, but pushed the manual console out of his way.

  The exit from transit was slick as newly formed road glass, and the spin only decreased their realspace speed by a few points, just as Malámselah had promised Captain Tanniffer when he’d asked permission for the maneuver.

  Kerzanna noted the comms packet exchange started the moment the automated systems detected realspace and locked onto the buoy’s broadcast link. She checked the realspace active and passive scan results, even though doing so was technically the pilot’s job. All were nominal except a significantly high value for flux residue.

  To hell with it being above her pay grade. “Pilot, sir, flux trace in—”

  Malámselah had already noticed, and pressed a control on the manual interface. “Chief Yarsulic, are the engines leaking?”

  “My engines don’t leak,” came Yarsulic’s testy reply.

  “Kane, boost the active object scan by one hundred percent and execute when ready, then repeat in two minutes and compare.”

  Kerzanna complied. Flux trace meant another ship had been in the area in the last five or six realspace hours. The drop was well trafficked, and Malámselah’s body language said he was alert but unconcerned. Kerzanna the Jumper pilot would have readied weapons and flux-punched back into transit, with or without all the comm packets, but all Class 1 Navigator Kane could do was look worried.

  Malámselah eyed her consideringly. “Kane, give me a solution for a random two-angle vector change, with maximum system burn on the last segment and prep for transit.”

  “Yes, sir.” If Kerzanna jacked into the navcomp, she could do it in seconds, but Kane could only use the manual interface, which is why she’d created and saved the various “exercises” in Kane’s private data space. Out of boredom, she’d done the same for the next five stops, too. She brought up a relevant nav plot, adjusted it with Malámselah’s specifications, and sent it to his data space.

  “Thank yo… shit!” Malámselah stood up.

  The reason for his curse became apparent when the navcomp displayed the results of the sequential active scan comparisons. Three ship-sized objects were vectoring straight for them. Malámselah tagged them MO-1, MO-2, and MO-3 in the real-time holo display.

  “Multiple active scans detected. Projectile firing solution achievable by MO-1.”

  She hoped the ship’s warning announcement only sounded in the nav and engine pods, or the passengers would panic.

  “Kane, get the captain online, even if you have to personally drag her out of the shower.”

  “Firing solution achievable MO-3.”

  “Yes, sir.” She brought up the emergency monitoring system, which told her Tanniffer—or at least her shiplink—was in the passenger lounge, which she seemed to prefer over her office. She pinged Tanniffer with an attention-getting tone and briefly described the situation. Tanniffer sent a crew-only announcement ordering them to emergency response stations. Another automated announcement with a calm and pleasant synth voice told the passengers to return to their staterooms for their safety owing to “realspace turbulence.”

  “Firing solution achievable MO-2.”

  Kerzanna quickly calculated the amount of time before contact, assuming the MOs wanted the Faraón’s contents more or less intact. Only three ships meant they were likely jackers. Th
ey relied on superior technology, rather than relying on small, fast swarms the way the pirate clan did. This comm buoy was popular and regularly patrolled by Space Div, so the jackers were either hungry or thought something in the cargo was worth the risk. The scans identified the jack ships as big corvettes, which they usually outfitted with shield generators and multiple weapons. Projectiles covered the longest distances, but even with variable propulsion and targeting AIs, they often missed when victims didn’t obligingly sit still. The closest jackers were still twenty minutes out from being able to use energy cutters to slice open the cargo bays.

  Kerzanna knew the Faraón had a three-layer incalloy hull and fair armor, but it wouldn’t hold up against a sustained assault. She wasn’t supposed to know the Faraón also had illegal weapons it wasn’t admitting to in the official ship configuration. Most commercial shipping companies chose to risk paying fines over losing the cargo or the whole ship.

  As fast as she could with the manual interface, she updated and sent her other “get out of trouble” nav solutions to Malámselah’s data space. She’d cover her ass later if he asked.

  Captain Tanniffer arrived at a brisk walk, accompanied by Pilot Liao. Tanniffer pointed to Kane. “You’re relieved. Liao volunteered to take over nav until we can get Bhatta in here.”

  Kerzanna hurriedly vacated the seat, swallowing her frustration at knowing they could use her expertise. They wouldn’t believe her now, even if she offered.

  Liao pulled one of the nav wires out of the drawer and adjusted the seat for her short legs while giving Kerzanna a thinly disguised look of disdain. “Why don’t you make yourself useful and go find out what’s keeping Bhatta.”

  Malámselah gave Liao a sour look, then swiveled his seat toward Tanniffer, who was webbing herself into her captain’s seat and jacking in. “We need help with defense.”

  Tanniffer nodded and looked at Kerzanna. “Report to Yarsulic in Engineering. He’ll tell you what he needs.”