Dammit.
“What is it going to take for you to come back to the program, Dr. Bennett? Dr. Roark?” There was a hint of a smile, she could tell. “I need you back with Livermore.”
Berkeley’s mouth fell open. Crawley had seemingly read her mind. The classified project had taken her away from academic life during the midst of a Nobel Prize nomination, and when Kieran died in her arms, that had been it. There was no way she could continue, let alone attempt to engage another subject on a physical level. When Kieran walked into the Sunset Beach Public House none the worse for wear, she decided that leaving Livermore’s well-funded research stable to have him was a small price to pay. Abandoning the Livermore program, despite its trappings, had been the right thing to do. She loved Kieran, and that was all that mattered. The thought of a second viable subject, or any of the other two-dozen initial experiments underway, did not matter. She had Kieran, and that was enough.
The static-filled screens did not change. She thought of her students at the University of Western Australia in Perth. Teaching was in her blood. The idea of leaving it behind sobered her and filled her with resignation. “I can’t.”
“Until we figure out what this is, we have to assume that the program is in danger,” Crawley said. “Kieran could be in danger. We’ve known that could be the case all along.”
“He’s not in danger. He’s on Mars.” Berkeley shook his head. Maybe he was in greater danger than they thought, after all. If this subject was indeed compromised, and the Terran Council found her first, the same people could potentially find Kieran. They would kill him without thinking twice about his life, or hers.
I wanted out of this crazy life. “What do you need?”
“Figure out what happened, and get that protocol back online. The faster you can get her back to Integration, the better.” Crawley took a long, slow breath but said nothing further.
The obvious question came to mind. “What about the council? If they figure out what’s going on—”
“I’ll take care of the council, Berkeley. You’ll have to trust me.”
Of course he has a plan. “How safe is Kieran? Do we need to warn him?”
“That’s going to depend on how fast we figure out what’s happening here,” Crawley replied. “Are you back?”
There was no question she had to help Crawley. Kieran’s life depended on it. Her students and the university needed her, too. “I’m staying at Perth, General. To do things from both places, I’ll need connection approval. Facial recognition permissions, too.”
Crawley chuckled. “You’re the best, Berkeley. Did you think I deleted your credentials? You’re still active. I’ll have your office at the university online in an hour.”
“You think of everything, don’t you, General?”
“I try, Dr. Roark. I try.” Crawley chuckled softly. “Get me in touch with that protocol. The subject named it Rock. Shut down all of Japan if you have to, but get him talking to us again. I need to know what’s going on. This subject’s been offline more than any protocol we’ve had, even the test articles.”
The agents left the camera’s viewpoint just as she found another camera atop the shrine. It rotated just far enough to see a woman kneeling under the cherry trees. She appeared ready to disembowel herself—what the Japanese called seppuku. Two meters apart, the agents closed the distance to the woman and took up positions. The one with the rifle shouldered it and inched forward toward the woman. Berkeley zoomed in, holding her breath. The agent pressed the barrel of the rifle to the girl’s temple. In her simple coveralls, the same kind Kieran had worn when he walked out of Sydney, she sagged forward but did not press the knife to her stomach. After two tense seconds, the girl straightened rigidly to vertical and looked up at the agent with the rifle. Her eyes were panicked and wide for a split second before they rolled upward into her head. The camera feed dissolved into static.
“What happened?” Crawley asked.
A signal icon appeared, red and flashing. “New signal, same frequency. Very different code, General. Something is trying to connect with the subject by overwriting our embedded coding. It’s trying to overwrite her protocol. I can’t get in. This is unbelievable.”
“Will it work?” Crawley asked.
The red icon blinked three times and steadied. Then it turned green, and the icon winked out of existence.
“I don’t have a signal, General.” She rubbed her temples. “I don’t have any idea what’s going on here. Never seen anything like this.”
Crawley spoke after a few seconds. His voice was low. “Is she dead?”
“I don’t know.” Berkeley tried to isolate a neural signal to the two agents but failed. Static filled the seven separate camera feeds she’d attempted to isolate. “It’s like we’re being jammed, but there’s nothing broadcasting.”
“Run the background diagnostics,” Crawley said. “We need to know—”
“Already running. I’ve got nothing in all searches.”
“Keep trying. Whatever it takes.”
There was something like fear in his voice—uncertainty, maybe, but that was never something she could have said about him before. “What is it, General? What’s going on?”
“I don’t like not being able to see or hear, Berkeley. Get me in touch with that protocol before it’s too late.”
Amy heard the men approach. One of them tended to drag one foot, and the other pranced like a dancer on his toes. Eyes closed, she knew the one on her left carried a heavy weapon of some kind. The clips for the weapon’s sling squeaked in the gentle breeze. The knife in her sweaty hands trembled. Why am I scared to do this? I can’t go back just to die again.
The man on the right spoke softly in Japanese. “Miss? Please stand, and come with us.”
Amy opened her eyes but stared at the wet ground in front of her. “I cannot. Please, permit me to finish.”
The man on the left stepped forward, and the cold muzzle of a rifle gently touched her temple. “By order of the Terran Council, you are to stand and come with us immediately.”
“Please.” A sob choked her throat, and she let it come. “I just want…” Hot tears ran down her cheeks and splashed onto her coveralls. Frustration sapped her strength, and her limbs trembled. Resolve failed as emotion came forth in great heaving waves. The slick knife threatened to fall from her hands, but she did not move.
“You are ordered to stand and come with us. Drop the tantō to the ground, and do what I say. Now.”
“Leave me alone.”
The other agent spoke. “We will take you in whatever you do.” There was an electric crackle from his direction. She caught the reflection of a stunner’s current on the blades of grass. “You are not supposed to be here.”
Amy sobbed. “Let me do this.”
“No. This is not allowed.” The muzzle pressed against her head. “I’m counting to three.”
Amy sobbed, but could not bear to plunge the knife into her stomach. “Please?”
“One.”
If I sit here, maybe they’ll kill me anyway. She sniffed and raised her head, opening her eyes to the sky. Rain pattered on the pond, growing heavier with every beat of her heart.
“Two,” the man with the rifle said slowly. His finger moved from its rest position to the trigger.
God, make it quick.
<
The voice was different. Rock was smooth and low, and this was a sharp, commanding tone that was decidedly female.
<
With a snap, she stood. How the fuck…? Wide-eyed, she looked at one of the men and then the other. Their matching suits and thin ties made them look comical, in a way. The shocked looks on their faces were anything but funny.
<
For what? Who are you?
There was a hesitation. <>
<
br /> Control? Of—
Her vision winked to black, and the world slipped away in silence.
In the blackness, she felt rain on her face. There was a faint light behind her eyelids, and Amy swam toward it. Feeling returned to her arms and hands. Moisture clung to her, making the backs of her hands slick. She felt the tantō in her right hand, the handle sticky in her sweaty palm. She realized her knees were on the ground, and she forced her eyes to open.
Looking into her lap, she saw her pale coveralls were soaked with blood. The tantō fell from her hands and landed in the wet grass among the fallen blossoms. She gasped and looked frantically around her. The two men—Agents, she corrected herself—lay sprawled on the ground. Neither of them moved. Blood soaked through their white shirts over multiple wounds. Their throats slashed, they lay on their backs, looking sightlessly into the clouds. Oh God. Amy wiped her bloody hands on her knees and stood slowly.
What did you do?
There was no response. Sirens wailed in the distance, and a breeze brought the sound of a helicopter.
Are you there?
<
I just want to die.
<
Thoughts of freedom and solitude startled her into moving. Amy unzipped her coveralls above her feet and then down the center. The bloody garment fell from her shoulders. She touched the tongue of her sturdy shoes, and the laces unwound quickly. The sticky-handled knife caught her eye. Sliding it through the wet grass, she wiped it clean and wrapped her coveralls around it. For good measure, she removed the hexhab package and tied it between the coveralls’ arms. Satisfied, she threw the bundle into the center of the pond. She watched it bob in the water once and then slip beneath the surface. Wearing an undershirt and tight shorts, she dug into her backpack and pulled out long pants and a heavy shirt and donned them as the sirens grew closer. Feet back in her shoes, she shouldered her backpack and ran in the opposite direction of the gate.
She concentrated. Did Integration send those men? I don’t understand.
There was no response. She touched the bone behind her ear. There was no reboot tone. She was alone and running. At the wooden fence, she jumped almost two meters straight up and vaulted over easily. On the other side, she paralleled a maglev track for a kilometer before ducking down into a pedestrian tunnel. Cameras glinted as she slowed down and tried like hell to look normal. Her bloody hands found the front pockets of her pants. Hunching her shoulders slightly and looking toward the ground, she settled into a pace like that of the unconcerned civilians around her.
She risked raising her head, and a traffic camera panned to her and froze.
I’m caught.
<
Who are you?
<
Are you from Integration?
There was no response. An escalator rose toward the suspended maglev station ahead. Amy negotiated the crowd and stepped into a bathroom. To her left, a row of sinks dominated one wall. The few at the end of the line were vacant. At the last sink, with one shoulder against the wall, Amy pulled her bloody hands from her pockets and washed them quickly. The copper swirls circled the drain and disappeared.
What have you done? The voice had said it wanted control. A heartbeat later, the two men were dead at Amy’s feet. Cause-and-effect logic told her that the voice had taken control of Amy’s body and killed the men who’d come to stop her. It made no sense, and neither did taking the first available flight for New York.
<
Why won’t you answer me? You’re a protocol. You are supposed to help me integrate.
<
Shaken, Amy dried her hands in the tunnel dryers and made her way up the escalator. Murder, traveling under a false name, and running from integration. You’re piling up a nice record, Amy.
The control voice did not want her to die. No, my new protocol will really help me live the life I want to live, not make me do what someone else orders me to do. For the first time in a year, hope blossomed in her chest.
But why New York? There’s nothing there. My protocol—
<
I suppose you’re right.
<>
What if I need you?
<
Maybe it could be trusted, especially after saving her life and providing an exit strategy. There was no further conversation, and the quiet of her protocol-less mind was both comforting and hypnotic. Relaxed, she stood on the platform with her eyes on the horizon. The massive volcanic mountains of Hokkaido’s southwest coast loomed into the hazy distance as the sun poked through the fog. The beauty of it struck her as if for the first time. Her initial protocol had led her to the beautiful places on Earth to try and evoke an emotional response, yet she’d had none until that very moment.
A maglev slid into the station two minutes later. The Chitose Spaceport lay on the southern coast of Hokkaido and boasted one lunar flight per day and service to North America. The North American terminal was nearly empty, as was the delta-winged vehicle Amy found parked at her departure gate. She waited behind a column, anxiously looking up and down the platform, before deciding that no one was there for her. Once aboard and strapped into a business-class seat, the rush of adrenaline abated and left her shaking in thoughtless exhaustion.
For the first time since awakening, the prospect of flying excited her. Seeing the world from the sky always cleared her mind and focused her. But instead of looking out the window, Amy slumped against it and fell fast asleep before the exocraft had taxied away from the gate.
With the girl asleep, Mally withdrew to the relative safety of her servers and began to formulate a plan. Weakness could be exploited. Her brief, intense takeover of the subject’s motor functions had threatened to overclock the processors and strain neural communication limits, but it had worked and proved her theory. Download to another sleeper was possible, provided she could gain total control. Deleting the previous protocol had been easy. She would have to access the girl’s batch file to see her memories to this point, but that was easy as well. There were a dozen covert burrows into the Terran Council and Terran Defense Force computers she’d built and fortified over the last several months. Gaining information from outside sources would be easy. Control was the issue at hand. The probability of maintaining physical control from a remote location for more than two minutes was around one ten-thousandth of a percent.
She would have to move closer.
Weighing the options took milliseconds. Secondary connections were still unstable, given the amount of data she’d need to transfer and collate. There would have to be a hard connection at some point—a pure, uninterrupted, still download window. If she took over the girl again, there was a chance it could be done before they left Japan.
No. In New York, a mere six hours away, she would take over the subject. Whether the girl resisted or not remained to be seen.
/>
CHAPTER FOUR
The last place I wanted to be on an off-duty weekend was an officers’ club. A long time ago, the officers’ club was either filled with sad-faced soldiers in uniform having to listen to a commander after hours on a Friday night, or it was filled with deployment widows—and widowers—looking for some kind of excitement with young, unattached, and mostly stupid lieutenants. I’d seen both too many times to count in a short career, but it had been enough. Of course, by the time I died in Afghanistan, the concept of the officers’ club—and its twin, the noncommissioned officers’ club—had gone by the wayside in the military’s effort to create parity between the ranks. That whole thing bothered me, too, but it was a product of the “we don’t want to piss anyone off” strategy of the early twenty-first century. Funny thing that, three hundred years later, we were right back to where we’d started. Officers and noncommissioned officers were again separate entities for the social part of service life.
I shook off the thoughts as I made my way through the enclosed base’s main corridor toward Admiral’s Row, where the Brass Anchor lay. Bonding with my classmates at the Brass Anchor was not something I wanted to do, but if the commandant was right, I had to play the game.
Fleet sailors and officers crowded through the corridor, most of them leaving for the entertainment district. Friday nights in the Brass Anchor belonged to the aviators. There would be a lot of drinking. Someone would eventually relight the constant arguments between fighter pilots and attack pilots, and there would be a fight. Monday morning, all would be forgiven, and the Fleet would be a finely tuned machine until Friday night. The pattern was as old as navies, I suspected.
Music, or something vaguely akin to it, thumped through the reinforced corridor. Only by looking through one of the slim pressurized rectangular windows along the walls could I confirm I was still on Mars. Even the gravity was Earth-like, thanks to manipulation techniques well beyond my comprehension. Night was falling outside. Earth hadn’t risen over the horizon yet, which was a good thing. I’d spent too many nights sitting at the observation deck with a glass of beer, wishing I were back in Esperance.
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