by M. D. Cooper
Tanis managed to keep the meter under 1.5g, except when she was in the midst of taking a step, and the station jerked up under her, spiking the meter to 2.7.
By some miracle, she made it to top of the stairs without having gone back over 2gs.
She leant forward to place the antimatter bottle in a pocket set into the middle of the webbing, when another series of vibrations ran through the deck, shaking her violently.
And then the bottle fell from her hands.
Tanis reached out desperately, expecting it to be the last thing she ever did, when a protrusion on the bottle caught in the web, and the bottle stopped its fall a centimeter from the bottom of the shell.
Darla whispered.
Tanis groaned from both exertion and disgruntlement as the machine completed its process, and she lifted the cocoon free and carefully backed out of the small room and turned toward the airlock.
Every part of her body ached from the beating she’d taken trying to get down the strut, plus the burns and pressure bruises across her skin. Oh, and being shot a dozen times, let’s not forget that.
Her arms were starting to shake as she carefully set the meter-wide cocoon down while the inner airlock door cycled open once more.
she said, feeling a stab of fear far stronger than she’d expected at the thought of the dark storm raging on the other side of a few centimeters of plas and steel.
The sporadic shudders that had been shaking the slanted deck had turned into a steady vibration, spurring Tanis into motion. She palmed the control to open the outer lock door and wrapped her arms around the cocoon, more than ready to gently shove the antimatter bottle down into Saturn’s depths.
A moment later, the door opened, and the planet’s howling winds reached into the small room, threatening to tear the cocoon from Tanis’s grasp. She held onto it desperately, her augmented vision gauging the windspeed. At present, it was over two hundred kilometers per hour.
She saw a solid-looking shape whip by in the dark clouds, and then came the sound of something pinging off the strut’s hull nearby.
Tanis clutched at the cocoon as a gust of wind almost grabbed it from her.
The winds began to diminish as the city drifted across the eye of the vortex they were in, and when they passed below seventy kilometers per hour, Tanis carefully rolled the cocoon to the edge of the airlock and looked down into the darkness below.
Not for the first time in the last hour, Tanis committed an action she sincerely hoped wouldn’t be her last, and rolled the antimatter cocoon out into Saturn’s winds.
You want to devour something, you monster? Devour this.
She tracked the cocoon’s progress as best she could, gauging that it would just barely clear the pontoon as it disappeared from view. Thirty seconds later, when no explosion had occurred, she breathed a sigh of relief—or tried to, with the tubes in her throat.
Tanis almost got a word out in response, when something hit the strut and the entire airlock, with her still inside, was torn free and flung out into the maelstrom.
UNWILLING
STELLAR DATE: 03.04.4085 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Unknown
REGION: Main Asteroid Belt, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
Agony tore through Harm’s mind for what had to be the thousandth time that day. It wasn’t like anything he’d ever experienced as a human. That pain had always been a physical sensation delivered to his brain through the body.
What he experienced now could only be described as the feeling of his very mind being on fire.
The pain suddenly ceased, though the aftereffects—a lingering sensation of throbbing and soreness—remained.
How strange it is that I keep using biological sensations to quantify how I feel. I need to develop a new vocabulary to properly reflect on this.
“How was that?” Lane asked. “I could tell by how your avatar was writhing on the ground here that it was probably unpleasant.”
Harm realized that he was laying on his side on the surface of the featureless plain. A second later, he was standing; his skill at manipulating his presence in this place increasing.
It had been six days since Lane had begun working him over, trying to extract his many secrets. Harm had given her a few things here and there…. Nothing too risky. A few of which were things he suspected Lane already knew.
She’d been pleased to gain verification of her methods, but his continuing ability to defy her was wearing on her patience.
He was certain that she would very soon move to less…recoverable methods of interrogation. In all honesty, he was surprised she hadn’t used more invasive methods to extract data from his mind already.
A few things she’d said led him to believe that she didn’t want to waste more seed blanks on him. Someone had procured the Heartbridge imaging system for her at great expense, and probably had hopes of using it more than once.
“It was lovely,” Harm muttered as he resumed probing the network he’d managed to gain access to. It was a buffered subnet that Lane had connected his seed to, a necessity for her to interface with him in the virtual space.
What she hadn’t realized was that he had spent decades as a network architect, and was right at home with this sort of puzzle. Bit by bit, he’d probed ports and sent packets into open connections, looking for a weakness, a way out into the rest of the ship’s systems.
Lane started talking again, telling him about how she was going to get what she wanted from him, and that he’d regret defying her.
Harm had begun to wonder if she had either lied about her skills to her employers, or was operating in defiance of orders. If he had been given unlimited access to a subject for fourteen days, they would be eating out of his hand by now.
“I wonder, Lieutenant Lane,” he said, interrupting whatever she had been rambling on about. “How long do you have to break me? Or were you supposed to transport me somewh
ere and have someone else do it? I mean…you’re a comm analyst, not a trained interrogator. Are you trying to prove yourself to someone?”
“W-what?” Lane stuttered.
“Lieutenant Lane. Like I said, you’re a comm analyst. Albeit one with some interesting side-skills. But you’re not at the top, and you probably weren’t supposed to burn through all those seeds to get this far. Stars, I wonder if you were even to be the one who did all this. Are you going to get offed if you don’t get fast results?”
Lane glowered at him. “You may think I’m just a peon, but I got into Division 99 and sat under your nose for over a year, getting into every part of your life, Elise. I masqueraded as you, and you were none the wiser.”
“Well,” Harm said as he rose to his feet. “You didn’t get into every part of my life. If you had, we wouldn’t be having this chat right now—you’d already know everything you wanted from me.”
“You know…I didn’t want to do this, Harm,” Lane muttered. “But I’m going to show you just how fucked you are.”
As Lane spoke, she opened up a connection out of the sequestered subnet and accessed the general shipnet. Harm could have sung with delight as he spotted her actions with his continuous network probes, and fashioned his own request to slip out through the port she had opened.
Crap, that worked! Ha-haaaa!
He knew he had only seconds before Lane closed the connection to the general shipnet, and he raced through systems looking for something he could use against her.
His suspicion that they were on a small interplanetary shuttle was confirmed as he saw that the craft was a H&K StarDuster. He remembered that StarDusters had a vulnerability in their environmental systems and prayed that the ship Lane was flying hadn’t had the weakness patched.
Lane was going on about how she was going to show him a feed that would change his mind about everything—show him how he was on the wrong side of things—and Harm paid half attention, goading her along, trying to buy himself more time.
Yes! There it is!
He ran the exploit and gained access to the shuttle’s environmental systems, not hesitating as he triggered an emergency venting procedure.
“What?!” Lane gasped. “What are—”
Her avatar disappeared from the featureless plain they stood upon, but the port to the general shipnet remained open—much to Harm’s relief. Moments later, the emergency venting completed, and the shuttle began to re-pressurize.
Automated crew safety systems kicked in, and a service bot trundled forward to pick up Lane’s body and take it to the autodoc.
Not there, little bot, Harm thought as he wormed his way into the bot’s motor controls and directed it instead to a part of the Heartbridge machine that Lane had not used.
The bot set Lane’s body down in the ancient pod, and it closed around her.
I can’t believe I’m going to do this.
He wondered if being turned into an AI had made him just a little bit insane.
* * * * *
An hour later, the pod opened, as did Lane’s eyes. She held up her hands, looking them over curiously before pushing herself upright and sliding her legs out of the pod.
“Well, Lane, let’s see where you’re going and get ourselves on a course to meet Tanis. She and I will have some things to discuss and plans to make.”
Inside Harm’s mind…or rather, inside Lane’s…the woman cried out in frustration, relegated to being a mere passenger inside her own body, as Harm—now an AI, embedded inside her—controlled her body as though it belonged to him.
“Please, Lane. I’m letting you remain conscious as a courtesy. But if you continue to shriek like that, we’re going to have a problem. Honestly, this is really your doing. No modern autodoc would ever implant an AI like this, giving it control over the host body. If you weren’t playing with forbidden technology, this wouldn’t have been a possibility.”
A wave of grief came over Harm, and he fought to maintain control of his emotions.
“I’d say ‘your loss is my gain’, Lane…but at the end of this, you’ll get your body and mind back, and I’ll have neither.”
He settled down in the cockpit and saw that Lane had the shuttle in a resonant orbit with Vesta. He pulled up to the locations that Tanis used for datadrops and saw that she was growing quite agitated at his lack of response, having left several queries in the past days.
“Just a few minutes longer, Tanis. First I want to look at this thing Lane was going to show me. Something that would convince me that our cause is doomed.”
Harm reopened the connection Lane had made back in the expanse, and traced it to a datastore on the ship’s network. Within was a vid; after making sure it posed no threat, he opened it and let it play.
“Oh…oh shit.”
RESCUE
STELLAR DATE: 03.02.4085 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Kirby Jones’s skiff, beneath New Amsterdam
REGION: Saturn, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
“I can’t see a damn thing!” Jeannie said as she swapped through views on the forward display. “There are EM bursts all over this storm. Fuck! That one was huge! Almost on top of us!”
“Trying to keep a read on the city’s beacons,” Connie replied as she worked on filtering out as much of the noise as she could. “Oh shit!”
“Fawk!” Jeannie screamed.
At the same time, they saw that the winds had blown them off-course, and they were within a hundred meters of one of the pontoon struts.
“That can’t be right,” Connie muttered. “That strut shouldn’t be there.”
Jeannie ducked the skiff under the towering structure, and as they passed within a dozen meters, they saw it shift and swing toward them, nearly colliding with the skiff as it raced past.
“Get out of here!” Connie screamed, while Jeannie hollered something unintelligible back at her.
“That wasn’t the one Tanis was on, was it?” Marion called up from the back. “Please tell me it wasn’t.”
“No,” Connie called back, having to raise her voice over the howl of the wind outside—not to mention the creaks and groans coming from the skiff’s hull. “At least, I don’t think so.”
“What the hell is going on, then?” Yves asked.
“I can’t pick up any Link signal, not Tanis’s or a general network,” Connie muttered, ignoring Yves. “But she said this is where she’d be.”
“I think that big burst was an antimatter detonation,” Jeannie said as she set the main display to show a backscatter radiation view.
Ahead, they could see Pontoon 5 still intact, where hopefully Tanis was still waiting for them.
“You sure?” Connie asked. “About an antimatter explosion.”
“Yeah, scan logs show that gamma rays were everywhere, and that intensified the lightning storm.”
“Damn…I guess that means that other guy hit his target.” Then she shook her head, clearing those thoughts and focusing on the task at hand. “Get up close,” Connie ordered. “There should be a hangar at the top of the pontoon.”
“On it,” Jeannie said, and Connie noticed that, while the pilot was trying to sound confident, her right leg was bouncing like her heel was spring-loaded.
The pilot brought the ship around to the leeward side of the pontoon, where a set of small hangar doors stood closed. “Who in their right mind ever thought they’d really use this thing,” Jeannie muttered.
She began easing the skiff toward the hangar, while Connie tried to interface with the door mechanism. A crosswind tore at the ship, and her stomach dropped as the ship rose up, then dropped toward the pontoon.
“Shit shit shit,” Jeannie muttered, as a crosswind caught them and blew the skiff away from the pontoon and out into the storms. It took almost three minutes to get the ship back to the now-open hangar doors, then suddenly, Connie got a signal.
“I found her!” she proclaimed. “Tanis! She’s…up the strut shaft, other side, there’s an airlock.”<
br />
Jeannie glanced at Connie and swallowed. “The other side?”
Connie set her console to show a visual of the level where the airlock lay.
Jeannie nodded and eased the skiff up from the pontoon, just as something white flew by and dropped into Saturn’s depths.
She looked back at Marion and Yves to see the private hooked up to a winch, while Marion had latched herself to a safety ring next to the door.
Connie nodded and hit the control to seal the cabin, adding a view of the rear compartment on her console. Jeannie fought the winds, bringing the skiff around the strut, sweat pouring down her temples in rivulets.
Moments later, they came into view of the airlock, and Connie could see a figure in red emergency gear standing in the opening.
“There she is!” she announced with glee. She was about to make a Link connection with Tanis, when something slammed into the side of the strut and tore a wide swath of hull away.
One minute Tanis was there, the next she was gone.
“I’ve got a lock on her beacon!” Connie yelled, as Jeannie spun the ship around and dove after Tanis.
A reading appeared on the main display, counting down to crush depth for the skiff and a lightly armored human. She pushed it from her mind while looking at the view of the skiff’s rear compartment. The door was open, and Yves was standing at the entrance, his feet locked to the deck.
he called up.
A gust of wind grabbed them, and the skiff slewed away, but Jeannie compensated, swinging them back toward Tanis.
Connie was about to call out to Yves, when the private leapt out of the skiff, the cable spooling out behind him. The taste of blood surprised Connie, and she realized that she’d bit her tongue. She sucked at the wound while watching Yves’ position indicator fly across fifteen meters of boiling clouds and make contact with Tanis.
