“You’re not military,” Randy said. “What are you, a bounty hunter?”
The synthetic’s words were calm, unemotional. It was always hard for them to lie, or to be intentionally sarcastic. “More or less.”
“What does that mean? Who do you work for?”
The synthetic fell silent again. If they could not lie, then they usually kept quiet in order to keep a secret.
Randy had dealt with a few of their kind. There were ways to trick them into telling the truth. Judging from the size of the cockpit it must be a one-man scout ship, so this synthetic must travel alone. “What’s your name, toaster?”
“Kierkegaard One.”
“You work for someone, don’t you? Are you a freelancer with the Star Force?”
“No.”
Randy nodded. “Corporate then. You work for Info-Net? The ones who build and maintain these drones?”
“No,” Kierkegaard said. “Now it is my turn to ask questions. The aphid job you did four months ago—who did you sell the information to?”
Randy was confused. “What? I do plenty of jobs. I don’t remember that far—it’s too long ago.”
In less than half a second, the synthetic’s hand was back on his throat. Randy choked. He tried to breathe in, but his airway was being tightened again.
Kierkegaard loomed closer until his own eyes were just a few centimeters away. Humans always gave out biometric indicators whenever they lied or told the truth. “The drone you and your brother leeched onto four months ago had special courier status. This was an exceptional aphid job and you got paid double—I looked at the numbers. The employers even gave you the transponder codes that day, so you didn’t have to use your stealth.”
“I … they said … they’d kill me.”
The synthetic man tilted his head sideways. “You humans never make any sense. I killed your brother to make a point. I can very well kill you right now. You should be as concerned about this as you are with their threats.”
The viselike grip on Randy’s neck slackened. He was given the chance to talk and he knew it had to be the right answer. “I-I don’t really know who they are. I just got a message from the exchange network, asking if I was willing to do a job for them. They gave me a generous cash advance. I couldn’t say no.”
Kierkegaard reached around the back of the man’s skull until he felt the implant chip. Using his thumb and forefinger, he twisted, then tore it out until the button-sized device was detached from the neural cord.
Randy screamed. It felt like part of his skull had been ripped out. “What did you do that for?”
Kierkegaard shook away the bits of scalp and hair from the chip. Droplets of blood floated about in the microgravity. He placed it in one of the nearby port interfaces by the console. A series of codes were displayed on one of the nearby holographic screens. “This is your banking code? Is this where they sent the money to?”
“Y-yes. Please, just let me go. I-I’ll disappear with my family. You’ll never hear from me again.”
“Now is not the time to bargain. You are simply a businessman contracted for a job, and you did it. All I’m doing is trying to track down the ones who hired you.”
Despite the pain, Randy felt a huge sense of relief. “Thank you. Thank you.”
Kierkegaard wagged a finger at him. “This interrogation is not yet finished. I am sure you were aware the information you took was valuable. Who else did you sell it to?”
Randy shook his head violently. “Nobody else. I’m an honorable guy. Once I get contracted for an aphid job I see it through, and I only give the data to the ones who hired me—nobody else gets it. That’s why my services are always in demand—my reputation has built up through the years.”
“But I’m sure you keep copies of all the work you’ve done,” the synthetic said. “Every competent aphid does it for insurance purposes.”
Randy put his head down. He might not be able to afford a luxury condominium on Mars anymore, but at least he still had his life. Might as well tell it all to this plastic bastard. “There’s a chip underneath the flowerpot in the bedroom of the apartment. That’s where I store all my backups.”
“Is that the only one? No virtual storage?”
“My ship the Eloise has got it hidden in her databanks too—I’ll give you the passcode to access it. That’s all of them.”
“Those would be all the copies? You’re sure?”
Randy nodded. “Yes, I swear to the antecessors. As soon as I get back to Mars I’ll take my wife and kids and bring them out of the apartment so your people can sweep it clean. You can have the Eloise too if you could just bring me back to Phobos Station. I’m sure it’s a generous deal, right?”
Kierkegaard nodded. “A very generous deal. But I’m afraid my own employers gave me strict orders to find the source of the leak and tie up any loose ends.”
Randy was speechless for a second. All he could think of was his wife and children. “No, wait—”
Kierkegaard grabbed Randy by his face and muffled the screams with the palm of his hand. The synthetic made a violent twist, snapping Randy’s neck with a loud crack. After waiting until the convulsions ceased, he turned and activated the com-link channel on his ship.
Hassan Obi’s face soon appeared in the virtual console. The laser com-link had a slight lag due to the great distances involved, so they patiently waited for minutes in between each response. “Hello.”
“Secretary Obi,” Kierkegaard said. “I have traced where the leak occurred. Based on testimony by a freelance operative and the decryption of the banking streams, it seems another corporation is behind it.”
Almost half an hour passed before the response came. “Thank you for the information. Please head back to Earth so I can get your full report. There’ll be plenty of work to do over here.”
“I will do so,” Kierkegaard said. “But I will first dispose of the aphid’s body and his ship. Then I will be taking a side trip to Mars to retrieve any remaining traces of the data. The aphid has a family, and the target data will be located in their housing unit. What would you like me to do with his dependents?”
For a long while Hassan’s face seemed frozen on the holo-screen as the lag time increased slightly due to Earth’s rotation. The response, on the other hand, was crisp and clear. “Continue with the original mandate. Tie up all loose ends … but make it look like an accident.”
9 Practice and Prediction
Adjusting his velocity, Duncan Hauk went in for a steeper angle of attack to avoid the incoming flashes of laser fire. He had reset his a-suit’s jump thrusters to give him an added burst of delta-V, but had woefully misjudged the amount of distance he had to cover. By the time he had realized his mistake and begun an emergency deceleration maneuver, it was almost too late.
The impact against the enemy ship’s hull was mostly absorbed by his battle suit, but it still made his legs hurt, and the sudden stop threw the boy into a temporary state of confusion as the recoil made him tumble backwards into the null gravity of space. The closest warbot spotted his distress and decelerated much sooner in order to try and help. Hauk was able to grab one of the handholds along the machine’s stubby torso and quickly righted himself, just as they both made it back onto the hull’s surface.
Commander Creull’s gruff-sounding voice came over his com-link channel. “What in the fekk are you doing, Hauk? You worthless piece of worm carrion. I told you to stop adjusting your suit’s thrust during the boarding. Now hurry up—the rest of your strike team are already making their way inside!”
It was his twelfth time wearing the Armatus, or a-suit, and he had begun to get more comfortable with it. The powered battle armor would instantly respond to his body movements, like a second skin. Hauk’s main problem was the bewildering array of options when it came to movement and weapon ordinance; everything from thruster velocity to knowing what armament to use in a particular situation had to be learned until it all became second nature. The suit’s
AI would automatically give him a set of options, but he always preferred to do it manually. One couldn’t get better by just agreeing to the computer’s suggestions every time.
Hauk crouched down while the warbot beside him used its plasma torch to burn through the ship’s hull. An enemy security bot climbed through a maintenance accessway and opened an exhaust panel less than twenty meters away from them, hoping to damage the incoming raiders using the laser rifle it carried.
Just as the enemy robot popped out of the now opened access panel, Hauk fired a quick burst of tungsten shells from his arm-mounted gauss rifle, decapitating his opponent. Deactivating the magnetic soles on his boots, he quickly made his way over to the wrecked security bot with his leg thrusters.
Why not board from two directions at once? Hauk grabbed what was left of the enemy machine and pulled out the remains before letting go, allowing the headless security bot to float away. As he peered into the opening, his helmet’s sensors failed to detect any other presence within.
Mentally commanding the three nearby warbots to continue their breaching, Hauk pulled himself through the opening and into the maintenance tunnel. The target ship was huge—nearly three kilometers long—so it made sense to have multiple points of entry for maintenance crews. Since his warbots were too big to fit inside the narrow accessway, Hauk went in by himself. The mission had a time limit, and he was hoping to beat the high score.
His lead warbot signaled through his neural link that its breaching had succeeded, and they would now be entering. Hauk mentally ordered them to keep him apprised as to their location at all times. Each warbot acknowledged, and the last affirmative came in a little too harsh and made him wince in pain from the mental feedback.
I need to have Sappho take a look at my neural link when this mission is over, he thought. With his head totally encased in bio-gel, Hauk was unable to talk verbally, and so had to issue mental orders through his AI implant. Sappho would continuously feed his mind information even when he was asleep, and the boy always woke up with a throbbing headache. The Nepenthe’s AI had called it subliminal schooling, the process of learning while being in deep sleep.
Coming upon an exit, Hauk twisted his body around and kicked the hatch open. His helmet’s sensors told him the wide corridor beyond functioned as one of the main junctions used by the crew of the enemy ship. Hauk’s strike team was tasked to disable the vessel by either killing the command crew or shutting down her engines via sabotage. During the planning stage he chose to go after the crewmembers. He’d figured to get extra points by commandeering the ship instead of just disabling her.
With the suit’s sensors telling him it was all clear, Hauk pushed himself out into the main corridor, making sure there was sufficient cover for him to use. His strike team was less than a minute away, so all he had to do now was to keep this corridor secure while his warbots got into position.
A nearby doorway opened, and a human wearing a full skinsuit popped his head out. Hauk instantly reacted the moment his a-suit detected movement, turning in that direction and firing the lasers on his left arm for a snap shot. The resulting barrage of flashing heat burned through almost five centimeters of the crewman’s body, vaporizing his torso and the front of his helmet into steaming globules of plasma. The expiring crewman went into his death throes while floating in the microgravity, his arms and legs twitching spasmodically before all movement ultimately ceased.
For a short while all he could do was stare blankly at the carnage he had just wrought. The crewman he had just killed didn’t look armed. Hauk had seen death before while growing up in Far Tortuga, but this was the first time he had ever experienced killing someone so defenseless. For a few seconds his mind seemed to shunt away all the other information streams as his senses focused on the pitiful corpse floating in front of him.
The beeps coming from the warbot drifting beside him snapped his mind back into focus. Shaking his head to wipe away the last of the mental cobwebs, Hauk concentrated on the task at hand. The next corridor would lead to the bridge, and he had less than a minute to get there.
Bringing up a virtual display of the ship’s interior in his helmet, Hauk quickly inputted minute adjustments into the battle plan. Since there was an AI control room beside the bridge, he instructed one of the warbots to breach it and disable all command links. He would follow behind the other three bots as they made the main assault.
Holding onto the third warbot from the rear, Hauk got his team into position. Engaging the five-second countdown while the first bot began using its plasma torch to breach the door, he mentally told the second bot to ready the stun grenades and fire them once they got the doors open.
The moment the timer went down to zero, the doors to both the bridge and the AI control room were breached. The two lead warbots fired close to a dozen stun grenades into the command area. In less than half a second, the concussive flashes had detonated all over the bridge, sending out bursts of blinding light and electromagnetic pulses to hopefully overwhelm their opponents’ senses for a few critical seconds. The warbots had shielded sensors, but they nevertheless retracted their sensory modules into their main blast plates for added protection as the grenades went off.
Half a second after the detonations, the warbots pushed through, catching a half dozen stunned crewmembers still strapped into their crash couches. Using aimed laser fire set to less than thirty percent charge, they quickly slaughtered the hapless crewmen, penetrating their helmets and literally frying their brains. In less than three seconds, each individual manning their assigned station was dead.
Hauk shouted in triumph as he drifted inside, his voice muffled by the bio-gel he was breathing in through his lungs. Holding his arms up in triumph, he checked the timer to see if he had got the highest score.
Two of the enemy had hidden behind the door, right along the sides, just before the breaching occurred, and braced themselves when the attack commenced. They had recovered in time to see Hauk making his way inside and looking forward, completely oblivious to their presence. With nothing else to lose, they aimed their laser rifles at him and fired at the same time, using full-charge pulses.
The next thing Hauk knew, his suit’s AI was screaming at him to take cover. The young boy turned around in shock as the alarms went up. His a-suit had already sustained multiple breaches, as the concentrated bursts of laser fire had severely damaged its outer layer.
The shock and bewilderment turned to rage as he lashed out at his attackers, firing everything he had. His own arm-mounted lasers had been damaged and were no longer usable. With his helmet sensors severely degraded from the headshots he was taking, Hauk fired blindly using his gauss rifle before activating the shoulder-mounted grenade launchers. He couldn’t tell their exact location anymore, so he just kept firing in their general direction, hoping his suit’s tremendous firepower would give him enough of a chance for a lucky hit or two.
Within moments, he could feel the front part of his helmet give way as their laser fire penetrated the faceplate. The once suspended bio-gel floating in front of his face hardened upon exposure to the vacuum in order to protect his body, but it wasn’t enough. The white, searing heat made him close his eyes before everything went to black. He was dead.
“Take that damned helmet off, you stupid son of a whore!”
Using both hands, Hauk lifted the virtual reality helmet from his head and gently placed it on the table beside him. He had failed once again, and the shame was unbearable.
The room was designed to be the Nepenthe’s virtual training simulator. A dozen gravity couches were spaced out evenly, and half were occupied by other spacers still wearing their VR helmets. A large part of their training was done here, and only those with the highest scores could even hope to be included in the actual strike teams.
Creull partially floated just above him, her rear limbs wearing magnetic boots that allowed her to stick to the wall. The whiskers underneath her two sets of nostrils were more akin to tentacles, fo
r they could curl up and even manipulate light objects, but now they had retracted because the commander had bared her fangs.
Hauk looked down and said nothing. A tiny bit of air exited from his mouth. The humiliation was too much, and he couldn’t look her in the eye.
“For the twelfth time today, you just got yourself killed again—along with your strike team,” Creull said. “Your life may not be worth anything, but the warbots we build are expensive machines, and they do cost something.”
His head was pounding, but the viselike pain was mild compared to the agony of his failure. “I’m sorry, Commander. It won’t happen again.”
Creull snarled. “You’ve said sorry to me over a dozen times today, and that still doesn’t make up for your relentless stupidity! You walk into a room like some dilettante of war and you don’t even bother to look behind you?”
“I assumed the crew would all be at their stations and—”
“You assumed … you assumed … Well, your silly, stupid assumptions are always wrong! You are not worth my time. I wonder why I even recruited you from that piece of dirt planet when the only thing you would be good for is standing in for a recycled corpse! Get out of the chair.”
Hauk looked away while meekly unstrapping himself. He had been so close, yet one little careless mistake cost him the entire mission. If it had been for real, he would be truly dead.
A nearby hatch opened and Puteri Sin drifted inside. “You sent for me, Commander?”
Creull pointed down towards the boy. “Get this little idiot out of here. Give him some menial work for the rest of the day so he may reflect on just how stupid he is.”
Puteri drifted on down towards Hauk. The boy was in a daze as she helped him remove the rest of the straps. “Come on, I think I’ve got a task for you to do.”
As Puteri led Hauk towards the open doorway, Creull pointed a stubby finger at the boy. “Remember this, cadet. If you are ever this careless again—even with the simulators—I’m going to recommend to the captain that we airlock you out of this ship. Do I make myself clear?”
Nepenthe Rising (Stars in Shadow Book 1) Page 10
